Single Referent Research Articles

The Cost of Production in Elicitation Studies and the Legacy Bias-Consensus Trade off

Gesture elicitation studies are a popular means of gaining valuable insights into how users interact with novel input devices. One of the problems elicitation faces is that of legacy bias, when elicited interactions are biased by prior technologies use. In response, methodologies have been introduced to reduce legacy bias. This is the first study that formally examines the production method of reducing legacy bias (i.e., repeated proposals for a single referent). This is done through a between-subject study that had 27 participants per group (control and production) with 17 referents placed in a virtual environment using a head-mounted display. This study found that over a range of referents, legacy bias was not significantly reduced over production trials. Instead, production reduced participant consensus on proposals. However, in the set of referents that elicited the most legacy biased proposals, production was an effective means of reducing legacy bias, with an overall reduction of 11.93% for the chance of eliciting a legacy bias proposal.

Legal thinking in a post-classical perspective

On there were the leading theorists of the law of the country. In article presented the authors position about problems and perspectives of juridical thinking in post-classic perspective. Juridical thinking is it is a symbolic and informational activities according to the sphere of law, which acts as an internal, mental or mental content of legal practice, accompanying every legal action. Understanding (reflection) of juridical thinking is actual because of cognitive revolution in modern science. Most importantly moments, defining thinking of the postmodern era, characterizing all its levels and types, including legal thinking, are: uncertainty, contextuality, relativity, complementarity. Our knowledge about object is always incomplete, relative and contextual. Law is a complex, multifaceted, stochastic, potentially inexhaustible phenomenon that does not have a single referent to which the entire legal reality could be reduced (reduced). In extensive relations with all social phenomena (and not only social) there are more and more new properties of law. Numerous authorities today form many legal orders and at the same time types of juridical thinking. They set different images of law at the level of customary law and different criteria for assessing formal legislation. One of the differences of post-modern legal thinking (as well as thinking in any other sphere) is also its manipulativeness carried out by the authorities through media communications.

Addressees Are Sensitive to the Presence of Gesture When Tracking a Single Referent in Discourse.

Production studies show that anaphoric reference is bimodal. Speakers can introduce a referent in speech by also using a localizing gesture, assigning a specific locus in space to it. Referring back to that referent, speakers then often accompany a spoken anaphor with a localizing anaphoric gesture (i.e., indicating the same locus). Speakers thus create visual anaphoricity in parallel to the anaphoric process in speech. In the current perception study, we examine whether addressees are sensitive to localizing anaphoric gestures and specifically to the (mis)match between recurrent use of space and spoken anaphora. The results of two reaction time experiments show that, when a single referent is gesturally tracked, addressees are sensitive to the presence of localizing gestures, but not to their spatial congruence. Addressees thus seem to integrate gestural information when processing bimodal anaphora, but their use of locational information in gestures is not obligatory in every discourse context.

Negated tautologies and copular contradictions

Abstract This paper investigates utterances with the structure A is not A, showing that they can be fully informative and are felicitously used and understood in discourse. Relying on the notions of metalinguistic and metarepresentational negation, we argue that the class of utterances A is not A is heterogeneous and differs in regard to the lower-order representation under the scope of the negative operator. Specifically, we distinguish negated tautologies and copular contradictions. The understanding of negated tautologies involves identifying the corresponding affirmative deep tautology (Bulhof & Gimbel, 2001) and rejecting the assumptions derived from it. The interpretation of copular contradictions is based on distinguishing each of the occurrences of the repeated constituent as describing (a) one single referent with different properties; (b) two different referents satisfying the same description in different evaluation worlds; (c) two different referents, with different properties, which are accessed by means of the same linguistic expression.

