Violation Of Structure Research Articles

The grammar of visual narrative: Neural evidence for constituent structure in sequential image comprehension

Constituent structure has long been established as a central feature of human language. Analogous to how syntax organizes words in sentences, a narrative grammar organizes sequential images into hierarchic constituents. Here we show that the brain draws upon this constituent structure to comprehend wordless visual narratives. We recorded neural responses as participants viewed sequences of visual images (comics strips) in which blank images either disrupted individual narrative constituents or fell at natural constituent boundaries. A disruption of either the first or the second narrative constituent produced a left-lateralized anterior negativity effect between 500 and 700ms. Disruption of the second constituent also elicited a posteriorly-distributed positivity (P600) effect. These neural responses are similar to those associated with structural violations in language and music. These findings provide evidence that comprehenders use a narrative structure to comprehend visual sequences and that the brain engages similar neurocognitive mechanisms to build structure across multiple domains.

Устройство контроля нагрузки при одонтопрепарировании

Work abrasive dental rotary tool is associated with tissue damage teeth. In case of non-observance of the thermal mode of preparation, it is possible the development traumatic pulpitis and violation of the local structure of hard tissues. To reduce unwanted consequences of preparation of teeth is mandatory, subject to such rules as the conduct of a stage of preparation of water-air cooling, the correct selection tool to perform certain tasks, the use of qualitative new tools, etc. One of the recommendations which aim to reduce the undesirable effects of preparation of hard tooth tissues, is to limit the load on the tool. In the available literature found research dedicated to finding the optimal values load on the tool preparation. It is believed that the load on the tool preparation to be about 20 g. At various times, the authors developed several devices designed to bring the power supply dental rotary tool to the recommended values. However, in the available literature hasn’t been met mention of using the proposed device. Thus, the problem of control load preparation remains unresolved. The authors developed a device that allows for preparation of teeth with preset effort. The article provides a technical description of the proposed device.

Foregrounding Socioeconomic Rights in Transitional Justice: Realising Justice for Violations of Economic and Social Rights

Transitional justice has traditionally ignored or sidelined violations of economic and social rights, focussing on violations of civil and political rights as the primary grave human rights violations to be addressed when seeking justice for past atrocities. This paper explores the omission of these rights from the field and uncovers the shortcomings of such an approach. It will argue that there is a need for transitional justice to address both deliberate violations of economic and social rights resulting from conflict or repression, but also structural violations which have acted as root causes of conflict within the State. It is submitted that past experiences of prosecutorial and restorative justice illustrate that violations of economic and social rights have been acknowledged as background information rather than primary concerns for transitional justice. In conclusion it is contended that economic and social rights need to be brought to the foreground of transitional justice processes in order to ensure effective transitional justice which reflects the needs and rights of the local population, and addresses the root causes of conflict, thus preventing conflict reoccurring around the same sources. The inclusion of economic and social rights concerns within transitional justice mechanisms will therefore contribute to a more holistic and inclusive transitional justice process.

Modeling of 6ΛHe hypernucleus within configuration space Faddeev approach

The cluster 4 He + � + n model is applied to describe the 6 He hyper- nucleus. The consideration is based on the configuration space Faddeev equations for a system of non-identical particles. A set of the pair potentials includes the OBE simulating (NSC97f) model for then interaction and the phenomenologi- cal potentials for the �� andn interactions. We calculated energies of (1 − ,2 − ) spin doublet. For the 2 − excitation energy, the obtained value is 0.18 MeV. The hyperon binding energy of the bound 1 − state is less than the experimental value, which may be an evidence for violation of the exact three-body cluster structure.

