Effects of efficient fronto-temporal circuitry on lexical ambiguity resolution: converging evidence from cross-age comparisons in eye-tracking and ERP data

Eye-tracking was used to examine how younger and older adults use syntactic and semantic information to disambiguate noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). We find that young adults exhibit inflated first fixations to NV-homographs when only syntactic cues are available for disambiguation (i.e., in syntactic prose). This effect is eliminated with the addition of disambiguating semantic information. Older adults (60+) as a group fail to show the first fixation effect in syntactic prose; they instead reread NV homographs longer. This pattern mirrors that in prior event-related potential work (Lee & Federmeier, 2009, 2011), which reported a sustained frontal negativity to NV-homographs in syntactic prose for young adults, which was eliminated by semantic constraints. The frontal negativity was not observed in older adults as a group, although older adults with high verbal fluency showed the young-like pattern. Analyses of individual differences in eye-tracking patterns revealed a similar effect of verbal fluency in both young and older adults: high verbal fluency groups of both ages show larger first fixation effects, while low verbal fluency groups show larger downstream costs (rereading and/or refixating NV homographs). Jointly, the eye-tracking and ERP data suggest that effortful meaning selection recruits frontal brain areas important for suppressing contextually inappropriate meanings, which also slows eye movements. Efficacy of fronto-temporal circuitry, as captured by verbal fluency, predicts the success of engaging these mechanisms in both young and older adults. Failure to recruit these processes requires compensatory rereading or leads to comprehension failures (Lee & Federmeier, in press).

El léxico disponible como herramienta de ayuda para la selección léxica en aula de ELE

This study aims to provide foreigns languages professionals with a sound methodology for selecting a suitable lexicon apropos of their students’ level in the language. The justification of said selection is, herein, rooted in a cognitive argument: If we are able to observe the manner in which words are organized within the mind, we will be better able to select the words needed for the natural process of communication. After poring over lists of lexical availability compiled by previous analyses, this study puts forth a glossary filtered by way of an objective procedure based on the mathematical concept known as Fuzzy Expected Value. I begin first by rigorously defining the concept of lexical availability and then thoroughly examining and explaining the manner in which I have obtained the results. Next, I employ the cognitive theory of prototypes to expound upon the organizational apparatus which arranges words within speakers’ minds. Subsequently and in accordance with objective criteria, a lexical selection is proposed. To end, I contemplate and muse upon the significance of a program that would enable us to identify the most appropriate vocabulary according to the students’ level of linguistic competence. In order to further substantiate this study, it will be juxtaposed to the specific notions outlined by the curriculum of The Cervantes Institute. Moreover, it will be relationed with the teaching levels proposed by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

La preposición διά en el griego del nuevo testamento. Ensayo de análisis semántico

