Search

This study investigated the knowledge of English phrasal verbs (PVs) among Japanese university students. PVs have been described by learners as ambiguous and difficult, often resulting in their avoidance, and much of the literature has focused on how they can be taught effectively. However, it is relatively unknown as to what knowledge learners typically develop on their own without undergoing classroom interventions that focus specifically on PVs. To investigate this issue, a survey on PVs was distributed to eight different departments at universities across Japan resulting in 221 participants, with six students participating in follow‐up interviews. The data from the PV survey provided qualitative data for analysis, the interviews were transcribed, and axial coding was utilized to formulate a holistic examination of the participants' knowledge of PVs. The results revealed that the participants had an awareness of PVs but had acquired most of them as chunks of language without much knowledge of their individual parts, which was found to lower their confidence and increase their perceived difficulty. Additionally, directional PVs, particularly with go and come, were the easiest for the participants due to L1–L2 similarities. However, their understanding of idiomatic and aspectual PVs appeared to be superficial and lacking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to the development of technology in medicine, millions of healthrelated data such as scanning the images are generated. It is a great challenge to store the data and handle a massive volume of data. Healthcare data is stored in the cloud-fog storage environments. This cloud-Fog based health model allows the users to get health-related data from different sources, and duplicated information is also available in the background. Therefore, it requires an additional storage area, increase in data acquisition time, and insecure data replication in the environment. This paper is proposed to eliminate the de-duplication data using a window size chunking algorithm with a biased sampling-based bloom filter and provide the health data security using the Advanced Signature-Based Encryption (ASE) algorithm in the Fog-Cloud Environment (WCA-BF + ASE). This WCA-BF + ASE eliminates the duplicate copy of the data and minimizes its storage space and maintenance cost. The data is also stored in an efficient and in a highly secured manner. The security level in the cloud storage environment Windows Chunking Algorithm (WSCA) has got 86.5%, two thresholds two divisors (TTTD) 80%, Ordinal in Python (ORD) 84.4%, Boom Filter (BF) 82%, and the proposed work has got better security storage of 97%. And also, after applying the de-duplication process, the proposed method WCA-BF + ASE has required only less storage space for various file sizes of 10 KB for 200, 400 MB has taken only 22 KB, and 600 MB has required 35 KB, 800 MB has consumed only 38 KB, 1000 MB has taken 40 KB of storage spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that error analysis (EA) can be a valuable tool for linguistic scholars to collect useful information on second language (L2) acquisition. In the domain of L2 listening development, identifying patterns of learners' erroneous output allows both teachers and students to have an overview of learners' listening problems. On this premise, remedial actions can be taken for the achievement of effective listening comprehension. Having said that, the goal of this study is to investigate the common types of listening errors made by 12 EFL university students at a private university in Vietnam. Specifically, the study attempts to seek an understanding of how listeners process speech at chunk level and how their listening transcriptions reflect their listening processes. Sixty chunks extracted as a separate clip from 15 dialogues with basic features of the oral language were embedded in listening tasks on a selfaccess online platform. Error analysis of a total of 720 transcriptions reveals that chunks containing errors occupied 44 percent, suggesting that at the chunk level, students still struggled to construct the meanings of the aural input. Major listening errors identified are related to sound misperception, including confusion, omission, addition, and misformation. The findings of this study stress the significance of respecting learners' meaning-making mechanisms in the listening process by giving listeners more control in accessing listening materials. On top of that, it highlights the priority of listening at the chunk level without contextual clues at the earlier stages of listening, which can be a head start for their listening development. More implications for language teachers and researchers in listening are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research focusing on Anglo-European languages indicates that children's acquisition of the subordinate structure of complement-clause constructions and the semantics of mental verbs facilitates their understanding of false belief, and that the two linguistic factors interact. Complement-clause constructions support false-belief development, but only when used with realis mental verbs like 'think' in the matrix clause (de Villiers, Jill. 2007. The interface of language and Theory of Mind. Lingua 117(11). 1858–1878). In Chinese, however, only the semantics of mental verbs seems to play a facilitative role in false-belief development (Cheung, Him, Hsuan-Chih Chen & William Yeung. 2009. Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 104(2). 141–155). We argue that these cross-linguistic differences can be explained by variations in availability and usage patterns of mental verbs and complement-clause constructions across languages. Unlike English, Mandarin-Chinese has a verb that indicates that a belief might be false: yi3wei2 '(falsely) think'. Our corpus analysis suggests that, unlike English caregivers, Mandarin-Chinese caregivers do not produce frequent, potentially unanalyzed, chunks with mental verbs and first-person subjects, such as 'I think'. In an experiment, we found that the comprehension of complement-clause constructions used with yi3wei2 '(falsely) think', but not with jue2de2 'think', predicted Mandarin children's false-belief understanding between the ages of 4 and 5. In contrast to English, whether mental verbs were used with first- or third-person subjects did not affect their correlation with false-belief understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the theoretical presuppositions of Usage-Based Functional Linguistics, this work aims to propose an analysis of four additive extension chunks attested in Portuguese: além de tudo, além do mais, além da contaand além do que. These chunks, derived from the schematic network [Além de X,Y], are investigated in terms of compositionality and analyzability (cf. BYBEE, 2016). The data analysis is done from a synchronic and quali-quantitative perspective, based on posts from the Twitter social network. The results demonstrate that the four mentioned chunks are arranged in a gradient scale that reflects different levels of syntactic-semantic integration. Furthermore, each chunk has its specific usage and is recruited for different communication purposes.

