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The present study aimed to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum showed differences in comprehending spatial demonstratives ("this" and "that", and "here" and "there"), as compared to typically developing (TD) children. Another aim of this study was to investigate the roles of theory of mind (ToM) and executive functions (EF) in the comprehension of spatial demonstratives. Twenty-seven autistic children (mean age 6.86) and 27 receptive-vocabulary-matched TD children (mean age 5.82) were recruited. Demonstrative comprehension was assessed based on participants' ability to place objects in certain locations according to experimenters' instructions which involved these demonstratives in three different conditions (same-, opposite-, and spectator-perspective conditions). Four false-belief tasks were administered to measure ToM, and the word-span task and the dimensional change card sort task were used to measure two subcomponents of EF – working memory and mental flexibility – respectively. Children on the autism spectrum were found to score below TD children in the comprehension of spatial demonstratives. In addition, the results showed that ToM and working memory were conducive to the correct interpretation of spatial demonstratives. The two cognitive abilities mutually influenced their respective roles in spatial demonstrative comprehension in the three different conditions. The findings suggest that the comprehension of spatial demonstratives comprehension is an area of need in Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum, and it might be linked to their differences in cognitive abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study two families of lattices whose number of elements are given by the numbers in even (respectively odd) positions in the Fibonacci sequence. The even Fibonacci lattice arises as the lattice of simple elements of a Garside monoid partially ordered by left-divisibility, and the odd Fibonacci lattice is an order ideal in the even one. We give a combinatorial proof of the lattice property, relying on a description of words for the Garside element in terms of Schröder trees, and on a recursive description of the even Fibonacci lattice. This yields an explicit formula to calculate meets and joins in the lattice. As a byproduct we also obtain that the number of words for the Garside element is given by a little Schröder number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the stability and developmental interplay of word reading and spelling in samples of Swedish (N = 191) and U.S. children (N = 489) followed across four time points: end of kindergarten, grades 1, 2, and 4. Cross-lagged path models revealed that reading and spelling showed moderate to strong autoregressive effects, with reading being more predictable over time than spelling. Regarding the developmental interplay, we found a bidirectional relationship between reading and spelling from kindergarten to Grade 1. However, starting in Grade 1, reading predicted subsequent spelling beyond the autoregressor but not the other way around. In all analyses, the findings were similar across the two orthographies. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing attentional resources for a task can enhance the performance of a concurrent memory task; this phenomenon is referred to as the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE). This effect is consistently observed in item memory. However, the results are mixed regarding its presence in the two primary types of associative memory with vocabulary as the material: source memory and context memory. Previous research has yet to examine item memory and these two types of associative memory ABE within the same experimental context. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of encoding awareness, encoding frequency, and encoding duration on the ABE in vocabulary memory through three experiments. The results indicate that the ABE for vocabulary item memory and source memory is relatively stable and unaffected by encoding awareness, encoding frequency, and encoding duration. However, the presence of ABE in vocabulary context memory is influenced by encoding frequency. These findings suggest that the ABE in vocabulary memory is affected by the specific type of memory. This result also supports the notion that ABE is not a broad, undifferentiated enhancement of background information but rather involves a specific allocation mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted assessment on young L2 learners' vocabulary knowledge, immunity, and resilience, considering parental and teacher support roles. Sixty junior high school students in Afghanistan, aged 13 to 14, participated in the study. They were divided into an experimental group receiving AI-assisted assessment and a control group with traditional instruction. The research employed a pretest–posttest control group design, using teacher-made vocabulary tests validated for reliability and instruments measuring immunity and resilience. The findings revealed that AI-assisted assessment significantly improved vocabulary knowledge and emotional resilience compared to the control group. While parental support showed a positive trend toward vocabulary enhancement, teacher support did not significantly impact the outcomes. The study highlights the potential of AI in language education, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts among educators, parents, materials developers, syllabus designers, and policymakers to maximize the benefits of AI tools. These findings underscore the importance of integrating advanced technologies into educational frameworks to support cognitive and emotional development in learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocabulary skills is a key ability for children's cognitive and social development. Although numerous studies demonstrated a positive correlation between SES and children\s vocabulary, the results regarding the extent of, and potential variations in, this relationship remain inconclusive. Therefore, this meta-analysis aimed to explore (a) the overall correlation between SES and children's vocabulary; (b) the moderation effects of age, measurement of SES, and types of vocabulary on this relationship; (c) the relationship between subdimensions of SES (SES index, education, income, and occupation) and subdimensions of vocabulary (receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary). 89 studies with 96 independent samples and 244 effect sizes (n = 36589) were included in this meta-analysis. The results showed that there was a moderate correlation between SES and children's vocabulary (r = 0.26, 95%CI [0.22, 0.29]). The measurements of SES, but neither age or types of vocabulary, moderated this relation. The four SES subdimensions were all similarly correlated to two subdimensions of vocabulary. There findings emphasized the significant effect of SES in the children's vocabulary and the necessity of effective intervention to promote the equal development for all children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valence is a dominant semantic dimension, and it is fundamentally linked to basic approach-avoidance behavior within a broad range of contexts. Previous studies have shown that it is possible to approximate the valence of existing words based on several surface-level and semantic components of the stimuli. Parallelly, recent studies have shown that even completely novel and (apparently) meaningless stimuli, like pseudowords, can be informative of meaning based on the information that they carry at the subword level. Here, we aimed to further extend this evidence by investigating whether humans can reliably assign valence to pseudowords and, additionally, to identify the factors explaining such valence judgments. In Experiment 