Off-line Task Research Articles

A developmental study of expressing simultaneous events in film-based narratives

This study examines the expression of simultaneity in the film-based oral narratives of 100 English monolinguals in the following three age groups: preschoolers (4–6 years), school-aged children (7–10 years), and adults (19–48 years). Participants told a story of what happened in the film, in an off-line task, to an interviewer who had not seen the film. The film was rich in simultaneous events at various sites through the episodic structure. Focus was on quantitative and qualitative aspects of simultaneity, from the perspective of forms and functions. Quantitative results showed very little simultaneity at preschool and almost similar expression at school age and adulthood. Qualitative analyses revealed that perceptual, semantic, and discourse factors affected the profiles of development. Preschool children expressed local simultaneity between situations in adjacent clauses, more frequently between unbounded situations that are implicitly simultaneous. Besides, they tended to express more simultaneity in scenes that were perceived in a single screen shot. From age 7, children became more able to express simultaneity across larger stretches of the text, covering a wider scope on situations on parallel timelines. Top-down knowledge of narrative organization guided older narrators to take temporal perspectives that go beyond the semantic properties of events, giving way to discourse-motivated simultaneity where causality plays a substantial role. Language forms to express simultaneity showed a long developmental route – through verb semantic and tense-aspect alternations as the widest, basic usage to specific lexical forms like conjunctions (e.g. while), adverbs (e.g. meanwhile), and more sophisticated syntactic configurations. The form-function analyses enabled an exploration of the cognitive and language abilities in the production of simultaneous relations under the constraints of narrative discourse organization. The study reinforced the results of previous developmental studies of temporality, shedding further light on the relatively unexplored topic of simultaneity expression.

Transfer of L1 processing strategies to the interpretation of sentence-level L2 input: A cross-linguistic comparison on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities

The present study aims to investigate the role of L1 transfer effects on L2 sentence processing strategies during the interpretation of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. The main body of the study is divided into two sections. The first section describes Experiment 1, which is designed to test the resolution of RC attachment ambiguities by Turkish learners of L2 English both in Turkish and English through the use of an off-line task (i.e., paper-and-pencil comprehension tests) and compare their processing preferences to those of native English speakers. The second section presents Experiment 2, which aims to investigate the real-time processing of the RC attachment ambiguities by the same participant groups employing eye-tracking methodology. The results indicated that L1 Turkish and L1 English RC attachment preferences differed and that Turkish learners of L2 English tended to transfer their Turkish sentence processing pattern to real-time interpretation of the English RC attachment ambiguities.

Variational Learning in Child L2 Acquisition? Comprehension of Verbal Agreement in Spanish and English

ABSTRACT The Spanish verbal system offers more evidence for agreement and tense than English, where morphological evidence is less robust. With a focus on the comprehension of verbal agreement morphology by child second (L2) learners of Spanish and English, we extend the Variational Learning account to L2 acquisition to investigate whether the abundance of morphological evidence for subject agreement in the target language contributes to the rate of acquisition. Participants were 32 Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English and 32 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish ages 7;5–10;11. The children’s comprehension of verb agreement morphology in Spanish and in English was assessed with an off-line picture-sentence matching task in each language. The results show higher accuracy comprehending agreement for the children learning L2 Spanish compared to the children learning L2 English. This finding is consistent with a probabilistic approach to morphological learning and the role of morphological typology in the rate of acquisition.

Syntactic complexity in the presence of an intervener: the case of an Italian speaker with anomia