In the present experimental study second-year students majoring in “Agricultural Engineering” and “Electrical engineering” revise for the Unified Entrance Exam to join the Master course. Both groups learn vocabulary through the online vocabulary learning platform Quizlet. In contrast, to control group the experimental group entered not isolated words, but words in chunks according to the lexical approach. To compare students’ progress in vocabulary acquisition the Student’s t-test was used. The results show that the first hypothesis should be taken into consideration: there is a significant difference in the average indicators in the groups. Learning words in chunks had a significant effect on the test scores and, consequently, increases the chances to pass the Unified Entrance Exam and do postgraduate studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that distributed practice—a training strategy that is known to facilitate memory—is likely to result in greater learning than massed practice. This effect has been demonstrated largely in explicit tasks. The purpose of this study was to test whether statistical learning of artificial grammar is affected by the lag between learning sessions overall, and by high and low complexity stimuli (as measure by chunk strength). Two groups (spaced-short and spaced-long) learned strings of letters created according to a set of rules and were required to produce new strings using given letter sets. For the spaced-short group, the two learning sessions, each including training and a test phase, took place sequentially with a 10-min break, whereas for the spaced-long group, learning sessions were distributed across two days (1-day lag). Overall results showed improved performance following spaced-long practice compared to spaced-short practice. The results also indicated that in the low chunk strength strings (indicating high complexity), both groups demonstrated similar improvement from first to second testing, while in the high chunk strength strings (indicating low complexity), improvement in letter reordering performance was significantly higher when the learning sessions were distributed across two days. This pattern of findings suggests that stimuli complexity affects the extent to which distributed practice enhance artificial grammar learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attaining native-like accuracy and fluency is the aim of every student that has embarked on the study of a foreign language. In order to achieve this aim, students are encouraged to perceive and analyse the way English is used in various contexts, especially in those that are of interest to them in the light of their future careers. The lexical approach facilitates the mediation of language by means of a purposeful focus on chunks of language, since words do not occur in isolation but in meaningful combinations that are formulaic (e.g. collocations, idioms, discourse markers, phrasal verbs) and reveal the speakers' level of proficiency. Linguists are in favour of teaching chunks as they facilitate the acquisition of fluency, confer idiomaticity and provide the basis for subsequent language acquisitions. The present study focuses on the extent to which the Occupational English Test (OET) for Veterinary Science practice tests can be used in order to expose students to various instances in which chunks of language occur in professional contexts. The practice tests that assess the receptive (reading and listening) and productive (speaking and writing) language skills rely on a consistent use of chunks in various healthcare professional settings and can be used to consolidate learners' linguistic knowledge and accurate communication skills. Learners can be trained to notice the various linguistic contexts in which chunks occur, to accurately infer their meaning and the typical structure they are based on, and to confidently build on this acquired knowledge. Careful consideration is given to specific collocations and formulaic phrases used in the OET listening and reading materials which can be further transferred to other communicative instances and activated in the area of productive skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Chess players do not have better cognitive abilities than other people. • Use multiple knowledge paradigm to define procedural chunks and STM capacity. • Efficiency of information processing depends on the level of expertise. • Combination of size and quantity of procedural chunks recalled defines STM capacity. • Procedural chunks retained in STM depend on skill level and information sort order. When it comes to cognitive architecture and human information processing, chunks are one of the best known and most recognized constructs. Nevertheless, the nature of chunks is still very elusive, especially when it comes to chunks in procedural knowledge. This study deals with basic features of procedural information processing and examines the manifestation of chunks in procedural knowledge. The participants' task was to reconstruct sequences of chess moves. Chess was chosen as an experimental domain, because of its complexity, well-defined rules and standardized measure of chess player strength. From the results we conclude that short-term memory capacity is determined by the combination of the size and amount of procedural chunks recalled to the short-term memory. We have shown that on average, participants with more specialized knowledge operated faster and with larger chunks of procedural information than participants with less specialized knowledge. We have shown that in procedural information processing, the level of expertise and the sorting order of the retrieved information are important factors that influence the amount of procedural chunks retained in the short-term memory. Therefore, the capacity of short-term memory in complex situations cannot be expressed as a simple concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to actual words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences—not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences.

