Use Of Contextual Cues Research Articles

Indonesian Suburban Area EFL Teachers' Perspectives on Translanguaging

Bilinguals and multilingual people use translanguaging, which is the technique of using different linguistic components or forms of independent languages to improve communication. When incorporated into teaching methods, translanguaging strategies enable educators to bridge linguistic gaps and support the learning of a foreign language. Despite the perceived advantages of translanguaging, variations in teachers' perceptions create ideological barriers, hindering students from fully embracing translanguaging. This study intends to investigate the perspectives of Indonesian teachers teaching in suburban areas on translanguaging in English language instruction in order to obtain a deeper knowledge of this subject. This study used semi-structured interviews using a qualitative research design to go deep into teachers’ insights on the topic. The result of the study shows that the participants had a generally positive perception on translanguaging and used a variety of translanguaging strategies in their teaching methods, such as the use of contextual cues, cooperation, student-centered approaches, and bidirectional translation. The result of this study also shows participants’ perspective on a crucial need to include translanguaging to support low proficiency level EFL students in their classrooms. In addition, the finding reveals teachers’ perspectives on ramifications of translanguaging when it is used in EFL classes. The findings can be valuable for education stakeholders, particularly in suburban areas, guiding design of lessons with translanguaging practices that cater to learners’ needs in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms.

Using a checklist-based electronic calculation aid and contextual cues to assist medication dose calculation and calculation resumption after interruptions

ObjectivesTo examine whether (1) the use of a checklist-based electronic calculation aid enhanced medication dose calculation and reduced the negative effects of interruptions on calculation, and (2) the use of contextual cues facilitated the resumption of calculation after an interruption. MethodsSixty students in healthcare majors participated in two computer-based laboratory experiments. Experiment 1 examined the effects of the calculation aid and interruptions on calculation error rate, calculation completion time, and perception outcomes. Experiment 2 assessed the effects of contextual cues on resumption error rate, calculation error rate, calculation completion time, and perception outcomes. ResultsIn Experiment 1, calculation error rates were lower for participants who received the calculation aid versus those who did not, and for uninterrupted calculations versus interrupted calculations, although the differences were not statistically significant.The participants spent significantly less time completing the calculation task with the use of the calculation aid than without the use of the calculation aid, and in the case without interruptions than in the case with interruptions. In Experiment 2, the use of contextual cues associated with previous actions significantly reduced the resumption error rate and the completion time of the medication dose calculation. Both experiments showed that the use of the calculation aid and contextual cues was associated with positive attitudes toward the aid and cues, reduced mental effort, and/or higher confidence in task performance. ConclusionsThe use of the checklist-based electronic calculation aid and contextual cues facilitated medication dose calculation and resumption after interruptions and thus has the potential to improve medication safety and work efficiency in healthcare.

Positioning Students of English Communication as “Knowers" in Research Interviews

This article describes connections between positioning theory and willingness to communicate in the context of English language learning. The author analyses the cues in research interviews, adopting the perspective of positioning theory. Interviews were carried out with 8 students during 2020 and 21, for the purpose of researching EFL students' willingness to communicate (MacIntyre, Clement, Dornyei, & Noels, 1998). In this study the interviews are reviewed to explore the patterns of communication between the interviewer and the students in the light of positioning theory. The originators of positioning theory, Van Lagenhove and Harré (1999), identify the following components in any interaction: position, speech and other acts, and storyline. Coding the teacher's cues as “structural", “contextual" or “social" reveals that students are empowered by the use of contextual cues, which build on the students' responses to questions, and social cues, which create friendly feeling (Hazari, Lock, Cass and Beattie, 2015). When the interview transcripts were analyzed according to these cues, the facilitating purpose of “researcher talk", which appeared to dominate the interviews, emerged clearly. This research study shows how positioning theory can help us to understand the dynamics of interaction between a teacher-researcher and students outside class. The author suggests that positioning analysis yields insights which are also helpful for understanding interactions in the classroom. The article concludes with suggestions as to how teachers can leverage this knowledge to understand classroom interaction as well as 1:1 interactions between teacher/researchers and students.

Vocabulary Teaching in Refugee Children within the Context of the Greek Formal Education

The aim of the present study is to investigate vocabulary teaching in children with refugee backgrounds. The effectiveness of three vocabulary interventions—flashcards, pantomime, and use of contextual cues—is examined within the context of formal primary education in Greece. The improvement of the children’s vocabulary is also assessed in association with factors related to the students’ background as well as factors related to the words taught. Thirty-three pupils from the second to the sixth primary school grade attended the teaching interventions. Their first languages are Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish. According to the results, flashcards and pantomime significantly improve children’s second language vocabulary skills, while this finding does not apply to the intervention involving contextual cues. Age is found to play a role only in the latter intervention, while the effectiveness of no intervention was influenced by word category.

