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Tämä artikkeli käsittelee autismikirjon varhaisnuorten puheen prosodian havaittua epätyypillisyyttä. Kyseessä on pilottitutkimus, jonka aineisto koostuu viiden 11–13-vuotiaan suomea äidinkielenään puhuvan autismikirjon pojan ja kuuden samanikäisen neurotyypillisen pojan puhenäytteistä. Puhenäytteet on kerätty spontaanista puheesta. Aineiston pohjalta koostettiin havaintokoe, jonka suoritti 50 neurotyypillistä yliopisto-opiskelijaa. Tulokset osoittavat, että neurotyypilliset aikuiset pitävät autismikirjon varhaisnuorten puheen prosodiaa epätyypillisempänä kuin samanikäisten neurotyypillisten verrokkien puheen prosodiaa. Epätyypillisyyden vaikutelma voi akustisten analyysien ja arvioijien kirjallisten vastausten perusteella aiheutua esimerkiksi laulunomaisesta tai poukkoilevasta sävelkulusta, katkonaisesta puherytmistä, suurista sävelkulun vaihteluista tai poikkeavan tasaisesta sävelkulusta. Epätyypillisyyden vaikutelmaa voivat korostaa mm. morfosyntaktiset ongelmat (kuten esimerkiksi väärät sijamuodot tai katkonaiset lauserakenteet), epäselvät sanat tai veltto artikulointi. Nariseva ääni, joka oli tavallinen piirre puhenäytteissä, ei sen sijaan kiinnittänyt arvioijien huomiota. Autismikirjon poikien puheen arveltiin usein olevan ei-syntyperäisen suomen puhujan tuottamaa, vaikka kaikki informantit olivat syntyperäisiä, yksikielisiä suomen puhujia. Arvioijien oli myös usein vaikeaa ymmärtää, mitä autismikirjon henkilöt sanoivat puhenäytteissä. Tutkimuksen tulokset kasvattavat tietoisuutta prosodisista erityispiirteistä suomenkielisillä autismikirjon varhaisnuorilla. This study explores the perceived atypicality of the prosody of persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The data consist of speech samples produced by 11- to 13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (n = 5), and by age- and gender-matched controls (n = 6). The speech samples have been collected from spontaneous speech. A perception test was administered to 50 neurotypical university students (n = 50). The results show that neurotypical adults find the prosody of preadolescent boys with ASD more atypical than the prosody of age- and gender-matched controls. According to the acoustic analyses and the written answers of the raters, the perceptions of atypicality may be generated by sing-song-like or bouncing pitch, disconnected speech rhythm, large pitch excursions or flatness of pitch. The impression of atypicality is further emphasized if there are occurrences of morpho-syntactic problems (such as wrong case endings and disconnected syntactic structures), if some words are unintelligible and if articulation is lethargic, for example. A creaky voice, which was common in the speech samples, did not attract the attention of the raters. The speech of the informants with ASD was frequently thought to have been produced by a non-native speaker of Finnish, although all the informants were monolingual speakers of the language. The raters also found it difficult to understand what the informants with ASD were saying in the speech samples. The results of this study have clinical implications in terms of increasing awareness of prosodic deficiencies among Finnish-speaking preadolescents with ASD.

The Na-K-2Cl cotransporter NKCC1 is widely expressed in cells within and outside the brain. However, our understanding of its roles in brain functions throughout development, as well as in neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders, has been severely hindered by the lack of reliable data on its developmental and (sub)cellular expression patterns. We provide here the first properly controlled analysis of NKCC1 protein expression in various cell types of the mouse brain using custom-made antibodies and an NKCC1 knock-out validated immunohistochemical procedure, with parallel data based on advanced mRNA approaches. NKCC1 protein and mRNA are expressed at remarkably high levels in oligodendrocytes. In immature neurons, NKCC1 protein was located in the somata, whereas in adult neurons, only NKCC1 mRNA could be clearly detected. NKCC1 immunoreactivity is also seen in microglia, astrocytes, developing pericytes, and in progenitor cells of the dentate gyrus. Finally, a differential expression of NKCC1 splice variants was observed, with NKCC1a predominating in non-neuronal cells and NKCC1b in neurons. Taken together, our data provide a cellular basis for understanding NKCC1 functions in the brain and enable the identification of major limitations and promises in the development of neuron-targeting NKCC1-blockers.

It has been argued, most famously by David Chalmers, that all objects of the so-called traditional sciences (from physics to neuroscience) are analysable in structural terms, whereas consciousness has qualitative properties that are irreducibly non-structural. From that it has been concluded that consciousness cannot be explained by traditional sciences. Some illusionists have responded by proposing that the apparently non-structural features of consciousness are in fact fully structural and merely seem to be non-structural. I argue that such a position is tenable, but only if the non-structural ‘seemings’ are interpreted as perspectival phenomena and not as theorists’ fictions or absolute nothingness. The resulting view allows us to ignore sensory qualities in the context of natural sciences while acknowledging their importance in the moral and philosophical domains. The proposed perspectivist interpretation also provides an account of how sensory qualities can be observed and talked about despite having no autonomous causal powers. It has been argued, most famously by David Chalmers, that all objects of the so-called traditional sciences (from physics to neuroscience) are analysable in structural terms, whereas consciousness has qualitative properties that are irreducibly non-structural. From that it has been concluded that consciousness cannot be explained by traditional sciences. Some illusionists have responded by proposing that the apparently non-structural features of consciousness are in fact fully structural and merely seem to be non-structural. I argue that such a position is tenable, but only if the non-structural ‘seemings’ are interpreted as perspectival phenomena and not as theorists’ fictions or absolute nothingness. The resulting view allows us to ignore sensory qualities in the context of natural sciences while acknowledging their importance in the moral and philosophical domains. The proposed perspectivist interpretation also provides an account of how sensory qualities can be observed and talked about despite having no autonomous causal powers.