One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to actual words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences—not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments explore whether knowledge of grammars defining global versus local regularities has an advantage in implicit acquisition and whether this advantage is affected by cultural differences. Participants were asked to listen to and memorize a number of strings of 10 syllables instantiating an inversion (i.e. a global pattern); after the training phase, they were required to judge whether new strings were well formed. In Experiment 1, Western people implicitly acquired the inversion rule defined over the Chinese tones in a similar way as Chinese participants when alternative structures (specifically, chunking and repetition structures) were controlled. In Experiments 2 and 3, we directly pitted knowledge of the inversion (global) against chunk (local) knowledge, and found that Chinese participants had a striking global advantage in implicit learning, which was greater than that of Western participants. Taken together, we show for the first time cross-cultural differences in the type of regularities implicitly acquired.

To some extent, we seem to use language in chunks – multiple words that are co-selected and used as gestalt units. By some estimates, these chunks constitute more than 50 percent of a given text (Erman and Warren, 2000). The extent to which our communication is composed of these units has broad implications for linguistic theory, psycholinguistics and applied linguistics, and so is the focus of this study. This study shows that claims made regarding the nature of formulaic language (Sinclair, 1991) lead to a method for the automatic detection of holistically used multi-word patterns in text corpora, which in turn allows for the estimation of the 'chunkiness' of linguistic corpora. These estimates may be useful for materials development in language teaching, as well as corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of learning lexical chunks on the speaking fluency of EFL Iranian learners (between the ages of 13 and 17) and at the same time taking into consideration the examining participants' use of lexical chunks and their knowledge of them. To this end, after administrating the Quick Placement Test (QPT), 60 intermediate L2 learners were selected at random out of 120, and then assigned to two experimental and control groups. The learners were assigned an interview of ten questions as a pretest. After that some lessons of lexical chunks using (Collocation in Use and Common Idioms in English) books were thought as the treatment to the experimental group. After the instruction, an interview was conducted on both the experimental and control group as the post test. The T-test analyzed data of the post test revealed that after the treatment, the participants' fluency in the experimental group was significantly improved. The results also showed that the participants in the experimental group had positive attitudes toward explicit instruction of lexical chunks. The study has theoretical and pedagogical implications in the field of foreign/second language teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lanthanum cerate (La 2 Ce 2 O 7 , LC) is one of the promising advanced thermal barrier coating (TBC) materials due to its high melting point, no phase transformation between room temperature and operating temperature, low thermal conductivity, comparable coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) with metallic substrate. The present study investigates plasma transferred arc synthesis of LC powder, its subsequent spheroidization in a thermal plasma jet and plasma spray deposition. The PTA-synthesized LC powder, spheroidized as well as the plasma sprayed coatings was found to possess excellent phase stability; the single phase cubic fluorite structure of LC was found to be retained even after prolonged arc-melting, corroborating that the material was stable from room temperature up to its melting point. It was observed that PTA melting for longer duration resulted in small deviation from stoichiometry, although the phase structure of LC was retained. Spheroidization efficiency was found to increase with the input power of the torch. Very good adherent LC coatings could be deposited on nickel super alloy with reasonably good deposition efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stories told by people with dementia are often fragmented and repeated many times. This leads people to discount their value and ignore what they can reveal about the tellers. This paper focuses on five types of stories told by ‘Ms Tatter’ in 10 conversations with student volunteer partners. Many of the stories involve Ms Tatter as a child interacting with her mother. In them she reveals much about herself and her early life as well as the ways in which she positions both herself and her mother. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a prototype model demonstrating the rationality in humans is developed. For queries to be answered, the internal knowledge representation mechanism is understood to be in the form of inter-related clusters permanently stored in the long term memory (LTM). In response to a query involving a single predicate (simplest case), only one cluster along with its various attributes and values may be retrieved. In contrast, a complex query involving multiple predicates requires the retrieval of multiple related chunks, forming a network of knowledge, often referred to as a concept map, from which the response is generated. An internal process that happens is the matching of predicate of the question with the facts in the knowledge-base and retrieval of the chunk(s) with the corresponding Attribute-Value pairs, through a process akin to unification, a substitution procedure. However, an unanswered query due to the absence of a specific knowledge generates a negative response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of ‘chunks’ is not only a common and characteristic feature of first language use, but may also be a distinguishing factor between less and more proficient second language users. The present study aimed at investigating potential correlations between chunk use and holistically rated proficiency scores and development over time in