Semantic Categories Research Articles

Ambient and focal attention during complex problem-solving: preliminary evidence from real-world eye movement data.

Time course analysis of eye movements during free exploration of real-world scenes often reveals an increase in fixation durations together with a decrease in saccade amplitudes, which has been explained within the two visual systems approach, i.e., a transition from ambient to focal. Short fixations and long saccades during early viewing periods are classified as ambient mode of vision, which is concerned with spatial orientation and is related to simple visual properties such as motion, contrast, and location. Longer fixations and shorter saccades during later viewing periods are classified as focal mode of vision, which is concentrated in the foveal projection and is capable of object identification and its semantic categorization. While these findings are mainly obtained in the context of image exploration, the present study endeavors to investigate whether the same pattern of interplay between ambient and focal visual attention is deployed when people work on complex real-world tasks-and if so, when? Based on a re-analysis of existing data that integrates concurrent think aloud and eye tracking protocols, the present study correlated participants' internal thinking models to the parameters of their eye movements when they planned solutions to an open-ended design problem in a real-world setting. We hypothesize that switching between ambient and focal attentional processing is useful when solvers encounter difficulty compelling them to shift their conceptual direction to adjust the solution path. Individuals may prefer different attentional strategies for information-seeking behavior, such as ambient-to-focal or focal-to-ambient. The observed increase in fixation durations and decrease in saccade amplitudes during the periods around shifts in conceptual direction lends support to the postulation of the ambient-to-focal processing; however, focal-to-ambient processing is not evident. Furthermore, our data demonstrate that the beginning of a shift in conceptual direction is observable in eye movement behavior with a significant prolongation of fixation. Our findings add to the conclusions drawn from laboratory settings by providing preliminary evidence for ambient and focal processing characteristics in real-world problem-solving.

Processing of auditory novelty in human cortex during a semantic categorization task

Auditory semantic novelty – a new meaningful sound in the context of a predictable acoustical environment – can probe neural circuits involved in language processing. Aberrant novelty detection is a feature of many neuropsychiatric disorders. This large-scale human intracranial electrophysiology study examined the spatial distribution of gamma and alpha power and auditory evoked potentials (AEP) associated with responses to unexpected words during performance of semantic categorization tasks. Participants were neurosurgical patients undergoing monitoring for medically intractable epilepsy. Each task included repeatedly presented monosyllabic words from different talkers (“common”) and ten words presented only once (“novel”). Targets were words belonging to a specific semantic category. Novelty effects were defined as differences between neural responses to novel and common words. Novelty increased task difficulty and was associated with augmented gamma, suppressed alpha power, and AEP differences broadly distributed across the cortex. Gamma novelty effect had the highest prevalence in planum temporale, posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus; alpha in anterolateral Heschl's gyrus (HG), anterior STG and middle anterior cingulate cortex; AEP in posteromedial HG, lower bank of the superior temporal sulcus, and planum polare. Gamma novelty effect had a higher prevalence in dorsal than ventral auditory-related areas. Novelty effects were more pronounced in the left hemisphere. Better novel target detection was associated with reduced gamma novelty effect within auditory cortex and enhanced gamma effect within prefrontal and sensorimotor cortex. Alpha and AEP novelty effects were generally more prevalent in better performing participants. Multiple areas, including auditory cortex on the superior temporal plane, featured AEP novelty effect within the time frame of P3a and N400 scalp-recorded novelty-related potentials. This work provides a detailed account of auditory novelty in a paradigm that directly examined brain regions associated with semantic processing. Future studies may aid in the development of objective measures to assess the integrity of semantic novelty processing in clinical populations.