LA PREPOSICIÓN διά EN EL GRIEGO DEL NUEVO TESTAMENTO. ENSAYO DE ANÁLISIS SEMÁNTICO Marta Merino Hernández Universidad de Córdoba La presente comunicación se centra en el análisis semántico de la preposición διά en el griego del NT, siguiendo la metodología usada para la confección del Diccionario Griego-Español del Nuevo Testamento (DGENT). Por tanto, se trata de un intento de arrojar luz sobre los significados de esta preposición en el NT desde un enfoque semántico-estructural. Nuestra intervención intenta paliar la escasa atención prestada al griego de la koiné y, en concreto, al utilizado para la composición del NT. Los más recientes estudios de sintaxis preposicional griega se han centrado principalmente en el griego clásico, a pesar de que fue en época helenística cuando se produjeron algunos de los cambios que más han modificado el sistema preposicional, debido al aumento considerable del número de locuciones prepositivas en lugar del uso simple de los casos. El trabajo parte, asimismo, del hecho de que la preposición es, tal vez, la más ambigua, compleja y polisémica categoría gramatical, encontrándose expuesta, a menudo, a sutiles gradaciones de significado, por lo que para abordar su análisis es necesario partir de un enfoque eminentemente semántico, además de estructural. Las dificultades a las que se enfrenta el estudioso de este campo de la sintaxis son debidas, por una parte, a que el de la preposición griega constituye un sistema de gran complejidad, complementario del de los casos, ya que los sintagmas preposicionales componen un significado que no es otra cosa sino el resultado de la combinación del sentido de la preposición y de la noción relacional que expresa el caso. Así, se trata de un sistema que se encuentra a medio camino entre lo gramatical y lo lexical. Por otra, a que también influyen en el significado de una preposición otros elementos oracionales como el contenido léxico del núcleo del sintagma, el del predicado y otros factores contextuales. Sin embargo, del examen de los diversos lemas propuestos para la preposición διά por los principales diccionarios dedicados al griego clásico y neotestamentario, es decir, los léxicos de Liddell-Scott & al. , F. Rodríguez Adrados & al., (DGE) , F. Zorell , J.H. Thayer & al. y W. Bauer – F.W. Danker & al. (BDAG) y Louw & Nida , se deduce que su estudio resulta insuficiente desde el punto de vista semántico, ya que en su mayoría constituyen léxicos bilingües tradicionales que siguen un criterio morfo-sintáctico y de uso, centrados, en definitiva, más en la sintaxis que en la semántica, y/o destinados a ofrecer equivalentes de traducción del griego a la lengua de destino, acompañados de información gramatical. Como consecuencia, demuestran en mayor o menor medida, falta de precisión en el análisis de un lexema dado en los diferentes contextos en que aparece. Es reseñable, en este sentido, que los diccionarios citados parecen carecer de un método de análisis semántico llevado hasta sus última consecuencias que permita fijar claramente la distinción entre significado lexical y contextual, así como describir el significado de cada lexema, lo que les hace caer en incoherencias y contradicciones, de modo que no siempre cada apartado corresponde a una acepción distinta. En cambio, el DGENT presenta una nueva forma de tratar los lexemas gracias, principalmente, a la aplicación sistemática de una rigurosa metodología de análisis semántico para la redacción de los lemas, desarrollada en las siguientes obras: Método de análisis semántico aplicado al griego del Nuevo Testamento de Juan Mateos y Metodología del Diccionario Griego-Español del Nuevo Testamento de Jesús Peláez . Esto hace posible el principal avance de este léxico, que lo diferencia del resto de diccionarios bilingües, es decir, la inclusión de una definición y su correspondiente traducción al castellano en la entrada de cada palabra analizada, así como la distinción sistemática entre ambas, tanto para el significado lexical como para sus diferentes acepciones, las cuales surgen por influjo contextual. En efecto, otra importante novedad lexicográfica de este diccionario es que explicita los factores contextuales que inciden en el cambio semántico de manera individualizada, partiendo del significado lexical o básico. Así, en el análisis y redacción del lema de διὰ que se llevará a cabo, se seguirán las siguientes fases: 1) Confrontación de todos los pasajes (667) del corpus neotestamentario donde aparece la preposición, lo que permitirá determinar cuál es el significado lexical de διά, estableciendo su definición, es decir, una descripción de su significado lexical o básico. 2) Propuesta de traducción a lengua castellana de este primer significado. 3) A continuación, la metodología seguida hará posible incluso deducir las causas o factores contextuales (morfológicos, sintácticos o extra-lingüísticos) que suscitan el cambio de significado lexical y, por consiguiente, de traducción, cuando διὰ aparece en uno u otro contexto. 4) Finalmente, siguiendo los mismos pasos anteriores, se propondrá una definición y traducción de cada una de estas acepciones o significados contextuales. En definitiva, en nuestra opinión, la aplicación del método de análisis semántico del DGENT permitirá no solo deducir de forma clara los diferentes significados, sino que revelará la existencia de acepciones de esta preposición que otros diccionarios consideran únicamente de forma sesgada o equivocada, por lo que los resultados de esta comunicación supondrán un avance en el estudio y la sistematización de las funciones semánticas de las preposiciones en el griego del corpus neotestamentario.