advanced Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) over the course of 18 months of English classes. Neither holistically rated proficiency scores nor common complexity measures had shown any progress in these learners, but a few lexically based measures did. Therefore, the development of chunks in these learners was examined as chunks are mostly lexical in nature and might show more subtle progress over time.The use of chunks was examined in the first and last two texts of the learners and, in line with previous research, it was found that more proficient writers use relatively more chunks, specifically collocations. Chunk coverage, the total number of chunk words divided by the total number of words, also correlated with some holistic proficiency scores, and increased significantly over time. Average chunk length did not show any correlation with proficiency scores nor did it increase over time. Increased proficiency in written texts is thus specifically related to the use of more chunks. This study shows that development in advanced Chinese L2 learners of English appears to be subtle, which might be due to the fact that at this advanced level mainly lexical changes take place. Future research into development over time in advanced learners may thus have to zoom in on lexical measures especially. Implications of this study point to the importance of promoting the use of target language chunks to advanced learners of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposed work models document level text plagiarism detection as a binary classification problem, where the task is to distinguish a given suspicious-source document pair as plagiarized or non-plagiarized. The objective is to explore the potency of syntax based linguistic features extracted using shallow natural language processing techniques for plagiarism classification task. Shallow syntactic features, viz., part of speech tags and chunks are utilized after effective pre-processing and filtrations for pruning the irrelevant information. The work further proposes the modelling of this classification phase as an intermediate stage, which will be post candidate source retrieval and before exhaustive passage level detections. A two-phase feature selection approach is proposed, which improves the effectiveness of classification by selecting appropriate set of features as the input to machine learning based classifiers. The proposed approach is evaluated on smaller and larger test conditions using the corpus of plagiarized short answers (PSA) and plagiarism instances collected from PAN corpus respectively. Under both the test conditions, performances are evaluated using general as well as advanced classification metrics. Another main contribution of the current work is the analysis of dependencies and impact of the extracted features, upon the type and complexity of plagiarism imposed in the documents. The proposed results are compared with the two state-of-the-art approaches and they outperform the baseline approaches significantly. This in turn reflects the cogency of syntactic linguistic features in document level plagiarism classification, especially for the instances close to manual or real plagiarism scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing evidence that, faced with a complex environment, participants subdivide the incoming information into small perceptual units, called chunks. Although statistical properties have been identified as playing a key role in chunking, we wanted to determine whether perceptual (repetitions) and positional (initial units) features might provide immediate guidance for the parsing of information into chunks. Children aged 5 and 8 years were exposed to sequences of 3, 4, or 5 colours. Sequence learning was assessed either through an explicit generation test (Experiment 1) or through a recognition test (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that perceptual and positional saliencies benefited learning and that sensitivity to repetitions was age dependent and permitted the formation of longer chunks (trigrams) in the oldest children. Experiment 2 suggested that children became sensitive to perceptual and positional saliencies regardless of age and that the both types of saliencies supported the formation of longer chunks in the oldest children. The discussion focuses on the multiple factors intervening in sequence learning and their differential effects as a function of the instructions used at test to assess sequence learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of the present article is to highlight the role of fluency for communication and defend the attention that it should be given within the foreign language classroom. The article presents a study on material designed as part of a project from the European Union Lifelong Learning Programme (Conversational Fluency in Phrases: Fluency for Conversational Interaction (FluenCi) 505023-LLP-1-2009-1-IEKA2- KA2MP) led by a team of researchers from the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia). The main objective of the project was to address English language learner's problems with perceiving and producing high-frequency phrases of spoken language which increase fluency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purposes of the present study were twofold. First, we sought to establish whether tonal symmetry produces processing fluency. Second, we sought to explore whether symmetry and chunk strength express themselves differently in fluency, as an indication of different mechanisms being involved for sub- and supra-finite state processing. Across two experiments, participants were asked to listen to and memorize artificial poetry showing a mirror symmetry (an inversion, i.e. a type of cross serial dependency); after this training phase, people completed a four-choice RT task in which they were presented with new artificial poetry. Participants were required to identify the stimulus displayed. We found that symmetry sped up responding to the second half of strings, indicating a fluency effect. Furthermore, there was a dissociation between fluency effects arising from symmetry versus chunk strength, with stronger fluency effects for symmetry rather than chunks in the second half of strings. Taken together, we conjecture a divide between finite state and supra-finite state mechanisms in learning grammatical sequences.