Resolving polite conflicts in predicate agreement

When an agreement controller contains conflicting semantic and formal features, the predicates that agree with it can differ with respect to the type of features they reflect. With the second person pronoun used for politely addressing a single referent, finite verbs always agree in (formal) plural number, while participles in some languages may or must agree in (natural) singular number and gender. Building on the claims from the previous literature that the honorific pronoun formally encodes both the grammatical features (plural number and person) and the natural gender and singular number, the analysis proposed in this paper derives the variation in predicate agreement by combining the formal tools of feature geometries, separate probing and variation in the ordering of Agree operations. The main claim advanced by the paper is that predicates differ with respect to the φ-features they probe for, and the order in which this probing applies.

Coordinating nominal compounds: Universal vs. areal tendencies

AbstractCoordinating compounds, i.e. complex word forms in which the constituent lexemes are in a coordination relation, may be divided into two classes: hyperonymic, in which the referent of the whole compound is the “sum” of the meanings of the constituent lexemes (Korowaiyumdefól‘(her) husband-wife, couple’; van Enk, Gerrit J., & Lourens de Vries. 1997.The Korowai of Irian Jaya: Their language in its cultural context. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 66), and hyponymic, where the compound designates a single referent having features of all the constituents (Englishactor-director). It has been proposed that languages choose either type as the one with the “tightest” marking pattern; whereas the crosslinguistic tendency is to have tighter hyperonymic compounds, most languages of Europe rather have tighter hyponymic compounds (Arcodia, Giorgio Francesco, Nicola Grandi, & Bernhard Wälchli 2010. Coordination in compounding. In Sergio Scalise & Irene Vogel (eds.),Cross-disciplinary issues in compounding, 177–198. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins). In this paper, we will test this assumption on noun-noun compounds in a sample of 20 Standard Average European languages and in a balanced sample of 60 non-SAE languages, arguing that the preference for hyperonymic compounds is best explained by the default referential function of nouns; in hyponymic compounds, on the other hand, nouns are used to indicate properties. We will then compare nominal and adjectival coordinating compounds, showing that for the latter the hyponymic compounding pattern is the dominant one, as adjectives are prototypical property-denoting words.

The repeated name penalty effect in children's natural reading: Evidence from eye tracking.

We report data from an eye tracking experiment on the repeated name penalty effect in 9-year-old children and young adults. The repeated name penalty effect is informative for the study of children's reading because it allows conclusions about children's ability to direct attention to discourse-level processing cues during reading. We presented children and adults simple three-sentence stories with a single referent, which was referred to by an anaphor-either a pronoun or a repeated name-downstream in the text. The anaphor was either near or far from the antecedent. We found a repeated name penalty effect in early processing for children as well as adults, suggesting that beginning readers are already susceptible to discourse-level expectations of anaphora during reading. Furthermore, children's reading was more influenced by the distance of anaphor and antecedent than adults', which we attribute to differences in reading fluency and the resulting cognitive load during reading.

Feminist Epistemology: A Reconstruction and Integration of Women's Knowledge and Experiences

Epistemology is the study of knowing. It is the basis for knowing and how it is that people come to know what they know (Johnson, 1995, p. 97). Originating from philosophy, epistemology seems to come to us from a number of disciplines, i. e.: sociology, psychology, and political science, among others (Duran, 1991, p. xi). These fields have all contributed to what is known as feminist epistemology. This occurred with the emergence of materials that professed to spelling out what feminist accounts of knowledge entail and what is implied by ways of knowing pertaining to women (p. xi). The term feminist epistemology does not have a single referent. Feminist theorists have used the term variously to refer to women's "ways of knowing," "women's experiences," or simple "women's knowledge" (Alcoff Potter, 1993, p. 1). Therefore, the term feminist epistemology is a means of summarizing, to some extent, and integrating women's knowledge and experiences. Inherent in feminist epistemology is the "multiplicity of women's voices" (Duran, 1991, p. xiii).