ABSTRACT Background A robust finding from language acquisition, adult processing, and individuals with language impairment is that certain types of Object Relatives (ORs) and Object Questions (OQs) are more challenging in both production and comprehension compared to their Subject counterparts. Approaches informed by linguistic theory have been proposed to clarify the source of the difficulties with these sentences in people with aphasia, with recent models supporting the idea of a grammatically based resource reduction selectively affecting sentences that require the processing of an element acting as an intervener. Aims This work presents new evidence to the study of syntactic competence in people with acquired language disorders, from a pilot study exploring in detail the morphosyntactic competence of an Italian speaker with anomia. Methods & Procedures The clinical diagnosis of anomia in the participant revealed a deficit in lexical retrieval with no deficit at grammatical level. Morphosyntactic competence was investigated through a series of off-line tasks on both comprehension and production. Outcomes & Results The morphosyntactic abilities of the participant turned out to be for the most part intact with no difficulties such as agrammatism. However, a selective deficit in the computation of certain ORs and OQs emerged. The deficit was selective for structures with an intervener and more specifically for structures in which the featural specification of the intervening subject is included in the specification of the displaced object. Conclusions Syntactic asymmetries emerged in the performance of an individual with anomia, with no apparent morphosyntactic impairment or sign of agrammatism. The deficit of the syntactic computation was selective and compatible with the grammatical Featural Relativized Minimality approach to the difficulties in the computation of sentences with an intervener. The preliminary results presented in this work suggest that the analysis of sentences with an intervener may be a sensitive test for the diagnosis of a syntactic-based impairment and that formal linguistic models may offer promising tools for exploring linguistic deficits. Further investigation is necessary to strengthen these findings.

Improving Reliability of Soft Real-Time Embedded Systems on Integrated CPU and GPU Platforms

Multiprocessor systems on a chip consisting of integrated CPUs and GPUs are suitable platforms for real-time embedded applications requiring massively parallel processing. For such applications, lifetime reliability due to permanent faults and soft-error reliability due to transient faults are major concerns. Detailed execution profiling has revealed that a CUDA task’s CPU execution time significantly increases if the task executes on a different core than the operating system (OS). Based on this observation, an extended task model is introduced to consider the execution time dependencies among tasks and the OS. A hybrid framework is proposed to improve soft-error reliability while satisfying a lifetime reliability constraint for soft real-time systems executing on integrated CPU and GPU platforms. This framework: 1) reduces the total utilization of cores and improves soft-error reliability via off-line task mapping; 2) achieves a higher lifetime reliability through task migration at run time; and 3) improves soft-error reliability by dynamically scaling frequencies of CPU and GPU cores. The experimental results show that the proposed framework leads to a system that can execute without soft errors for at least 4 days (4 times) and 6 days (6 times) longer, on average, than existing approaches.

As Time Goes by: A rTMS Study on Age-Related Changes in Sentence Comprehension.

It is well established that off-line sentence judgment tasks (oSJTs) typically rely on phonological working memory (WM), beyond specific linguistic processing. Nevertheless, empirical findings suggest that a juvenile level of performance in an oSJT could be associated with the recruitment of age-specific additional supportive neural network in healthy aging. In particular, in one of our previous study, healthy elderlies showed the additional activation of associative visual cortices when compared with young controls. We suggested that age-related hyperactivations, during an auditory sentence judgment task, might represent the neurofunctional correlate of the recruitment of compensatory strategies that are necessary to maintain a juvenile level of performance. To explicitly test this hypothesis we adopted repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Twelve healthy elderlies and 12 young participants were engaged in an off-line semantic plausibility judgment task while rTMS was delivered over: (1) the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG; i.e., a core region of the WM network); (2) the precuneus; and (3) a Control Site (vertex). Results showed a significant main effect of Stimulation Site and a significant Group-by-Stimulation Site interaction effect. In particular, the rTMS stimulation of the LIFG slowed down reaction times (RTs) both in young and healthy elderly participants, while only healthy elderlies showed an increment of RTs during the stimulation of the precuneus. Taken together our results further support the idea that the maintenance of a juvenile level of performance in graceful aging may be associated with task-specific compensatory processes that would manifest them-selves, from the neurofunctional point of view, by the recruitment of additional neural supportive regions.

Compound production in agrammatism: Evidence from stroke-induced and Primary Progressive Aphasia

Abstract The present multiple case study investigates the production of compound words in three Greek-speaking individuals with agrammatism, as a symptom either of stroke-induced aphasia or Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). Two off-line tasks were conducted, a picture naming and a production by definition task, using different types of compounds, in order to examine patients' ability to produce complex morphological structures and the impact of specific compound properties. Results showed that all patients’ performance was significantly more impaired compared to healthy controls. Qualitative analysis revealed different error patterns for each pathological condition, suggesting that agrammatism in stroke-induced and primary progressive aphasia does not necessarily result in the same deficits when it comes to morphological processing. Moreover, heterogeneous results emerged for the two PPA patients which further highlight the progressive nature of PPA as a crucial factor in complex word retrieval.