Langage et cerveau : vingt ans d’imagerie fonctionnelle

International audience

Carbon reduction activism in the UK: lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change

This article examines discourses associated with a new environmental movement, “Carbon Rationing Action Groups” (CRAGs). This case study is intended to contribute to a wider investigation of the emergence of a new type of language used to debate climate change mitigation. Advice on how to reduce one's “carbon footprint,” for example, is provided almost daily. Much of this advice is framed by the use of metaphors and “carbon compounds”—lexical combinations of at least two roots—such as “carbon finance” or “low carbon diet.” The study uses a combination of tools from frame analysis and lexical pragmatics within the general framework of ecolinguistics to compare and contrast language use on the CRAGs' website with press coverage reporting on them. The analysis shows how the use of such lexical carbon compounds enables and facilitates different types of metaphorical frames such as dieting, finance and tax paying, war time rationing, and religious imperatives in the two corpora.

A longitudinal study on the lexical sophistication and sentence length in Finnish upper secondary school students’ English compositions.

The aim of the present study was to find out the level of lexical sophistication and the mean length of sentences used in compositions written by Finnish upper secondary school students of English. In addition, the present study investigated the possible relationship between the two abovementioned variables. The study at hand was longitudinal: as data, a set of 50 compositions were collected in 2014 from the same writers both in the first and the final year of upper secondary school, 25 in the first year and 25 in the final year. In the analysis, an internet-based program called VocabProfile was utilized in order to find out the lexical sophistication of the investigated students. To find out the mean length of sentence and the relationship between these two, I used Microsoft Excel. Findings of the present study include a minor decrease in the use of less frequent vocabulary and a slight increase in the use of the two most frequently appearing thousand words of English: both of these changes were 1.99 percentage points. As for the mean length of sentence, it grew by 1.28 words during upper secondary school. As for the relationship between the two variables, no clear correlations could be found. It became, however, relatively clear that the topic of the composition might have an effect on the results. Thus more research is needed to fully see the effect of lexical sophistication and mean length of sentence on one another. In addition, future research would benefit greatly if all investigated students wrote on the same topic.

Determinar os níveis de conhecimento linguístico-lexical à entrada e saída do 1º ano de escolaridade e a sua influência na aprendizagem da leitura e escrita

Esta tese, elaborada a partir do nosso interesse em determinar os níveis de conhecimento linguístico das crianças à entrada e saída do primeiro ano de escolaridade, teve como objetivo verificar de que forma esse conhecimento influencia a aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita. Para tal, realizámos parte de dois testes que permitem avaliar as competências linguísticas de crianças que possuem o Português como Língua Materna, o Teste de Identificação de Competências Linguísticas (TICL), de Fernanda Leopoldina Viana (2004) e o Teste de Avaliação da Linguagem Oral (TALO), de Inês Sim-Sim (2003) numa turma a iniciar e a concluir o primeiro ano de escolaridade. Com a análise de dados almejamos concluir que os alunos que apresentam um capital lexical mais variado à entrada no primeiro Ciclo do Ensino Básico apresentam melhores resultados na aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita.

Polvo de lavar o Irex: incidencia de estímulos fonológicos y semánticos en la producción de palabras habladas de una paciente afásica

Se estudia la incidencia de los estímulos fonológicos y semánticos en los procesos de producción léxica, a partir de los datos obtenidos en pruebas de denominación con paciente afásica con características anómicas. Arroja datos en relación con la naturaleza del lexicón, el debate entre procesos seriales y de acceso directo y su papel en la recuperación léxica la longitud fonológica y silábica de la palabra.The incidence of semantic and phonological stimuli in word production processes is addressed. This research analyzes the results obtained from different denomination tasks with an anomic speaker with aphasia. The basis of research was a lexicon theory, the debate between connectionist or serial levels in language production, and the incidence of syllabical and phonological length in word recovery.

