Written production of English compounds: effects of morphology and semantic transparency

The results of research on the processing of morphologically complex words are consistent with a lexical system that activates both whole-word and constituent representations during word recognition. In this study, we focus on written production and examine whether semantically priming the first constituent of a compound influences the ease of producing a compound (as measured by typing latencies), and whether any such priming effect depends on the semantic transparency of the compound’s constituents. We found that semantic transparency of the constituents affects whether semantic priming results in changes to processing. However, it is not only the semantic transparency of the primed constituent that exerts an influence—for example, the semantic transparency of the head affects whether semantically priming the modifier results in a change in typing times. We discuss these effects in terms of competition among the various representations as the compound is output, such that overall performance is a combination of facilitation and inhibition that changes over the course of the output.     

Indeterminacy,complex features and underspecification

At its simplest, morphosyntactic agreement may be viewed as involving linguistic objects which have the same values for a given feature. In contemporary constraint-based formalisms the relationship is usually modelled by structure sharing in the syntax; for predicate-argument agreement, most often it is assumed that the target and the controller provide compatible (complete or partial) specifications of features of the controller. This approach has much to recommend it, being based on the straightforward mechanism of combining information monotonically in the syntax. Additionally, it is often (but not invariably) assumed that (a subset of) these same morphosyntactic features are simply passed down to the morphology for spell out (Bresnan, In: Baltin and Collins (eds.) Handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, 2000; Lexical functional syntax, 2001) (but see e.g. Ackerman and Webelhuth (In: Butt and King (eds.) Online proceedings of the LFG96 conference, 1996); Sadler and Spencer (Yearbook of morphology 2002:71–97, 2001); Sells (In: Sadler and Spencer (eds.) Projecting morphology, 2004; In: Nikolaeva (ed.) Finiteness: theoretical and empirical foundations, 2007); Sadler and Nordlinger (In: Sadler and Spencer (eds.) Projecting morphology, 2004); Hinrichs and Nakazawa (Proceedings of HPSG2001, 2002) for approaches in lfg and other constraint-based formalisms which allow some further separation between these components). We discuss a range of cases of morphosyntactic agreement which are challenging in one way or another to this lean approach and explore how they may be modelled without adding any extra machinery, by using underspecified feature representations in the syntax, within one such framework, that of Lexical Functional Grammar lfg.     

Attentional Blink Is Hierarchically Modulated by Phonological,Morphological, Semantic and Lexical Connections between Two Chinese Characters

The ability to identify the second of two targets (T2) is impaired if that target is presented less than ∼500 ms after the first (T1). This transient deficit is known as attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have suggested that the magnitude of the AB effect can be modulated by manipulating the allocation of attentional resources to T1 or T2. However, few experiments have used Chinese characters and words to explore this phenomenon. The existence of lexical, semantic, phonological and morphological connections between Chinese characters has been well established, and understanding these connections may improve our knowledge of reading Chinese. In this study, we employed varying connections between T1 and T2 and examined how these connections modulate the AB effect. We found that the strongest AB was observed when the two Chinese characters were completely unrelated, while the AB was reduced when T1 and T2 were phonologically, orthographically or semantically related and was almost completely eliminated when T1 and T2 were united in a lexical phrase. The order of activation between Chinese characters was identified as follows: (a) lexical phrases, (b) semantic connection, (c) morphological connection, (d) phonological connection and (e) unrelated words.     

Effects of Grammaticality and Morphological Complexity on the P600 Event-Related Potential Component

We investigated interactions between morphological complexity and grammaticality on electrophysiological markers of grammatical processing during reading. Our goal was to determine whether morphological complexity and stimulus grammaticality have independent or additive effects on the P600 event-related potential component. Participants read sentences that were either well-formed or grammatically ill-formed, in which the critical word was either morphologically simple or complex. Results revealed no effects of complexity for well-formed stimuli, but the P600 amplitude was significantly larger for morphologically complex ungrammatical stimuli than for morphologically simple ungrammatical stimuli. These findings suggest that some previous work may have inadequately characterized factors related to reanalysis during morphosyntactic processing. Our results show that morphological complexity by itself does not elicit P600 effects. However, in ungrammatical circumstances, overt morphology provides a more robust and reliable cue to morphosyntactic relationships than null affixation.     