1, we trained several models to predict valence judgments for existing words from their combined form and meaning information. Then, in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, we extended the results by predicting participants' valence judgments for pseudowords, using a set of models indexing different (possible) sources of valence and selected the best performing model in a completely data-driven procedure. Results showed that the model including basic surface-level (i.e., letters composing the pseudoword) and orthographic neighbors information performed best, thus tracing back pseudoword valence to these components. These findings support perspectives on the nonarbitrariness of language and provide insights regarding how humans process the valence of novel stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many models of lexical and semantic processing, it is assumed that single word processing is a function of the characteristics of the words presented and the distributional properties of the words' networks. Recent research suggests that semantic characteristics of a target word's associates may in fact influence target-word responses in lexical-semantic tasks. The present study extends that previous research to examine whether lexical and semantic properties of target-word associates are recruited during lexical and semantic decision tasks, and whether the type of associate information recruited varies as a function of task and concreteness of the target word. We found that lexical-semantic properties of words' first associates are related to accuracy of responses to words in lexical decision, and that semantic properties of words' first associates are related to both response time and accuracy in semantic decision. Further, these effects differ depending on the target word's concreteness. These findings provide new insight about the way words' associates contribute to semantic representation and processing, even though the associates are not actually presented, moving beyond previous assumptions about lexical-semantic processing of single words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the asymptotic Borel mapping, sending a function into its series of asymptotic expansion in a sector, is known to be surjective for arbitrary openings in the framework of ultraholomorphic classes associated with sequences of rapid growth, there is no general procedure to construct extension operators in this case. We do provide such operators in complex sectors for some particular classes considered by S. Pilipović, N. Teofanov and F. Tomić in the ultradifferentiable setting. Although these classes are, in their words, "beyond Gevrey regularity", in some cases they keep the property of stability under differentiation, which is crucial for our technique, based on formal Borel- and truncated Laplace-like transforms with suitable kernels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An algebra is finitely related (or has finite degree) if its term functions are determined by some finite set of finitary relations. Nilpotent monoids built from words, via Rees quotients of free monoids, have been used to exhibit many interesting properties with respect to the finite basis problem. We show that much of this intriguing behaviour extends to the world of finite relatedness by using interlocking patterns called chain, crown, and maelstrom words. In particular, we show that there are large classes of non-finitely related nilpotent monoids that can be used to construct examples of: ascending chains of varieties alternating between finitely and non-finitely related; non-finitely related semigroups whose direct product are finitely related; the addition of an identity element to a non-finitely related semigroup to produce a finitely related semigroup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address defining and identifying students with dyslexia within the context of multi-tier systems of support (MTSS). We review proposed definitions of dyslexia, evidence for proposed definitional attributes, and emphasize the role of instructional response in identifying students with dyslexia. We identify dyslexia as individuals with specific deficits in reading and spelling single words combined with inadequate response to evidence-based instruction. We propose a hybrid identification process in which assessment is utilized within school-wide MTSS allowing for integration of routinely collected progress monitoring data as well integrating with more formal diagnostic measures. This proposed "hybrid" method demonstrates strong evidence for valid decision-making and directly informs instruction. We close proposing a revised definition of dyslexia that incorporates these elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picturebooks can play an important function in the development of language by promoting language acquisition and enriching the overall language development of the child. Reading picturebooks to children builds a number of developmental domains and fosters significant learning outcomes for future achievements. In this study, children's ability to acquire language through picturebooks was tested to determine if more exposure to picturebooks related to higher vocabulary language development. Participants for this study were anonymous parents of children 16–30 months of age (N = 60), who agreed to answer questions on a survey distributed via social media. The survey included demographic information, specific questions related to shared picturebook reading in the home, and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, and the information gathered was used to determine the relationship between the shared reading of picturebooks to language development. Results showed that children who are exposed to a higher amount of time being read to by parents had higher language abilities than children who had less exposure to picturebook reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative block is a familiar foe to any who attempt to create and is especially related to "writers block". While significant effort has been focused on developing methods to break such blocks, it remains an active challenge. Here, we focus on the role of semantic memory structure in driving creative block, by having people get "stuck" in a certain part of their semantic memory network. We directly examine whether we can "pull out" a participant from where they got "stuck" in their semantic memory, breaking their creative impasse. Our Associative Creativity Sparker (ACS) is a cognitive network science-based online tool that aims to spark creative ideas and break creative impasse: Once a participant runs out of ideas in a creative idea generation task, word recommendations are suggested to prime new ideas. These word recommendations are either towards or away from previous ideas, as well as close or far from the target object, based on a conceptual space extracted from the participants responses using online text analysis. In Study 1, 121 participants use the ACS to generate creative alternative uses for five different objects and completed creativity and Gf tasks. In Study 2, we repeat the design of Study 1, but further examine the impact of writing experience on the ACS, by examining 120 novice and 120 experienced writers. Across both studies, our results indicate that the location of word recommendations affects the fluency and originality of one's ideas, and that novice and experienced writers differently benefit from these word recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to (a) examine the underlying assessment structure of the Derivational Morphology Task (DMORPH) and (b) investigate the relation of the DMORPH to vocabulary and reading comprehension outcomes with a sample of struggling adult readers. Specifically, participants included 218 struggling adult readers enrolled in adult