Two-Item Sentence Comprehension by a Dog (Canis familiaris)

Syntax use by non-human animals remains a controversial issue. We present here evidence that a dog may respond to verbal requests composed of two independent terms, one referring to an object and the other to an action to be performed relative to the object. A female mongrel dog, Sofia, was initially trained to respond to action (point and fetch) and object (ball, key, stick, bottle and bear) terms which were then presented as simultaneous, combinatorial requests (e. g. ball fetch, stick point). Sofia successfully responded to object-action requests presented as single sentences, and was able to flexibly generalize her performance across different contexts. These results provide empirical evidence that dogs are able to extract the information contained in complex messages and to integrate it in directed performance, an ability which is shared with other linguistically trained animals and may represent a forerunner of syntactic functioning.

Mini-Mental State Examination sentence writing among community-dwelling elderly adults in Brazil: text fluency and grammar complexity

Background: In normal aging, the decrease in the syntactic complexity of written production is usually associated with cognitive deficits. This study was aimed to analyze the quality of older adults' textual production indicated by verbal fluency (number of words) and grammatical complexity (number of ideas) in relation to gender, age, schooling, and cognitive status. Methods: From a probabilistic sample of community-dwelling people aged 65 years and above (n = 900), 577 were selected on basis of their responses to the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) sentence writing, which were submitted to content analysis; 323 were excluded as they left the item blank or performed illegible or not meaningful responses. Education adjusted cut-off scores for the MMSE were used to classify the participants as cognitively impaired or unimpaired. Total and subdomain MMSE scores were computed. Results: 40.56% of participants whose answers to the MMSE sentence were excluded from the analyses had cognitive impairment compared to 13.86% among those whose answers were included. The excluded participants were older and less educated. Women and those older than 80 years had the lowest scores in the MMSE. There was no statistically significant relationship between gender, age, schooling, and textual performance. There was a modest but significant correlation between number of words written and the scores in the Language subdomain. Conclusions: Results suggest the strong influence of schooling and age over MMSE sentence performance. Failing to write a sentence may suggest cognitive impairment, yet, instructions for the MMSE sentence, i.e. to produce a simple sentence, may limit its clinical interpretation.

Language and Embodiment: sensory-motor and linguistic-social experience. Evidence on sentence comprehension

In this work I address the study of language comprehension in an “embodied” framework. Firstly I show behavioral evidence supporting the idea that language modulates the motor system in a specific way, both at a proximal level (sensibility to the effectors) and at the distal level (sensibility to the goal of the action in which the single motor acts are inserted). I will present two studies in which the method is basically the same: we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: hand action vs. foot action vs. mouth action) and the effector by which participants had to respond (hand vs. foot vs. mouth; dominant hand vs. non-dominant hand). Response times analyses showed a specific modulation depending on the kind of sentence: participants were facilitated in the task execution (sentence sensibility judgment) when the effector they had to use to respond was the same to which the sentences referred. Namely, during language comprehension a pre-activation of the motor system seems to take place. This activation is analogous (even if less intense) to the one detectable when we practically execute the action described by the sentence. Beyond this effector specific modulation, we also found an effect of the goal suggested by the sentence. That is, the hand effector was pre-activated not only by hand-action-related sentences, but also by sentences describing mouth actions, consistently with the fact that to execute an action on an object with the mouth we firstly have to bring it to the mouth with the hand. After reviewing the evidence on simulation specificity directly referring to the body (for instance, the kind of the effector activated by the language), I focus on the specific properties of the object to which the words refer, particularly on the weight. In this case the hypothesis to test was if both lifting movement perception and lifting movement execution are modulated by language comprehension. We used behavioral and kinematics methods, and we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: the lifting of heavy objects vs. the lifting of light objects). To study the movement perception we measured the correlations between the weight of the objects lifted by an actor (heavy objects vs. light objects) and the esteems provided by the participants. To study the movement execution we measured kinematics parameters variance (velocity, acceleration, time to the first peak of velocity) during the actual lifting of objects (heavy objects vs. light objects). Both kinds of measures revealed that language had a specific effect on the motor system, both at a perceptive and at a motoric level. Finally, I address the issue of the abstract words. Different studies in the “embodied” framework tried to explain the meaning of abstract words The limit of these works is that they account only for subsets of phenomena, so results are difficult to generalize. We tried to circumvent this problem by contrasting transitive verbs (abstract and concrete) and nouns (abstract and concrete) in different combinations. The behavioral study was conducted both with German and Italian participants, as the two languages are syntactically different. We found that response times were faster for both the compatible pairs (concrete verb + concrete noun; abstract verb + abstract noun) than for the mixed ones. Interestingly, for the mixed combinations analyses showed a modulation due to the specific language (German vs. Italian): when the concrete word precedes the abstract one responses were faster, regardless of the word grammatical class. Results are discussed in the framework of current views on abstract words. They highlight the important role of developmental and social aspects of language use, and confirm theories assigning a crucial role to both sensorimotor and linguistic experience for abstract words.