Context: Tertiary education institutions aim to prepare their computer science and software engineering students for working life. While much of the technical principles are covered in lower-level courses, team-based capstone courses are a common way to provide students with hands-on experience and teach soft skills. Objective: This paper explores the characteristics of project-based software engineering capstone courses presented in the literature. The goal of this work is to understand the pros and cons of different approaches by synthesising the various aspects of software engineering capstone courses and related experiences. Method: In a systematic literature review for 2007–2022, we identified 127 articles describing real-world capstone courses. These articles were analysed based on their presented course characteristics and the reported course outcomes. Results: The characteristics were synthesised into a taxonomy consisting of duration, team sizes, client and project sources, project implementation, and student assessment. We found out that capstone courses generally last one semester and divide students into groups of 4–5 where they work on a project for a client. For a slight majority of courses, the clients are external to the course staff and students are often expected to produce a proof-of-concept level software product as the main end deliverable. The courses generally include various forms of student assessment both during and at the end of the course. Conclusions: This paper provides researchers and educators with a classification of characteristics of software engineering capstone courses based on previous research. We also further synthesise insights on the reported course outcomes. Our review study aims to help educators to identify various ways of organising capstones and effectively plan and deliver their own capstone courses. The characterisation also helps researchers to conduct further studies on software engineering capstones. Context: Tertiary education institutions aim to prepare their computer science and software engineering students for working life. While much of the technical principles are covered in lower-level courses, team-based capstone courses are a common way to provide students with hands-on experience and teach soft skills. Objective: This paper explores the characteristics of project-based software engineering capstone courses presented in the literature. The goal of this work is to understand the pros and cons of different approaches by synthesising the various aspects of software engineering capstone courses and related experiences. Method: In a systematic literature review for 2007–2022, we identified 127 articles describing real-world capstone courses. These articles were analysed based on their presented course characteristics and the reported course outcomes. Results: The characteristics were synthesised into a taxonomy consisting of duration, team sizes, client and project sources, project implementation, and student assessment. We found out that capstone courses generally last one semester and divide students into groups of 4–5 where they work on a project for a client. For a slight majority of courses, the clients are external to the course staff and students are often expected to produce a proof-of-concept level software product as the main end deliverable. The courses generally include various forms of student assessment both during and at the end of the course. Conclusions: This paper provides researchers and educators with a classification of characteristics of software engineering capstone courses based on previous research. We also further synthesise insights on the reported course outcomes. Our review study aims to help educators to identify various ways of organising capstones and effectively plan and deliver their own capstone courses. The characterisation also helps researchers to conduct further studies on software engineering capstones.

This work presents an unsupervised method of selecting filters and threshold values for the OpusFilter parallel corpus cleaning toolbox. The method clusters sentence pairs into noisy and clean categories and uses the features of the noisy cluster center as filtering parameters. Our approach utilizes feature importance analysis to disregard filters that do not differentiate between clean and noisy data. A randomly sampled subset of a given corpus is used for filter selection and ineffective filters are not run for the full corpus. We use a set of automatic evaluation metrics to assess the quality of translation models trained with data filtered by our method and data filtered with OpusFilter’s default parameters. The trained models cover English-German and English-Ukrainian in both directions. The proposed method outperforms the default parameters in all translation directions for almost all evaluation metrics. This work presents an unsupervised method of selecting filters and threshold values for the OpusFilter parallel corpus cleaning toolbox. The method clusters sentence pairs into noisy and clean categories and uses the features of the noisy cluster center as filtering parameters. Our approach utilizes feature importance analysis to disregard filters that do not differentiate between clean and noisy data. A randomly sampled subset of a given corpus is used for filter selection and ineffective filters are not run for the full corpus. We use a set of automatic evaluation metrics to assess the quality of translation models trained with data filtered by our method and data filtered with OpusFilter’s default parameters. The trained models cover English-German and English-Ukrainian in both directions. The proposed method outperforms the default parameters in all translation directions for almost all evaluation metrics.

Tämä katsaus tarkastelee kielididaktiikan ja aivotutkimuksen kehitysvaiheita aikaisemman tutkimuksen pohjalta sekä osoittaa yhtymäkohtia kielididaktiikan, kognitiivisen psykologian ja aivotutkimuksen välillä. Artikkeli kuvaa sitä, miten käyttäytymisen ja aivojen tutkimus on lisännyt ymmärrystä kielen oppimisen mikrotasosta ja miten tätä tietoa voisi hyödyntää opetuksessa. Lopuksi pohditaan aivotutkimuksen menetelmien hyödyntämisen tulevaisuuden näkymiä sekä niihin mahdollisesti liittyviä riskejä. Aivotutkimuksen ja kielididaktiikan yhteyksien havaitseminen auttaa valaisemaan ihmisen ainutlaatuisinta ominaisuutta: kielen avulla olemme rakentaneet sivilisaation, ja uusia kieliä oppimalla voimme kehittää sitä edelleen.

Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. Acta Paediatrica published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation Acta Paediatrica. Aim: Studies examining the long-term effects of neonatal music interventions on the cognition of children born preterm are scarce. We investigated whether a parental singing intervention before term age improves cognitive and language skills in preterm-born children. Methods: In this longitudinal, two-country Singing Kangaroo, randomised controlled trial, 74 preterm infants were allocated to a singing intervention or control group. A certified music therapist supported parents of 48 infants in the intervention group to sing or hum during daily skin-to-skin care (Kangaroo care) from neonatal care until term age. Parents of 26 infants in the control group conducted standard Kangaroo care. At 2–3 years of corrected age, the cognitive and language skills were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition. Results: There were no significant differences in cognitive and language skills between the intervention and control groups at the follow-up. No associations between the amount of singing and the cognitive and language scores were found. Conclusion: Parental singing intervention during the neonatal period, previously shown to have some beneficial short-term effects on auditory cortical response in preterm infants at term age, showed no significant long-term effects on cognition or language at 2–3 years of corrected age.

Using lattice simulations we calculate the rate of baryon number violating processes, the sphaleron rate, in the Standard Model with an external (hyper)magnetic field for temperatures across the electroweak cross-over, focusing on the broken phase. Additionally, we compute the Higgs expectation value and the pseudocritical temperature. The electroweak cross-over shifts to lower temperatures with increasing external magnetic field, bringing the onset of the suppression of the baryon number violation with it. When the hypermagnetic field reaches the magitude $B_Y \approx 2 T^2$ the cross-over temperature is reduced from $160$ GeV to $145$ GeV. In the broken phase for small magnetic fields the rate behaves quadratically as a function of the magnetic flux. For stronger magnetic fields the rate reaches a linear regime which lasts until the field gets strong enough to restore the electroweak symmetry where the symmetric phase rate is reached., 15 pages, 16 figures, corrected typos, published version

Anxiety and fear are evolutionarily conserved emotions that increase the likeli-hood of an organism surviving threatening situations. Anxiety and vigilance states are regulated by neural networks involving multiple brain regions. In anx-iety disorders, this intricate regulatory system is disturbed, leading to excessive or prolonged anxiety or fear. Anxiety disorders have both genetic and environ-mental risk factors. Genetic research has the potential to identify specific genetic variants causally associated with specific phenotypes. In recent decades, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have revealed variants predisposing to neuropsychiatric disorders, suggesting novel neurobiological pathways in the etiology of these disorders. Here, we review recent human GWASs of anxiety dis -orders, and genetic studies of anxiety-like behavior in rodent models. These studies are paving the way for a better understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying anxiety disorders.

Funding Information: We acknowledge the use of IBM Quantum services for this work. The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not reflect the official policy or position of IBM or the IBM Quantum team. G.G.-P., O.K., M.A.C.R., and S.M. acknowledge financial support from the Academy of Finland via the Centre of Excellence program (Project no. 336810 and 336814). G.G.-P. acknowledges support from the Academy of Finland via the Postdoctoral Researcher program (Project no. 341985). O.K. acknowledges financial support from the Turku University Foundation. The description of the complex separability structure of quantum states in terms of partially ordered sets has been recently put forward. In this work, we address the question of how to efficiently determine these structures for unknown states. We propose an experimentally accessible and scalable iterative methodology that identifies, on solid statistical grounds, sufficient conditions for nonseparability with respect to certain partitions. In addition, we propose an algorithm to determine the minimal partitions (those that do not admit further splitting) consistent with the experimental observations. We test our methodology experimentally on a 20-qubit IBM quantum computer by inferring the structure of the 4-qubit Smolin and an 8-qubit W state. In the first case, our results reveal that, while the fidelity of the state is low, it nevertheless exhibits the partitioning structure expected from the theory. In the case of the W state, we obtain very disparate results in different runs on the device, which range from nonseparable states to very fragmented minimal partitions with little entanglement in the system. Furthermore, our work demonstrates the applicability of informationally complete positive operator-valued measurements for practical purposes on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

We compare the capacity of entanglement with the entanglement entropy by considering various aspects of these quantities for free bosonic and fermionic models in one spatial dimension, both in the continuum and on the lattice. Substantial differences are observed in the subleading terms of these entanglement quantifiers when the subsystem is made by two disjoint intervals, in the massive scalar field and in the fermionic chain. We define $c$-functions based on the capacity of entanglement similar to the one based on the entanglement entropy, showing through a numerical analysis that they display a monotonic behaviour under the renormalisation group flow generated by the mass. The capacity of entanglement and its related quantities are employed to explore the symmetry resolution. The temporal evolutions of the capacity of entanglement and of the corresponding contour function after a global quench are also discussed., Comment: 63 pages, 12 figures