Aus der Sicht der Neurowissenschaft kann Kognition als ein Wissenserwerb-Prozess definiert werden, der sowohl Informationen aus der Umwelt als auch aus unserem Gedächtnis verwendet. Der Prozess baut auf Perzeption, Aufmerksamkeit, Gedächtnis und Handeln auf und läuft nicht immer bewusst ab. Es handelt sich dabei aber nicht nur um Wissenserwerb, sondern um die Umwandlung all dessen, was vom Lerner anhand seiner Identität und Erfahrungen wahrgenommen wird. Davon ausgehend wird hier ein theoretisches Modell der Wissensverarbeitung im Rahmen der Produktion in einer Fremdsprache vorgestellt, das auf neuen neurowissenschaftlichen Theorien über Gedächtnis, Lernen und die Verarbeitung von Repräsentationen häufiger linguistischer Sequenzen (chunks) basiert und mit Daten aus dem Bereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache illustriert wird. Aus dem Modell ergibt sich, dass theoretisches Wissen über eine Fremdsprache und die Fähigkeit, die Sprache erfolgreich zu verwenden, als einander ergänzende, während des Lernprozesses miteinander interagierende Fähigkeiten anzusehen sind, und nicht als zwei Phasen einer durch Lernzeit und Speicherung im Gedächtnis bestimmten einheitlichen Kenntnis, wie von manchen Autoren vorgeschlagen wird.

Shallow syntactic annotation in the corpus of Wrocław University of Technology In this paper we present shallow syntactic annotation of The Wrocław University of Technology Corpus. We discuss some theoretical and practical considerations related to shallow parsing of Polish, then we present our annotation guidelines. The proposed annotation scheme includes chunking – four chunk types are defined with reference to the notion of accommodation and syntactic connotation, as well as annotation of four inter-chunk predicate-argument relations. Until now almost 18k chunk and 4k relation instances have been annotated. We believe that both the corpus and the annotation guideliness will prove their applicability in construction of automatic shallow parsers.

We examined whether visual statistical learning (VSL) produced implicit and/or explicit knowledge about temporal order information and scene chunks, using a rapid serial visual presentation target detection task and a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) familiarity test as indirect and direct measures of VSL, respectively. In the familiarization phase, participants viewed a visual stream of natural scenes consisting of four triplets (i.e., three images that always appeared in the same order). In the subsequent target detection task, participants were required to detect target items embedded in a stream of 12 images or 12 words representing each natural scene. In the final 2AFC familiarity test, participants observed two test sequences (statistically related triplets vs. unrelated foils) and decided whether the first or second sequence was more familiar based on the familiarization phase. In both test phases, we included the same (forward) and reverse (backward) order of scenes as presented during the familiarization phase to examine whether the expression of VSL was based on temporal order of scenes or scene chunks. The results of the target detection task showed a learning effect for both temporal order in the forward condition and chunks in the backward condition, irrespective of whether stimuli were images or words; in contrast, we did not observe a learning effect in the backward condition for scene images in the familiarity test. Our findings are compatible with a learning mechanism that has both implicit and explicit components based on temporal order information and scene chunks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of expertise based on the acquisition of chunk and templates suggest a differential geometric organization of perception between experts and novices. It is implied that expert representation is less anchored by spatial (Euclidean) proximity and may instead be dictated by the intrinsic relation in the structure and grammar of the specific domain of expertise. Here we set out to examine this hypothesis. We used the domain of chess which has been widely used as a tool to study human expertise. We reasoned that the movement of an opponent piece to a specific square constitutes an external cue and the reaction of the player to this perturbation should reveal his internal representation of proximity. We hypothesized that novice players will tend to respond by moving a piece in closer squares than experts. Similarly, but now in terms of object representations, we hypothesized weak players will more likely focus on a specific piece and hence produce sequence of actions repeating movements of the same piece. We capitalized on a large corpus of data obtained from internet chess servers. Results showed that, relative to experts, weaker players tend to 1) produce consecutive moves in proximal board locations, 2) move more often the same piece and 3) reduce the number of remaining pieces more rapidly, most likely to decrease cognitive load and mental effort. These three principles might reflect the effect of expertise on human actions in complex setups.

