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Behavior Research Methods Apr 2022We present Shabd, a psycholinguistic database in Hindi. It is based on a corpus of 1.4 billion words from electronic newspapers and news websites. Word frequencies and...
We present Shabd, a psycholinguistic database in Hindi. It is based on a corpus of 1.4 billion words from electronic newspapers and news websites. Word frequencies and part of speech information have been derived and are made available in a cleaned list of 34 thousand hand-selected words, and a list of 96 thousand words observed with a frequency of more than 100 times in the corpus. Next to the Shabd database, we also make a list with all 2.3 million word types available and a list with the 2.5 million most frequent word pairs (word bigrams). The quality of the word frequency measure was tested in two lexical decision tasks. We observed that the Shabd word frequencies outperform existing frequencies based on smaller corpora of newspapers but not the Worldlex word frequencies based on an analysis of blogs. We also observed that word frequency accounts for as much variance as contextual diversity (operationalized as the number of documents in which the words were observed). The Shabd database is freely available for research.
Topics: Blogging; Databases, Factual; Humans; Language; Psycholinguistics; Speech
PubMed: 34357542
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-021-01625-2 -
Journal of Stomatology, Oral and... Feb 2018
Topics: Multilingualism; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 29413261
DOI: 10.1016/j.jormas.2018.01.002 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Dec 2019The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others... (Review)
Review
The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.
Topics: Concept Formation; Humans; Psycholinguistics; Role
PubMed: 31290008
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-019-01634-5 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Aug 2020This study analyzed the types of lexical relations produced by Spanish-speaking older adults with typical aging. A total of 120 older adults completed a word association...
This study analyzed the types of lexical relations produced by Spanish-speaking older adults with typical aging. A total of 120 older adults completed a word association norms task with 117 stimulus words, which allowed us to explore differences in associations by sex, age, and years of education. We employed two classifications to code the lexical relations: a traditional classification (paradigmatic versus syntagmatic) and a second classification categorizing responses into 17 types of associations (e.g., categorial versus non-categorial). Our results show that participants have a preference for paradigmatic responses (e.g., dog-animal), as well as associations with thematic-contextual co-occurrence plus semantic relations (e.g., cradle-baby). These findings suggest that older adults tend to establish lexical relations based on a combined link, one that is semantic and contextual.
Topics: Aged; Aging; Association; Female; Humans; Male; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 32519228
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-020-09708-5 -
Applied Neuropsychology. Adult 2022Color has demonstrated to have an influence on picture naming tasks. Objects with high color diagnosticity are recalled faster than objects with low value. That is why...
Color has demonstrated to have an influence on picture naming tasks. Objects with high color diagnosticity are recalled faster than objects with low value. That is why the Argentinean Psycholinguistic Picture Naming Test in color (PAPDIC in Spanish) was designed. The items and semantic cues were built considering local psycholinguistic norms. A series of psychometric analyses were performed on a sample of patients with focal brain damage with ( = 11) and without ( = 14) aphasia, a sample of patients with degenerative disease ( = 46) and two samples of healthy participants (young = 27, old = 50). Evidence of convergent validity was obtained through the correlation with the brief Boston Naming Test ( = 0.871; < .001); of criteria validity by means of contrasted groups analysis ( = 4.059, < .001), and through the ROC curve analysis (AUC = 0.993). Scores' reliability was explored by means of an internal consistency analysis (KR20 = 0.905). These results indicate that the PAPDIC is a promising color naming test which can be applied in the field of clinical neuropsychology to identify anomia. This test has several advantages in comparison with the available naming tests in Argentina.
Topics: Anomia; Aphasia; Argentina; Humans; Psycholinguistics; Reproducibility of Results; Semantics
PubMed: 32584150
DOI: 10.1080/23279095.2020.1780238 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Apr 2018Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties:...
Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are 'segment-sized' (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract (a single phoneme may be have different acoustic realisations). Nevertheless, there is a long history of challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some theorists arguing for differently sized phonological units (e.g. features or syllables) and others rejecting abstract codes in favour of representations that encode detailed acoustic properties of the stimulus. The phoneme hypothesis is the minority view today. We defend the phoneme hypothesis in two complementary ways. First, we show that rejection of phonemes is based on a flawed interpretation of empirical findings. For example, it is commonly argued that the failure to find acoustic invariances for phonemes rules out phonemes. However, the lack of invariance is only a problem on the assumption that speech perception is a bottom-up process. If learned sublexical codes are modified by top-down constraints (which they are), then this argument loses all force. Second, we provide strong positive evidence for phonemes on the basis of linguistic data. Almost all findings that are taken (incorrectly) as evidence against phonemes are based on psycholinguistic studies of single words. However, phonemes were first introduced in linguistics, and the best evidence for phonemes comes from linguistic analyses of complex word forms and sentences. In short, the rejection of phonemes is based on a false analysis and a too-narrow consideration of the relevant data.