The aim of this study was to examine the development of the associations between elementary school students’ mindsets and the attentional neural processing of positive and negative feedback in math. For this, we analyzed data collected twice from 100 Finnish elementary school students. During the autumn semesters of their 3rd and 4th grade, the participants’ general intelligence mindset and math ability mindset were measured with a questionnaire, and their brain responses elicited by performance-relevant feedback were recorded during an arithmetic task. We found that students’ fixed mindsets about general intelligence and math ability were associated with greater attention allocated to positive feedback as indicated by a larger P300. These associations were driven by the effects of mindsets on attention allocation to positive feedback in grade 4. Additionally, 4th graders’ more fixed general intelligence mindset was marginally associated with greater attention allocated to negative feedback. In addition, the effects of both mindsets on attention allocation to feedback were marginally stronger when the children were older. The present results, although marginal in the case of negative feedback and mainly driven by effects in grade 4, are possibly a reflection of the greater self-relevance of feedback stimuli for students with a more fixed mindset. It is also possible that these findings reflect the fact that, in evaluative situations, mindset could influence stimulus processing in general. The marginal increase in the effects of mindsets as children mature may reflect the development of coherent mindset meaning systems during elementary school years. publishedVersion

Musically trained individuals have been found to outperform untrained peers in various tasks for executive functions. Here, we present longitudinal behavioral results and cross-sectional, event-related potential (ERP), and fMRI results on the maturation of executive functions in musically trained and untrained children and adolescents. The results indicate that in school-age, the musically trained children performed faster in a test for set shifting, but by late adolescence, these group differences had virtually disappeared. However, in the fMRI experiment, the musically trained adolescents showed less activity in frontal, parietal, and occipital areas of the dorsal attention network and the cerebellum during the set-shifting task than untrained peers. Also, the P3b responses of musically trained participants to incongruent target stimuli in a task for set shifting showed a more posterior scalp distribution than control group participants’ responses. Together these results suggest that the musician advantage in executive functions is more pronounced at an earlier age than in late adolescence. However, it is still reflected as more efficient recruitment of neural resources in set-shifting tasks, and distinct scalp topography of ERPs related to updating and working memory after childhood.

Dissipative collective effects are ubiquitous in quantum physics, and their relevance ranges from the study of entanglement in biological systems to noise mitigation in quantum computers. Here, we put forward the first fully quantum simulation of dissipative collective phenomena on a real quantum computer, based on the recently introduced multipartite collision model. First, we theoretically study the accuracy of this algorithm on near-term quantum computers with noisy gates, and we derive some rigorous error bounds that depend on the timestep of the collision model and on the gate errors. These bounds can be employed to estimate the necessary resources for the efficient quantum simulation of the collective dynamics. Then, we implement the algorithm on some IBM quantum computers to simulate superradiance and subradiance between a pair of qubits. Our experimental results successfully display the emergence of collective effects in the quantum simulation. In addition, we analyze the noise properties of the gates that we employ in the algorithm by means of full process tomography, with the aim of improving our understanding of the errors in the near-term devices that are currently accessible to worldwide researchers. We obtain the values of the average gate fidelity, unitarity, incoherence and diamond error, and we establish a connection between them and the accuracy of the experimentally simulated state. Moreover, we build a noise model based on the results of the process tomography for two-qubit gates and show that its performance is comparable with the noise model provided by IBM. Finally, we observe that the scaling of the error as a function of the number of gates is favorable, but at the same time reaching the threshold of the diamond errors for quantum fault tolerant computation may still be orders of magnitude away in the devices that we employ., Accepted version. We have extensively expanded and modified the experimental noise analysis

Abstract. The increasing use of digital technology among adolescents and young adults has led to concerns about possible detrimental effects on cognitive and brain functions. Indeed, as reviewed here, according to behavioral and brain-imaging studies, excessive media multitasking (i.e., using different digital media in parallel) may lead to enhanced distractibility and problems in maintaining attention. However, frequent video gaming may be beneficial for the development of working memory, task switching, and attention skills. All these cognitive skills depend on executive cognitive functions. Still scant but gradually cumulating brain-imaging results suggest that the negative effects of frequent media multitasking and the positive effects of frequent video gaming on cognitive skills in adolescents and young adults are mediated by effects on the frontal lobes, implicated in executive cognitive functions and still developing even through early adulthood.

Background and aims Online interventions for problem gambling are increasingly popular, but not everyone benefits from them. We describe 12 years of real-world data from an online intervention for gambling problems and aim to find out the extent to which depression, alcohol use, and sense of financial control influence the effectiveness of the program. Methods We analyzed treatment effectiveness and moderators in the Finnish “Peli Poikki” program (2007–2018)—an 8-week cognitive behavioral therapy and follow-up program for problem gambling. Participants were Finnish-speaking adults over 18 years of age (N = 2011, 66.9% males). We measured the self-reported level of problem gambling, depression, alcohol use, and sense of financial control across four treatment phases (baseline, post-treatment, 6-month follow-up, and 12-month follow-up), as well as the presence of gambling debt, psychological and physiological health, years suffered from gambling problems, and demographic variables. Results Participation grew across years with retention rates of 55%, 30%, and 19% for post-treatment and the two follow-ups, respectively. The average problem gambling scores declined significantly following treatment and remained low throughout the follow-ups. However, this decline (the beneficial treatment effect) was reversed after the follow-ups for those with high depression scores and those who felt they had no control over their finances. Discussion and Conclusions The Peli Poikki program is a well-functioning online intervention but less effective in the long term for participants with persisting symptoms of depression or without a sense of financial control. More attention is needed to screen and direct people with comorbidities to the appropriate services.