literacy classes. We used item-level analyses to evaluate the underlying structure of the DMORPH. Items with phonological (e.g., "music" to "musician") and non-phonological transformations ("teach" to "teacher") were examined in relation to adult literacy students' vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. A bifactor model was the best fit to the data, suggesting that the DMORPH measured a single factor of derivational morphological awareness with some variation due to phonological and non-phonological change items. Follow-up analyses revealed that the DMORPH can essentially be considered unidimensional, which justified the use of a single scoring system for the DMORPH with adult literacy students. However, after controlling for word reading and phonological awareness, the phonological change items uniquely predicted vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, whereas the non-phonological change items were not significant. The results support the structural validity of the DMORPH and the need to use both phonological and non-phonological change items with adult literacy students. The present findings also provide insight into potential intervention targets for instructors in adult literacy programs who are interested in improving students' vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by applications in DNA storage, we study a setting in which strings are affected by tandem-duplication errors. In particular, we look at two settings: disjoint tandem-duplication errors, and equal-length tandem-duplication errors. We construct codes, with positive asymptotic rate, for the two settings, as well as for their combination. Our constructions are duplication-free codes, comprising codewords that do not contain tandem duplications of specific lengths. Additionally, our codes generalize previous constructions, containing them as special cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word embeddings provide an unsupervised way to understand differences in word usage between discursive communities. A number of papers have focused on identifying words that are used differently by two or more communities. But word embeddings are complex, high-dimensional spaces and a focus on identifying differences only captures a fraction of their richness. Here, we take a step towards leveraging the richness of the full embedding space, by using word embeddings to map out how words are used differently. Specifically, we describe the construction of dialectograms, an unsupervised way to visually explore the characteristic ways in which each community uses a focal word. Based on these dialectograms, we provide a new measure of the degree to which words are used differently that overcomes the tendency for existing measures to pick out low-frequency or polysemous words. We apply our methods to explore the discourses of two US political subreddits and show how our methods identify stark affective polarisation of politicians and political entities, differences in the assessment of proper political action as well as disagreement about whether certain issues require political intervention at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television programs are a rich source of input for which we can utilize in vocabulary acquisition. With foreign language television programs becoming more accessible globally, there is the possibility to better use this input source for learning. Can we incorporate television viewing into classroom learning (intentional learning)? Or use it as a supplementary resource to in-class learning (incidental learning)? An area of particular interest with regards to vocabulary learning is formulaic sequences, as they tend to be difficult for language learners to acquire and master. There is very little research on formulaic sequences and viewing television, although it is a promising area because television viewing can offer rich vocabulary input and provide access to authentic language. The aim of this paper is to initiate the conversation around this topic through outlining the theoretical underpinnings, current research, and rationale for why viewing television is important; classroom implications for incorporating television viewing into the curriculum; and what areas could be researched about in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The computing models such as crisp automata, fuzzy automata and general fuzzy automata (GFA) are used to represent complex systems for predefined input alphabets or symbols. A framework that can process words rather than symbols is needed to simulate applications based on the natural language. Semantic computing (SC) offers a technique to accommodate semantically similar words instead of predefined words, thus extends the applicability and flexibility of GFA. In present work, a hybrid model of GFA and SC is proposed to deal with a situation where input can be user-dependent or related to words that have semantically similar meanings. In traditional theory of automata, if input symbols are changed one must define a new automata, whereas in the proposed work instead of defining a new GFA, existing GFA can process the semantically similar external words. An application related to transportation e-service is further discussed to understand the enhanced flexibility and applicability of the proposed models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has documented that socio-economically disadvantaged students (SEDSs) lag behind in reading when compared with their counterparts from privileged backgrounds. Although well-designed instructional interventions could improve students' reading achievement, what is still unknown is which pedagogical approach could improve the reading of SEDSs especially in the context of a developing nation. We compared the effects of two different approaches that contain metacognitive reading strategies with the conventional teaching method on the reading achievement (comprehension and vocabulary) of students with low socio-economic status. We adopted a non-randomized pretest–posttest control group design. One hundred and twenty-eight students from three community secondary schools participated in the study. Data were collected with a teacher-made reading achievement test. Using the mixed repeated-measures ANOVA, findings indicated no significant differences in their reading achievement across groups, though similar significant improvements were observed within groups. Gender also showed a significant main effect only on the comprehension achievement of the students showing that female students did better than their male counterparts in comprehension achievement. Results did not show a significant interaction effect between gender and method. It was concluded that the students' reading achievement could be improved in the three approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have shown that mathematical vocabulary is an important predictor for mathematical performance in kindergartners, primary school students, and secondary school students (e.g., King & Purpura, 2021; Peng & Lin, 2019; Ünal et al., 2021). However, a recent meta-analysis showed that mathematical vocabulary might be more important in some mathematical domains than in others (Peng et al., 2020). The current manuscript focusses on proportional reasoning, a mathematical subdomain containing a high amount of proportional vocabulary (a subtype of mathematical vocabulary), and consists of two studies. The first study describes the development of an instrument specially created to measure proportional vocabulary, as there was no good instrument available. The results provide indications that the scores on our new proportional vocabulary task are valid and reliable. This instrument was used in a second study to investigate whether second graders' proportional vocabulary is associated with (1) proportional reasoning