The Functional and Semantic Category of Appeal as a Linguistic Tool in Political Propaganda Texts (in the Example of the English Language)

The Functional and Semantic Category of Appeal as a Linguistic Tool in Political Propaganda Texts (in the Example of the English Language)

VissE: a versatile tool to identify and visualise higher-order molecular phenotypes from functional enrichment analysis

Functional analysis of high throughput experiments using pathway analysis is now ubiquitous. Though powerful, these methods often produce thousands of redundant results owing to knowledgebase redundancies upstream. This scale of results hinders extensive exploration by biologists and can lead to investigator biases due to previous knowledge and expectations. To address this issue, we present vissE, a flexible network-based analysis and visualisation tool that organises information into semantic categories and provides various visualisation modules to characterise them with respect to the underlying data, thus providing a comprehensive view of the biological system. We demonstrate vissE’s versatility by applying it to three different technologies: bulk, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. Applying vissE to a factor analysis of a breast cancer spatial transcriptomic data, we identified stromal phenotypes that support tumour dissemination. Its adaptability allows vissE to enhance all existing gene-set enrichment and pathway analysis workflows, empowering biologists during molecular discovery.

Motion events in Swedish and French: a Holistic Spatial Semantics analysis

Abstract The present study investigates cross-linguistic differences in the description of motion events using Holistic Spatial Semantics (HSS) as a theoretical framework. In this study, six short video stimuli featuring various motion situations were used to elicit narratives from 35 speakers of French and 29 speakers of Swedish. The proportions of semantic category Path linguistically expressed did not vary significantly between the groups. However, the French narratives had significantly less Manner and Direction expression. Furthermore, they included significantly more unbounded non-translocative events compared to the Swedish narratives. Partly, this was due to the tendency within the Swedish group to construe situations as bounded events that were clearly shown as unbounded in the stimuli. There was also a tendency within the French group to distribute the information about the same situation over two clauses. These findings lend further support to the relevance of distinguishing between the Path and Direction categories, as well as other key features of the HSS framework, such as the distinction between non-verbal motion situations and their linguistic construals.

Simplifying open-set video domain adaptation with contrastive learning

In an effort to reduce annotation costs in action recognition, unsupervised video domain adaptation methods have been proposed that aim to adapt a predictive model from a labelled dataset (i.e., source domain) to an unlabelled dataset (i.e., target domain). In this work we address a more realistic scenario, called open-set video domain adaptation (OUVDA), where the target dataset contains “unknown” semantic categories that are not shared with the source. The challenge lies in aligning the shared classes of the two domains while separating the shared classes from the unknown ones. In this work we propose to address OUVDA with an unified contrastive learning framework that learns discriminative and well-clustered features. We also propose a video-oriented temporal contrastive loss that enables our method to better cluster the feature space by exploiting the freely available temporal information in video data. We show that discriminative feature space facilitates better separation of the unknown classes, and thereby allows us to use a simple similarity based score to identify them. We conduct thorough experimental evaluation on multiple OUVDA benchmarks and show the effectiveness of our proposed method against the prior art.

Decoding Semantics from Dynamic Brain Activation Patterns: From Trials to Task in EEG/MEG Source Space.

The temporal dynamics within the semantic brain network and its dependence on stimulus and task parameters are still not well understood. Here, we addressed this by decoding task as well as stimulus information from source-estimated EEG/MEG human data. We presented the same visual word stimuli in a lexical decision (LD) and three semantic decision (SD) tasks. The meanings of the presented words varied across five semantic categories. Source space decoding was applied over time in five ROIs in the left hemisphere (anterior and posterior temporal lobe, inferior frontal gyrus, primary visual areas, and angular gyrus) and one in the right hemisphere (anterior temporal lobe). Task decoding produced sustained significant effects in all ROIs from 50 to 100 ms, both when categorizing tasks with different semantic demands (LD-SD) as well as for similar semantic tasks (SD-SD). In contrast, a semantic word category could only be decoded in lATL, rATL, PTC, and IFG, between 250 and 500 ms. Furthermore, we compared two approaches to source space decoding: conventional ROI-by-ROI decoding and combined-ROI decoding with back-projected activation patterns. The former produced more reliable results for word category decoding while the latter was more informative for task decoding. This indicates that task effects are distributed across the whole semantic network while stimulus effects are more focal. Our results demonstrate that the semantic network is widely distributed but that bilateral anterior temporal lobes together with control regions are particularly relevant for the processing of semantic information.