Culture et altérité à travers de la littérature

La literatura de expresión francesa constituye una herramienta pedagógica muy útil en clase FLE. Extractos de novelas magrebís de Tahar Ben Jelloun y africanas (senegalesas y camerunesas), han permitido obtener excelentes proporcionan notables resultados por sus características y por la oralidad. La literatura contribuye al enriquecimiento lexical y al estudio de la alteridad cultural. El análisis de la estructura narrativa muestra la estructura mental de los pueblos, así como una comprensión de sus reacciones y de su identidad.La littérature francophone constitue un outil pédagogique très utile en classe FLE. Des extraits de  romans maghrébins de Tahar Ben Jelloun et africains (sénégalais et camerounais) se révelent très performants de par leurs caractéristiques propres et I'oralité. Elle contribue également a l'enrichissement du vocabulaire et a l'étude de l'altérité cuIturelle. L'analyse de la structure narrative permet de découvrir autant la structure mentale des peuples que de mieux comprendre leurs réactions et leur identité.

Exploring Hidden Coherent Feature Groups and Temporal Semantics for Multimedia Big Data Analysis

Thanks to the advanced technologies and social networks that allow the data to be widely shared among the Internet, there is an explosion of pervasive multimedia data, generating high demands of multimedia services and applications in various areas for people to easily access and manage multimedia data. Towards such demands, multimedia big data analysis has become an emerging hot topic in both industry and academia, which ranges from basic infrastructure, management, search, and mining to security, privacy, and applications. Within the scope of this dissertation, a multimedia big data analysis framework is proposed for semantic information management and retrieval with a focus on rare event detection in videos. The proposed framework is able to explore hidden semantic feature groups in multimedia data and incorporate temporal semantics, especially for video event detection. First, a hierarchical semantic data representation is presented to alleviate the semantic gap issue, and the Hidden Coherent Feature Group (HCFG) analysis method is proposed to capture the correlation between features and separate the original feature set into semantic groups, seamlessly integrating multimedia data in multiple modalities. Next, an Importance Factor based Temporal Multiple Correspondence Analysis (i.e., IF-TMCA) approach is presented for effective event detection. Specifically, the HCFG algorithm is integrated with the Hierarchical Information Gain Analysis (HIGA) method to generate the Importance Factor (IF) for producing the initial detection results. Then, the TMCA algorithm is proposed to efficiently incorporate temporal semantics for re-ranking and improving the final performance. At last, a sampling-based ensemble learning mechanism is applied to further accommodate the imbalanced datasets. In addition to the multimedia semantic representation and class imbalance problems, lack of organization is another critical issue for multimedia big data analysis. In this framework, an affinity propagation-based summarization method is also proposed to transform the unorganized data into a better structure with clean and well-organized information. The whole framework has been thoroughly evaluated across multiple domains, such as soccer goal event detection and disaster information management.

Semantics, knowledge and grids on big data

Semantics, knowledge and Grids represent three spaces where people interact, understand, learn and create. Grids represent the advanced cyber-infrastructures and evolution. Big data influence the evolution of semantics, knowledge and Grids. Exploring semantics, knowledge and Grids on big data helps accelerate the shift of scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies.

Regionalismos léxicos y paremiológicos en la narrativa de Jorge Amado: aspectos sociolingüístico y antropológico

The work of Jorge Amado collects and processes relevant aspects of Brazilian miscegenation and allows discussion on various issues relating to the cultural productions of the country. If on the one hand the racial mixture can be seen as the result of an harmonious process, as is traditional Brazilian thought that comes from XVIII century, on the other hand it portrays the customs of Bahian society at different times, mixing the humorous tone to the optimistic view of the world. As for the miscegenation, reality of the Bahian people, as of all Brazil, can also be analyzed in their heterogeneity, for whom observes that, in the end, the crossing of economic, social and cultural boundaries have been, in many cases, quite problematic. The aim of this work is to make a journey into reality, past and present in Brazil, to understand the lexical regionalisms present in each work; it is important to understand the history of slavery, indigenous groups and the relation that the white man had with this world. All that enormous database of spoken language (a true linguistic laboratory) served and is serving to describe the Portuguese in Brazil in its regional, ethnic and social varieties. (Bagno, 2011: 104-105) I analyze here two works by Jorge Amado, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon: Chronicle of an Inner City and Tieta of Agreste, which constitute the corpus of this work, which will consist in detecting an extensive glossary and the collection thereof as well as paremiological regionalisms; phrases or expressions corresponding to a region and time of Brazil...