This article presents the semantic portal and Linked Open Data service WarVictimSampo 1914–1922 about the war victims, battles, and prisoner camps in the Finnish Civil and other wars in 1914–1922. The system is based on a database of the National Archives of Finland and additional related data created, compiled, and linked during the project. The system contains detailed information about some 40,000 deaths extracted from several data sources and data about over 1,000 battles of the Civil War. A key novelty of WarVictimSampo 1914–1922 is the integration of ready-to-use Digital Humanities visualizations and data analysis tooling with semantic faceted search and data exploration, which allows, e.g., studying data about wider prosopographical groups in addition to individual war victims. The article focuses on demonstrating how the tools of the portal, as well as the underlying SPARQL endpoint openly available on the Web, can be used to explore and analyze war history in flexible and visual ways. WarVictimSampo 1914–1922 is a new member in the series of “Sampo” model-based semantic portals. The portal is in use and has had 23,000 users, including both war historians and the general public seeking information about their deceased relatives.

Eduskunnan täysistunnoissa on vuosina 1907–2022 pidetty lähes miljoona puheenvuoroa, ja yhteensä puhujia on ollut noin 2 800. Uusi Parlamenttisampo-palvelu tarjoaa kaiken tämän aineiston yhtenäisenä datana, mikä mahdollistaa kansanedustajien sekä poliittisen kielen, kulttuurin ja verkostojen tutkimisen entistä helpommalla tavalla.

A crucial skill in infant language acquisition is learning of the native language phonemes. This requires the ability to group complex sounds into distinct auditory categories based on their shared features. Problems in phonetic learning have been suggested to underlie language learning difficulties in dyslexia, a developmental reading-skill deficit. We investigated auditory abilities important for language acquisition in newborns with or without a familial risk for dyslexia with electrophysiological mismatch responses (MMRs). We presented vowel changes in a sequence of acoustically varying vowels, requiring grouping of the stimuli to two phoneme categories. The vowel changes elicited an MMR which was significantly diminished in infants whose parents had the most severe dyslexia in our sample. Phoneme-MMR amplitude and its hemispheric lateralization were associated with language test outcomes assessed at 28 months, an age at which it becomes possible to behaviourally test children and several standardized tests are available. In addition, statistically significant MMRs to violations of a complex sound-order rule were only found in infants without dyslexia risk, but these results are very preliminary due to small sample size. The results demonstrate the relevance of the newborn infants’ readiness for phonetic learning for their emerging language skills. Phoneme extraction difficulties in infants at familial risk may contribute to the phonological deficits observed in dyslexia.Research highlightsWe recorded mismatch responses (MMRs) to vowel changes in a variable speech streamNewborns extracted relevant phonetic information from the stream, evidenced by MMRsHigh dyslexia risk infants had diminished MMRs to vowel changesMMR amplitudes and hemispheric lateralization correlated with later language skillsPoor phoneme extraction may compromise phonological and language development

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Linguistic accessibility presents a challenge for public broadcasters. While demand for multilingual content to support accessibility is growing, limited resources do not allow translating to a wide range of languages. One possibility to increase linguistic accessibility in media would be to provide automated translations into languages that cannot be served otherwise. However, implementing automation with the objective of supporting linguistic accessibility requires careful, proactive investigation together with the prospective audience. This article explores automated interlingual subtitling from the audience's perspective, based on focus group discussions and an online survey conducted in association with the Finnish public broadcaster Yle. We investigated English-speaking viewers’ reactions to automated English subtitles in Finnish-language news and current affairs video clips. Our analysis indicates that while viewers are able to understand the gist of a programme with automated subtitles, shortcomings in the quality of automated speech recognition, translation and timing of subtitles result in significant cognitive load that limits the usability of the subtitles. Participants expressed clear interest in automated subtitles for breaking news and other important local content, as well as to facilitate access to local culture and entertainment. However, quality improvements are required before automated subtitles can be deployed.

Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS). Why do children learn language more easily than adults do? This puzzle has fascinated cognitive and language scientists for decades. In the present letter, we approach the language learning puzzle from a cognitive perspective that is inspired by evidence from the perceptual and motor learning literature. Neuroscientific studies show that two memory systems in the brain are involved in human learning: an early implicit procedural memory system and a late-developing cognitive or declarative memory system. We argue that higher cognitive development constrains implicit statistical learning processes that are essential for learning patterns and regularities in languages, that is, the adult cognitive architecture has a cost. This is supported by experimental evidence showing that acquisition of implicit linguistic knowledge is enhanced under cognitive depletion in adults. More research is needed to test the cognitive cost hypothesis as it could partly solve the language learning puzzle.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is promoted by offering teachers’ SEL workshops worldwide. However, little is known about their short-term and long-term outcomes. We explored how teachers benefit from Lions Quest (Mitt Valg in Norwegian) training in the short and long term in Norway. The development of teachers was investigated by exploring their perceived importance and sense of competence in teaching SEL during an almost two-year period. The development of their students’ SEL was explored as well. Imputed values from the intervention group (n = 247) and the comparison group (n = 47) were used in analysing teachers’ short and long-term outcomes. Students’ intervention group consisted of 112 students and the comparison group consisted of 53 students. Data were collected from the teachers three times and from the students two times via Likert-scale questionnaires. The results indicated that the teachers felt to be more competent in teaching SEL after their Lions Quest (Mitt Valg) teacher training. This trend appeared to be continuing in the long run. Students’ SEL among the intervention group slightly increased whereas SEL among the comparison group decreased during their teachers' training. Lions Quest (Mitt Valg) intervention appeared to improve teachers’ sense of competence to teach SEL at school. In addition, findings showed that teachers were willing to implement LQ as part of their teaching.

We study first-order electroweak phase transitions nonperturbatively, assuming any particles beyond the Standard Model are sufficiently heavy to be integrated out at the phase transition. Utilising high temperature dimensional reduction, we perform lattice Monte-Carlo simulations to calculate the main quantities characterising the transition: the critical temperature, the latent heat, the surface tension and the bubble nucleation rate, updating and extending previous lattice studies. We focus on the region where the theory gives first-order phase transitions due to an effective reduction in the Higgs self-coupling and give a detailed comparison with perturbation theory., Comment: 25 pages, 20 figures, for videos of bubble nucleation see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6548608, and for the dataset see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6539259

Background The P3a response is thought to reflect involuntary orienting to an unexpected stimulus and has been connected with set-shifting and inhibition in some studies. In our exploratory study, we investigated if the amplitude and the latency of the P3a response were associated with the performance in a modified flanker task measuring inhibition and set-shifting in 10-year-old children (N = 42). Children participated in electroencephalography (EEG) measurement with an auditory multifeature paradigm including standard, deviating, and novel sounds. In addition, they performed a separate flanker task requiring inhibition and set-shifting skills. Results The P3a latencies for deviant sounds were associated with the reaction time reflecting inhibition: the shorter the response latencies were, the faster the reaction time was. The P3a latencies for novel sounds were not linked to the reaction times reflecting either inhibition or set-shifting. In addition, the magnitude of the P3a response was not associated with the performance in the flanker task. Conclusions Our results suggest that P3a response latency and reaction speed reflecting inhibitory skills are based on shared neural mechanism. Thus, the present study brings new insight to the field investigating the associations between behavior and its neural indices.

Empirical research of community-based music interventions has advanced to investigate the individual, social, and educational implications of arts-for-wellbeing practices. Here, we present the motivations, aims, hypotheses, and implications of this complex field of inquiry. We describe examples of recent large-scale investigations to reflect on the major methodological challenges. Community-based music interventions strike a balance between the empirical rigor of clinical trials and the demands of ecological validity. We argue that this balance should be viewed as an asset rather than a mere pragmatic compromise. We also offer some perspectives on best-practice models for effectively engaging in this type of work.

The determination of entanglement measures in SU(N) gauge theories is a non-trivial task. With the so-called "replica trick", a family of entanglement measures, known as "R\'enyi entropies", can be determined with lattice Monte Carlo. Unfortunately, the standard implementation of the replica method for SU(N) lattice gauge theories suffers from a severe signal-to-noise ratio problem, rendering high-precision studies of R\'enyi entropies prohibitively expensive. In this work, we propose a method to overcome the signal-to-noise ratio problem and show some first results for SU(N) in 4 dimensions., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, contribution to the proceedings of the 39th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 8th-13th August, 2022, Bonn, Germany

Prosodic features are important in achieving intelligibility, comprehensibility, and fluency in a second or foreign language (L2). However, research on the assessment of prosody as part of oral proficiency remains scarce. Moreover, the acoustic analysis of L2 prosody has often focused on fluency-related temporal measures, neglecting language-dependent stress features that can be quantified in terms of syllable prominence. Introducing the evaluation of prominence-related measures can be of use in developing both teaching and assessment of L2 speaking skills. In this study we compare temporal measures and syllable prominence estimates as predictors of prosodic proficiency in non-native speakers of English with respect to the speaker’s native language (L1). The predictive power of temporal and prominence measures was evaluated for utterance-sized samples produced by language learners from four different L1 backgrounds: Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian. Firstly, the speech samples were assessed using the revised Common European Framework of Reference scale for prosodic features. The assessed speech samples were then analyzed to derive articulation rate and three fluency measures. Syllable-level prominence was estimated by a continuous wavelet transform analysis using combinations of F0, energy, and syllable duration. The results show that the temporal measures serve as reliable predictors of prosodic proficiency in the L2, with prominence measures providing a small but significant improvement to prosodic proficiency predictions. The predictive power of the individual measures varies both quantitatively and qualitatively depending on the L1 of the speaker. We conclude that the possible effects of the speaker’s L1 on the production of L2 prosody in terms of temporal features as well as syllable prominence deserve more attention in applied research and developing teaching and assessment methods for spoken L2.