Case and configurationality: scrambling or mapping?

Kanum, a language of southern New Guinea, displays nonconfigurationality only for arguments marked with an overt structural case. After examining a variety of constraints on scrambling, in main and subordinate clauses, I argue that nonconfigurationality is a process of scrambling, rather than independent mapping from functional structure to constituency, and further is dependent on features associated with overt morphological case, and that alternative accounts in terms of grammatical function identity cannot be sustained.     

Scope,phonology and morphology in an agglutinating language: Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) variable suffix ordering

What is the nature of the interaction between scope, phonological conditions and morphologically specified precedence relations in determining affix combinatorics in morphologically complex languages? In depth studies of affix ordering patterns in typologically diverse languages reveal intricate interactions among multiple factors. Mixed scope/template systems, for instance, have been characterized as either involving scope taking precedence over templates [Athabaskan (Rice 2000)], or templates overriding scope [Chichewa (Hyman 2002, 2003) and Pulaar (Paster 2005)]. This paper makes an empirical contribution by documenting a novel type of affix order system of a previously unstudied language, Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico, which features free affix permutation, and which cannot be characterized as either ‘template-emergent’ or ‘scope-emergent’. In this agglutinating language, scope and morphological constraints are freely ranked, with phonological subcategorization overriding all other constraints. This paper also documents how semantically non-compositional suffix sequences may arise through priming effects and morphophonologically conditioned multiple exponence.     

The nose smells what the eye sees: crossmodal visual facilitation of human olfactory perception

Human olfactory perception is notoriously unreliable, but shows substantial benefits from visual cues, suggesting important crossmodal integration between these primary sensory modalities. We used event-related fMRI to determine the underlying neural mechanisms of olfactory-visual integration in the human brain. Subjects participated in an olfactory detection task, whereby odors and pictures were delivered separately or together. By manipulating the degree of semantic correspondence between odor-picture pairs, we show a perceptual olfactory facilitation for semantically congruent (versus incongruent) trials. This behavioral advantage was associated with enhanced neural activity in anterior hippocampus and rostromedial orbitofrontal cortex. We suggest these findings can be interpreted as indicating that human hippocampus mediates reactivation of crossmodal semantic associations, even in the absence of explicit memory processing.     

Wordhood and the interplay of linguistic levels in synthetic languages. An empirical study on Wichi (Mataguayan,Gran Chaco)

On the basis of data from the synthetic and agglutinative South American language Wichi (Mataguayan, Argentina/Bolivia), I argue in favor of regarding interface phenomena as typological variables. In particular, in this paper I discuss what type of interactions these are, arguing that they do not affect wordhood but do contribute to its formation. I will defend the hypothesis that linguistic level interactions within the word are of two types and different in nature: overlapping on the one hand and conditioning and alteration on the other. Conditioning only takes place in morphophonological and morphosemantic interactions and it follows the wordhood requirements of the language. Conversely, the interaction of morphology with all linguistic levels shows overlapping of units: the phonological word and the grammatical word in the morphophonological relation; the word and the simple clause or nominal phrase in the morphosyntactic relation; and the word and the semantic unit in the morphosemantic relation. This explains why the word is generally defined by phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria. It is to be hoped that the conclusions arrived at in this paper would contribute to deepen our knowledge of the notion of wordhood in synthetic languages in South America as well as our understanding of language structure and functioning.     