"Where are the . . . Fixations?": Grammatical number cues guide anticipatory fixations to upcoming referents and reduce lexical competition.

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological information with the target. The current study used the visual world paradigm to assess whether and how listeners use contextual cues about grammatical number during sentence processing by presenting target words in carrier phrases that were grammatically unconstraining ("Click on the . . .") or grammatically constraining ("Where is/are the . . ."). Prior to the onset of the target word, listeners were already more likely to fixate on plural objects in the "Where are the . . ." context than the "Where is the . . ." context, indicating that they used the construction of the verb to anticipate the referent. Further, participants showed less interference from cohort competitors when the sentence frame made them contextually inappropriate, but still fixated on those words more than on phonologically unrelated distractor words. These results suggest that listeners rapidly and flexibly make use of contextual cues about grammatical number while maintaining sensitivity to the bottom-up input. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Crafted vs Learned Representations in Predictive Models—A Case Study on Cyclist Path Prediction

This paper compares two models for context-based path prediction of objects with switching dynamics: a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). These models are instances of two larger model categories, distinguished by whether expert knowledge is explicitly crafted into the state representation (and thus is interpretable) or whether the representation is learned from data, respectively. They have shown state-of-the-art performance in previous work. In order to provide a fair comparison, we ensure that both models are treated similarly with respect to the use of context cues and parameter estimation. Specifically, we describe (1) how to integrate the context cues (used previously by the DBN) into the RNN, and (2) how to optimize the DBN with backpropagation similar to the RNN, while keeping an interpretable state representation. Experiments are performed on a scenario where a cyclist might turn left at an intersection in front of the ego-vehicle. Results show that the RNN successfully leverages the context cues, and that optimizing the DBN improves its performance with respect to existing work. While the RNN outperforms the optimized DBN in predictive log-likelihood by a significant margin, both models attain similar average Euclidean distance errors (23-39 cm for DBN and 31-34 cm for RNN, predicting 1 s ahead).

Contextual recruitment of selective attention can be updated via changes in task relevance.

Evidence across a wide variety of attention paradigms shows that environmental cues can trigger adjustments to ongoing priorities for attending to relevant and irrelevant information. This context-specific control over attention suggests that cognitive control can be both automatic and flexible. For instance, in selective attention tasks, congruency effects are larger for items that appear in a context associated with infrequent conflict than in a context associated with frequent conflict. Because the to-be-presented context cannot be predicted or prepared for in advance, attention is assumed to be rapidly updated on-the-fly, triggered by the currently presented context. Context-specific control exemplifies how learning and memory processes can influence attention to enable cognitive flexibility. However, what determines the use of previously learned associations remains unclear. In the current study, we examined whether task relevance would influence the learning and use of context cues in a flanker task. Using a secondary counting task, context dimensions associated with differing levels of conflict were made task-relevant or -irrelevant across the experiment. In short, we found that making new contextual information task-relevant caused participants to suppress a previously learned context-attention association and adopt a new context-specific control strategy--all without changing the experimental stimuli. Furthermore, we found participants did not spontaneously learn about context-specific proportion manipulations (Experiment 2) and explicit instructions were insufficient for producing context-specific effects (Experiment 3). These results suggest that task relevance is a key determinant of context-specific control. All data, analyses, article preparation, and experimental design code is available at https://osf.io/ztcyb/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Habit Formation in Wearable Activity Tracker Use Among Older Adults: Qualitative Study

BackgroundWearable activity trackers are popular devices used to motivate behavior change. Wearable activity trackers are especially beneficial for encouraging light physical activity such as walking, which is an ideal behavior for older adults or individuals who cannot be physically active at moderate and vigorous levels. A common problem is that people do not continue to use these wearable devices, with initial behavioral change gains eroding as people disengage. Limited research is available regarding the continued use of wearable activity trackers. The habit formation literature may provide insights into the long-term use of wearables and other health informatics devices.ObjectiveThis study aims to uncover the mechanism underlying the long-term continued use of wearable devices among older adults through the theoretical lens of habit formation.MethodsIn-depth interviews were conducted with 20 participants who were aged 65 years or older and had used wearable activity trackers for more than 6 months to understand their experiences and the strategies they employed to support continued use.ResultsThematic analysis of data revealed 8 themes related to habit formation, including aspects in initiation and goal setting, use of contextual cues, action planning, and coping planning. Long-term users tended to have meaningful initiation of wearable activity trackers. They usually started with a small behavioral change goal and gradually increased it. They used consistent time and locational cues to make the use of wearable activity trackers routine. Long-term users also used creative contextual cues and reminders to facilitate action planning, engaged in coping planning to deal with anticipated problems, and had a positive mindset and inventive strategies for managing unfulfillment and lapses.ConclusionsThe results of this qualitative study of long-term users of wearable activity trackers suggest specific ways to enhance long-term habit formation among older adults. These best practices by long-term users can inform the future design of technology-based behavior interventions.