Chinese Carless Young Drivers’ Self-Reported Driving Behavior and Simulated Driving Performance

Objective: Carless young drivers refers to those drivers aged between 18 and 25 years who have a driver's license but seldom have opportunities to practice their driving skills because they do not have their own cars. Due to China's lower private car ownership, many young drivers become carless young drivers after licensure, and the safety issue associated with them has raised great concern in China. This study aims to provide initial insight into the self-reported driving behaviors and simulated driving performance of Chinese carless young drivers. Methods: Thirty-three carless young drivers and 32 young drivers with their own cars (as a comparison group) participated in this study. A modified Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ) with a 4-factor structure (errors, violations, attention lapses, and memory lapses) was used to study carless young drivers’ self-reported driving behaviors. A simulated driving experiment using a low-cost, fixed-base driving simulator was conducted to measure their simulated driving performance (errors, violations, attention lapses, driving maintenance, reaction time, and accidents). Results: Self-reported DBQ outcomes showed that carless young drivers reported similar errors, more attention lapses, fewer memory lapses, and significantly fewer violation behaviors relative to young drivers with their own cars, whereas simulated driving results revealed that they committed significantly more errors, attention lapses, and violation behaviors than the comparison group. Carless young drivers had a lower ability to maintain the stability of speed and lane position, drove more cautiously approaching and passing through red traffic lights, and committed more accidents during simulated driving. A tendency to speed was not found among carless young drivers; their average speed and speeding frequency were all much lower than that of the comparison group. Lifetime mileage was the only significant predictor of carless young drivers’ self-reported violations, simulated violations, speed, and reaction time, whereas no significant predictor was found for young drivers with their own cars. Conclusions: Carless young drivers had poorer driving performance and were more overconfident of their self-reported driving skills compared to those young drivers with greater access to vehicles. Given that the lifetime mileage positively predicted the simulated violations measure of carless young drivers, immediate interventions are needed to help them increase driving exposure and gain driving experience gradually before moving to more challenging on-road driving tasks. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Traffic Injury Prevention to view the supplemental file.

Specific aspects of cognitive and language proficiency account for variability in neural indices of semantic and syntactic processing in children

The neural activity mediating language processing in young children is characterized by large individual variability that is likely related in part to individual strengths and weakness across various cognitive abilities. The current study addresses the following question: How does proficiency in specific cognitive and language functions impact neural indices mediating language processing in children? Thirty typically developing seven- and eight-year-olds were divided into high-normal and low-normal proficiency groups based on performance on nonverbal IQ, auditory word recall, and grammatical morphology tests. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited by semantic anomalies and phrase structure violations in naturally spoken sentences. The proficiency for each of the specific cognitive and language tasks uniquely contributed to specific aspects (e.g., timing and/or resource allocation) of neural indices underlying semantic (N400) and syntactic (P600) processing. These results suggest that distinct aptitudes within broader domains of cognition and language, even within the normal range, influence the neural signatures of semantic and syntactic processing. Furthermore, the current findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of developmental studies of ERPs indexing language processing, and they highlight the need to take into account cognitive abilities both within and outside the classic language domain.

To the Victor Goes the Toil -- Remedies for Regulated Parties in Separation-of-Powers Litigation

The U.S. Constitution imposes three key limits on the design of federal agencies. It constrains how agency officers are appointed, the extent of their independence from the President, and the range of issues that they can decide. Scholars have trumpeted the importance of these safeguards with soaring rhetoric. And the Supreme Court has permitted regulated parties to vindicate these safeguards through implied private rights of action under the Constitution. Regulated parties, for their part, have been successfully challenging agency structure with increased frequency. At the same time, regulated parties, courts, and scholars have largely ignored the practical question of “structural remedies” — i.e., how to remedy the violation of structural safeguards for prevailing regulated parties. This inattention may arise because courts often provide what seems at first blush to be an appropriate remedy: severing the structural defect from an agency’s “organic” act. In fact, however, structural remedies often fail to satisfy core remedial values relevant to regulated parties — namely, compensating past harm, preventing future harm from the past defect, incentivizing regulated parties to seek redress, and deterring structural violations — and may leave regulated parties in a worse place than they occupied before asserting the challenge. These ineffectual remedies thereby undermine the very safeguards that judicial decisions purport to vindicate and render any “private right” potentially illusory. Courts, in response, can improve the status quo. They could select (or Congress could provide) better remedies, and this article considers how they could do so. But if structural remedies cannot be sufficiently improved, courts should either become more candid about the underlying safeguards’ limitations, or reconsider altogether the nature of the safeguards and regulated parties’ relationship to them.