Integration and maintenance of gradient acoustic information in spoken language processing

Models of speech processing seek to explain how continuous acoustic input is mapped onto discrete symbols at various levels of representation, such as phonemes, words, and referents. While recent work has supported models that posit maintenance of fine-grained information, it is not clear how continuous, low-level information in the speech signal is integrated with discrete, higher-level linguistic information. To investigate this, we created acoustic continua between the pronouns “he” and “she” by manipulating the amplitude of frication in the initial phoneme. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, listeners viewed scenes containing male and female referents and heard sentences containing a pronoun, which later disambiguated to a single referent. Measures of eye-gaze revealed immediate sensitivity to both graded acoustic information and discourse-level information. Moreover, when listeners made an initially incorrect interpretation of the referent, recovery time varied as a function of acoustic st...

The Pursuit of Word Meanings.

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word-learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest.

Phonological and Semantic Cues to Learning from Word-Types.

Word-types represent the primary form of data for many models of phonological learning, and they often predict performance in psycholinguistic tasks. Word-types are often tacitly defined as phonologically unique words. Yet, an explicit test of this definition is lacking, and natural language patterning suggests that word meaning could also act as a cue to word-type status. This possibility was tested in a statistical phonotactic learning experiment in which phonological and semantic properties of word-types varied. During familiarization, the learning targets—word-medial consonant sequences—were instantiated either by four related word-types or by just one word-type (the experimental frequency factor). The expectation was that more word-types would lead participants to generalize the target sequences. Regarding semantic cues, related word-types were either associated with different referents or all with a single referent. Regarding phonological cues, related word-types differed from each other by one, two, or more phonemes. At test, participants rated novel wordforms for their similarity to the familiarization words. When participants heard four related word-types, they gave higher ratings to test words with the same consonant sequences, irrespective of the phonological and semantic manipulations. The results support the existing phonological definition of word-types.

Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds' cross-situational word learning.

While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2·5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational evidence were more ambiguous. Children saw four trials in which a novel word occurred with four novel objects; only one object consistently co-occurred with the word across trials. The frequency of distracter objects varied across conditions. When all distracter referents occurred only once (no-competition), children successfully identified the noun's referent. When a high-probability competitor referent occurred on three trials, children identified the target referent if the competitor was absent on the third trial (short-competition) but not if it was present until the fourth trial (long-competition). This suggests that although 2·5-year-olds' cross-situational learning scales up to more ambiguous scenes, it is disrupted by high-probability competitor referents.

R60 - AIFA anti-tumor drugs platform break: a good clinical management

Background: When the AIFA (Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco) online drugs prescription program was broken in December 2013, every Italian oncology ward didn't have the means to record the new prescriptions of monitored anti-tumor drugs on the program itself, as required by the national guidelines. This system damage also prevented the access to the old data of patients still in treatment. At the Oncology Day Hospital of Guastalla, after this event a new inner database was created in order to record all the new prescriptions. For patients who began anti-tumor treatments before the break, old data prescriptions were needed to continue the chemotherapy. These were taken from the paper medical records and inserted in the database. AIFA did not give any guideline or direction to follow after the program break. April 2014, AIFA created a completely new platform for recording drug prescriptions. From that moment, every Oncology Unit had to insert in the new program both all the drugs prescribed during previous 16 months and the new prescriptions not later than December 2014. Materials and methods: In our Oncology DayHospitalin Guastalla, a target working group was created in order to perform this job. The group was composed by an oncologist and a pharmacist, both supervised by their respective chiefs. They met twice a week to record all the pending data, working from 8.30 to 14.The work was very hard because of the inadequate AIFA guidelines and the delayed answers to team queries. Both oncology and pharmaceutical Department suffered from the absence of a single professional referent . For each patient and for each drug, the working group had to collect the natural history of the disease, the time of progression and the number of chemotherapy cycles. This analysis was necessary for every drug in order to obtain the pay back of the costs of the treatment itself. In fact, there are different types of pay back in relation to the cancer diagnosis, the kind of drug and the results of the treatment. Results: The working team succeeded in completing the AIFA new drug prescription program before the deadline. The local Health Trust received the expected pay back for the prescribed treatments. Conclusions: This experience is an example of an integrative work between professionals from different areas. Successful results could be obtained thanks to the good management skills of the professionals involved, despite the lack of guidelines and support from AIFA.

