Processing of conceptual relationships within simple Czech and English sentences--ERPs and behavioral correlates

The paper presents findings of an experiment the participants of which were native Czech speakers (L1 ) possessed of perfect knowledge of English (L2). We assumed that the subjects could process differently each of the three types of English and Czech sentences; the first type represented correct sentences, the other two violated sentences. Violated sentences differed in the precise relationship between the verbs, their preceding noun phrases, and their preceding context. ERPs to critical verbs, the accuracy rate for both English and Czech sentences processing and decision time for each were evaluated. Participants' personality traits were assessed too. It has been shown that our subjects, who learned English after the age of 15, displayed significant differences in all measured parameters. It was especially the longer latency N400, the lower accuracy rate of English sentence processing, the longer decision time, and the same dynamics of all measured ERPs parameters. Possible causes of these differences are discussed.     

Treatment in England of Canadian Patients Addicted to Narcotic Drugs

The method of treatment and the results obtained from the treatment of 50 Canadian patients addicted to narcotic drugs who went to England are recorded. These patients were first stabilized on the minimal dose of narcotic drug which permitted them to work, and to acquire security and self-respect. Then, after psychiatric treatment dealing with the basic problem of their personality disorder, complete withdrawal treatment of the narcotic drug was undertaken.Nine of 10 patients aged between 20 and 30, of good social and cultural background, have been relieved of dependence on drugs for over two years.The other 40 patients came from a different background. Nearly all had been imprisoned for drug offences and they had come to England to obtain treatment and to avoid further prison sentences in Canada.The 31 patients whose prison sentences had been directly connected with drug offences are working steadily and leading an apparently normal life.The remaining nine patients had been convicted of criminal acts before becoming addicted to narcotic drugs and, with two exceptions, the results of their treatment compare unfavourably with the other patients, seven having been convicted and imprisoned in London.     

The evolutionary dynamics of grammar acquisition

Grammar is the computational system of language. It is a set of rules that specifies how to construct sentences out of words. Grammar is the basis of the unlimited expressibility of human language. Children acquire the grammar of their native language without formal education simply by hearing a number of sample sentences. Children could not solve this learning task if they did not have some pre-formed expectations. In other words, children have to evaluate the sample sentences and choose one grammar out of a limited set of candidate grammars. The restricted search space and the mechanism which allows to evaluate the sample sentences is called universal grammar. Universal grammar cannot be learned; it must be in place when the learning process starts. In this paper, we design a mathematical theory that places the problem of language acquisition into an evolutionary context. We formulate equations for the population dynamics of communication and grammar learning. We ask how accurate children have to learn the grammar of their parents' language for a population of individuals to evolve and maintain a coherent grammatical system. It turns out that there is a maximum error tolerance for which a predominant grammar is stable. We calculate the maximum size of the search space that is compatible with coherent communication in a population. Thus, we specify the conditions for the evolution of universal grammar.     

Fuzzy chorotypes as a conceptual tool to improve insight into biogeographic patterns

Chorotypes--statistically significant groups of coincident distribution areas--constitute biogeographic units that are fuzzy by nature. This quality has been referred to in the literature but has not been analyzed in depth or methodologically developed. The present work redefines chorotypes as fuzzy sets from a pragmatic perspective and basically focuses on the methodological and interpretative implications of this approach. The amphibian fauna in the Iberian Peninsula was used as an example to explore the fuzzy nature of chorotypes. The method on which this article is based is a widely used technique to define chorotypes. This method involves the fuzziness that is inherent to the identification between degree of similarity and degree of membership and includes a probabilistic analysis of the classification for the objective delimitation of chorotypes. The main innovation of this paper is a procedure to analyze chorotypes as fuzzy biogeographic units. A set of fuzzy parameters to deal with the biogeographic interpretation of fuzzy chorotypes is also described. A computer program has been developed and is freely available. History may be related to the degree of fuzziness of chorotypes. In our example, with amphibian distributions in Iberia, less fuzzy chorotypes could have a historical explanation, and the internal fuzziness of chorotypes increases with their distance to hypothetical Pleistocene refugia.     

Children’s and Adults’ On-Line Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences during Reading

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults’ syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I’ll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It’s really nice’ in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children.     