Early childhood stuttering and electrophysiological indices of language processing

We examined neural activity mediating semantic and syntactic processing in 27 preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) and 27 preschool-age children who do not stutter (CWNS) matched for age, nonverbal IQ and language abilities. All participants displayed language abilities and nonverbal IQ within the normal range. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited while participants watched a cartoon video and heard naturally spoken sentences that were either correct or contained semantic or syntactic (phrase structure) violations. ERPs in CWS, compared to CWNS, were characterized by longer N400 peak latencies elicited by semantic processing. In the CWS, syntactic violations elicited greater negative amplitudes for the early time window (150–350ms) over medial sites compared to CWNS. Additionally, the amplitude of the P600 elicited by syntactic violations relative to control words was significant over the left hemisphere for the CWNS but showed the reverse pattern in CWS, a robust effect only over the right hemisphere. Both groups of preschoolage children demonstrated marked and differential effects for neural processes elicited by semantic and phrase structure violations; however, a significant proportion of young CWS exhibit differences in the neural functions mediating language processing compared to CWNS despite normal language abilities. These results are the first to show that differences in event-related brain potentials reflecting language processing occur as early as the preschool years in CWS and provide the first evidence that atypical lateralization of hemispheric speech/language functions previously observed in the brains of adults who stutter begin to emerge near the onset of developmental stuttering.Educational objectives: The reader will be able to: (1) describe the role of language processing in current theoretical models of developmental stuttering; (2) summarize current evidence regarding language processing differences between individuals who do and do not stutter; (3) describe typical changes in neural indices of semantic and syntactic processing across development; (4) discuss the potential implications of the current findings in relation to theories of developmental stuttering.

The influence of rhythmic (ir)regularities on speech processing: Evidence from an ERP study on German phrases

The present study investigates the status of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech and the importance of rhythmic alternations in cognitive processing. Previous studies showed the relevance of rhythm for language processing, but there has been only little research using the method of event-related potentials to investigate this phenomenon in a natural metrical context. To this end, an experiment was conducted in which the so-called Rhythm Rule (alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables) was either met or violated by stress clashes or stress lapses which are known to occur in German. The comparison of rhythmic well-formed conditions with the conditions including rhythmic irregularities revealed biphasic EEG-patterns for rhythmically marked structures, i.e., stress clashes and lapses.The present results show that irregular but possible rhythmic variants are costly in language processing, reflected by an early negativity and an N400 in contrast to the well-formed control conditions. Supposedly, the early negativity reflects error detection in rhythmical structure and supports the view that the brain is sensitive to subtle violations of rhythmical structure. A late positive component reflects the evaluation process related to the task requirements.The study shows that subtle rhythmical deviations from the Rhythm Rule are perceived and treated differently from well-formed structures during processing, even if the deviation in question is permitted and can therefore occur in language production.

Possibilities of Measuring Stress and Health Monitoring in Materials Using Contact-Less Sensor Based on Magnetic Microwires

This paper deals with the possibilities of contactless stress measuring inside a material. Conventional strain gauge measuring methods cover surface stress measuring, however measuring inside in material is widely limited. Magnetic microwires give us the ability to create a build-in sensor inside the material without its structure violation. Moreover, sensor can measure several parameters simultaneously, what makes this technology very interesting for many applications.