abilities, and (2) performance on proportional and additive word problems. The results showed that after controlling for gender, age and class, proportional vocabulary uniquely contributed to proportional reasoning abilities and performance on both proportional and additive word problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word learning depends on attention – children must focus on the right things at the right times. However, autistic children often display restricted interests, limiting their intake of stimuli during word learning. This study investigates how category interests influence word learning in autism and neurotypical development. Autistic and neurotypical children matched on receptive vocabulary used a touch-screen computer to learn novel words associated with animals (high-interest stimuli) and objects (neutral-interest stimuli) via fast mapping. Response accuracy and speed were examined at referent selection, 5-minute retention, and 24-hour retention. Both groups identified meanings of novel words associated with unfamiliar animals and objects via mutual exclusivity with comparable accuracy. After 5 minutes, autistic children retained animal names with greater accuracy than neurotypical children. Autistic children showed a greater increase in their accuracy between 5-minute and 24-hour retention and outperformed neurotypical children across conditions after a night's sleep. Across groups, 24-hour retention was predicted by number of target word repetitions heard at referent selection, indicating a relationship between fast mapping input and retention. However, autistic children were slower to respond correctly, particularly in the animal condition. For autistic children, superior word learning associated with high-interest stimuli was relatively short-term, as sleep appeared to consolidate their memory representations for neutral-interest stimuli. Although these results demonstrate that fundamental word learning mechanisms are not atypical in autism, slower response times may signal a speed-accuracy trade-off that could have implications for naturalistic language acquisition. Our findings also indicate favourable environmental conditions to scaffold word learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his recent The Parmenidean Ascent, Michael Della Rocca develops a regress-theoretic case, reminiscent of F. H. Bradley's famous argument in Appearance and Reality, against the intelligibility of relations and in favor of a monistic conception of reality. I argue that Della Rocca illicitly supposes that "internal" relations — in one sense of that word — lead to a "chain" regress, a regress of relations relating relations and relata. In contrast, I contend that if "internal" or grounded relations lead to a regress at all, it is a kind of "fission" regress within the relata themselves, and that a chain regress for relations only arises, if at all, for so-called "external" relations, relations not grounded in their relata. In this way, I contend that Della Rocca pursues a regress for so-called "internal" or grounded relations that only arise, if at all, for so-called "external" relations, relations not grounded in their relata. I compare Della Rocca's case against relations with Bradley's reasoning in Appearance and Reality and suggest in this context that Bradley may, perhaps, have the upper hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildlife observation with camera traps has great potential for ethology and ecology, as it gathers data non-invasively in an automated way. However, camera traps produce large amounts of uncurated data, which is time-consuming to annotate. Existing methods to label these data automatically commonly use a fixed pre-defined set of distinctive classes and require many labeled examples per class to be trained. Moreover, the attributes of interest are sometimes rare and difficult to find in large data collections. Large pretrained vision-language models, such as contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP), offer great promises to facilitate the annotation process of camera-trap data. Images can be described with greater detail, the set of classes is not fixed and can be extensible on demand and pretrained models can help to retrieve rare samples. In this work, we explore the potential of CLIP to retrieve images according to environmental and ecological attributes. We create WildCLIP by fine-tuning CLIP on wildlife camera-trap images and to further increase its flexibility, we add an adapter module to better expand to novel attributes in a few-shot manner. We quantify WildCLIP's performance and show that it can retrieve novel attributes in the Snapshot Serengeti dataset. Our findings outline new opportunities to facilitate annotation processes with complex and multi-attribute captions. The code is available at https://github.com/amathislab/wildclip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on voice recognition for African languages is limited due to the scarcity of digital resources for training and adaptation, despite its broad usefulness. The Hausa language, spoken by almost fifty million inhabitants in West and Central Africa, is an example of a linguistic domain that has not been thoroughly studied. The Hausa language employs diacritics, which are symbols located above alphabetical characters to convey further information. By removing diacritics, the number of homographs increases, making it difficult to distinguish between similar words. This paper presents a study on speech recognition in the Hausa Language, specifically focusing on diacritized words. The study utilises the state-of-the-art wave2vec2.0 and Whisper deep learning architecture models, for transcribing audio signals into corresponding Hausa text. According to the results obtained in the study, the Whisper-large deep model emerged as the best, achieving a word error rate of 4.23% representing a considerable improvement of 43.9% when compared to the existing state-of-the-art model for Hausa language speech recognition. Additionally, the Whsiper-large model demonstrated a diacritic coverage of 92%, precision of 98.87%, with a diacritic error rate of 2.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drill-and-practice flashcard interventions are often used when students display delays in sight word recognition and word reading fluency. Sight-phrase interventions connect two to three words together to teach connected text instead of words in isolation. Although studies have shown that students can learn to read sight phrases through a tablet-based intervention, there have been no studies comparing a tablet-based drill-and-practice sight-phrase intervention with a similar paper-based intervention. The current study used a multiple-baseline design across three students and implemented a sight-phrase intervention both using traditional flashcards and using an iPad app. Students were prompted to see the phrase, attempt to read the phrase, hear the phrase read, and then say the phrase again before moving to the next phrase. Results showed that all students quickly acquired all unknown phrases within two to five sessions. There was no difference in acquisition rate between the paper and iPad modalities. Discussion focuses on the applicability of the iPad intervention to increase efficiency in flashcard intervention delivery given that the intervention can increase student sight-phrase acquisition at a similar rate as traditional flashcard interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examined the improvement in vocabulary and listening skills of children with ASD through adapted shared reading. It also investigated the generalisation effect of this increase to new books and social validity. Methods: A multiple probe across participants design was used to investigate the effect of ASR (adapted shared reading) on the vocabulary and listening