Abstract B56: Racial disparities in the receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy among stage III colon cancer patients

Abstract Background: Although the incidence and mortality of colorectal cancer (CRC) in the U.S. has declined over the past two decades, CRC disproportionately affects blacks, who have higher incidence and mortality compared with whites. CRC disparities are partly attributable to differences in risk factors, screening and early detection, and tumor biology; however, variations in treatment may also contribute to mortality differentials. Few studies have evaluated how disparities in CRC treatment have changed over time and across different settings. Using the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Patterns of Care studies, we examined patterns in the use of adjuvant chemotherapy and differences for non-Hispanic whites and blacks in a population-based sample of stage III colon cancer patients during the period 1990-2010. Methods: Patients diagnosed with stage III colon cancer were randomly sampled from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program in 1990-91, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010. There was oversampling by race in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010. Patients were categorized as non-Hispanic white (n=869) or black (n=385). Treatment data were obtained from medical record review with physician verification. All patients in these analyses underwent cancer-directed surgery. Patients who received or were recommended any chemotherapy agents as part of primary therapy were considered to have received chemotherapy. Log-binomial regression models with stratum-specific sample weights were used to estimate the association between race and receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy. Potential confounders included age at diagnosis, sex, insurance, comorbidity, and year of diagnosis. Effect measure modification by insurance was assessed using single referent models. Results: There were few differences in sociodemographic characteristics among whites and blacks in the total study population (n=1,254). A similar proportion of white and black patients had high-risk features (e.g., poorly differentiated histology, bowel obstruction, positive surgical margins). Receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy increased among both white and black patients from 1990/91 (white: 57%, black: 45%) to 2005 (white: 72%, black: 71%) and decreased in 2010 (white: 65%, black: 53%). There were marked racial disparities in receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy in 1990/91 and again in 2010. After adjusting for potential confounders, black patients were less likely to receive adjuvant chemotherapy compared to whites (RR 0.82, 95% CI [0.73, 0.93]). A similar trend was observed when the analysis was limited to “healthy” patients age <75 years and with a comorbidity score of one or less (RR 0.84, 95% CI [0.75, 0.95]). There was no difference in the types of chemotherapy agents or regimens received by race among chemotherapy-treated patients. Single referent models suggested the association of black race with receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy did not differ across insurance categories (private: RR 0.81, 95% CI [0.77, 0.94]; Medicare: RR 0.80, 95% CI [0.59, 1.09]; Medicaid: RR 0.85, 95% CI [0.69, 1.05]), although a larger proportion of black patients had Medicaid in all years of the study compared to whites. Conclusions: The gap in the proportion of white and black stage III colon cancer patients who received adjuvant chemotherapy narrowed after 1990/91, but our findings suggest the disparity reemerged in 2010. The disparity persisted after adjusting for multiple confounders and across insurance types. Recent decreases in chemotherapy use may be due, in part, to the economic downturn and a shift toward greater use of Medicaid coverage. This shift followed the 2008 financial crisis, which may have also resulted in barriers to treatment access. Receipt of chemotherapy decreased more substantially in black patients compared to whites in 2010. Programs to address this treatment disparity are needed to improve quality of care, increase survival, and reduce disparities related to CRC mortality. Citation Format: Caitlin C. Murphy, Linda C. Harlan, Joan L. Warren, Ann M. Geiger. Racial disparities in the receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy among stage III colon cancer patients. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Seventh AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 9-12, 2014; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2015;24(10 Suppl):Abstract nr B56.