A Kaleidoscope Perspective: Change in the Semantics and Structure of Facets and Isolates in Analytico-Synthetic Classification

Examines the limitations of the dynamic theory of classification in accommodating the changes and rapid growth of new topics in the universe of knowledge. Change in an analytico-synthetic scheme for classification is much more a web of connections and mapping these changes is a complex process. Suggests that there is need for exploration of this complexity for both improving systems, and revisiting our theory.

Relación entre atrofia cortical difusa y desempeño cognitivo : estudio en población mayor de 60 años en un hospital universitario en la ciudad de Bogotá

El presente trabajo tuvo como objetivo evaluar la existencia de la relación entre la atrofia cortical difusa objetivada por neuroimagenes cerebrales y desempeños cognitivos determinados mediante la aplicación de pruebas neuropsicológicas que evalúan memoria de trabajo, razonamiento simbólico verbal y memoria anterógrada declarativa. Participaron 114 sujetos reclutados en el Hospital Universitario Mayor Méderi de la ciudad de Bogotá mediante muestreo de conveniencia. Los resultados arrojaron diferencias significativas entre los dos grupos (pacientes con diagnóstico de atrofia cortical difusa y pacientes con neuroimagenes interpretadas como dentro de los límites normales) en todas las pruebas neuropsicológicas aplicadas. Respecto a las variables demográficas se pudo observar que el grado de escolaridad contribuye como factor neuroprotector de un posible deterioro cognitivo. Tales hallazgos son importantes para determinar protocoles tempranos de detección de posible instalación de enfermedades neurodegenerativas primarias.

Ad summum bonum iter: revisione testuale e commento di Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium XLVIII, CXI.

Questa tesi di dottorato “Ad summum bonum iter. Revisione testuale e commento di Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium XLVIII, CXI” (relatore Prof. F. Citti), si propone di fornire un commento scientifico al testo latino di alcune Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (48 e 111), corredato da traduzione, note esegetiche di carattere lessicale, stilistico-retorico e storico-letterario e discussione delle principali problematiche testuali (testo di riferimento l'edizione critica di Reynolds, Oxonii 1965). Scopo della ricerca è approfondire e completare lo studio delle lettere 48 e 111 del carteggio, esaminato solo episodicamente e non sistematicamente, soffermandosi sugli aspetti filosofici salienti e sui motivi conduttori più significativi, come la critica senecana alla nimia subtilitas (tema presente soprattutto nelle cosiddette epistole dialettiche, connesse alle diverse forme di sillogismi e alle modalità di contestazione degli stessi), con particolare riferimento alle ambiguità derivanti dall'uso di termini in senso proprio e metalinguistico riflessivo e non riflessivo; la ricerca si sofferma inoltre sul linguaggio colloquiale, vicino a quello della commedia e della satira, utilizzato da Seneca per ridicolizzare i sillogismi stoici; sul tema dell'amicizia; sull'uso di citazioni e/o allusioni poetiche (virgiliana e non virgiliana), decontestualizzate e risemantizzate in funzione educativa e psicagogica, piegate ad esprimere il personale messaggio etico; sull'uso del lessico specialistico, proveniente da diversi ambiti semantici (giuridico, economico, militare, medico), applicato da Seneca alla parenesi filosofica e, soprattutto, sul rapporto tra lessico filosofico latino e modelli greci. Infine, oltre ad approfondire il motivo delle egestas temporis e i riferimenti diatribici contenuti nelle epistole, sono stati individuati e approfonditi alcuni topoi presenti.