comprehension skills of young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The participants were Turkish-speaking children diagnosed with ASD attending a preschool special education institution in Turkey. The researcher analysed the data obtained from the baseline, intervention, generalization and mastery phases using the visual analysis method. Results: Following the intervention, all three participating children gradually improved their vocabulary and listening comprehension skills. The findings suggest that young children with ASD can participate in and benefit from shared reading interventions with support. Conclusion: The adapted shared reading method (ASR) is an effective method for increasing the vocabulary and listening comprehension skills of young children with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word-representable graphs were introduced in 2008 by Kitaev and Pyatkin in the context of semigroup theory. Graphs are called word-representable if there exists a word with the graph's nodes as letters such that the letters in the word alternate iff there is an edge between them in the graph. Until today numerous works investigated the word-representability of graphs but mostly from the graph perspective. In this work, we change the perspective to the words, i.e., we take classes of words and investigate the represented graphs. Our first subject of interest are the conjugates of words: we determine exactly which graphs are represented if we rotate the word. Afterwards, we look at k-local words introduced by Day et al. (FSTTCS LIPIcs, 2017) in order to gain more insights into this class of words. Here, we investigate especially which graphs are represented by 1-local words. Lastly, we prove that the language of all words representing a graph is regular. We were also able to characterise k-representable graphs, solving an open problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on theories on vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, and reading comprehension subcomponents, ten attributes/subskills were defined for 50 items from relevant subtests of TEM4 (Band Four of Test for English Majors in China). Cognitive diagnosis was conducted on the TEM4 data of the randomly sampled 2285 examinees (roughly at the B2 level) through the saturated generalized deterministic inputs, noisy "and" gate (G-DINA) model. The person parameters obtained from cognitive diagnosis served as the basis for simple multiple regression and path analyses for detecting relationship patterns. The study discovered that the relationship pattern at both construct and attribute/subskill levels can be better described as a mediation pattern in which vocabulary knowledge and its attributes are more suitable to serve as the starting point for reading comprehension. The study also discussed the patterns of the impact of vocabulary and grammar attributes on reading subskills as well as the internal subskill relationships within the construct of reading comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to explore the relation of morphological awareness to vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension for middle school students in Korea. A total of 121 students (73 boys and 48 girls) in Grade 7 from two middle schools in a metropolitan city in South Korea participated in the study. The students were assessed on the following skills in Korean: morphological awareness in three dimensions (inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological awareness), vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension. Using structural equation modeling, we found that students' morphological awareness predicted vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension directly. In addition, morphological awareness was also indirectly related to reading comprehension mediated by word reading. Interestingly, once morphological awareness was accounted for, vocabulary did not make an independent contribution to reading comprehension. Our findings illustrate the direct and indirect relations of morphological awareness to vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension for Korean adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prompt-tuning has emerged as a promising approach for improving the performance of classification tasks by converting them into masked language modeling problems through the insertion of text templates. Despite its considerable success, applying this approach to relation extraction is challenging. Predicting the relation, often expressed as a specific word or phrase between two entities, usually requires creating mappings from these terms to an existing lexicon and introducing extra learnable parameters. This can lead to a decrease in coherence between the pre-training task and fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose a novel method for prompt-tuning in relation extraction, aiming to enhance the coherence between fine-tuning and pre-training tasks. Specifically, we avoid the need for a suitable relation word by converting the relation into relational semantic keywords, which are representative phrases that encapsulate the essence of the relation. Moreover, we employ a composite loss function that optimizes the model at both token and relation levels. Our approach incorporates the masked language modeling (MLM) loss and the entity pair constraint loss for predicted tokens. For relation level optimization, we use both the cross-entropy loss and TransE. Extensive experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance in relation extraction tasks. The results show an average improvement of approximately 1.6 points in F1 metrics compared to the current state-of-the-art model. Codes are released at https://github.com/12138yx/TCohPrompt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent days have seen significant improvements in multi-modal learning made by Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models. However, most of them employ the coarse-grained global alignment to overcome semantic gap for generating common representations, which makes them inadequate to capture intrinsic semantic correlations in image-text retrieval and consequently degrading the accuracy. Moreover, it is expensive to fine-tune a VLP model to perform image-text retrieval due to its large number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective image-text retrieval method, termed Cross-Modality Interaction Reasoning for enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training (CMIR-VLP). Specifically, a Cross Modality Interaction Reasoning (CMIR) module, which is designed to inject fine-grained image-text associations into semantic correlations learning, integrates the patch cues into the word reasoning with a multi-modal interaction encoder. Besides, we propose a cross-interaction process to associate each local text semantics with local visual information for fine-grained image-text alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method gains 52 and 97.5 over state-of-the-art non-pre-training methods on two widely used datasets, and it also outperforms several mainstream fine-tuned VIP models. The related code repository in https://github.com/PSYGIM/CMIR-VLP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show that native speakers spontaneously divide the complex meaning of a new word into a presuppositional component and an assertive component. These results argue for the existence of a productive triggering algorithm for presuppositions, one that is not based on alternative lexical items nor on contextual salience. On a methodological level, the proposed learning paradigm can be used to test further theories concerned with the interaction of lexical properties and conceptual biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) models learn a mapping function that can transfer word embedding (WE) spaces from one language to another. This usually relies on the isomorphism hypothesis, which posits that words in different languages share the same structures and relationships (i.e. similar in geometric structure). However, WE's isomorphism weakens substantially in distant language pairs, resulting in low accuracy of BLI. To address this problem, we propose a novel BLI method incorporating synonymous knowledge. The main idea is to stabilize the distance between words to optimize the monolingual WE space, yielding higher isomorphism. Specifically, we first induce monolingual synonym pairs from Wordnet and construct monolingual synonym lexicons. We then generate pseudo-sentences by substituting words in the training corpus with synonyms. Finally, the original sentences and pseudo-sentences are jointly used to generate monolingual WEs, enabling the word vectors of synonyms to be closer naturally. Comprehensive experiments on standard BLI datasets in diverse distant languages demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the strong BLI systems in word translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The graphic units in Chinese are Chinese characters (characters), most of which often join with others to form words of two or more characters. High-frequency two-character words (2C-words) tend to be composed of high-frequency characters. However, whether similarities exist between 2C-words and their constituent characters in other features remains an open question. The present study used a sample of 7,311 commonly used 2C-words (2CWs) and their constituent characters (CCs) to compare correlations among features that are common to 2CWs and characters. For both the 2CWs and the CCs, age of acquisition (AoA) was negatively correlated with frequency, sensory experience arousal was positively correlated with concreteness and emotion arousal and imageability was positively correlated with concreteness, sensory experience arousal, and emotion arousal. However, as the result of changes in AoA, skilled readers were more likely to be aware of changes in concreteness, imageability, and sensory experience arousal for the 2CWs than for the CCs. They might be less aware of valence, concreteness, number of strokes, and number of meanings but more conscious of emotion arousal and imageability of the 2CWs than of the CCs. The implications are that words and characters are important units in parallel and that words are both associated with and independent of their constituent characters. This may suggest a resolution to the debates about whether words or characters should be taken as the basic structural units in the Chinese language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Reading problems are the most prevalent type of specific learning disability. Reading problems usually result from phonological deficits; however, it is unclear how much other linguistic abilities are impacted as well. Objective: To study different language parameters and cognitive skills in a group of Egyptian children with reading problems to better understand the difficulties that need to be considered in rehabilitation programs for those children. Methods: A case–control study was conducted on 30 children with reading problems having IQs above 85 and 30 normal control children matched for age and gender (their ages ranged from 7 to 9 years and 11 months). They underwent testing for dyslexia by the Arabic dyslexia assessment test, language evaluation using the Receptive Expressive Arabic Language Scale (REAL scale), and the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale, fifth edition. Results: There were highly significant correlations between the severity of dyslexia and total language scores, most of REAL scale subtests. Also, highly significant correlations were detected between the severity of dyslexia and the total IQ, verbal IQ, and verbal working memory subtests. The linear regression model revealed a highly significant association between dyslexia and expressive language scaled scores, total language scaled scores, and a significant association with expressive vocabulary and understanding oral instructions subtests of REAL scale. Additionally, a highly significant association has been detected between dyslexia and the verbal working memory subtest of the Stanford-Binet test. Correlations between total language scores and intellectual abilities (total IQ, verbal IQ, and non-verbal IQ) revealed highly significant positive results. Conclusion: Deficits in both receptive and expressive language were observed in children with reading problems. Expressive vocabulary, listening comprehension, and verbal working memory subtests are the most affected language and cognitive skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We refine the enumeration of fusene chains of a given length with respect to the number of turns by constructing bijections between such chains and ternary words. Explicit formulas thus obtained are then used to compute the expected values for the whole class of bond-additive degree-based topological indices over all such chains of a given length. The results are also applicable to several other classes of chemically interesting polycyclic chains, such as, e.g., phenylene and spiro chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this study, with two repeated measurements, was to analyze the development of autobiographical memory in a sample of 78 Spanish participants at ages 5 (Time 1; M = 62.43 months, range: 50–74 months) and 12 (Time 2; M = 142.71 months, range: 132–155 months). Data were collected on autobiographical memory and verbal functions. We analyzed the relation between language and autobiographical memory specificity from a longitudinal perspective and assessed the indirect effect of vocabulary in the relationship between age and specific memory at both temporal moments. The results showed that language skills were positively related with autobiographical memory specificity at preschool age, but not at the second measurement. Furthermore, vocabulary scores appear to mediate the relationship between age and autobiographical specificity when children are in the preschool years, but not later. These findings agree with previous research that consider preschool age to be a crucial period for the development of autobiographical memory and its relations with language, but once basic command of language is acquired, linguistic differences impact much less on individual differences in autobiographical specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We proceed with the study of ultimate periodicity properties related to overlaps between the suffixes of a left-infinite word λ and the prefixes of a right-infinite word ρ . For a positive integer n, let g(n) be n minus the maximum length of overlaps between the suffix of λ and the prefix of ρ of length n. In a recent publication we have shown that the function g has finite image if and only if λ and ρ are ultimately periodic words with a same root. In this paper we give an asymptotic characterization of words λ and ρ for which the function g has finite image. We prove that this condition is true if and only if the sequence (g (n) / n) n tends to zero [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, neural topic modeling has increasingly raised extensive attention due to its capacity on generating coherent topics and flexible deep neural structures. However, the widely used Dirichlet distribution in shallow topic models is difficult to reparameterize. Therefore, most existing neural topic models assume the Gaussian as the prior of topic proportions for reparameterization. Gaussian distribution does not have the sparsity like Dirichlet distribution, which limits the model's topic extraction ability. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural topic model approximating the Dirichlet prior with the reparameterizable Kumaraswamy distribution, namely Kumaraswamy Neural Topic Model (KNTM). Specifically, we adopted the stick-breaking process for posterior inference with the Kumaraswamy distribution as the base distribution. Besides, to capture the dependencies among topics, we propose a Kumaraswamy Recurrent Neural Topic Model (KRNTM) based on the recurrent stick-breaking construction to ensure that the model can still generate coherent topical words in high-dimensional topic space. We examined our method on five prevalent benchmark datasets over six Dirichlet-approximating neural topic models, among which KNTM has the lowest perplexity and KRNTM performance best on topic coherence and topic uniqueness. Qualitative analysis of the top topical words verifies that our proposed models can extract more semantically coherent topics compared with state-of-the-art models, further demonstrating our method's effectiveness. This work contributes to the broader application of VAEs with Dirichlet priors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) – children's ability to learn words by tracking co-occurrence statistics of words and their referents over time – has been identified as a fundamental mechanism underlying lexical learning. However, it is unknown whether children can acquire new words when faced with variable input in XSWL paradigms, such as varying object exemplars and variable speakers. In the present study, we examine the separate and combined effects of exemplar and speaker variability on XSWL in typically developing English-speaking monolingual children. Results revealed that variability in speakers and exemplars did not facilitate or hinder XSWL performance. However, input that varied in both speakers and exemplars simultaneously did hinder children's word learning. Results from this work suggest that XSWL mechanisms may support categorization and generalization beyond word-object associations, but that accommodating multiple forms of variable input may incur costs. Overall, this research provides new theoretical insights into how fundamental mechanisms of word learning scale to more complex and naturalistic forms of input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reported a large-scale Internet-based experiment to investigate the impact of emotion information on Chinese word segmentation, in which participants completed an overlapping ambiguous string (OAS) segmentation task and the Chinese version of Beck Depression Inventory-II in a counterbalanced order. OAS is a three-character string (ABC) in which the middle character can form a distinct word with both the character on its left side (word AB) and the character on its right side (word BC). Participants were presented with isolated OASs and were asked to report the word they identified first. Emotional OAS was constructed by a combination of a neutral word and an emotional word, with the neutral and emotional words sharing character B. We orthogonally manipulated the valence of the emotional words (positive vs. negative) and their position in the OAS (left-side vs. right-side). The results showed that compared with neutral words, both positive and negative words were more likely to be segmented, and this segmentation outcome was not affected by readers with different depression tendencies. These findings suggest that emotion information can influence word segmentation, and that both positive and negative words take precedence over neutral words in the word segmentation process. This study provides a new perspective and evidence to understand the impact of emotion information on word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A notoriously contested subarea of phonological typology is word-prosodic typology, which governs suprasegmental structure (such as tone, syllable structure and stress) at the word level. Within word-prosodic typology, it is widely recognized that some languages have so-called stress systems while others have lexical-tone systems. Other languages appear to have intermediate systems, with properties of both stress and lexically contrastive tone. Certain types of such intermediate systems are at the core of ongoing theoretical debates on the nature of word- prosodic systems, viz. language varieties with contrasts between two word tones that are restricted to the main-stressed syllables of a word, a phenomenon that is often descriptively referred to as tonal accent. In this paper, we aim to show that exploring tone-accent systems in detail has the potential to significantly contribute to word-prosodic typology, specifically concerning the foot as a tool for the analysis of syllable-internal prosodic contrasts. The phonology of tonal accent in Franconian (a variety of West Germanic spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) will be the main piece of evidence supporting our claims, with a focus on predictable interactions between segmental structure and accentuation. A central implication of our analysis is that tonal contrasts within syllables can sometimes derive from two types of feet being active in the same prosodic system. We support the Franconian evidence with analogous tone-segment interactions in Estonian and discuss the relevance of our claims in the broader context of word-prosodic typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The fixed-length Levenshtein (FLL) distance between two words x , y ∈ Z m n is the smallest integer t such that x can be transformed to y by t insertions and t deletions. The size of a ball in the FLL metric is a fundamental yet challenging problem. Very recently, Bar-Lev, Etzion, and Yaakobi explicitly determined the minimum, maximum and average sizes of the FLL balls with radius one, respectively. In this paper, based on these results, we further prove that the size of the FLL balls with radius one is highly concentrated around its mean by Azuma's inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writing system – the transparency of orthography in alphabet-based systems and differences between logographic and phonetic-based systems – can affect the efficiency of inferential word learning when words are introduced visually. It can also shape how people self-evaluate their learning success (we refer to such type of self-evaluation as metacognitive monitoring of word learning). By contrast, differences in metacognition and learning performance do not emerge when words are presented auditorily. To measure metacognition, we assessed retrospective confidence by asking participants to rate their certainty about the correctness of their responses. As this direct question raises a person's conscious awareness of how well they have learned a particular lexical unit, it allowed us to measure those aspects of metacognition that are modulated by consciousness. Such consciousness comes into play when a word is associated with an object. Differences in conscious awareness of the word learning success when words are represented visually make differential demands on word learning across languages and modalities. The observed differences between populations using different writing systems and between perceptual modalities may potentially modulate the effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition activities during foreign language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Growing evidence suggests that physical activity (PA) could improve cognitive performance in youths, but whether these effects occur from early childhood remains unclear. Objective: To summarize evidence on the effects of PA interventions on cognitive performance in early childhood. Methods: We performed a systematic search in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and PsycINFO (from inception to 6 September 2023) for randomized controlled trials assessing the effects of PA interventions (≥ 3 weeks) on cognitive-related outcomes in early