Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh, and English-Welsh bilingual infants

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure the familiarity effect was detected as early as 10 months in English but did not reach significance in monolingual Welsh. Bilingual children showed word form familiarity effects by 11 months in both languages and also revealed an online time course for word recognition that combined effects found for monolingual English and Welsh. To account for the findings, accentual, grammatical, and sociolinguistic differences between English and Welsh are considered.

Neglect dyslexia with a stimulus-centred deficit and without visuospatial neglect.

This paper reports a single case of ipsilesional left neglect dyslexia and interprets it according to the three-level model of visual word recognition proposed by Caramazza and Hillis (1990). The three levels reflect a progression from the physical stimulus to an abstract representation of a word. RR was not impaired at the first, retinocentric, level, which represents the individual features of letters within a word according to the location of the word in the visual field: She made the same number of errors to words presented in her left visual field as in her right visual field. A deficit at this level should also mean the patient neglects all stimuli. This did not occur with RR: She did not neglect when naming the items in rows of objects and rows of geometric symbols. In addition, although she displayed significant neglect dyslexia when making visual matching judgements on pairs of words and nonwords, she did not do so to pairs of nonsense letter shapes, shapes which display the same level of visual complexity as letters in words. RR was not impaired at the third, graphemic, level, which represents the ordinal positions of letters within a word: She continued to neglect the leftmost (spatial) letter of words presented in mirror-reversed orientation and she did not neglect in oral spelling. By elimination, these results suggest RR's deficit affects a spatial reference frame where the representational space is bounded by the stimulus: A stimulus-centred level of representation. We define five characteristics of a stimulus-centred deficit, as manifest in RR. First, it is not the case that neglect dyslexia occurs because the remaining letters in a string attract or capture attention away from the leftmost letter(s). Second, the deficit is continuous across the letter string. Third, perceptually significant features, such as spaces, define potential words. Fourth, the whole, rather than part, of a letter is neglected. Fifth, category information is preserved. It is concluded that the Caramazza-Hillis model accounts well for RR's data, although we conclude that neglect dyslexia can be present when a more general visuospatial neglect is absent.

Priming vs. rhyming : orthographic and phonological representations in the left and right hemispheres

The right cerebral hemisphere has long been argued to lack phonological processing capacity. Recently, however, a sex difference in the cortical representation of phonology has been proposed, suggesting discrete left hemisphere lateralization in males and more distributed, bilateral representation of function in females. To evaluate this hypothesis and shed light on sex differences in the phonological processing capabilities of the left and right hemispheres, we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 assessed phonological activation implicitly (masked homophone priming), testing 52 (M = 25, F = 27; mean age 19.23 years, SD 1.64 years) strongly right-handed participants. Experiment 2 subsequently assessed the explicit recruitment of phonology (rhyme judgement), testing 50 (M = 25, F = 25; mean age 19.67 years, SD 2.05 years) strongly right-handed participants. In both experiments the orthographic overlap between stimulus pairs was strictly controlled using DICE [Brew, C., & McKelvie, D. (1996). Word-pair extraction for lexicography. In K. Oflazer & H. Somers (Eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on new methods in language processing (pp. 45–55). Ankara: VCH], such that pairs shared (a) high orthographic and phonological similarity (e.g., not–KNOT); (b) high orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., pint–HINT); (c) low orthographic and high phonological similarity (e.g., use–EWES); or (d) low orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., kind–DONE). As anticipated, high orthographic similarity facilitated both left and right hemisphere performance, whereas the left hemisphere showed greater facility when phonological similarity was high. This difference in hemispheric processing of phonological representations was especially pronounced in males, whereas female performance was far less sensitive to visual field of presentation across both implicit and explicit phonological tasks. As such, the findings offer behavioural evidence indicating that though both hemispheres are capable of orthographic analysis, phonological processing is discretely lateralised to the left hemisphere in males, but available in both the left and right hemisphere in females.