Determination of Language Dominance: Wada Test and fMRI Compared Using a Novel Sentence Task

This study aimed to develop a new linguistic based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-sentence decision task that reliably detects hemispheric language dominance.

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.

Conflict and cognitive control during sentence comprehension: recruitment of a frontal network during the processing of Spanish object-first sentences.

During sentence processing there is a preference to treat the first noun phrase found as the subject and agent, unless marked the other way. This preference would lead to a conflict in thematic role assignment when the syntactic structure conforms to a non-canonical object-before-subject pattern. Left perisylvian and fronto-parietal brain networks have been found to be engaged by increased computational demands during sentence comprehension, while event-reated brain potentials have been used to study the on-line manifestation of these demands. However, evidence regarding the spatiotemporal organization of brain networks in this domain is scarce. In the current study we used Magnetoencephalography to track spatio-temporally brain activity while Spanish speakers were reading subject- and object-first cleft sentences. Both kinds of sentences remained ambiguous between a subject-first or an object-first interpretation up to the appearance of the second argument. Results show the time-modulation of a frontal network at the disambiguation point of object-first sentences. Moreover, the time windows where these effects took place have been previously related to thematic role integration (300–500 ms) and to sentence reanalysis and resolution of conflicts during processing (beyond 500 ms post-stimulus). These results point to frontal cognitive control as a putative key mechanism which may operate when a revision of the sentence structure and meaning is necessary

Sentence selection for improving the tuning process of a statistical machine translation system

Este artículo describe una estrategia de selección de frases para hacer el ajuste de un sistema de traducción estadístico basado en el decodificador Moses que traduce del español al inglés. En este trabajo proponemos dos posibilidades para realizar esta selección de las frases del corpus de validación que más se parecen a las frases que queremos traducir (frases de test en lengua origen). Con esta selección podemos obtener unos mejores pesos de los modelos para emplearlos después en el proceso de traducción y, por tanto, mejorar los resultados. Concretamente, con el método de selección basado en la medida de similitud propuesta en este artículo, mejoramos la medida BLEU del 27,17% con el corpus de validación completo al 27,27% seleccionando las frases para el ajuste. Estos resultados se acercan a los del experimento ORACLE: se utilizan las mismas frases de test para hacer el ajuste de los pesos. En este caso, el BLEU obtenido es de 27,51%.

Anatomy of word and sentence meaning

Reading and listening involve complex psychological processes that recruit many brain areas. The anatomy of processing English words has been studied by a variety of imaging methods. Although there is widespread agreement on the general anatomical areas involved in comprehending words, there are still disputes about the computations that go on in these areas. Examination of the time relations (circuitry) among these anatomical areas can aid in understanding their computations. In this paper, we concentrate on tasks that involve obtaining the meaning of a word in isolation or in relation to a sentence. Our current data support a finding in the literature that frontal semantic areas are active well before posterior areas. We use the subject’s attention to amplify relevant brain areas involved either in semantic classification or in judging the relation of the word to a sentence to test the hypothesis that frontal areas are concerned with lexical semantics and posterior areas are more involved in comprehension of propositions that involve several words.

Court intervention: pre-sentence investigation techniques for drinking/driving offenses. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Washington, D.C.