We probably sense sense probabilities Filipović Đurđević, Dušica; Kostić, Aleksandar
Language, cognition and neuroscience,
04/2023, Volume:
38, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this paper, we demonstrate the effects of Information Theory measures on the processing of polysemous nouns and reveal that the sensitivity to multiple related senses can be learned from the ...linguistic context. We collected large-scale data and applied a correlation design to show that an increase in sense uncertainty (or sense diversity) is followed by a faster visual lexical decision. The facilitatory effect of sense uncertainty was revealed by the predictive power of entropy, followed by the additional analysis, which revealed that both the number of senses and the balance of sense probabilities affected processing. For the first time, the balance of sense probabilities was described via redundancy to demonstrate the effect of the numerical description of the balance of sense probabilities. Finally, we crossed distribution semantics and discrimination learning to show that polysemy effects can arise as a consequence of the principles of error-driven learning.
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Among the factors argued to contribute to a bilingual advantage in executive function (EF), the combination of languages spoken by the bilingual is often overlooked. In this study, we explored the ...role of language similarity on memory and EF task by comparing performance of three groups of young adults—Hungarian–Serbian and Slovak–Serbian early balanced bilinguals, and Serbian-speaking monolinguals. Slovak is typologically related to Serbian, which are both Slavic, in contrast to Hungarian, which is Finno–Ugric. On the computerized tasks from the CANTAB battery (CANTAB Cognition, 2016, www.cantab.com), differences between monolinguals and bilinguals emerged on the EF tasks: Stockings of Cambridge (SOC) and Attentional Set Shifting (AST), but not the memory tasks: Delayed Matching to Sample (DMS), Paired Associate Learning (PAL), Spatial Working Memory (SWM). Both Hungarian–Serbian and Slovak–Serbian bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals on the more difficult SOC tasks, solved using more than a minimally required number of moves. This is in line with reports that bilinguals perform better under more complex conditions that require more monitoring and switching. However, bilinguals speaking Hungarian and Serbian spent less time preparing to execute the simpler SOC tasks, which can be solved in a minimum of two or three moves; they also exhibited reduced local switching cost and were faster overall on AST than both the Slovak–Serbian bilinguals and Serbian monolinguals. The advantageous performance of speakers of the typologically unrelated languages in our study suggests that these bilinguals may have more efficient attention switching and inhibition systems than bilinguals who speak typologically similar languages.
The Semantic Settling Dynamics model postulated that the seemingly inconsistent effects of lexical ambiguity are, in fact, a systematic manifestation of the specific dynamics that arise as a ...consequence of the amount of time spent in processing. The model has thus far been tested by prolonging lexical decision and comparing homonymous, polysemous, and unambiguous words in a factorial design. Here, we kept the strategy of task manipulation but tested the model by using continuous measures as indices of the level of lexical ambiguity and their slopes as indices of the effect size. We expressed the size of the polysemy effect as the slope of the effect of entropy of sense probability distribution and the size of the homonymy effect as the redundancy of sense probability distribution. Comparing lexical decision tasks with the shorter and longer time spent in processing, we observed the predicted decrease in the effect of the polysemy level as well as the predicted increase in the effect of homonymy level.
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The research deals with the set of Serbian homonymous nouns (nouns with multiple unrelated meanings) presented in the nor-ming study and in the visual lexical decision task experiment. Native ...speakers listed the meanings of homonymous words and provided word familiarity and word concreteness ratings. Accord-ingly, the first database of Serbian homonyms was constructed containing subjective meanings of homonymous nouns along with the estimated meaning probabilities, as well as a number of meanings, redundancy and entropy of the distribution of mean-ing probabilities, word familiarity and word concreteness. The processing disadvantage of homonymous nouns over unambigu-ous nouns was replicated in the visual lexical decision task. Ad-ditionally, the processing of homonymous nouns was linked with redundancy: the information theory measure of the balance of meaning probabilities. The results revealed that homonyms with higher redundancy of the meaning probability distribution (i.e., unbalanced meaning probabilities) were processed faster. This finding was in accordance with the hypothesis derived from the Semantic Settling Dynamics account of the processing of ambigu-ous words, according to which the competition among the unrelat-ed meanings derived the processing disadvantage in homonymy. However, the same pattern was not observed for the number of meanings and entropy, inviting for further research of the process-ing of ambiguous words.