Involvement of working memory in college students’ sequential pattern learning and performance

When learning highly organized sequential patterns of information, humans and nonhuman animals learn rules regarding the hierarchical structures of these sequences. In three experiments, we explored the role of working memory in college students’ sequential pattern learning and performance in a computerized task involving a sequential multiple-choice paradigm. In Experiment 1, we explored whether working memory was necessary to abstract the structure of sequential patterns both with and without violations of pattern structure. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether working memory was necessary for accurate pattern performance after patterns with and without violations to pattern structure were learned well. Results indicated working memory was necessary for abstracting the rule describing overall pattern structure for patterns both with and without a violation of pattern structure. Further, once the pattern was well learned, working memory was required only for accurate performance of patterns containing a violation of pattern structure. In Experiment 3, we evaluated whether occupying working memory impaired participants’ ability to track their location within a sequence while performing the sequence or impaired their ability to abstract the rule governing the sequence. Results suggested that occupying working memory impaired participants’ ability to learn the rule describing the sequence.

Electrophysiological Responses to Semantic and Argument Structure Violations in Agrammatic Primary Progressive Aphasia

Electrophysiological Responses to Semantic and Argument Structure Violations in Agrammatic Primary Progressive Aphasia

Electrophysiological responses to argument structure violations in healthy adults and individuals with agrammatic aphasia

Sentence comprehension requires processing of argument structure information associated with verbs, i.e. the number and type of arguments that they select. Many individuals with agrammatic aphasia show impaired production of verbs with greater argument structure density. The extent to which these participants also show argument structure deficits during comprehension, however, is unclear. Some studies find normal access to verb arguments, whereas others report impaired ability. The present study investigated verb argument structure processing in agrammatic aphasia by examining event-related potentials associated with argument structure violations in healthy young and older adults as well as aphasic individuals. A semantic violation condition was included to investigate possible differences in sensitivity to semantic and argument structure information during sentence processing. Results for the healthy control participants showed a negativity followed by a positive shift (N400-P600) in the argument structure violation condition, as found in previous ERP studies (Friederici & Frisch, 2000; Frisch, Hahne, & Friederici, 2004). In contrast, individuals with agrammatic aphasia showed a P600, but no N400, response to argument structure mismatches. Additionally, compared to the control groups, the agrammatic participants showed an attenuated, but relatively preserved, N400 response to semantic violations. These data show that agrammatic individuals do not demonstrate normal real-time sensitivity to verb argument structure requirements during sentence processing.

Melodic pitch expectation interacts with neural responses to syntactic but not semantic violations

Current behavioural and electrophysiological evidence suggests that music and language syntactic processing depends on at least partly shared neural resources. Existing studies using a simultaneous presentation paradigm are limited to the effects of violations of harmonic structure in Western tonal music on processing of single syntactic or semantic violations. Because melody is a universal property of music as it is emphasized also by non-western musical traditions, it is fundamental to investigate interactions between melodic expectation and language processing. The present study investigates the effect of melodically unexpected notes on neural responses elicited by linguistic violations. Sentences with or without a violation in the last word were presented on screen simultaneously with melodies whose last note had a high- or low-probability, as estimated by a computational model of melodic expectation. Violations in language could be syntactic, semantic or combined. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants occasionally responded to language stimuli. Confirming previous studies, low-probability notes elicited an enhanced N1 compared to high-probability notes. Further, syntactic violations elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) and P600 component, and semantic violations elicited an N400. Combined violations elicited components which resembled neural responses to both syntactic and semantic incongruities. The LAN amplitude was decreased when language syntactic violations were presented simultaneously with low-probability notes compared to when they were presented with high-probability notes. The N400 was not influenced by the note-probability. These findings show support for the neural interaction between language and music processing, including novel evidence for melodic processing which can be incorporated in a computational framework of melodic expectation.