The effects of physical and semantic incongruites on auditory event-related potentials

Twenty subjects listened to a series of simple sentences, spoken by a male voice, in which the last word was on occassions either made semantically incongruous or was unexpectedly spoken by a female voice. Averages of ERPs to the last words revealed that a consistent late negative compenent (N456) was associated with semantic incongruity and a late positive component (P416) with physical (voice) incongruity. The results were consistent with thise in the visual modality by Kutas and Hillyard (1980a,b) and are interpreted in terms of the facilitatory and inhibitory effects of contextual priming on the processing of the words concerned. In a subsidiary experiment 6 subjects were required to repeat the last words of the same set of sentences as rapidly as possible. Verbal response latency increased by 62 msec to physically incongruous words and by 185 msec to semantically incongruous words.     

Audio-Visual and Meaningful Semantic Context Enhancements in Older and Younger Adults

Speech perception is critical to everyday life. Oftentimes noise can degrade a speech signal; however, because of the cues available to the listener, such as visual and semantic cues, noise rarely prevents conversations from continuing. The interaction of visual and semantic cues in aiding speech perception has been studied in young adults, but the extent to which these two cues interact for older adults has not been studied. To investigate the effect of visual and semantic cues on speech perception in older and younger adults, we recruited forty-five young adults (ages 18–35) and thirty-three older adults (ages 60–90) to participate in a speech perception task. Participants were presented with semantically meaningful and anomalous sentences in audio-only and audio-visual conditions. We hypothesized that young adults would outperform older adults across SNRs, modalities, and semantic contexts. In addition, we hypothesized that both young and older adults would receive a greater benefit from a semantically meaningful context in the audio-visual relative to audio-only modality. We predicted that young adults would receive greater visual benefit in semantically meaningful contexts relative to anomalous contexts. However, we predicted that older adults could receive a greater visual benefit in either semantically meaningful or anomalous contexts. Results suggested that in the most supportive context, that is, semantically meaningful sentences presented in the audiovisual modality, older adults performed similarly to young adults. In addition, both groups received the same amount of visual and meaningful benefit. Lastly, across groups, a semantically meaningful context provided more benefit in the audio-visual modality relative to the audio-only modality, and the presence of visual cues provided more benefit in semantically meaningful contexts relative to anomalous contexts. These results suggest that older adults can perceive speech as well as younger adults when both semantic and visual cues are available to the listener.     

Trade‐offs between growth and reproduction: an analysis of the quantitative genetic evidence

The assumption of a trade‐off between development time and fecundity, resulting from a positive correlation between body size and fecundity and between body size and development time, is a common feature of life history models. The present paper examines the evidence for such a trade‐off as indicated by genetic correlations between traits. The genetic covariances between traits are derived using a model in which maturation occurs when the organism achieves a genetically variable size threshold, and fecundity is an allometric function of body size with one genetically variable parameter (excluding body size itself). This model predicts that the heritabilities of the life history traits (growth rate, development time, fecundity) will not necessarily be less than the heritability of adult size (i.e. morphological traits). It is shown that if growth rate is genetically correlated with adult size then it is not possible, in general, to predict the sign of the genetic correlation between development time and fecundity. For particular cases the signs of the covariances between traits can be predicted. These predictions are tested using data drawn from the literature.     

Comparative Assessment of Genetic and Morphological Variation at an Extensive Hybrid Zone between Two Wild Cats in Southern Brazil

Increased attention towards the Neotropical cats Leopardus guttulus and L. geoffroyi was prompted after genetic studies identified the occurrence of extensive hybridization between them at their geographic contact zone in southern Brazil. This is a region where two biomes intersect, each of which is associated with one of the hybridizing species (Atlantic Forest with L. guttulus and Pampas with L. geoffroyi). In this study, we conducted in-depth analyses of multiple molecular markers aiming to characterize the magnitude and spatial structure of this hybrid zone. We also performed a morphological assessment of these species, aiming to test their phenotypic differentiation at the contact zone, as well as the correlation between morphological features and the admixture status of the individuals. We found strong evidence for extensive and complex hybridization, with at least 40% of the individuals sampled in Rio Grande do Sul state (southernmost Brazil) identified as hybrids resulting from post-F1 generations. Despite such a high level of hybridization, samples collected in this state still comprised two recognizable clusters (genetically and morphologically). Genetically pure individuals were sampled mainly in regions farther from the contact zone, while hybrids concentrated in a central region (exactly at the interface between the two biomes). The morphological data set also revealed a strong spatial structure, which was correlated with the molecular results but displayed an even more marked separation between the clusters. Hybrids often did not present intermediate body sizes and could not be clearly distinguished morphologically from the parental forms. This observation suggests that some selective pressure may be acting on the hybrids, limiting their dispersal away from the hybrid zone and perhaps favoring genomic combinations that maintain adaptive phenotypic features of one or the other parental species.     