DUSTBUSTER: AN AUTONOMOUS VACUUM CLEANING ROBOT

This paper proposes the development of an autonomous robot which is controlled by sensors and an Android Phone (optional). The implementation of AI concepts in the development of a software application for off-line robot task programming. We can use concept of the designed programming application to power the knowledge base for task accumulation. This work aims at the cleaning a house on its own, without human interference. In the current scenario, the economical versions of iRobot Roomba (currently in the market) cannot develop a map of its own; however, this feature is present in the luxurious versions. As the luxurious versions aren’t affordable, our Dustbuster will prove to be an efficient and economic stopgap solution.

Distributed Optimal On-Line Task Allocation Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Complex wireless sensor network applications as those in Internet-of-Things or in-network processing are pushing the requirements for energy efficiency and data processing drastically. Energy-aware task allocation becomes crucial to efficiently distribute the tasks of the applications for the nodes to extend the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a distributed optimal on-line task allocation algorithm, by considering the energy cost of communicating, computing, sensing, and sleeping activities, to optimally balance the workload distribution among the sensor nodes. Through an in-depth analysis, this paper proves that the optimal partition solution for each node consists of at most two partition cuts with the corresponding weights. This observation enables the proposed on-line algorithm to maximize the network lifetime with low execution complexity. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm extends the network lifetime by 12.26 times compared with the strategy of no scheduling, which is 2.22 times more than previous off-line task allocation methods. Moreover, the energy spent on executing the on-line algorithm is so small that it can be neglected.

Processing complex pseudo-words in mild cognitive impairment: The interaction of preserved morphological rule knowledge with compromised cognitive ability

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) affects the cognitive performance of elderly adults. However, the level of severity is not high enough to be diagnosed with dementia. Previous research reports subtle language impairments in individuals with MCI specifically in domains related to lexical meaning. The present study used both off-line (grammaticality judgment) and on-line (lexical decision) tasks to examine aspects of lexical processing and how they are affected by MCI. 21 healthy older adults and 23 individuals with MCI saw complex pseudo-words that violated various principles of word formation in Slovenian and decided if each letter string was an actual word of their language. The pseudo-words ranged in their degree of violability. A task effect was found, with MCI performance to be similar to that of healthy controls in the off-line task but different in the on-line task. Overall, the MCI group responded slower than the elderly controls. No significant differences were observed in the off-line task, while the on-line task revealed a main effect of Violation type, a main effect of Group and a significant Violation × Group interaction reflecting a difficulty for the MCI group to process pseudo-words in real time. That is, while individuals with MCI seem to preserve morphological rule knowledge, they experience additional difficulties while processing complex pseudo-words. This was attributed to an executive dysfunction associated with MCI that delays the recognition of ungrammatical formations.

Preposition Stranding in Spanish as a Heritage Language

Previous research examining heritage speaker bilingualism has suggested that interfaceconditioned properties are likely to be affected by crosslinguistic influence (e.g., Montrul & Polinsky, 2011; White, 2011). It is not clear, however, whether the core syntax can also be affected to the same degree (e.g., Cuza, 2013; Depiante & Thompson, 2013). Departing from Cuza’s (2013) and Depiante and Thompson’s (2013) research, the present study seeks to determine the extent to which this is possible in the case of Spanish as a heritage language. With this goal in mind, a total of thirty-three Spanish heritage speakers (divided into sequential and simultaneous bilinguals) and a comparison group of eleven late Spanish-English bilinguals completed a battery of off-line tasks that examined knowledge and use of preposition stranding (i.e., a syntactic construction whereby the object of the preposition is fronted while the preposition itself is left stranded), an understudied core syntactic phenomenon that is licit in English but precluded in Spanish. Overall findings reveal that the sequential heritage speakers pattern with participants from the control group. The simultaneous heritage speakers, on the other hand, seem to have a grammar that is not so restricting as they accept and produce ungrammatical cases of preposition stranding. Herein, we argue that these results do not obtain the way they do due to incomplete acquisition or L1 attrition but crucially because of the timing of exposure to the societal language. We propose that this property was completely acquired, although differently acquired due to the structural overlap observed between the two languages involved (e.g., Müller & Hulk, 2001), and most importantly, to the timing of acquisition of English (e.g., Putnam & Sánchez, 2013).