Sentence comprehension in proficient adult cochlear implant users: On the vulnerability of syntax

Comprehending language via a cochlear implant, a neural prosthesis which stimulates the acoustic nerve electrically, poses a remarkable challenge to the brain. We investigated auditory sentence comprehension in a group of thirteen high proficient adult cochlear implant patients using event-related brain potentials. Four types of sentences were examined: correct sentences with either high (1) or low (2) expectancy of the sentence final word (cloze probability), semantically incorrect sentences (3), and sentences violating the argument structure of the verb (4). Participants judged the acceptability of the sentences. Relative to correct sentences with a high cloze probability all other conditions elicited a N400 effect in both the patient group and a matched control group, although the timing of the effect differed between the two groups. Moreover, whereas the argument structure violation elicited a late positivity in addition to the N400 effect in the control group, no such effect was observable in the cochlear implant group. We take these data to indicate that under adverse input conditions, processes of syntactic repair reflected in the P600 effect, are much more vulnerable than processes of semantic integration reflected in N400 effects.

Production and perception rules underlying visual patterns: effects of symmetry and hierarchy

Formal language theory has been extended to two-dimensional patterns, but little is known about two-dimensional pattern perception. We first examined spontaneous two-dimensional visual pattern production by humans, gathered using a novel touch screen approach. Both spontaneous creative production and subsequent aesthetic ratings show that humans prefer ordered, symmetrical patterns over random patterns. We then further explored pattern-parsing abilities in different human groups, and compared them with pigeons. We generated visual plane patterns based on rules varying in complexity. All human groups tested, including children and individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), were able to detect violations of all production rules tested. Our ASD participants detected pattern violations with the same speed and accuracy as matched controls. Children's ability to detect violations of a relatively complex rotational rule correlated with age, whereas their ability to detect violations of a simple translational rule did not. By contrast, even with extensive training, pigeons were unable to detect orientation-based structural violations, suggesting that, unlike humans, they did not learn the underlying structural rules. Visual two-dimensional patterns offer a promising new formally-grounded way to investigate pattern production and perception in general, widely applicable across species and age groups.

Accesso ai rimedi costituzionali, previo esaurimento e gestione "sussidiaria" delle violazioni strutturali della CEDU derivanti da difetti legislativi

The increasing number of judgments delivered by the Strasbourg Court in cases of human rights violations stemming from a systemic problem in the domestic legal system of a contracting State (so called "structural violations") and the development of the caselaw on the obligation of States to adopt general measures under Article 46 ECHR to remove the causes of such violations (including by amending the relevant legislation) are reinforcing the idea of Court as a sort of pan-European constitutional jurisdiction entrusted with the mandate to safeguard the European public order. At the same time, the "collective" dimension of the protection mandate must always be balanced against the need to afford individual justice to the "victims, calling for a better coordination of the two concurring interests. The article focuses on how to ensure that structural violations of ECHR rights caused by defects of domestic legislation are dealt with in accordance to the principle of subsidiarity, which is at the core of the entire protection mechanism established by the Convention. After highlighting the role of subsidiarity in respect of this particular kind of violations, the author explores two possible alternative developments of the Strasbourg case-law which would contribute to strengthening the cooperation between domestic constitutional jurisdictions and the ECHR system in those States (like Italy) where individuals do not enjoy direct access to constitutional justice. Notably, the author suggests a reinterpretation of the rule of previous exhaustion of domestic remedies in order to allow national judges to assess in the first place whether a law is compatible with the ECHR; in the alternative, the Court should conclude for a violation of the right to an effective remedy under Article 13, imposing on the contracting State the obligation to provide forms of individual constitutional justice at the domestic level that would ensure the "subsidiary management" of structural violations and of the mass litigation arising thereout

Processing simultaneous auditory objects: Infants’ ability to detect mistuning in harmonic complexes