Fuzzy-Sets Approach to Noise Impact Assessment (7 pp)

Background, Aims and Scope Noise impacts are rarely assessed in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), probably due to lack of data, to the difficulty of setting up an appropriate assessment method including relevant uncertainties and vagueness and to their site-dependent nature. The evaluation, as well as for odour, cultural and aesthetic impacts, seems to be closely related to human judgements and perception based. Although fuzzy-sets have been developed for this purpose since the late '60s and their usefulness has been proven by successful applications, noise impact assessment approaches have been essentially crisp so far. The aim of this paper is to present a method for noise impact assessment based on fuzzy sets with an application to a simple example. Methods The fuzzy noise impact assessment involves: 1) the quality assessment of the site concerned by the noise impact before the occurrence of noise emissions; quality is expressed by a crisp (i.e. non-fuzzy) function depending on variables (the so-called 'primitives'), which are relevant for the evaluation (e.g. the population density, the type of land use,...); 2) the fuzzy representation of the primitives, e.g. their evaluation by means of linguistic variables (such as 'the population density is high') and by fuzzy numbers; 3) the fuzzy representation of the quality, by fuzzifying the crisp function defined in 1) and 4) the fuzzy representation of the noise impact. In the example, the noise impacts of three processes of coal mining and combustion are assessed. Results and Discussion The application example proved the operationability of the method. Primitives and noise impact assessment results are represented by fuzzy numbers and intervals that are more informative than crisp numbers for the interpretation of results The quality and impact assessment results obtained seem to be coherent with the nature of the processes involved and of the variables characterizing them. Conclusion and Outlook Fuzzy intervals and numbers could be more informative and closer to human judgements and perceptions than crisp numbers are, thus improving the pertinence and the interpretation of the results. Despite the increase in sophistication and the fact that the representation of the variables involved in calculations should be developed further (e.g. on the basis of consensus gained in an expert panel), the fuzzy approach seems to be promising for the assessment of noise impacts in LCA.     

Determination of forest fire risk with fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and its mapping with the application of GIS: The case of Turkey/Çakırlar

The objectives of this study are the determination of forest fire risks with the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and the mapping of risk levels with the use of geographic information systems (GIS). Socioeconomic, topographic, climatic, and stand structures have been taken into consideration as instrumental criteria in terms of fire risk. Each risk criteria and their sub-criteria membership grades have been determined with the fuzzy set theory. Five-scale fuzzy linguistic importance has been used for pairwise comparison matrices. Criterion weights have been mapped with the use of GIS, and a final risk map was established with weighted overlay analysis. Socioeconomic properties had the highest impact on fire risk with 35%. The high risk degree of this criterion manifests in shrublands with substantial fuel loads and young Calabrian pine forests in low elevation areas at the edge of roads, urban and urban periphery areas, south sloping, and steep sloped areas. The lowest risk degree was manifest in stands of cedar, black pine, and juniper forests, qualifying as old growth spreading in sub-mountain areas where land usage is rather low. Experiences regarding high accuracy fire risk determination and decision support approaches for fire risk management have been discussed and concluded in terms of applied FAHP and GIS procedures.     

EBIMed--text crunching to gather facts for proteins from Medline

To allow efficient and systematic retrieval of statements from Medline we have developed EBIMed, a service that combines document retrieval with co-occurrence-based analysis of Medline abstracts. Upon keyword query, EBIMed retrieves the abstracts from EMBL-EBI's installation of Medline and filters for sentences that contain biomedical terminology maintained in public bioinformatics resources. The extracted sentences and terminology are used to generate an overview table on proteins, Gene Ontology (GO) annotations, drugs and species used in the same biological context. All terms in retrieved abstracts and extracted sentences are linked to their entries in biomedical databases. We assessed the quality of the identification of terms and relations in the retrieved sentences. More than 90% of the protein names found indeed represented a protein. According to the analysis of four protein-protein pairs from the Wnt pathway we estimated that 37% of the statements containing such a pair mentioned a meaningful interaction and clarified the interaction of Dkk with LRP. We conclude that EBIMed improves access to information where proteins and drugs are involved in the same biological process, e.g. statements with GO annotations of proteins, protein-protein interactions and effects of drugs on proteins. AVAILABILITY: Available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Rebholz-srv/ebimed     

Privacy preserving sub-feature selection based on fuzzy probabilities

The feature selection addresses the issue of developing accurate models for classification in data mining. The aggregated data collection from distributed environment for feature selection makes the problem of accessing the relevant inputs of individual data records. Preserving the privacy of individual data is often critical issue in distributed data mining. In this paper, it proposes the privacy preservation of individual data for both feature and sub-feature selection based on data mining techniques and fuzzy probabilities. For privacy purpose, each party maintains their privacy as the instruction of data miner with the help of fuzzy probabilities as alias values. The techniques have developed for own database of data miner in distributed network with fuzzy system and also evaluation of sub-feature value included for the processing of data mining task. The feature selection has been explained by existing data mining techniques i.e., gain ratio using fuzzy optimization. The estimation of gain ratio based on the relevant inputs for the feature selection has been evaluated within the expected upper and lower bound of fuzzy data set. It mainly focuses on sub-feature selection with privacy algorithm using fuzzy random variables among different parties in distributed environment. The sub-feature selection is uniquely identified for better class prediction. The algorithm provides the idea of selecting sub-feature using fuzzy probabilities with fuzzy frequency data from data miner’s database. The experimental result shows performance of our findings based on real world data set.     