Um Cuidar Baseado nas Forças: Plano Pós-parto para uma Vivência Positiva do Quarto Trimestre

Introduction The fourth trimester or postpartum period is a concept that places the woman (newborn and couple) at the centre of care, within the family. In this study, an instrument was developed to enable the puerperal woman/couple to plan and organise the postpartum period, in order to facilitate adaptation during this period. The theoretical framework of Laurie Gottlieb's Strengths-Based Nursing Care guided this process. Objective This study begins with the research question: What difficulties does the puerperal woman experience in the postpartum period? Its objectives are: to identify the triad's bio-psycho-social needs in the first 12 weeks postpartum, the puerperal woman's/couple's strategies for overcoming perceived difficulties and the items to be included in the postpartum plan, from the maternal perspective. Methods A descriptive exploratory study with a mixed-methods approach, with a questionnaire administered to mothers aged between 18 and 39, obtaining 141 responses with eligibility criteria between April 14 and May 5, 2023. The data collection tool was shared through groups of mothers on social networks (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Content analysis was carried out according to Bardin and semantic categorization was used to process the qualitative data and statistical analysis of the quantitative data. Results The study revealed the difficulties, the needs of the triad in the first 12 weeks, the strategies or strengths to overcome the difficulties and the suggested items for the postpartum plan. Conclusion It can be concluded that the postpartum plan is an innovative concept, since pregnant women/couples focus on drawing up the birth plan, unaware of or not valuing the postpartum plan. However, most of the participants considered planning to be one of the strengths or strategies for a positive experience of the fourth trimester.

Quantifying the effects of practicing a semantic task according to subclinical schizotypy

The learning ability of individuals within the schizophrenia spectrum is crucial for their psychosocial rehabilitation. When selecting a treatment, it is thus essential to consider the impact of medications on practice effects, an important type of learning ability. To achieve this end goal, a pre-treatment test has to be developed and tested in healthy participants first. This is the aim of the current work, which takes advantage of the schizotypal traits present in these participants to preliminary assess the test’s validity for use among patients. In this study, 47 healthy participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) and performed a semantic categorization task twice, with a 1.5-hour gap between sessions. Practice was found to reduce reaction times (RTs) in both low- and high-SPQ scorers. Additionally, practice decreased the amplitudes of the N400 event-related brain potentials elicited by semantically matching words in low SPQ scorers only, which shows the sensitivity of the task to schizotypy. Across the two sessions, both RTs and N400 amplitudes had good test–retest reliability. This task could thus be a valuable tool. Ongoing studies are currently evaluating the impact of fully deceptive placebos and of real antipsychotic medications on these practice effects. This round of research should subsequently assist psychiatrists in making informed decisions about selecting the most suitable medication for the psychosocial rehabilitation of a patient.

EEG Searchlight Decoding Reveals Person- and Place-specific Responses for Semantic Category and Familiarity.

Proper names are linguistic expressions referring to unique entities, such as individual people or places. This sets them apart from other words like common nouns, which refer to generic concepts. And yet, despite both being individual entities, one's closest friend and one's favorite city are intuitively associated with very different pieces of knowledge-face, voice, social relationship, autobiographical experiences for the former, and mostly visual and spatial information for the latter. Neuroimaging research has revealed the existence of both domain-general and domain-specific brain correlates of semantic processing of individual entities; however, it remains unclear how such commonalities and similarities operate over a fine-grained temporal scale. In this work, we tackle this question using EEG and multivariate (time-resolved and searchlight) decoding analyses. We look at when and where we can accurately decode the semantic category of a proper name and whether we can find person- or place-specific effects of familiarity, which is a modality-independent dimension and therefore avoids sensorimotor differences inherent among the two categories. Semantic category can be decoded in a time window and with spatial localization typically associated with lexical semantic processing. Regarding familiarity, our results reveal that it is easier to distinguish patterns of familiarity-related evoked activity for people, as opposed to places, in both early and late time windows. Second, we discover that within the early responses, both domain-general (left posterior-lateral) and domain-specific (right fronto-temporal, only for people) neural patterns can be individuated, suggesting the existence of person-specific processes.