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s). Flow is a well-known construct describing the experience of deep absorption in a task, typically demanding but intrinsically motivating, and conducted with high skill. Flow is operationalized by self-report, and various instruments have been developed for this, but none have been made available in the Finnish language in thoroughly validated form. We present a psychometric scale-validation study for the Finnish translation of the Flow Short Scale (FSS). We collected data from 201 Finnish speaking participants using the Prolific Academic platform. We assessed the scale’s factorial structure using Mokken scale analysis, Parallel Analysis, Very Simple Structures analysis and a standard Confirmatory Factor Analysis. We then evaluated how correlated was the FSS with the Flow State Scale and Flow Core Scale. Finally, we evaluated how well the FSS distinguished Flow-inducing experiences from boring (non-Flow-inducing) experiences. Taken together, our results show that an 8-item, two-factor version of the scale was a justified instrument with good psychometric properties.

After motivating an interest in the shape of the topological charge density spectral function in hot Yang-Mills theories, we estimate it with the help of thermally averaged classical real-time simulations, for $N_{\rm c} = 2,3$. After subtracting a perturbative contribution at large frequencies, we observe a non-trivial shape at small frequencies (a dip rather than a peak), interpolating smoothly towards the sphaleron rate at zero frequency. Possible frequency scales making an appearance in this shape are discussed. Implications for warm axion inflation and reheating, and for imaginary-time lattice measurements of the strong sphaleron rate, are recapitulated., Comment: 24 pages. v2: clarifications added, published version

ObjectiveThe aim of the present study was to investigate speech processing development in children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CI) groups using a multifeature event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. Singing is associated to enhanced attention and speech perception. Therefore, its connection to ERPs was investigated in the CI group.MethodsThe paradigm included five change types in a pseudoword: two easy- (duration, gap) and three difficult-to-detect (vowel, pitch, intensity) with CIs. The positive mismatch responses (pMMR), mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a and late differentiating negativity (LDN) responses of preschoolers (below 6 years 9 months) and schoolchildren (above 6 years 9 months) with NH or CIs at two time points (T1, T2) were investigated with Linear Mixed Modeling (LMM). For the CI group, the association of singing at home and ERP development was modeled with LMM.ResultsOverall, responses elicited by the easy- and difficult to detect changes differed between the CI and NH groups. Compared to the NH group, the CI group had smaller MMNs to vowel duration changes and gaps, larger P3a responses to gaps, and larger pMMRs and smaller LDNs to vowel identity changes. Preschoolers had smaller P3a responses and larger LDNs to gaps, and larger pMMRs to vowel identity changes than schoolchildren. In addition, the pMMRs to gaps increased from T1 to T2 in preschoolers. More parental singing in the CI group was associated with increasing pMMR and less parental singing with decreasing P3a amplitudes from T1 to T2.ConclusionThe multifeature paradigm is suitable for assessing cortical speech processing development in children. In children with CIs, cortical discrimination is often reflected in pMMR and P3a responses, and in MMN and LDN responses in children with NH. Moreover, the cortical speech discrimination of children with CIs develops late, and over time and age, their speech sound change processing changes as does the processing of children with NH. Importantly, multisensory activities such as parental singing can lead to improvement in the discrimination and attention shifting toward speech changes in children with CIs. These novel results should be taken into account in future research and rehabilitation.

Epistolary data about historical letters are typically distributed in different archives depending on where the letters were sent to and received, and the data are represented using local heterogeneous data models and different natural languages. To study such letter data on a global level, the heterogeneous, distributed data in local siloes need to be aggregated and harmonized into larger services where local metadata can enrich each other to complement missing information. This article presents a new framework, LetterSampo, for representing, publishing, and using epistolary data as Linked Open Data (LOD) on the Web for Digital Humanities (DH) research. The framework is used for creating LOD services and for building individual LetterSampo portals on top of them. To test and demonstrate the framework, it has been applied to the epistolary CKCC dataset of ca. 20,000 letters of the Huygens Institute, the Netherlands, to the correspSearch dataset of ca. 151,000 letters aggregated by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and to the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) data of ca. 170,000 letters published by the University of Oxford. The CKCC and correspSearch datasets were published as LOD services, SPARQL endpoints, and as data dumps at Zenodo.org for re-use, and a demonstrational portal LetterSampo: Historical Letters on the Semantic Web was created based on this data. A novelty of the LetterSampo portals is to use faceted semantic search for filtering data of interest in flexible ways from multiple perspectives on two conceptual levels, and then visualize and analyze the results and data by seamlessly integrated data analytic tools—programming skills are not needed for using the portal. In addition to using the tools of the portal, the SPARQL endpoints can be used with modest knowledge about programming for DH research.