A Corpus Investigation of Syntactic Embedding in Pirah?

The Pirahã language has been at the center of recent debates in linguistics, in large part because it is claimed not to exhibit recursion, a purported universal of human language. Here, we present an analysis of a novel corpus of natural Pirahã speech that was originally collected by Dan Everett and Steve Sheldon. We make the corpus freely available for further research. In the corpus, Pirahã sentences have been shallowly parsed and given morpheme-aligned English translations. We use the corpus to investigate the formal complexity of Pirahã syntax by searching for evidence of syntactic embedding. In particular, we search for sentences which could be analyzed as containing center-embedding, sentential complements, adverbials, complementizers, embedded possessors, conjunction or disjunction. We do not find unambiguous evidence for recursive embedding of sentences or noun phrases in the corpus. We find that the corpus is plausibly consistent with an analysis of Pirahã as a regular language, although this is not the only plausible analysis.     

A Recipe for Unconventional Evenness Measures

The degree to which abundances are evenly divided among the species of a given community is a basic property of any biological community. Several evenness indices have thus far been proposed in ecological literature. However, despite their vast potential applicability in ecological research, none seems to be generally preferred. In this paper, I first summarize the basic requirements that evenness measures should meet to adequately behave in ecological studies. Then, I discuss the major drawbacks of these requirements and propose an alternative family of measures that are based on the notion of specificity used in fuzzy set theory for measuring the uncertainty associated with a fuzzy set.     

Emotional speech perception unfolding in time: the role of the basal ganglia

The basal ganglia (BG) have repeatedly been linked to emotional speech processing in studies involving patients with neurodegenerative and structural changes of the BG. However, the majority of previous studies did not consider that (i) emotional speech processing entails multiple processing steps, and the possibility that (ii) the BG may engage in one rather than the other of these processing steps. In the present study we investigate three different stages of emotional speech processing (emotional salience detection, meaning-related processing, and identification) in the same patient group to verify whether lesions to the BG affect these stages in a qualitatively different manner. Specifically, we explore early implicit emotional speech processing (probe verification) in an ERP experiment followed by an explicit behavioral emotional recognition task. In both experiments, participants listened to emotional sentences expressing one of four emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness) or neutral sentences. In line with previous evidence patients and healthy controls show differentiation of emotional and neutral sentences in the P200 component (emotional salience detection) and a following negative-going brain wave (meaning-related processing). However, the behavioral recognition (identification stage) of emotional sentences was impaired in BG patients, but not in healthy controls. The current data provide further support that the BG are involved in late, explicit rather than early emotional speech processing stages.     

Working Memory Is Partially Preserved during Sleep

Although several cognitive processes, including speech processing, have been studied during sleep, working memory (WM) has never been explored up to now. Our study assessed the capacity of WM by testing speech perception when the level of background noise and the sentential semantic length (SSL) (amount of semantic information required to perceive the incongruence of a sentence) were modulated. Speech perception was explored with the N400 component of the event-related potentials recorded to sentence final words (50% semantically congruent with the sentence, 50% semantically incongruent). During sleep stage 2 and paradoxical sleep: (1) without noise, a larger N400 was observed for (short and long SSL) sentences ending with a semantically incongruent word compared to a congruent word (i.e. an N400 effect); (2) with moderate noise, the N400 effect (observed at wake with short and long SSL sentences) was attenuated for long SSL sentences. Our results suggest that WM for linguistic information is partially preserved during sleep with a smaller capacity compared to wake.     

Listening to action-related sentences impairs postural control

According to the mirror neurons data there exist areas in the premotor cortex that are activated both during action perception and action execution. It was hypothesized that posture maintenance would be impaired by simultaneous action perception in concordance with cognitive dissonance theory. A test was conducted during which 23 neurologically normal humans were to maintain their posture erect on the forceplate and to listen to the action-related sentences. Tests of differences and Friedman analysis of variance proved that listening to sentences that describe different actions and movements in the first and the third person impairs postural control in comparison with listening to sentences that describe objects of nature and everyday life.     