Conversion in languages with different morphological structures: a semantic comparison of English and Czech

This article presents a comparative study of the semantics of conversion between verbs and nouns in two languages with different morphological structures – English and Czech. To make the cross-linguistic comparison of semantic relations possible, a cognitive approach is used to provide conceptual semantic categories applicable within both languages. The semantic categories, based on event schemata introduced by Radden and Dirven (2007) primarily for syntactic description, are applied to data samples of verb–noun conversion pairs in both languages, using a dictionary-based approach. We analyse a corpus sample of 300 conversion pairs of verbs and nouns in each language (e.g., run.v – run.n, pepper.n – pepper.v; běhat ‘run.v’– běh ‘run.n’, pepř ‘pepper.n’ – pepřit ‘pepper.v’) annotated for the semantic relation between the verb and the noun. We analyse which relations appear in the two languages and how often, looking for sizeable differences to answer the question of whether the morphological characteristics of a language influence the semantics of conversion. The analysis of the annotated samples documents that the languages most often employ conversion for the same concepts (namely, instance of action/process and result) and that the range of semantic categories in English and Czech is generally the same, suggesting that the differences in the morphology of the two languages do not affect the range of possible meanings that conversion is employed for. The data also show a difference in the number of types of combinations of multiple semantic relations between the verb and the noun in a single conversion pair, which was found to be larger in English than in Czech, and also in the frequency with which certain individual semantic relations occur, and these differences seem to be at least partially related to the morphological characteristics of Czech and English.

Determining the Relativity of Word Meanings Through the Construction of Individualized Models of Semantic Memory.

Distributional models of lexical semantics are capable of acquiring sophisticated representations of word meanings. The main theoretical insight provided by these models is that they demonstrate the systematic connection between the knowledge that people acquire and the experience that they have with the natural language environment. However, linguistic experience is inherently variable and differs radically across people due to demographic and cultural variables. Recently, distributional models have been used to examine how word meanings vary across languages and it was found that there is considerable variability in the meanings of words across languages for most semantic categories. The goal of this article is to examine how variable word meanings are across individual language users within a single language. This was accomplished by assembling 500 individual user corpora attained from the online forum Reddit. Each user corpus ranged between 3.8 and 32.3 million words each, and a count-based distributional framework was used to extract word meanings for each user. These representations were then used to estimate the semantic alignment of word meanings across individual language users. It was found that there are significant levels of relativity in word meanings across individuals, and these differences are partially explained by other psycholinguistic factors, such as concreteness, semantic diversity, and social aspects of language usage. These results point to word meanings being fundamentally relative and contextually fluid, with this relativeness being related to the individualized nature of linguistic experience.

Abstract TP84: Characteristics of Cerebellar Cognitive Affective Syndrome in Patients With Acute Cerebellar Stroke and Its Impact on Outcome