Topics: Humans; Language; Linguistics; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Speech Perception
PubMed: 28875456
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-017-1362-0 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Feb 2015We address two important questions about the relationship between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. First, do grammatical theories and language processing... (Review)
Review
We address two important questions about the relationship between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. First, do grammatical theories and language processing models describe separate cognitive systems, or are they accounts of different aspects of the same system? We argue that most evidence is consistent with the one-system view. Second, how should we relate grammatical theories and language processing models to each other?
Topics: Cognition; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 25408514
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-014-9329-z -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Feb 2015Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the... (Review)
Review
Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at the elementary restrictions that apply to Merge (i.e., selection and licensing of functional features), we could conclude that a re-orientation of the syntactic derivation (from bottom-up/right-left to top-down/left-right) is necessary to make the theory simpler, especially for long-distance (filler-gap) dependencies, and is also empirically more adequate. If the structure building operations would assemble lexical items in the order they are pronounced (Phillips in Order and structure. PhD thesis, MIT, 1996; Chesi in Phases and cartography in linguistic computation: Toward a cognitively motivated computational model of linguistic competence. PhD thesis, Università di Siena, 2004; Chesi in Competence and computation: Toward a processing friendly minimalist grammar. Unipress, Padova, 2012), on-line performance data could better fit the grammatical model, without resorting to external "performance factors." The phase-based, top-down (and, as a consequence, left-right) Minimalist Grammar here discussed goes in this direction, ultimately showing how strong Islands (Huang in Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. PhD thesis, MIT, 1982) and intervention effects (Gordon et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27:1411-1423, 2001, Gordon et al. in J Mem Lang 51:97-114, 2004) could be better explained in structural terms assuming this unconventional derivational direction.
Topics: Cognition; Humans; Learning; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 25408515
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-014-9330-6 -
Quarterly Journal of Experimental... Feb 2024Pseudowords are letter strings that look like words but are not words. They are used in psycholinguistic research, particularly in tasks such as lexical decision. In...
Pseudowords are letter strings that look like words but are not words. They are used in psycholinguistic research, particularly in tasks such as lexical decision. In this context, it is essential that the pseudowords respect the orthographic statistics of the target language. Pseudowords that violate them would be too easy to reject in a lexical decision and would not enforce word recognition on real words. We propose a new pseudoword generator, UniPseudo, using an algorithm based on Markov chains of orthographic n-grams. It generates pseudowords from a customizable database, which allows one to control the characteristics of the items. It can produce pseudowords in any language, in orthographic or phonological form. It is possible to generate pseudowords with specific characteristics, such as frequency of letters, bigrams, trigrams, or quadrigrams, number of syllables, frequency of biphones, and number of morphemes. Thus, from a list of words composed of verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, UniPseudo can create pseudowords resembling verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs in any language using an alphabetic or syllabic system.
Topics: Humans; Reading; Language; Psycholinguistics; Linguistics
PubMed: 36891822
DOI: 10.1177/17470218231164373 -
Cognition Oct 2021The influence of stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments diffuses across time because the human response to language is not instantaneous. The linear models typically...
The influence of stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments diffuses across time because the human response to language is not instantaneous. The linear models typically used to analyze psycholinguistic data are unable to account for this phenomenon due to strong temporal independence assumptions, while existing deconvolutional methods for estimating diffuse temporal structure model time discretely and therefore cannot be directly applied to natural language stimuli where events (words) have variable duration. In light of evidence that continuous-time deconvolutional regression (CDR) can address these issues (Shain & Schuler, 2018), this article motivates the use of CDR for many experimental settings, exposits some of its mathematical properties, and empirically evaluates the influence of various experimental confounds (noise, multicollinearity, and impulse response misspecification), hyperparameter settings, and response types (behavioral and fMRI). Results show that CDR (1) yields highly consistent estimates across a variety of hyperparameter configurations, (2) faithfully recovers the data-generating model on synthetic data, even under adverse training conditions, and (3) outperforms widely-used statistical approaches when applied to naturalistic reading and fMRI data. In addition, procedures for testing scientific hypotheses using CDR are defined and demonstrated, and empirically-motivated best-practices for CDR modeling are proposed. Results support the use of CDR for analyzing psycholinguistic time series, especially in a naturalistic experimental paradigm.
Topics: Humans; Language; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Psycholinguistics; Reading
PubMed: 34303182
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104735