Spontaneous death of mononuclear cells, obtained from health donors and patients with systemic lupus erythematosus]

Unstimulated human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (MNC) underwent death during incubation in vitro. According to morphological criteria the type of death was identified as apoptosis. There was a good correlation between a fraction of apoptotic cells qualified morphologically, and fraction of "apoptotic" comets. The use of DNA-comets for studying the spontaneous death in vitro of MNC from patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) showed that 24 h after isolation cells from SLE patients demonstrated a higher level of apoptosis than MNC from normal donors. It is likely that the increased apoptosis of SLE-MNC in vitro may reflect changes occurring in those cells in vivo which are bound with pathogenesis of disease. In this context the comet assay may be promising in diagnostics and monitoring of therapeutic treatments.     

Über mögliche Internbedingungen der transspezifischen Evolution

On the basis of some theoretical doubts concerning the principal abilities of explication of the “modern synthetic thEorie”, and, in addition the Homologienforschung, some well known problems of evolution beyond the species level are mentioned. Subject of special reflection is the problem of “Stammesalterung”. Recent developments of the scientific knowledge make renewed approaches to the topic possible. There are briefly introduced and discussed the applications of conceptions of systemdynamics and selforganisation. Ageing, the most questionable phenomenon in makroevolutionary terminations, is interpreted as homologous system property. Criteria for falsification of this assumption are presented. Possible endogen factors determining the general morphological traits of evolution, are discussed on the basis of the recent work ofRiedl. The importance of the epigenetic system is mentioned. Because there is an urgent need for correlation of ageing with morphological features, finally a general measuring instruction concerning this relationship will be discussed.     

Towards Semantically Sensitive Text Clustering: A Feature Space Modeling Technology Based on Dimension Extension

The objective of text clustering is to divide document collections into clusters based on the similarity between documents. In this paper, an extension-based feature modeling approach towards semantically sensitive text clustering is proposed along with the corresponding feature space construction and similarity computation method. By combining the similarity in traditional feature space and that in extension space, the adverse effects of the complexity and diversity of natural language can be addressed and clustering semantic sensitivity can be improved correspondingly. The generated clusters can be organized using different granularities. The experimental evaluations on well-known clustering algorithms and datasets have verified the effectiveness of our approach.     

Age-related characteristics of the formation of neurophysiological mechanisms of the phonemic, grammatical, and semantic linguistic levels

The structure of regional interactions of brain bioelectric potentials has been studied during performance by adults (n = 18) and children aged five to six (n = 15) and eight to nine years (n = 17) of three analytical verbal tasks: recognition of a given phoneme in the context of auditory presented words and recognition of grammatical and semantic mistakes in auditory presented sentences. According to the data of cross-correlation and coherent EEG analyses, adults and, to a lesser extent, children of both age groups showed a noticeable intensification of interhemispheric interaction during the performance of all three tasks, especially between temporal areas, with relatively minor changes in ipsilateral EEG relations. Children were shown to have elements of immaturity of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying various aspects of the language function, such as the analysis of the grammatical formation of a verbal utterance and the semantic content of a phrase. The results also suggest that the level of maturation of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying phonemic analysis is somewhat higher at these age stages than the level of maturity of central mechanisms responsible for the analysis of the semantic content and grammatical construction of a phrase. Quantitative comparison of the patterns of spatial interaction of cortical bioelectric potentials recorded during the performance of the tasks related to different linguistic levels showed a high degree of their statistical similarity for each of the age groups. The findings confirm the assumption that the distributive central maintenance of different linguistic levels is based on topologically close constellations of interacting cortical areas and on similar organization of their regional interactions.     