The resource allocation problem for the downlink of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) wireless multicast systems is investigated. It is assumed that the base station consists of multiple antennas in a distributed antenna system (DAS), whereas each user is equipped with a single antenna. The multicasting technology is able to support several groups of users with flexible quality of service (QoS) requirements. The general mathematical formulation is provided, but achieving the optimal solution has a high computational cost. In our approach, the allocation unit is not the subcarrier, as in conventional OFDMA systems, but a set of contiguous subcarriers, which is called 'chunk'. For practical implementation, a suboptimal but efficient algorithm is proposed in order to maximize the sum of the maximum attainable data rates of multicast groups of users, subject to total available power and proportional maximum attainable data rate constraints among multicast groups of users. Simulation and complexity analyses are provided to support the benefits of chunk-based resource allocation to multicast OFDMA DASs, supporting that the proposed algorithm can be applied to latest-generation wireless systems that provide QoS guarantees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new method based on an algorithm usually dedicated to DNA sequence alignment in order to both reliably score short-term memory performance on immediate serial-recall tasks and analyse retention-error patterns. There can be considerable confusion on how performance on immediate serial list recall tasks is scored, especially when the to-be-remembered items are sampled with replacement. We discuss the utility of sequence-alignment algorithms to compare the stimuli to the participants' responses. The idea is that deletion, substitution, translocation, and insertion errors, which are typical in DNA, are also typical putative errors in short-term memory (respectively omission, confusion, permutation, and intrusion errors). We analyse four data sets in which alphanumeric lists included a few (or many) repetitions. After examining the method on two simple data sets, we show that sequence alignment offers 1) a compelling method for measuring capacity in terms of chunks when many regularities are introduced in the material (third data set) and 2) a reliable estimator of individual differences in short-term memory capacity. This study illustrates the difficulty of arriving at a good measure of short-term memory performance, and also attempts to characterise the primary factors underpinning remembering and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study tires to explore the effectiveness of acquisition of chunks to improve L2 learners' listening competency. An empirical study is designed and conducted on the basis of theory of chunks and information processing mode. Analysis of the experimental data shows that acquisition of chunks can effectively help L2 learners to improve their listening competency. Result of the experiment reveals that the number of chunks closely correlates with L2 learners' listening scores, because chunks can boost L2 learners' efficiency of processing language information and predicate information while listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on TExSIS, a flexible bilingual terminology extraction system that uses a sophisticated chunk-based alignment method for the generation of candidate terms, after which the specificity of the candidate terms is determined by combining several statistical filters. Although the set-up of the architecture is largely language-independent, we present terminology extraction results for four different languages and three language pairs. Gold standard data sets were created for French-Italian, French-English and French-Dutch, which allowed us not only to evaluate precision, which is common practice, but also recall. We compared the TExSIS approach, which takes a multilingual perspective from the start, with the more commonly used approach of first identifying term candidates monolingually and then aligning the source and target terms. A comparison of our system with the LUIZ approach described by Vintar (2010) reveals that TExSIS outperforms LUIZ both for monolingual and bilingual terminology extraction. Our results also clearly show that the precision of the alignment is crucial for the success of the terminology extraction. Furthermore, based on the observation that the precision scores for bilingual terminology extraction outperform those of the monolingual systems, we conclude that multilingual evidence helps to determine unithood in less related languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A single experiment is reported that investigated implicit learning using a conjunctive rule set applied to natural words. Participants memorized a training list consisting of words that were either rare-concrete and common-abstract or common-concrete and rare-abstract. At test, they were told of the rule set, but not told what it was. Instead, they were shown all four word types and asked to classify words as rule-consistent words or not. Participants classified the items above chance, but were unable to verbalize the rules, even when shown a list that included the categories that made up the conjunctive rule and asked to select them. Most participants identified familiarity as the reason for classifying the items as they did. An analysis of the materials demonstrated that conscious micro-rules (i.e., chunk knowledge) could not have driven performance. We propose that such materials offer an alternative to artificial grammar for studies of implicit learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Our