Background: Recently, cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome-scale (CCAS-S) was developed to assess CCAS in which cognitive impairment is caused by cerebellar lesions. However, very few studies have been conducted regarding CCAS in patients with stroke, and its impact on outcomes is unclear. This study aimed to evaluate CCAS in patients with acute cerebellar stroke and examine its association with outcome. Methods: Patients who experienced acute cerebellar stroke for the first time and were admitted to Steel Memorial Yawata Hospital, Japan within seven days of stroke onset between April 2021 and April 2023 were included in this observational study. CCAS-S, Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and Scale for Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) scores were measured one week after stroke onset, and Functional Independence measure (FIM)/ Barthel Index (BI) at discharge, physical function, activities of daily living, length of hospital stay, and outcome (discharge destination) were evaluated. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare CCAS-S scores and other variables between patients with acute cerebellar stroke and healthy controls. Additionally, we compared these variables between patients discharged home and those discharged to a rehabilitation hospital. A significance level of less than 5%. Results: Thirteen consecutive patients with acute cerebellar stroke (9 women) and age-and sex-matched healthy controls (7 women) were included. The MMSE score was within the normal range in all patients; however, patients with stroke had a lower total CCAS-S score (median 72, interquartile range [IQR] 66-80) and a higher number of failed tests (median 4, IQR 3-5) than healthy controls. Significant deficits were observed in semantic fluency (p=0.008), category switching (p=0001), and similarity (p=009). Possible, probable, and definite CCAS were diagnosed in 2, 1, and 10 patients, respectively. Patients discharged home showed better SARA and FIM/BI scores but similar CCAS-S scores compared to those discharged to rehabilitation hospitals. Conclusion: CCAS along with impaired executive and language functions is frequently observed in patients with acute cerebellar stroke; however, impaired motor function, and not CCAS, influenced the outcome.

Predictive Brain Activity Shows Congruent Semantic Specificity in Language Comprehension and Production.

Sentence fragments strongly predicting a specific subsequent meaningful word elicit larger preword slow waves, prediction potentials (PPs), than unpredictive contexts. To test the current predictive processing models, 128-channel EEG data were collected from both sexes to examine whether (1) different semantic PPs are elicited in language comprehension and production and (2) whether these PPs originate from the same specific "prediction area(s)" or rather from widely distributed category-specific neuronal circuits reflecting the meaning of the predicted item. Slow waves larger after predictable than unpredictable contexts were present both before subjects heard the sentence-final word in the comprehension experiment and before they pronounced the sentence-final word in the production experiment. Crucially, cortical sources underlying the semantic PP were distributed across several cortical areas and differed between the semantic categories of the expected words. In both production and comprehension, the anticipation of animal words was reflected by sources in posterior visual areas, whereas predictable tool words were preceded by sources in the frontocentral sensorimotor cortex. For both modalities, PP size increased with higher cloze probability, thus further confirming that it reflects semantic prediction, and with shorter latencies with which participants completed sentence fragments. These results sit well with theories viewing distributed semantic category-specific circuits as the mechanistic basis of semantic prediction in the two modalities.

The right side of price: evidence of a SNARC-like effect for economic value

It is well known that both numerical and non-numerical magnitudes can be represented horizontally from left to right. Building on this knowledge, here we explored whether a similar spatial representation exists for the economic value of goods. Participants were presented with images of a reference and a target product and classified the economic value of the target as higher or lower than that of the reference (Experiments 1 and 2), or classified the target product as belonging to the same or different semantic category as the reference (Experiment 3). Responses were collected using lateralized keys. Evidence of a SNARC-like effect for economic value emerged, whereby low economic value was associated with the left side of space, and high economic value was associated with the right side of space. Importantly, this spatial representation appeared to be based on external spatial coordinates and only emerged when the economic value was treated as an explicit dimension. Regression analyses also ruled out the potential contributions of other dimensions, such as the presumed physical weight of the target products or their valence. These findings support the hypothesis of a general magnitude representation system.

Learning semantic categories of L2 verbs: The case of cutting and breaking verbs.

To attain native-like proficiency in second-language word usage, learners have to discover intricate semantic categories in the target language. We investigated the factors influencing the development of two aspects of second-language learners' semantic categories: the category center and category boundary of word meanings. In the experiment, second-language learners of Japanese, whose first language is Mandarin, were asked to produce the best verb for 28 videos depicting various cutting and breaking events. Descriptive analyses were conducted to compare the verb patterns used by second-language learners with those of native speakers. The second-language learners' verb use pattern suggested their struggle in delineating the semantic ranges of breaking verbs in a native-like manner. Model analyses further revealed that different factors contribute to learning two different aspects of word meanings. The learning category center of word meaning depended on the similarity between the lexical domains in the first and second languages. On the contrary, the success of learning the semantic boundaries of verbs required a large input frequency and smaller semantic coverage, and smaller category ambiguity. The results suggest that constructing a semantic domain in the second language should be evaluated from at least two different aspects of semantic representation.