Communication strategies : an interplay between proficiency and gender

This paper is intended to investigate the interplay between proficiency and gender in the use of communication strategies. Sixty Iranian university male and female subjects studying English took part in the experiment and performed two tasks: word recognition and picture-story narration. The results indicate that proficiency had a more perceptible effect on the frequency and types of communication strategies. Tasks also had a strong effect on the number and type of strategies chosen. Gender did not yield any significant results except in the case of low proficiency level of female participants. The reason was attributed to the subject of study and formal educational system.

3D motion matching algorithm using signature feature descriptor

This paper introduces a basic frame for rehabilitation motion practice system which detects 3D motion trajectory with the Microsoft Kinect (MSK) sensor system and proposes a cost-effective 3D motion matching algorithm. The rehabilitation motion practice system displays a reference 3D motion in the database system that the player (patient) tries to follow. The player’s motion is traced by the MSK sensor system and then compared with the reference motion to evaluate how well the player follows the reference motion. In this system, 3D motion matching algorithm is a key feature for accurate evaluation for player’s performance. Even though similarity measurement of 3D trajectories is one of the most important tasks in 3D motion analysis, existing methods are still limited. Recent researches focus on the full length 3D trajectory data set. However, it is not true that every point on the trajectory plays the same role and has the same meaning. In this situation, we developed a new cost-effective method that only uses the less number of features called ‘signature’ which is a flexible descriptor computed from the region of ‘elbow points’. Therefore, our proposed method runs faster than other methods which use the full length trajectory information. The similarity of trajectories is measured based on the signature using an alignment method such as dynamic time warping (DTW), continuous dynamic time warping (CDTW) or longest common sub-sequence (LCSS) method. In the experimental studies, we applied the MSK sensor system to detect, trace and match the 3D motion of human body. This application was assumed as a system for guiding a rehabilitation practice which can evaluate how well the motion practice was performed based on comparison of the patient’s practice motion traced by the MSK system with the pre-defined reference motion in a database. In order to evaluate the accuracy of our 3D motion matching algorithm, we compared our method with two other methods using Australian sign word dataset. As a result, our matching algorithm outperforms in matching 3D motion, and it can be exploited for a base framework for various 3D motion-based applications at low cost with high accuracy.

Familiarity-based word-frequency effects in recognition memory and implicit priming

Provides evidence that familiarity as well as recollection contributes to the recognition advantage for low-frequency words. The importance for explanations of the low-frequency word advantage to account for the influence of both explicit and implicit memory processes is discussed with emphasis given to developing the dual-process model.

Classification ensemble to improve medical named entity recognition

An accurate Named Entity Recognition (NER) is important for knowledge discovery in text mining. This paper proposes an ensemble machine learning approach to recognise Named Entities (NEs) from unstructured and informal medical text. Specifically, Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Maximum Entropy (ME) classifiers are applied individually to the test data set from the i2b2 2010 medication challenge. Each classifier is trained using a different set of features. The first set focuses on the contextual features of the data, while the second concentrates on the linguistic features of each word. The results of the two classifiers are then combined. The proposed approach achieves an f-score of 81.8%, showing a considerable improvement over the results from CRF and ME classifiers individually which achieve f-scores of 76% and 66.3% for the same data set, respectively.

Glucose enhancement of recognition memory: differential effects on effortful processing but not aspects of 'remember-know' responses

The administration of a glucose drink has been shown to enhance cognitive performance with effect sizes comparable with those from pharmaceutical interventions in human trials. In the memory domain, it is currently debated whether glucose facilitation of performance is due to differential targeting of hippocampal memory or whether task effort is a more important determinant. Using a placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover 2(Drink: glucose/placebo) × 2(Effort: ± secondary task) design, 20 healthy young adults' recognition memory performance was measured using the 'remember-know' procedure. Two high effort conditions (one for each drink) included secondary hand movements during word presentation. A 25 g glucose or 30 mg saccharine (placebo) drink was consumed 10 min prior to the task. The presence of a secondary task resulted in a global impairment of memory function. There were significant Drink × Effort interactions for overall memory accuracy but no differential effects for 'remember' or 'know' responses. These data suggest that, in some circumstances, task effort may be a more important determinant of the glucose facilitation of memory effect than hippocampal mediation. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled 'Cognitive Enhancers'.