review of research on PET and fMRI neuroimaging of experts and expertise acquisition reveals two apparently discordant patterns in working-memory-related tasks. When experts are involved, studies show activations in brain regions typically activated during long-term memory tasks that are not observed with novices, a result that is compatible with functional brain reorganization. By contrast, when involving novices and training programs, studies show a decrease in brain regions typically activated during working memory tasks, with no functional reorganization. We suggest that the latter result is a consequence of practice periods that do not allow important structures to be completely acquired: knowledge structures (i.e., Ericsson and Kintsch’s retrieval structures; Gobet and Simon’s templates) and in a lesser way, chunks. These structures allow individuals to improve performance on working-memory tasks, by enabling them to use part of long-term memory as working memory, causing a cerebral functional reorganization. Our hypothesis is that the two brain activation patterns observed in the literature are not discordant, but involve the same process of expertise acquisition in two stages: from decreased activation to brain functional reorganization. The dynamic of these two physiological stages depend on the two above-mentioned psychological constructs: chunks and knowledge structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study is an analysis of working memory capacity in the context of both visual and auditory information. Working memory storage capacity is important because cognitive tasks can be completed only with sufficient ability to hold information as it is processed. The ability to repeat information depends on task demands but can be distinguished from a more constant, underlying mechanism: a central memory store limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items in young adults. The purpose of this study is to use strategies that can increase the efficiency of the use of a limited capacity or allow the maintenance of additional information separate from that limited capacity. The researcher will discuss why this central limit is important, how it can be observed, how it differs among individuals, and why it may exist. The review focuses on the term nature of capacity limits, storage capacity limit, views of researchers on working memory, and evidences of both visual and auditory working memory. The results suggest a focus on central capacity limits that are beneficial in predicting which thought processes individuals can do, and in understanding individual differences in cognitive maturity and intellectual aptitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Second language (L2) learners’ successful performance in an L2 can be partly attributed to their knowledge of collocations. In some cases, this knowledge is accompanied by knowledge of the semantic and/or grammatical patterns that motivate the collocation. At other times, collocational knowledge may serve a compensatory role. To determine the extent to which second language learners’ interlanguage relies on collocational knowledge in lieu of precise semantic knowledge, an experiment examined the performance of advanced adult English learners (N =90) from Chinese, Korean, and Spanish L1 backgrounds on a fill-in-the-blanks test in which matched items targeted the same specific sense of a preposition but varied in word co-occurrence frequency, as determined through a corpus analysis. An ANOVA indicated that collocational frequencies of the phrase in which the preposition was embedded had a significant effect (p <.001) on the performance of the learners. The study suggests that even fairly advanced NNSs use collocational knowledge when acquiring prepositions’ noncentral senses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We present ChunkStream, a system for efficient streaming and interactive editing of online video. Rather than using a specialized protocol and stream format, ChunkStream makes use of a generic mechanism employing chunks. Chunks are fixed-size arrays that contain a mixture of scalar data and references to other chunks. Chunks allow programmers to expose large, but fine-grained, data structures over the network. ChunkStream represents video clips using simple data types like linked lists and search trees, allowing a client to retrieve and work with only the portions of the clips that it needs. ChunkStream supports resource-adaptive playback and “live” streaming of real-time video as well as fast, frame-accurate seeking; bandwidth-efficient high-speed playback; and compilation of editing decisions from a set of clips. Benchmarks indicate that ChunkStream uses less bandwidth than HTTP Live Streaming while providing better support for editing primitives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the treatment of definitions and examples and contrasts four types of learner's dictionaries of English by way of analyzing EFL learners' mental representation and comprehension processes. It concludes by suggesting that, first, the bilingualized treatment of the definition facilitates EFL learners' mental construction of the connection between the word and the concept; and, second, the bilingual treatment of examples facilitates EFL learners' comprehension of contextual meaning shifts and the storage of chunks in the mental lexicon. The bilingualized dictionary possesses these two merits, and is more helpful and convenient for the EFL learner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether authentic native speaker (NS) to NS speech can be made available to the learner listener through the use of a novel slow-down tool. Results from various