IeMTLF: Interaction-enhanced Multi-Task Learning Framework for next location prediction

Location-Based Services (LBSs) provide spatial and semantic information of various locations, thanks to the advances in mobile devices and commercial map services. However, most existing studies on next location prediction neglect the semantic information and do not investigate the effects of different levels of semantic granularity. To address these issues, we propose an Interaction-enhanced Multi-Task Learning Framework (IeMTLF) that jointly predicts the next location and its semantic category and leverages higher-order feature interactions to enrich the semantic learning process. Moreover, we examine the effect of two different levels of semantic granularity, namely, specific and abstract, on prediction performance. We conducted extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and demonstrate that IeMTLF outperforms seven baselines on all evaluation metrics, with a maximum gain of more than 13% for Acc@5 compared to the state-of-the-art method. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/mrc-wyh/IeMTLF.

The semantic content of concrete, abstract, specific, and generic concepts

Abstract Abstraction processes involve two variables that are often confused with one another: concreteness (banana versus belief) and specificity (chair versus furniture or Buddhism versus religion). Researchers are investigating the relationship between them, but many questions remain open, such as: What type of semantics characterizes words with varying degrees of concreteness and specificity? We tackle this topic through an in-depth semantic analysis of 1049 Italian words for which human-generated concreteness and specificity ratings are available. Our findings show that (as expected) the semantics of concrete and abstract concepts differs, but most interestingly when specificity is considered, the variance in concreteness ratings explained by semantic types increases substantially, suggesting the need to carefully control word specificity in future research. For instance, mathematical concepts (phase) are on average abstract and generic, while behavioral qualities (arrogant) are on average abstract but specific. Moreover, through cluster analyses based on concreteness and specificity ratings, we observe the bottom-up emergence of four subgroups of semantically coherent words. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence and theoretical insight into the interplay of concreteness and specificity in shaping semantic categorization.

Expressive vocabulary word categories of children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing.

This study investigated the acquisition of early expressive vocabulary among young children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH; n = 68) using auditory technology (hearing aids and cochlear implants). Parents completed a standardized vocabulary checklist, which allowed analyses of (i) the size of their child's spoken vocabulary; (ii) composition of the expressive lexicon (e.g., parts of speech such as nouns and verbs; semantic categories such as routines and body parts); and (iii) demographic and audiologic factors (e.g., chronologic age, degree of hearing access) potentially associated with these metrics. Young children who are DHH and use auditory technology acquired fewer spoken words than peers with typical hearing (TH) matched for chronologic age but more spoken words than peers with TH matched for listening experience. Action verbs-not nouns-significantly increased the odds of a child who is DHH achieving a vocabulary quotient within the normative range. These findings support the exploration of early expressive vocabulary size and composition-especially the number of active verbs-to guide clinical management and decision-making for young children who are DHH.

The role of vision in the acquisition of words: Vocabulary development in blind toddlers.

What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N=40, Mean age=24months [R: 7-57months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N=6574). We found that on average, blind children showed a roughly half-year vocabulary delay relative to sighted children, amid considerable variability. However, the content of blind and sighted children's vocabulary was statistically indistinguishable in word length, part of speech, semantic category, concreteness, interactiveness, and perceptual modality. At a finer-grained level, we also found that words' perceptual properties intersect with children's perceptual abilities. Our findings suggest that while an absence of visual input may initially make vocabulary development more difficult, the content of the early productive vocabulary is largely resilient to differences in perceptual access. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Infants and toddlers born blind (with no other diagnoses) show a 7.5 month productive vocabulary delay on average, with wide variability. Across the studied age range (7-57months), vocabulary delays widened with age. Blind and sighted children's early vocabularies contain similar distributions of word lengths, parts of speech, semantic categories, and perceptual modalities. Blind children (but not sighted children) were more likely to say visual words which could also be experienced through other senses.