In this study, we compared affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal for 882 Serbian words at three points in time: before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2018), during the COVID-19 ...lockdown (2020), and after the government measures were abandoned (2022). We did not observe a significant change in average valence or arousal ratings across time points. A more detailed look into the data revealed the change in arousal that was different across the valence values. An increase in their linear correlations and a decrease in the nonlinearity of the GAMM smooth demonstrated that, upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emotionally negative words elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas emotionally positive words elicited lower arousal ratings. It revealed that our participants became more sensitive to the negative content and less sensitive to the positive content. Our results add to the findings, which showed that the relationship between emotional valence and arousal is a function of contextual factors, which primarily influence the arousal of words.
We investigated the processing of inflected Serbian adjective forms to bring together quantitative linguistic measures from two frameworks – information theory and discrimination learning. From each ...framework we derived several quantitative descriptions of an inflectional morphological system and fitted two separate regression models to the processing latencies that were elicited by inflected adjectival forms presented in a visual lexical decision task. The model, which was based on lexical distributional and information theory revealed a dynamic interplay of information. The information was sensitive to syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of variation; the paradigmatic information (formalized as respective relative entropies) was also modulated by lemma frequency. The discrimination learning based model revealed an equally complex pattern, involving several learning-based variables. The two models revealed strikingly similar patterns of results, as confirmed by the very high proportion of shared variance in model predictions (85.83%). Our findings add to the body of research demonstrating that complex morphological phenomena can arise as a consequence of the basic principles of discrimination learning. Learning discriminatively about inflectional paradigms and classes, and about their contextual or syntagmatic embedding, sheds light on human language-processing efficiency and on the fascinating complexity of naturally emerged language systems.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
This collective monograph is the first data-oriented, empirical in-depth study of the system of clitics on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. It fills the gap between the theoretical and normative ...literature by including solid data on variation found in dialects and spoken language and obtained from massive Web Corpora and speakers’ acceptability judgements. The authors investigate three primary sources of variation: inventory, placement and morphonological processes. A separate part of the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of clitic climbing, the major challenge for any syntactic theory. The theory of complexity serves as the explanation for the very diverse constraints on clitic climbing established in the empirical studies. It allows to construct a series of hierarchies where the factors relevant for predicting clitic climbing interact with each other. Thus, the study pushes our understanding of clitics away from fine-grained descriptions and syntactic generalisations towards a probabilistic modelling of syntax.
revious research with the visual lexical decision task demonstrated that polysemous words (multiple related senses) have a processing advantage when compared to unambiguous words, whereas homonymous ...words (multiple unrelated meanings) have a processing disadvantage. Although the same pattern of results was observed in Serbian, the two effects were investigated in separate studies. The aim of this study was to test whether the effects can be replicated when both types of ambiguity are presented within the same experimental list. To test this, we conducted three experiments. In the first one, the mixed presentation of unambiguous, homonymous, and polysemous words did not reveal any of the ambiguity effects, leading to the conclusion that the experimental context may affect the emergence of ambiguity effects. The other two experiments were conducted to explicitly control for the experimental context. In both experiments, we presented each ambiguity type within the same block and counterbalanced the order of the block presentation. These experiments revealed the presence of the polysemy advantage, but not the homonymy disadvantage, which is a common pattern in literature. Polysemy effects typically emerge relatively easily, whereas the homonymy disadvantage requires additional conditions. Finally, we conclude that experimental context does play a role in ambiguity processing, although the order of presentation does not affect the overall results.
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Cilj ovog rada je da predstavi novi alat za pripremu i izvođenje psiholoških eksperimenata, koji smo kreirali kako bi se obogatila i olakšala praktična nastava kognitivne psihologije, ali i ostalih ...psiholoških disciplina koje koriste eksperimentalnu metodologiju. Osnovna namena tog alata je pomoć univerzitetskoj nastavi, ali se može koristiti i za prikupljanje podataka. Prikazan je program UltraLab koji je osmišljen sa idejom da prati savremene trendove i bude besplatan, jednostavan za pripremu i zadavanje eksperimenata, a da se može koristiti za širok spektar eksperimentalnih paradigmi. Priložen je i link preko kojeg se može preuzeti prikazani alat. U radu je dat opis osnovnih tehničkih karakteristika, detaljno uputstvo za pripremu eksperimentalnih fajlova, kao i detaljno tumačenje ispisa sa podacima. Na kraju, istaknute su prednosti koje primena ovakvog alata donosi studentima koji usvajaju gradivo iz eksperimentalne psihologije.
The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific ...literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1,
N
= 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2,
N
= 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words’ tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
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