Psycholinguistic Evidence for Inverse Scope in Korean.

We use experimental data to shed light on the ongoing question of whether Korean allows inverse scope interpretation in sentences containing an indefinite subject and a universally quantified direct object (e.g., 'Someone bought each loaf of bread at the bakery'). The results of an off-line acceptability judgment task (n=38) and an online self-paced reading task (n[Formula: see text]22) indicate that inverse scope interpretations are in fact permitted in Korean as a secondary option, as is also the case in English. We argue that the dispreference for the inverse scope reading reflects processing considerations related to burden on working memory.

Advanced learners’ comprehension of discourse connectives: The role of L1 transfer across on-line and off-line tasks

Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this article, we compare advanced learners’ sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the influence of first language (L1) transfer by comparing learners’ comprehension of two non-native-like semantic uses of connectives in English, often produced by learners due to transfer from French and Dutch. Our results indicate that in an off-line task transfer is an important factor accounting for French- and Dutch-speaking learners’ non-native-like comprehension of connectives. During on-line processing, however, learners are as sensitive as native speakers to the meaning conveyed by connectives. These results raise intriguing questions regarding explicit vs. implicit knowledge in language learners.

What causes the processing advantage in the comprehension of German object relative clauses?

What causes the processing advantage in the comprehension of German object relative clauses?

Open Style Network Control System of Multi-Sucker Wall-Climbing Mechanism

This paper presents an open-architecture network motion controller system of Multi-sucker Wall-climbing Mechanism. It uses motion controller as control system kernel and industrial control computer as its system sustaining cell, also introduces system function, hardware configuration and the method of software design base on bus, winsock process manages off-line tasks. Complete the development of the client and server programming and networks of movement control system base on the C/S structure. Experiment show that the same wave between the actual speed of electrical and given speed. Delay is very small, constant speed along the passage of the volatility, run smoothly up and no speed super. The motion control system achieves some excellent capabilities such as precise trajectory, little responding time, high precision in fixing position.

(Eye) tracking short-term memory over time

Background: Previous studies have produced conflicting findings concerning the role of short-term memory in syntactic comprehension. Aims: The study aimed to investigate whether eye-movement monitoring shows significant differences in critical sentences and in sentence-critical areas for patients with an impaired short-term memory compared to controls. Methods & Procedures: We monitored a short-term memory patient during a 4-year period with on-line and off-line tasks. On the last examination her eye movements were tested while she was reading four different types of sentence that she had to judge for plausibility. Response times, accuracy, and eye movements were recorded. Her performance was compared to that of seven matched controls. Outcomes & Results: Accuracy improved along with span increase. However, the patient's response times were slower than controls' even after partial span recovery. Fixations and regressions in relative clauses were significantly more frequent than in sentences with simple coordination. In addition the patient differed from controls in fixations and regressions on the critical region, namely the relative clause. Conclusions: Taken together, our results suggest that verbal short-term memory is involved in the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences and not only in post-interpretive stages. This result must be taken into account when programming an aphasia treatment concerning sentence comprehension.

Designing Compact and Maximally Permissive Deadlock Avoidance Policies for Complex Resource Allocation Systems Through Classification Theory: The Linear Case

Most of the past research on the problem of deadlock avoidance for complex resource allocation systems (RAS) has acknowledged the fact that the computation of the maximally permissive deadlock avoidance policy (DAP) possesses super-polynomial complexity for most RAS classes, and therefore, it has resorted to solutions that trade off maximal permissiveness for computational tractability. In this paper, we distinguish between the off-line and the on-line computation that is required for the effective implementation of the maximally permissive DAP, and we seek to develop representations of this policy that will require minimal on-line computation. The particular representation that we adopt is that of a compact classifier that will effect the underlying dichotomy of the reachable state space into safe and unsafe subspaces. Furthermore, in this first study of the aforementioned problem, we restrict our attention to a particular RAS class that is motivated by an ongoing project of ours called Gadara, and accepts separation of the safe and unsafe subspaces of its instantiations through a set of linear inequalities. Through a series of reductions of the derived classification problem, we are also able to attain extensive reductions in the computational complexity of the off-line task of the construction of the sought classifier. We formally establish completeness and optimality properties for the proposed design procedures. We also offer heuristics that, if necessary, can alleviate the computational effort that is necessary for the construction of the sought classifier. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the developed approaches through a series of computational experiments. To the best of our knowledge, these experiments also establish the ability of the proposed methodology to effectively compute tractable implementations of the maximally permissive DAP for problem instances significantly beyond the capacity of any other approach currently available in the literature.