An integrative account of constraints on cross-situational learning

Word-object co-occurrence statistics are a powerful information source for vocabulary learning, but there is considerable debate about how learners actually use them. While some theories hold that learners accumulate graded, statistical evidence about multiple referents for each word, others suggest that they track only a single candidate referent. In two large-scale experiments, we show that neither account is sufficient: Cross-situational learning involves elements of both. Further, the empirical data are captured by a computational model that formalizes how memory and attention interact with co-occurrence tracking. Together, the data and model unify opposing positions in a complex debate and underscore the value of understanding the interaction between computational and algorithmic levels of explanation.

Sources of Unity and Disunity in Sociology

In this essay I will present some ideas on the themes of unity and disunity in our field. It will be a sociological analysis of our own house, a kind of sociology of knowledge about sociology. I will not only consider internal features of the discipline but also will move out of doors and consider our institutional embeddedness in the academy, as well as in larger societal, political, and cultural environments. It is rare that sociologists use their own tools to analyze themselves, but it important and profitable to do so. I use the terms “unity” and “disunity” in the title. Neither term is very clear in its meaning. My subject is sufficiently complex, however, that a single term with a single referent will not do. By “unity” I mean commitment to a common culture and mission, a sense of solidarity, lack of conflict, and a generally positive attitude toward others in one’s social category (in this case, other sociologists). By “disunity” I mean the opposite of each of the factors making for unity.

Taking care of group size and heterogeneity in social recognition systems

Scrutinizing the relative effects and inter-relations of genetic relatedness per se and familiarity (established independently, but maybe used as a proxy, of genetic relatedness) in social recognition systems is, owing to their fundamental evolutionary significance, an important but experimentally challenging task. de Bruijn et al. (2014) report that immature thrips Frankliniella occidentalis living in sibling groups have higher survival chances under predation risk when they are familiar than unfamiliar whereas this is not the case in non-sibling groups. The authors conclude that (1) direct familiarity enhances survival of thrips under predation risk and (2) thrips only familiarize with kin or kinship is needed for generating beneficial effects of familiarity under predation risk. Conclusion (1) is straightforward and clearly supported by the presented experiments; conclusion (2) is invalid. Possible effects of prior association, leading to direct familiarity based recognition (e.g. Blaustein and Porter 1996; Mateo 2004), are commonly constrained by referent number and heterogeneity (label variability) during familiarization (e.g. Reeve 1989; Griffiths and Magurran 1997; Liebert and Starks 2004; Croney and Newberry 2007). Due to cognitive limitations, these constraints principally apply to both social recognition mechanisms based on familiarity via prior association, learning and memorizing distinct individual labels of the referents (direct familiarity), and its extension, generalizing on a shared feature of the referents (indirect familiarity, phenotype matching). Accordingly, the acceptance thresholds of the actors (the discriminating individuals) depend on and vary with the number and variability of referents (the label carrying individuals) encountered during the phase of neural template formation (Reeve 1989; Liebert and Starks 2004). The larger the group size, the higher the number of referents encountered, the less likely the chance of encountering every single possible referent, the more difficult forming and storing neural templates of every individual label, the less precise the individual neural templates formed, the more likely formation of a generalized template, the more liberal the acceptance threshold of the actor upon encountering conspecific individuals to be recognized (i.e., the recipients), the higher the chance of recognition errors. The tight linkage between acceptance thresholds and number and variability of referents/recipients is disregarded in experiment 2 of de Bruijn et al. (2014). In experiment 2 of de Bruijn et al. (2014), sibling and nonsibling group size was the same during the experiment on survival under predation risk, but sibling and non-sibling group size and label heterogeneity differed decisively during the pre-experimental familiarizat ion phase. Preexperimentally, siblings grew up in groups of 10 to 15 individuals, whereas non-siblings grew up in >10 times larger groups. de Bruijn et al. (2014) placed 1 vs. 10 to 15 ovipositing thrips females on the same leaf for 4 days giving rise to larvae used in sibling and non-sibling groups, respectively (at 21 °C, each thrips female deposits two to three eggs per day on cucumber—see Deligeorgidis et al. (2006)). Following is that due to largely differing pre-experimental group sizes, the likelihood of mutual encounter between any pair of individuals, and with that the opportunity to mutually familiarize, was much lower in non-sibling than sibling groups. Additionally, due to the high number and associated variability of founder females of the non-sibling groups, referent label variability was much higher in non-sibling than sibling groups. While de Bruijn et al. (2014) acknowledge the difference in pre-experimental group size of siblings and nonsiblings and separately analyzed survival of familiar vs. Communicated by J. C. Choe

Nicotine Absorption from Smokeless Tobacco Modified to Adjust pH.