childhood (3–6 years). We conducted a random-effects meta-analysis when five or more studies assessed a given outcome. The potential moderating role of participant (e.g., age) and intervention characteristics (e.g., duration, volume, intensity, cognitive engagement) was also assessed. Results: We found a total of 24 studies (N = 3483 children) that were deemed to be of overall fair methodological quality. PA interventions were supervised and lasted between 3 and 24 weeks. The most common session duration was 30 min, with a frequency of two sessions per week. Pooled analyses revealed that PA interventions have positive effects on all analysed outcomes, including attention (standardized mean difference (SMD) = 0.49, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.18–0.79, p = 0.002), inhibition (SMD = 0.45, 95% CI 0.06–0.84, p = 0.022), working memory (SMD = 0.50, 95% CI 0.18–0.82, p = 0.002), cognitive flexibility (SMD = 0.39, 0.15–0.62, p = 0.002) and vocabulary (SMD = 1.18, 0.19–2.16, p = 0.019). Sensitivity analyses confirmed the benefits in all cases except for inhibition (p = 0.062). No consistent differences were found relating to any moderator variable. Conclusions: Although further research is warranted, our findings suggest that PA interventions may improve cognitive performance in early childhood, particularly in the domains of attention, inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility and vocabulary. These findings might support the implementation of PA interventions from early childhood. PROSPERO Registration: CRD42021249319. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to read is a middle-distance race for children worldwide. Most of them succeed in this acquisition with "normal" difficulties that ensue from the progressive (re)structuring of the phonological and orthographic systems. Evidence accumulated on reading difficulties in children with developmental dyslexia (DYS children, henceforth) shows a pervasive phonological deficit. However, the phonological deficit may not be due to degraded phonological representations but rather due to impaired access to them. This study focused on how and to what extent phonological syllables, which are essential reading units in French, were accessible to DYS children to segment and access words. We tested the assumption that DYS children did not strictly have pervasive degraded phonological representations but also have impaired access to phonological and orthographic representations. We administered a visually adapted word-spotting paradigm, engaging both sublexical processing and lexical access, with French native-speaking DYS children (N = 25; Mage in months = 121.6, SD = 3.0) compared with chronological age-matched peers (N = 25; Mage in months = 121.8, SD = 2.7; CA peers henceforth) and reading level-matched peers (N = 25; Mage in months = 94.0, SD = 4.6; RL peers henceforth). Although DYS children were slower and less accurate than CA and RL peers, we found that they used phonological syllables to access and segment words. However, they exhibit neither the classical inhibitory syllable frequency effect nor the lexical frequency effect, which is generally observed in typically developing children. Surprisingly, DYS children did not show strictly degraded phonological representations because they demonstrated phonological syllable-based segmentation abilities, particularly with high-frequency syllables. Their difficulties are rather interpreted in terms of impaired access to orthographic and phonological representations, which could be a direct effect of difficulties in generalizing and consolidating low-frequency syllables. We discuss these results regarding reading acquisition and the specificities of the French linguistic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their outstanding ability of vocal imitation, parrots are often kept as pets. Research has shown that they do not just repeat human words. They can use words purposefully to label objects, persons, and animals, and they can even use conversational phrases in appropriate contexts. So far, the structure of pet parrots' vocabularies and the difference between them and human vocabulary acquisition has been studied only in one individual. This study quantitatively analyses parrot and child vocabularies in a larger sample using a vocabulary coding method suitable for assessing the vocabulary structure in both species. We have explored the composition of word-like sounds produced by 21 grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) kept as pets in Czech- or Slovak-speaking homes, and compared it to the composition of early productive vocabularies of 21 children acquiring Czech (aged 8–18 months), who were matched to the parrots by vocabulary size. The results show that the 'vocabularies' of talking grey parrots and children differ: children use significantly more object labels, activity and situation labels, and emotional expressions, while parrots produce significantly more conversational expressions, greetings, and multiword utterances in general. These differences could reflect a strong link between learning spoken words and understanding the underlying concepts, an ability seemingly unique to human children (and absent in parrots), but also different communicative goals of the two species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a quasi-order generated by a homomorphism from the semigroup of all words onto a finite ordered semigroup was introduced by Bucher et al. (Theor. Comput. Sci. 40, 131–148 1985). It naturally occurred in their studies of derivation relations associated with a given set of context-free rules, and they asked a crucial question, whether the resulting relation is a well quasi-order. We answer this question in the case of the quasi-order generated by a semigroup homomorphism. We show that the answer does not depend on the homomorphism, but it is a property of its image. Moreover, we give an algebraic characterization of those finite semigroups for which we get well quasi-orders. This characterization completes the structural characterization given by Kunc (Theor. Comput. Sci. 348, 277–293 2005) in the case of semigroups ordered by equality. Compared with Kunc's characterization, the new one has no structural meaning, and we explain why that is so. In addition, we prove that the new condition is testable in polynomial time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word equations are equations α ≐ β where α and β are words consisting of letters from some alphabet Σ and variables from a set X. Recently, there has been substantial interest in the context of string solving in logics combining word equations with other kinds of constraints on words such as (regular) language membership (regular constraints) and arithmetic over string lengths (length constraints). We consider the expressive power of such logics by looking at the set of all values a single variable might take as part of a satisfying assignment for a given formula. Hence, each formula-variable pair defines a formal language, and each logic defines a class of formal languages. We consider logics arising from combining word equations with either length constraints, regular constraints, or both. We also consider word equations with visibly pushdown language membership constraints as a generalisation of the combination of regular and length constraints. We show that word equations with visibly pushdown membership constraints are sufficient to express all recursively enumerable languages and hence satisfiability is undecidable in this case. We then establish a strict hierarchy involving the other combinations. We also provide a complete characterisation of when a thin regular language is expressible by word equations (alone) and some further partial results for regular languages in the general case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]