Offline grammar-based recognition of handwritten sentences

This paper proposes a sequential coupling of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) recognizer for offline handwritten English sentences with a probabilistic bottom-up chart parser using Stochastic Context-Free Grammars (SCFG) extracted from a text corpus. Based on extensive experiments, we conclude that syntax analysis helps to improve recognition rates significantly.

Unattended emotional intonations modulate linguistic prosody processing

Prosody or speech melody subserves linguistic (e.g., question intonation) and emotional functions in speech communication. Findings from lesion studies and imaging experiments suggest that, depending on function or acoustic stimulus structure, prosodic speech components are differentially processed in the right and left hemispheres. This direct current (DC) potential study investigated the linguistic processing of digitally manipulated pitch contours of sentences that carried an emotional or neutral intonation. Discrimination of linguistic prosody was better for neutral stimuli as compared to happily as well as fearfully spoken sentences. Brain activation was increased during the processing of happy sentences as compared to neutral utterances. Neither neutral nor emotional stimuli evoked lateralized processing in the left or right hemisphere, indicating bilateral mechanisms of linguistic processing for pitch direction. Acoustic stimulus analysis suggested that prosodic components related to emotional intonation, such as pitch variability, interfered with linguistic processing of pitch course direction.

"Old proverbs in new skins – an fMRI study on defamiliarization"

We investigated how processing fluency and defamiliarization (the art of rendering familiar notions unfamiliar) contribute to the affective and esthetic processing of reading in an event-related functional magnetic-resonance-imaging experiment.We compared the neural correlates of processing (a) familiar German proverbs, (b) unfamiliar proverbs, (c) defamiliarized variations with altered content relative to the original proverb (proverb-variants), (d) defamiliarized versions with unexpected wording but the same content as the original proverb (proverb-substitutions), and (e) non-rhetorical sentences. Here, we demonstrate that defamiliarization is an effectiveway of guiding attention, but that the degree of affective involvement depends on the type of defamiliarization: enhanced activation in affect-related regions (orbito-frontal cortex, medPFC) was found only if defamiliarization altered the content of the original proverb. Defamiliarization on the level of wording was associated with attention processes and error monitoring. Although proverb-variants evoked activation in affect-related regions, familiar proverbs received the highest beauty ratings.

"When we like what we know – A parametric fMRI analysis of beauty and familiarity"

This paper presents a neuroscientific study of aesthetic judgments on written texts. In an fMRI experiment participants read a number of proverbs without explicitly evaluating them. In a post-scan rating they rated each item for familiarity and beauty. These individual ratings were correlated with the functional data to investigate the neural correlates of implicit aesthetic judgments. We identified clusters in which BOLD activity was correlated with individual post-scan beauty ratings. This indicates that some spontaneous aesthetic evaluation takes place during reading, even if not required by the task. Positive correlations were found in the ventral striatum and in medial prefrontal cortex, likely reflecting the rewarding nature of sentences that are aesthetically pleasing. On the contrary, negative correlations were observed in the classic left frontotemporal reading network. Midline structures and bilateral temporo-parietal regions correlated positively with familiarity, suggesting a shift from the task-network towards the default network with increasing familiarity.

Experimental induction of psychotherapeutically relevant emotional states

Background: Emotion research in neuroscience targets brain structures and processes involved in discrete emotion categories (e.g. anger, fear, sadness) or dimensions (e.g. valence, arousal, approach-avoidance), and usually relies on carefully controlled experimental paradigms with standardized and often simple emotion-eliciting stimuli like e.g. unpleasant pictures. Emotion research in clinical psychology and psychotherapy is often interested in very subtle differences between emotional states, e.g. differences within emotion categories (e.g. assertive, self-protecting vs. rejecting, protesting anger or specific grief vs. global sadness), and/or the biographical, social, situational, or motivational contexts of the emotional experience, which are desired to be minimized in experimental neuroscientific research. Objective: In order to facilitate the experimental and neurophysiological investigation of psychotherapeutically relevant emotional experiences, the present study aims at developing a priming procedure to induce specific, therapeutically and biographically relevant emotional states under controlled experimental conditions. Methodology: N = 50 participants who reported negative feelings towards another close person were randomly assigned to 2 different conditions. They fulfilled 2 different sentence completion tasks that were supposed to prime either ‘therapeutically productive’ or ‘therapeutically unproductive’ emotional states and completed an expressive writing task and several self-report measures of specific emotion-related constructs. The sentence completion task consisted in max. 22 sentence stems drawn from psychotherapy patients’ statements that have been shown to be typical for productive or unproductive therapy sessions. The subjects of the present study completed these sentence stems with regard to their own negative feelings towards the close person. Results: There were a substantial inter-individual variability concerning the number of completed sentences, and significant correlations between number of completed sentences and problem activation in both conditions. No differences were observed in general mood or problem activation between both groups after priming. Descriptively, there were differences between groups concerning emotion regulation aspects. Significant differences between groups in resolution of negative feelings towards the other person were found. Discussion: The results point in the expected direction, however the small sample sizes (after exclusion of several subjects) and low power hinder the detection of convincing significant effects. More data is needed in order to evaluate the efficacy of this emotional priming procedure.