Comparison of Idiom Comprehension Ability and Its Relationship to Executive Functions in School-Aged Children with and without Vocabulary Delay

본 연구는 학령기 어휘지연 아동과 일반 아동이 문맥 유무 조건에 따라 관용어 이해능력과 오류유형에 차이를 나타내는지 알아보고, 관용어 이해능력과 집행기능 하위 요소(작업기억, 억제, 전환)의관계를 살펴보고자 하였다. 이를 위하여 초등학교 4-6학년에 재학 중인 18명의 일반 아동과 19명의어휘지연 아동을 대상으로 관용어 이해 과제, 비단어 따라말하기, 정지신호과제, 차원전환카드분류과제를 실시하였다. 관용어 이해 과제에서 어휘지연 아동 집단은 일반 아동 집단보다 유의하게 낮은수행력을 보였으며, 두 집단은 문맥과제에서의 수행력이 높았다. 어휘지연 아동 집단은 억제 능력이취약하여 문맥 단서를 효율적으로 활용하지 못하였고, 이로 인해 관용적 의미를 파악하여 관용어를이해하는 데 어려움을 갖는 것으로 나타났다.This study aimed to compare idiom comprehension abilities and error types between school-aged children with typical development (TD) and those with vocabulary delay (VD). We also explored how and what kinds of relations lie among idiom comprehension skills and three executive function (EF) components (working memory, inhibition, shifting), in two groups. Eighteen children with TD and nineteen children with VD participated in this study. The children’s performance was assessed via idiom comprehension task and EF tasks of working memory, inhibition, and shifting (NWR, SST, DCCS). As a result, VD group performed significantly lower in general on idiom comprehension task than TD, and both performed better on the contextually cued condition. The results highlight that children with VD require conscious effort to activate inhibitory control of irrelevant information to fully make use of contextual cues.

From Controlled to Automatic Processes and Back Again: The Role of Contextual Features.

In cognitive psychology, classical approaches categorize automatic and controlled processes from a dichotomous point of view. Automatic processes are believed to be rigid, whereas controlled processes are thought to be flexible. New theories have softened this dichotomous view. The aim of the present study is to examine the possibility of implementing flexibility in automatic processing through reliance on contextual features. One hundred and twenty subjects (mean age 22.4, SD = 4.2), 60 male and 60 female, participated in this study. An automatic sequence task (with and without contextual features) was used to test flexibility in automatic processing. Results showed that the use of contextual cues can increase flexibility in automatic processes. The results are discussed in light of new theories on softened automaticity.

Effect of informational content of noise on speech representation in the aging midbrain and cortex.

The ability to understand speech is significantly degraded by aging, particularly in noisy environments. One way that older adults cope with this hearing difficulty is through the use of contextual cues. Several behavioral studies have shown that older adults are better at following a conversation when the target speech signal has high contextual content or when the background distractor is not meaningful. Specifically, older adults gain significant benefit in focusing on and understanding speech if the background is spoken by a talker in a language that is not comprehensible to them (i.e., a foreign language). To understand better the neural mechanisms underlying this benefit in older adults, we investigated aging effects on midbrain and cortical encoding of speech when in the presence of a single competing talker speaking in a language that is meaningful or meaningless to the listener (i.e., English vs. Dutch). Our results suggest that neural processing is strongly affected by the informational content of noise. Specifically, older listeners' cortical responses to the attended speech signal are less deteriorated when the competing speech signal is an incomprehensible language rather than when it is their native language. Conversely, temporal processing in the midbrain is affected by different backgrounds only during rapid changes in speech and only in younger listeners. Additionally, we found that cognitive decline is associated with an increase in cortical envelope tracking, suggesting an age-related over (or inefficient) use of cognitive resources that may explain their difficulty in processing speech targets while trying to ignore interfering noise.