Referential context effects in L2 ambiguity resolution: Evidence from self-paced reading

This study investigates the degree to which referential context information influences structural ambiguity resolution preferences in non-native sentence comprehension, using both an off-line questionnaire and an on-line self-paced reading task. The critical target sentences contained prepositional phrases (PPs) modifying either the verb phrase (VP) or the preceding noun phrase (NP), as in Bill glanced at the customer with strong suspicion (with ripped jeans). These were embedded within short context paragraphs providing either one or two potential referents for the postverbal NP. The results showed that native Chinese-speaking learners of English and native English speakers were affected differently by referential information in the on-line task. The learners’ reading times of the critical PP were influenced significantly by the referential context, with VP-modifying items being read faster than NP-modifying ones in a VP-supporting context, and the reverse pattern seen in NP-supporting contexts. The native speakers’ ambiguity resolution preferences, on the other hand, were modulated by the referential context in the off-line task only. Our results indicate that non-native comprehenders are highly sensitive to extra-sentential discourse-level information during processing even at intermediate levels of proficiency, a finding that provides a challenge for ‘processing capacity limitation’ accounts for non-targetlike L2 performance.

Quantification Scope Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Persian and English

This study investigates the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing noun phrases with double quantified constituents from a processing perspective. The questions this study tried to answer were: whether or not the preferred interpretation for doubly quantified ambiguous sentences in English was influenced by English learners' L1 scope interpretation possibilities; whether or not the preferred interpretation of ambiguous sentences with double quantificational noun phrases was driven by surface configurations of sentences in English and Persian for SL learners of English either in off-line or on-line reading; and finally, whether or not the referential contexts of ambiguous sentences with double quantificational noun phrases in English and in Persian guided interpretation preferences for SL learners in off-line and on-line readings. Using an off-line judgment task and an on-line truth-value judgment task combined with a self-paced reading technique, the data of the study were collected from the Persian speakers and English learners. The results obtained from offline tasks indicated that the interpretation preferences of L2 learners of English were influenced by their background language. However, such influences were not found in the self-paced study. Furthermore, it was indicated that the surface configurations of sentences strongly affected L2 learners’ interpretation preferences favoring isomorphic interpretation for the universal quantifiers included in the subject position. Concerning the semantically referential-context effect on ambiguity resolution, the collected data revealed that context played a crucial role in the processing of scope ambiguity since the RTs for acontextualized stimuli were more than for contextualized ones in constructions with QNP-QNP in Persian and English.Key words: Quantification, Scope Ambiguity, On-line Tasks, Off-line Tasks

Optimal deadlock avoidance for complex resource allocation systems through classification theory

Most of the past research on the problem of deadlock avoidance for sequential complex resource allocation systems (RAS) has acknowledged the fact that the maximally permissive deadlock avoidance policy (DAP) possesses super-polynomial complexity for most RAS classes, and it has resorted to solutions that trade off maximal permissiveness for computational tractability. In this work, we seek the effective implementation of the maximally permissive DAP for a broad spectrum of RAS, by distinguishing between the off-line and the on-line computation that is required for the specification of this policy, and developing a representation of the derived result that will require minimal on-line computation. The particular representation that we adopt is that of a compact classifier that will effect the underlying dichotomy of the reachable state space into safe and unsafe subspaces. Through a series of reductions of the posed classification problem, we are also able to attain extensive reductions in the computational complexity of the off-line task of the construction of the sought classifier. A series of computational experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach and establish its ability to provide tractable implementations of the maximally permissive DAP for problem instances significantly beyond the capacity of any other approach currently available in the literature.