The ability to separate simultaneous auditory objects is crucial to infant auditory development. Music in particular relies on the ability to separate musical notes, chords, and melodic lines. Little research addresses how infants process simultaneous sounds. The present study used a conditioned head-turn procedure to examine whether 6-month-old infants are able to discriminate a complex tone (240 Hz, 500 ms, six harmonics in random phase with a 6 dB roll-off per octave) from a version with the third harmonic mistuned. Adults perceive such stimuli as containing two auditory objects, one with the pitch of the mistuned harmonic and the other with pitch corresponding to the fundamental of the complex tone. Adult thresholds were between 1% and 2% mistuning. Infants performed above chance levels for 8%, 6%, and 4% mistunings, with no significant difference between conditions. However, performance was not significantly different from chance for 2% mistuning and significantly worse for 2% compared to all larger mistunings. These results indicate that 6-month-old infants are sensitive to violations of harmonic structure and suggest that they are able to separate two simultaneously sounding objects.

Harmonious Madness: The Poetics of Analogy at the Limits of Blending Theory

This essay argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792–1822) analogical poetics at once anticipates and challenges contemporary cognitive-scientific models of conceptual structure. Section 1 outlines unresolved logical and motivational issues that limit the explanatory power of conceptual metaphor and blending theories with respect to conceptual conflict and creativity. The deficiency may be supplied by recourse to English Romantic theories of poetic imagination, which are centrally occupied with the logic of conceptual conflict and the motive for creativity. Particularly pertinent are Shelley’s suggestive hypotheses about the projective processes that drive novel metaphoric conceptualization, which he (in company with cognitive theorists) posits as the engine and outpost of creativity. To demonstrate the plausibility of Shelley’s hypotheses, section 2 marshals as evidence early twentiethcentury literarycritical responses to Shelley’s poetics, especially as enacted in his 1820 ode “To a Sky-Lark.” These diverge in their evaluations of the poem, but they nevertheless converge in their descriptive accounts of the peculiar cognitive effect primed by Shelley’s complexly metaphoric verse, which orients attention not to emergent meanings or achieved mental representations but rather to underlying processes of meaning-making and representation that precede, produce, and ceaselessly replace any such products of (literary) cognition. Section 3 attributes this peculiarly dynamic effect to the poem’s insistent violations both of consistent conceptual structure and of “directionality” constraints on metaphoric projections from one conceptual domain to another. These violations upset deeply ingrained habits of conceptualization, frustrating the normally automatic processes that generate more or less consistent mental representations and thereby rendering those processes perceptible. The analysis thus illustrates a reciprocal exchange between poetics and cognitive science: the systematic deviances of Shelley’s verse can be exactly characterized in terms developed by cognitive metaphor theory; so characterized, those deviances may in turn be systematically manipulated to test and improve blending theory’s account of what it itself describes as “the mind’s hidden complexities” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).

Maturational Constraints on the Recruitment of Early Processes for Syntactic Processing

An enduring question in the study of second-language acquisition concerns the relative contributions of age of acquisition (AOA) and ultimate linguistic proficiency to neural organization for second-language processing. Several ERP and neuroimaging studies of second-language learners have found that neural organization for syntactic processing is sensitive to delays in second-language acquisition. However, such delays in second-language acquisition are typically associated with lower language proficiency, rendering it difficult to assess whether differences in AOA or proficiency lead to these effects. Here we examined the effects of delayed second-language acquisition while controlling for proficiency differences by examining participants who differ in AOA but who were matched for proficiency in the same language. We compared the ERP response to auditory English phrase structure violations in a group of late learners of English matched for grammatical proficiency with a group of English native speakers. In the native speaker group, violations elicited a bilateral and prolonged anterior negativity, with onset at 100 msec, followed by a posterior positivity (P600). In contrast, in the nonnative speaker group, violations did not elicit the early anterior negativity, but did elicit a P600 which was more widespread spatially and temporally than that of the native speaker group. These results suggest that neural organization for syntactic processing is sensitive to delays in language acquisition independently of proficiency level. More specifically, they suggest that both early and later syntactic processes are sensitive to maturational constraints. These results also suggest that late learners who reach a high level of second-language proficiency rely on different neural mechanisms than native speakers of that language.