Verbal Reports of Proficient Readers In Coping With Unfamiliar Words

The present study reports the actual strategy use of good readers when they face hindrance in the form of unfamiliar words. Eight undergraduates majoring in English at Surabaya State University performed think-aloud while reading two texts to find out how they coped with such difficulties. The verbal protocol indicated that half of the participants mainly relied on a bilingual (English-Indonesian) dictionary to attack unfamiliar words, and only one of them preferred to use a monolingual (English-English) one. Two of them employed context cues to infer the meaning of the words, while one participant combined the use of context cues and a monolingual dictionary as the major strategy. All but one of the participants skipped some of lexical items whose meaning was unknown to them, especially when these words did not have a key contribution to the meaning of the whole text.

Understanding the use of contextual cues: design implications for medication adherence technologies that support remembering.

ObjectiveForgetfulness is one of the main reasons of unintentional medication non-adherence. Adherence technologies that help people remember to take their medications on time often do not take into account the context of people’s everyday lives. Existing evidence that highlights the effectiveness of remembering strategies that rely on contextual cues is largely based on research with older adults, and thus it is not clear whether it can be generalized to other populations or used to inform the design of wider adherence technologies that support medication self-management. Understanding how younger populations currently remember medications can inform the design of future adherence technologies that take advantage of existing contextual cues to support remembering.MethodsWe conducted three surveys with a total of over a thousand participants to investigate remembering strategies used by different populations: women who take oral contraception, parents and carers who give antibiotics to their children, and older adults who take medications for chronic conditions.ResultsRegardless of the population or the type of regimen, relying on contextual cues—routine events, locations, and meaningful objects—is a common and often effective strategy; combinations of two or more types of cues are more effective than relying on a single cue.ConclusionsTo effectively support remembering, adherence technologies should help users recognize contextual cues they already have at their disposal and reinforce relevant cues available in their environment. We show that, given the latest developments in technology, such support is already feasible.

The effect of semantic cues on intelligibility: A comparison between spectrally sparse speech and natural speech in noise

Listeners are known to make use of contextual cues when perceiving speech. Using contextual information is even more important when listening to distorted or difficult speech signals. For example, listeners benefit from contextual cues to compensate for the absence of fine acoustic-phonetic information when listening to natural speech in noise. In the present investigation, the effect of context was compared between four- and eight-channel spectrally degraded speech (Shannon et al., 1995) versus natural speech-in-noise (0 dB SNR). Spectrally degraded speech simulates the primary information transmitted by cochlear implant devices. The results demonstrated that eight-band signals received benefit from context to the same extent as natural speech in noise. In contrast, four-band signals provided significantly less benefit from context than natural speech in noise. The most parsimonious explanation of this pattern of results is that listeners need a threshold amount of acoustic information to make use of context equally, regardless of the type of distortion. Alternatively, the results could be explained by assuming that listeners employ different strategies depending on the overall acoustic characteristics of the speech signal. Future experiments will distinguish between these alternatives.

Korean EFL Learners’ Knowledge of Polysemous Words in Relation to Word Frequency and Reading Proficiency

The acquisition of polysemous words in a foreign language epitomizes the retention and representation of linguistic knowledge as well as its developmental dynamics. In this study, Korean high school students were asked to carry out two types of English vocabulary tasks: a word-in-isolation task and a word-in-context task. Each task was made up of three sets of polysemous words selected from 1000-, 2000-, and 3000-level frequency words, respectively. In addition, the students’ strategies for learning and determining the meanings of polysemous words were assessed through written questionnaires and class discussion. Overall, the students showed a higher rate of acquisition when measured by the word-in-context task than the word-in-isolation task, and they had greater difficulty identifying the meaning of less frequent polysemous words. Students relied more on memorized meanings when dealing with high-frequency polysems. When words were presented in isolation, the meanings of more frequent polysems were better recalled than less frequent ones. When words were presented in context, however, frequency was not proportionate to knowledge. All these observations suggest that differences in L2 learners’ knowledge of polysemous words lie not only in how many individual meanings they have memorized but in how well they make use of contextual cues and that as the learners’ reading proficiency develops, their vocabulary knowledge becomes contextualized to a greater extent. (Chonnam National University)

Social Emotions in Children's Human Figure Drawings: Drawing Shame, Pride and Jealousy

The study examines children's ability to convey social – as opposed to basic – emotions in their human figure drawings. One hundred children aged 4‐, 6‐ and 8‐years were asked to draw a person experiencing shame, pride, jealousy, happiness, sadness and fear as well as a baseline figure ‘feeling nothing’. Drawings were rated in terms of (i) overall emotional expressiveness and (ii) variety and types (face, body/posture and context) of graphic cues used to convey emotion. The effect of age on overall expressiveness and use of these graphic cues was also investigated. The results showed that drawings depicting social emotions were rated as less expressive and presented fewer graphic cues than those conveying basic emotions. Children's developing ability to depict pride, shame and jealousy was largely driven by an increased use of contextual cues in their human figure drawings. As regards the effect of age, it was found that 6‐ and 8‐years old produced more expressive drawings containing a larger range of graphic cues than the 4‐year olds. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Two rooms, two representations? Episodic‐like memory in toddlers and preschoolers