preliminary tests seem to indicate that the use of a slow-down algorithm in many cases, and in particular in samples with a higher speed rate and word count, leads to an improvement in subjects' ability to perceive and understand what was being uttered in the samples. Tests revealed that even NS listeners, as opposed to non-native (NN) listeners, prefer to hear authentic NS speech which is either unscripted or is influenced by regional accent, at a slowed down speed. It also seems that 'unexpected' words (such as words with high contextual value, but which cannot be processed in a top-down fashion because of the size of the sound snippet) are initially not understood at the original speed of delivery, even in a scripted and carefully pronounced pedagogic sample. Samples containing chunks or formulaic sequences, however, appear to be easily understood at 100% by the majority of NS listeners due to the holistic processing of these language units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper addresses the nature of the temporary storage buffer used in implicit or statistical learning. Kuhn and Dienes [Kuhn, G., & Dienes, Z. (2005). Implicit learning of nonlocal musical rules: implicitly learning more than chunks. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition, 31(6) 1417–1432] showed that people could implicitly learn a musical rule that was solely based on non-local dependencies. These results seriously challenge models of implicit learning that assume knowledge merely takes the form of linking adjacent elements (chunking). We compare two models that use a buffer to allow learning of long distance dependencies, the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) and the memory buffer model. We argue that these models – as models of the mind – should not be evaluated simply by fitting them to human data but by determining the characteristic behaviour of each model. Simulations showed for the first time that the SRN could rapidly learn non-local dependencies. However, the characteristic performance of the memory buffer model rather than SRN more closely matched how people came to like different musical structures. We conclude that the SRN is more powerful than previous demonstrations have shown, but it’s flexible learned buffer does not explain people’s implicit learning (at least, the affective learning of musical structures) as well as fixed memory buffer models do. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Whereas some research on immediate recall of verbal lists has suggested that it is limited by the number of chunks that can be recalled (e.g., N. Cowan, Z. Chen, & J. N. Rouder, 2004; E. Tulving & J. E. Patkau, 1962), other research has suggested that it is limited by the length of the material to be recalled (e.g., A. D. Baddeley, N. Thomson, & M. Buchanan, 1975). The authors investigated this question by teaching new paired associations between words to create 2-word chunks. The results suggest that both chunk capacity limits and length limits come into play. For the free recall of 12-word lists, 6 pre-learned pairs could be recalled about as well as 6 pre-exposed singletons, suggesting a chunk limit. However, for the serially ordered recall of 8-word lists, 4 pre-learned pairs could be recalled about as well as 8 pre-exposed singletons, suggesting a length limit. Other conditions yielded intermediate results suggesting that sometimes both limits may operate together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant theory of what people can learn implicitly is that they learn chunks of adjacent elements in sequences. A type of musical grammar that goes beyond specifying allowable chunks is provided by serialist or 12-tone music. The rules constitute operations over variables and could not be appreciated as such by a system that can only chunk elements together. A series of studies investigated the extent to which people could implicitly (or explicitly) learn the structures of serialist music. We found that people who had no background in atonal music did not learn the structures, but highly selected participants with an interest in atonal music could implicitly learn to detect melodies instantiating the structures. The results have implications for both theorists of implicit learning and composers who may wish to know which structures they put into a piece of music can be appreciated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

How people learn chunks or associations between adjacent items in sequences was modelled. Two previously successful models of how people learn artificial grammars were contrasted: the CCN, a network version of the competitive chunker of Servan-Schreiber and Anderson [J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 16 (1990) 592], which produces local and compositionally-structured chunk representations acquired incrementally; and the simple recurrent network (SRN) of Elman [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179], which acquires distributed representations through error correction. The models’ susceptibility to two types of interference was determined: prediction conflicts, in which a given letter can predict two other letters that appear next with an unequal frequency; and retroactive interference, in which the prediction made by a letter changes in the second half of training. The predictions of the models were determined by exploring parameter space and seeing how densely different regions of the space of possible experimental outcomes were populated by model outcomes. For both types of interference, human data fell squarely in regions characteristic of CCN performance but not characteristic of SRN performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]