Frontal and facial flatness of major human populations

In the present study, the frontal and facial features of 112 populations from around the world are compared in terms of frontal and facial flatness measurements. Univariate analyses and canonical correlation analysis were applied to six indices representing flatness of frontal and facial bones. The deep infraglabellar notch, marked prognathism, and flat frontal bone show distinctive Australian/Melanesian characters among recent populations. Very flat faces in the transverse plane are the most common condition in eastern Asians. Some subSaharan Africans share similar characteristics with Australians in terms of marked prognathism and flat frontal bones in the sagittal plane on the one hand, and with eastern Asians on the other hand, for flat nasal and zygomaxillary regions. These results are not necessarily inconsistent with the evidence for regional continuity. The examination of relationships between frontal and facial flatness through canonical correlation analysis reveals a significant association between morphological features such as a deep infraglabellar notch, prognathism, flat frontal bone, and flat faces in the transverse plane. In this context, together with the generalized features of the late Pleistocene fossil record, the features of Australians having transversely projecting faces and of eastern Asians showing weak infraglabellar notches, ortho-/mosognathism, and rounded frontal bones can be interpreted as a differential retention of ancestral traits of anatomically modern humans. This may allow us to suppose that the frontal and facial flatness features treated herein can be explained by the hypothesis of a single origin of anatomically modern humans.     

The Devonian land plant Protosalvinia

Gray, Jane&Boucot, ArthurJ. 197901 15: The Devonian land plant Protosalvinia. Lethaia . Vol. 12, pp. 57–63. Oslo. ISSN 0024–1164.
Protosalvinia (=Foerstia ) shows a number of morphological features which suggest that it was a land plant, possibly an emergent aquatic. Certain kinds of biochemical data, as presently interpreted, also support the morphological evidence. The weight of evidence supports neither a fucoid nor even an algal attribution for this enigmatic plant. Protosalvinia should be treated as the representative of a separate group of land plants, as previously advocated. Tracheid-like tubes with internal spiral thickenings appear on the basis of direct comparison to be morphologically identical to those of nematophytalean origin. They may have functioned in a capacity similar to the tracheids of vascular plants. The Nematophytales are non-marine plants of uncertain taxonomic position.     

Reproducibility and discriminability of brain patterns of semantic categories enhanced by congruent audiovisual stimuli

One of the central questions in cognitive neuroscience is the precise neural representation, or brain pattern, associated with a semantic category. In this study, we explored the influence of audiovisual stimuli on the brain patterns of concepts or semantic categories through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. We used a pattern search method to extract brain patterns corresponding to two semantic categories: "old people" and "young people." These brain patterns were elicited by semantically congruent audiovisual, semantically incongruent audiovisual, unimodal visual, and unimodal auditory stimuli belonging to the two semantic categories. We calculated the reproducibility index, which measures the similarity of the patterns within the same category. We also decoded the semantic categories from these brain patterns. The decoding accuracy reflects the discriminability of the brain patterns between two categories. The results showed that both the reproducibility index of brain patterns and the decoding accuracy were significantly higher for semantically congruent audiovisual stimuli than for unimodal visual and unimodal auditory stimuli, while the semantically incongruent stimuli did not elicit brain patterns with significantly higher reproducibility index or decoding accuracy. Thus, the semantically congruent audiovisual stimuli enhanced the within-class reproducibility of brain patterns and the between-class discriminability of brain patterns, and facilitate neural representations of semantic categories or concepts. Furthermore, we analyzed the brain activity in superior temporal sulcus and middle temporal gyrus (STS/MTG). The strength of the fMRI signal and the reproducibility index were enhanced by the semantically congruent audiovisual stimuli. Our results support the use of the reproducibility index as a potential tool to supplement the fMRI signal amplitude for evaluating multimodal integration.