Nicotine delivery from smokeless tobacco (ST) products leads to addiction and the use of ST causes pathology that is associated with increased initiation of cigarette smoking. The rapid delivery of nicotine from ST seems to be associated with the pH of the aqueous suspension of the products - high pH is associated with high nicotine absorption. However, early studies compared nicotine absorption from different commercial products that not only differed in pH but in flavoring, nicotine content, and in format-pouches and loose tobacco. The present study compared nicotine absorption from a single unflavored referent ST product (pH 7.7) that was flavored with a low level of wintergreen (2 mg/g) and the pH was amended to either high (8.3) or low (5.4) pH with sodium carbonate or citric acid, respectively. In a within-subject clinical study, the higher pH products delivered more nicotine. No significant differences were seen between perceived product strengths and product experience in all conditions. Heart rate increased by 4 to 6 beats per minute after the high pH flavored and the un-amended product but did not change after the low pH flavored product. These results indicate that pH is a primary determinant of buccal nicotine absorption. The role of flavoring and other components of ST products in nicotine absorption remain to be determined.

Gender representation in the 1999 Nigerian constitution: A critical discourse analysis for socio-political equity

The article appraises gender representation in the 1999 Nigerian Constitution using insights from critical discourse analysis, feminism and systemic functional linguistics, with particular emphasis on grammatical cohesion. Specifically, it examines lexical and grammatical expressions that encode gender in the Constitution, the ideological positions evident in these expressions, and their impact on gender parity and socio-political equity. The focus is on the reference-antecedent cohesion of gender-marked pronouns and nouns used to refer to individuals and social/political positions. Our findings show a preponderance of generic masculine noun and pronoun references, tracking antecedents that refer to social and political positions open to eligible individuals in Nigeria, while the single feminine referent was a marked case. These findings buttress the ‘male-as-norm’ ideology and the relegation to anonymity of the female gender in this important national document. For equity and fairness, the article recommends revising the Constitution with epicene expressions to expunge gender biases.

Grip-force modulation in multi-finger prehension during wrist flexion and extension

Extrinsic digit muscles contribute to both fingertip forces and wrist movements (FDP and FPL-flexion, EDC-extension). Hence, it is expected that finger forces depend on the wrist movement and position. We investigated the relation between grip force and wrist kinematics to examine whether and how the force (1) scales with wrist flexion-extension (FE) angle and (2) can be predicted from accelerations induced during FE movement. In one experiment, subjects naturally held an instrumented handle using a prismatic grasp and performed very slow FE movements. In another experiment, the same movement was performed cyclically at three prescribed frequencies. In quasistatic conditions, the grip force remained constant over the majority of the wrist range of motion. During the cyclic movements, the grip force changed. The changes were described with a linear regression model that represents the thumb and virtual finger (VF = four fingers combined) normal forces as the sum of the effects of the object's tangential and radial accelerations and an object-weight-dependent constant term. The model explained 99 % of the variability in the data. The independence of the grip force from wrist position agrees with the theory that the thumb and VF forces are controlled with two neural variables that encode referent coordinates for each digit while accounting for changes in the position dependence of muscle forces, rather than a single neural variable like referent aperture. The results of the cyclical movement study extend the principle of superposition (some complex actions can be decomposed into independently controlled elemental actions) for a motor task involving simultaneous grip-force exertion and wrist motion with significant length changes of the grip-force-producing muscles.