Speech Intelligibility in Noise With a Pinna Effect Imitating Cochlear Implant Processor.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the speech intelligibility in noise with a new cochlear implant (CI) processor that uses a pinna effect imitating directional microphone system. STUDY DESIGN Prospective experimental study. SETTING Tertiary referral center. PATIENTS Ten experienced, unilateral CI recipients with bilateral severe-to-profound hearing loss. INTERVENTION All participants performed speech in noise tests with the Opus 2 processor (omnidirectional microphone mode only) and the newer Sonnet processor (omnidirectional and directional microphone mode). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE The speech reception threshold (SRT) in noise was measured in four spatial settings. The test sentences were always presented from the front. The noise was arriving either from the front (S0N0), the ipsilateral side of the CI (S0NIL), the contralateral side of the CI (S0NCL), or the back (S0N180). RESULTS The directional mode improved the SRTs by 3.6 dB (p < 0.01), 2.2 dB (p < 0.01), and 1.3 dB (p < 0.05) in the S0N180, S0NIL, and S0NCL situations, when compared with the Sonnet in the omnidirectional mode. There was no statistically significant difference in the S0N0 situation. No differences between the Opus 2 and the Sonnet in the omnidirectional mode were observed. CONCLUSION Speech intelligibility with the Sonnet system was statistically different to speech recognition with the Opus 2 system suggesting that CI users might profit from the pinna effect imitating directionality mode in noisy environments.

Cue Recognition and Integration - Eye Tracking Evidence of Processing Differences in Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia

PURPOSE: We aimed at further elucidating whether aphasic patients' difficulties in understanding non-canonical sentence structures, such as Passive or Object-Verb-Subject sentences, can be attributed to impaired morphosyntactic cue recognition, and to problems in integrating competing interpretations. METHODS: A sentence-picture matching task with canonical and non-canonical spoken sentences was performed using concurrent eye tracking. Accuracy, reaction time, and eye tracking data (fixations) of 50 healthy subjects and 12 aphasic patients were analysed. RESULTS: Patients showed increased error rates and reaction times, as well as delayed fixation preferences for target pictures in non-canonical sentences. Patients' fixation patterns differed from healthy controls and revealed deficits in recognizing and immediately integrating morphosyntactic cues. CONCLUSION: Our study corroborates the notion that difficulties in understanding syntactically complex sentences are attributable to a processing deficit encompassing delayed and therefore impaired recognition and integration of cues, as well as increased competition between interpretations.

Givenness, procedural meaning and connectives: The case of French puisque

I argue that the communication of given information is part of the procedural instructions conveyed by some connectives like the French puisque. I submit in addition that the encoding of givenness has cognitive implications that are visible during online processing. I assess this hypothesis empirically by comparing the way the clauses introduced by two French causal connectives, puisque and parce que, are processed during online reading when the following segment is ‘given’ or ‘new’. I complement these results by an acceptability judgement task using the same sentences. These experiments confirm that introducing a clause conveying given information is a core feature characterizing puisque, as the segment following it is read faster when it contains given rather than new information, and puisque is rated as more acceptable than parce que in such contexts. I discuss the implications of these results for future research on the description of the meaning of connectives.

Eye movements reveal mental looking through time

People often make use of a spatial "mental time line" to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to "detect" invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Implicit memory for the content but not the speaker of sleep-played messages

We presented 28 sentences uttered by 28 unfamiliar speakers to sleeping participants to investigate whether humans can encode new verbal messages, learn voices of unfamiliar speakers, and form associations between speakers and messages during EEG-defined deep sleep. After waking, participants performed three tests which assessed the unconscious recognition of sleep-played speakers, messages, and speaker-message associations. Recognition performance in all tests was at chance level. However, response latencies revealed implicit memory for sleep-played messages but neither for speakers nor for speaker-message combinations. Only participants with excellent implicit memory for sleep-played messages also displayed implicit memory for speakers but not speaker-message associations. Hence, deep sleep allows for the semantic encoding of novel verbal messages.

The specificity of emotion inferences as a function of emotional contextual support

Research on emotion inferences has shown that readers include a representation of the main character's emotional state in their mental representations of the text. We examined the specificity of emotion representations as a function of the emotion content of short narratives, in terms of the quantity and quality of emotion components included in the narratives, based on the GRID instrument (Fontaine et al., 2013). In a self-paced reading task, target sentences that only moderately matched the emotional context were read faster than target sentences that strongly matched the emotional context of the narratives. In a “makes sense” judgment task, we showed that this result was not driven by a mapping difficulty and, in a memory task, we provided some evidence that these effects reflected integration processes. We suggest that readers can integrate specific emotions into their mental representations, but only if provided with the appropriate emotional contextual support.