Episodic memory involves binding together what-where-when associations. In three experiments, we tested the development of memory for such contextual associations in a naturalistic setting. Children searched for toys in two rooms with two different experimenters; each room contained two identical sets of four containers, but arranged differently. A distinct toy was hidden in a distinct container in each room. In Experiment 1, which involved children between 15 and 26 months who were prompted with a very explicit cue (a part of the hidden toy), we found a marked shift in performance with age: while 15- to 20-month-olds concentrated their searches on the two containers that sometimes contained toys, they did not distinguish between them according to context, but 21-26-month-olds did. However, surprisingly, without toy cues, even the youngest children showed a fragile ability to disambiguate the two containers by room context. In Experiment 2, we tested 34- to 40-month-olds and 64- to 72-month-olds without toy cues. The 5-year-olds were nearly perfect, and the 3-year-olds showed a significant preference for the correct container given only the context. In Experiment 3, we filled in the age range, and also investigated the effects of the use of labels (i.e. names of experimenters and rooms) and of familiarization time, in groups of 34- to 40-month-olds, 42- to 48-month-olds, and 50- to 56-month-olds. Neither labels nor familiarization time had an effect. Across experiments, there was regular age-related improvement in context-based memory. Overall, the results suggest that children's episodic memory may undergo an early qualitative change, yet to be precisely characterized, and that continuing increments in the use of contextual cues occur throughout the preschool period. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkwEFw0UEz4&list=PLwxXcOKHPC0llAPVcJyW4EtzlA934A2Rz&index=1.

The use of contextual cues to improve warning symbol comprehension: making the connection for older adults

This study teased apart the effects of comprehensibility and complexity on older adults' comprehension of warning symbols by manipulating the relevance of additional information in further refining the meaning of the symbol. Symbols were systematically altered such that increased visual complexity (in the form of contextual cues) resulted in increased comprehensibility. One hundred older adults, aged 50–71 years, were tested on their comprehension of these symbols before and after training. High comprehensibility–complexity symbols were found to be better understood than low- or medium-comprehensibility–complexity symbols and the effectiveness of the contextual cues varied as a function of training. Therefore, the nature of additional detail determines whether increased complexity is detrimental or beneficial to older adults' comprehension – if the additional details provide ‘cues to knowledge’, older adults' comprehension improves as a result of the increased complexity. However, some cues may require training in order to be effective. Practitioner Summary: Research suggests that older adults have greater difficulty in understanding more complex symbols. However, we found that when the complexity of symbols was increased through the addition of contextual cues, older adults' comprehension actually improved. Contextual cues aid older adults in making the connection between the symbol and its referent.

Prepulse inhibition modulation by contextual conditioning of dopaminergic activity

When a neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a drug, an association is established between them that can induce two different responses: either an opponent response that counteracts the effect of the drug, or a response that is similar to that induced by the drug. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of the associations that can be established between the contextual cues and the administration of dopamine agonists or antagonists. Our hypothesis suggests that repeated administration of drugs that modulate dopaminergic activity in the presence of a specific context leads to the establishment of an association that subsequently results in a conditioned response to the context that is similar to that induced by the drug. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments that revealed that contextual cues acquired the property to modulate pre-pulse inhibition by prior pairings of such context with the dopamine antagonist haloperidol (Experiment 1), and with the dopamine agonist d-amphetamine (Experiment 2). The implications of these results are discussed both at a theoretical level, and attending to the possibilities that could involve the use of context cues for the therapeutic administration of dopaminergic drugs.

Infants’ use of contextual cues in the generalization of effective actions from imitation

We examined infants’ ability to generalize effective actions in an imitation task. In Experiment 1, 15-month-olds imitated effective and ineffective actions on two similarly designed toys. They were then shown a third toy of the same design with both actions available. Children reliably touched and manipulated the effective action handle first and more persistently. In Experiment 2, however, 15-month-olds did not generalize the efficacy of the action when the test toy was different from the two demonstration toys. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 2 but also showed that infants generalized efficacy when the demonstration toys differed from one another as well as from the test toy. Our findings are consistent with a computational model that uses certain rational pedagogical assumptions. Overall, the results suggest that 15-month-olds are sensitive to the sampling information they observe and use this information to guide whether to generalize efficacy information they learn from imitation.