Neuro-fuzzy decision trees

Fuzzy decision trees are powerful, top-down, hierarchical search methodology to extract human interpretable classification rules. However, they are often criticized to result in poor learning accuracy. In this paper, we propose Neuro-Fuzzy Decision Trees (N-FDTs); a fuzzy decision tree structure with neural like parameter adaptation strategy. In the forward cycle, we construct fuzzy decision trees using any of the standard induction algorithms like fuzzy ID3. In the feedback cycle, parameters of fuzzy decision trees have been adapted using stochastic gradient descent algorithm by traversing back from leaf to root nodes. With this strategy, during the parameter adaptation stage, we keep the hierarchical structure of fuzzy decision trees intact. The proposed approach of applying backpropagation algorithm directly on the structure of fuzzy decision trees improves its learning accuracy without compromising the comprehensibility (interpretability). The proposed methodology has been validated using computational experiments on real-world datasets.     

Evaluating an Explicit Functional Relationship by Fuzzifying the Statement of its Satisfying

Combining the concepts of interval arithmetic and fuzzy theory the observations to identify some explicit functional relationship are assumed to be fuzzy sets given by the threshold sets of their membership function, which have contours suitable for the application of interval arithmetic procedures. The result is a fuzzy set on the parameter region, which offers possibilities for reasoning on the validity of the relationship. The proceeding is illustrated by an example.     

Do not resonate with actions: sentence polarity modulates cortico-spinal excitability during action-related sentence reading

Background

Theories of embodied language suggest that the motor system is differentially called into action when processing motor-related versus abstract content words or sentences. It has been recently shown that processing negative polarity action-related sentences modulates neural activity of premotor and motor cortices.

Methods and Findings

We sought to determine whether reading negative polarity sentences brought about differential modulation of cortico-spinal motor excitability depending on processing hand-action related or abstract sentences. Facilitatory paired-pulses Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (pp-TMS) was applied to the primary motor representation of the right-hand and the recorded amplitude of induced motor-evoked potentials (MEP) was used to index M1 activity during passive reading of either hand-action related or abstract content sentences presented in both negative and affirmative polarity. Results showed that the cortico-spinal excitability was affected by sentence polarity only in the hand-action related condition. Indeed, in keeping with previous TMS studies, reading positive polarity, hand action-related sentences suppressed cortico-spinal reactivity. This effect was absent when reading hand action-related negative polarity sentences. Moreover, no modulation of cortico-spinal reactivity was associated with either negative or positive polarity abstract sentences.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that grammatical cues prompting motor negation reduce the cortico-spinal suppression associated with affirmative action sentences reading and thus suggest that motor simulative processes underlying the embodiment may involve even syntactic features of language.     

The ultrastructure of the tentacles of eleven species of dendrochirote holothurians studied with special reference to the surface coats and papillae

Summary The tentacles of eleven species of dendrochirote holothurians have been studied. The water vascular system, deep fibre system, ectoneural nerve ring and superficial fibre system are described and are similar to those of other holothurian tentacles. A conspicuous fuzzy coat covers the entire tentacular surface except for the tips of cilia. On the basis of its structure it is thought to be an attenuated glycocalyx. Its function is discussed in relation to anti-fouling and surface adhesion. The two surface coats underlying the fuzzy coat are termed the cuticle. Bacteria are found both within the surface coats and in the sub-cuticular space. Primary fixatives lacking osmium give poor preservation of the surface coats. The adhesive papillae of the apices of the tentacles contain elements of support cells and two other cells named Type-1 and Type-2 papillar cells. The secretions of Type-1 papillar cells are dense-cored vesicles and may contain a proteinaceous adhesive. The vesicles fuse with the cuticle and release their products which are apparently disseminated along the fuzzy coat filaments. The secretions of Type-2 papillar cells may have a neurosecretory function. The different models of food capture by dendrochirote tentacles are discussed as are duo-glandular adhesive systems in relation to dendrochirote tentacles.     

Vasopressin analog (DDAVP) improves memory in human males

One specific analog of arginine vasopression, 1-desamine-8-D-arginine vasopressin (DDAVP), has been shown to improve learning and memory in humans. Healthy young male adult subjects treated with DDAVP demonstrated better memory for implicational sentences than did control subjects. The same treatment had no influence on women given the same memory task. These results suggest that DDAVP may have a sexually dimorphic effect on learning and memory.