In this chapter, we reflect on the deployment of AI as a pedagogical and educational instrument. When AI enters into classrooms, it becomes as a project with diverse members who have differing stakes, and it produces various socio-cognitive-technological questions that must be discussed. Furthermore, AI is developing fast and renders obsolete old paradigms for, e.g. data access, privacy, and transparency. AI may bring many positive consequences in schools — not only for individuals, or teachers, but for the educational system as a whole. On the other hand, there are also serious risks. Thus, the analysis of the educational uses of AI in future schools pushes us to compare the possible benefits (for example, using AI-based tools for supporting different learners) with the possible risks (for example, the danger of algorithmic manipulation, or a danger of hidden algorithmic discrimination). Practical solutions are many, for example the Solid protocol by Tim Berners-Lee, but are often conceived as solutions to single problems, with limited application. We describe a thought experiment: "education as a massively multiplayer social online game". Here, all actors (humans, institutions, AI agents and algorithms) are required to conform to the definition of a player: which is a role designed to maximise protection and benefit for human players. AI models that understand the game space provide an API for typical algorithms, e.g. deep learning neural nets or reinforcement learning agents, to interact with the game space. Our thought experiment clarifies the steep challenges, and also the opportunity, of AI in education.

Funding Information: This work received funding from the Academy of Finland (Grant #297848, “Modulation of brain activity patterns during selective attention to speech”, 2016–2021 and Grant #348353 “Solving the puzzle of natural sound object perception—neural mechanisms in humans and animal models”), the Emil Aaltonen Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, collection, analysis, or interpretation of data, or in the writing of the article. Open access funded by the University of Helsinki Library. Selective listening to cocktail-party speech involves a network of auditory and inferior frontal cortical regions. However, cognitive and motor cortical regions are differentially activated depending on whether the task emphasizes semantic or phonological aspects of speech. Here we tested whether processing of cocktail-party speech differs when participants perform a shadowing (immediate speech repetition) task compared to an attentive listening task in the presence of irrelevant speech. Participants viewed audiovisual dialogues with concurrent distracting speech during functional imaging. Participants either attentively listened to the dialogue, overtly repeated (i.e., shadowed) attended speech, or performed visual or speech motor control tasks where they did not attend to speech and responses were not related to the speech input. Dialogues were presented with good or poor auditory and visual quality. As a novel result, we show that attentive processing of speech activated the same network of sensory and frontal regions during listening and shadowing. However, in the superior temporal gyrus (STG), peak activations during shadowing were posterior to those during listening, suggesting that an anterior–posterior distinction is present for motor vs. perceptual processing of speech already at the level of the auditory cortex. We also found that activations along the dorsal auditory processing stream were specifically associated with the shadowing task. These activations are likely to be due to complex interactions between perceptual, attention dependent speech processing and motor speech generation that matches the heard speech. Our results suggest that interactions between perceptual and motor processing of speech relies on a distributed network of temporal and motor regions rather than any specific anatomical landmark as suggested by some previous studies.

Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s). The ambition of the Open Translation Models, Tools and Services (OPUSMT) project is to develop state-of-the art neural machine translation (NMT) models that can freely be distributed and applied in research as well as professional applications. The goal is to pre-train translation models on a large scale on openly available parallel data and to create a catalogue of such resources for streamlined integration and deployment. For the latter we also implement and improve web services and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools that can be used in on-line interfaces and professional workflows. Furthermore, we want to enable the re-use of models to avoid repeating costly training procedures from scratch and with this contribute to a reduction of the carbon footprint in MT research and development. The ELG pilot project focused on European minority languages and improved translation quality in low resource settings and the integration of MT services in the ELG infrastructure.

This paper describes the success of OPUS, starting from a small side-project but leading to a full-fledged ecosystem for training and deploying open machine translation systems. We briefly present the current state of the framework focusing on the mission of increasing language coverage and translation quality in public translation models and tools that can easily be integrated in end-user applications and professional workflows. OPUS now provides the biggest hub of freely available parallel data and thousands of open translation models have been released supporting hundreds of languages in various combinations. Non

We analyze the learning dynamics of neural language and translation models using Loss Change Allocation (LCA), an indicator that enables a fine-grained analysis of parameter updates when optimizing for the loss function. In other words, we can observe the contributions of different network components at training time. In this article, we systematically study masked language modeling, causal language modeling, and machine translation. We show that the choice of training objective leads to distinctive optimization procedures, even when performed on comparable Transformer architectures. We demonstrate how the various Transformer parameters are used during training, supporting that the feed-forward components of each layer are the main contributors to the optimization procedure. Finally, we find that the learning dynamics are not affected by data size and distribution but rather determined by the learning objective.

Prerecorded laughter accompanying dialog in comedy TV shows encourages the audience to laugh by clearly marking humorous moments in the show. We present an approach for automatically detecting humor in the Friends TV show using multimodal data. Our model is capable of recognizing whether an utterance is humorous or not and assess the intensity of it. We use the prerecorded laughter in the show as annotation as it marks humor and the length of the audience's laughter tells us how funny a given joke is. We evaluate the model on episodes the model has not been exposed to during the training phase. Our results show that the model is capable of correctly detecting whether an utterance is humorous 78% of the time and how long the audience's laughter reaction should last with a mean absolute error of 600 milliseconds., Comment: Outstanding paper award in COLING 2022

Artificial intelligences (AIs) are widely used in tasks ranging from transportation to healthcare and military, but it is not yet known how people prefer them to act in ethically difficult situations. In five studies (an anthropological field study, n = 30, and four experiments, total n = 2150), we presented people with vignettes where a human or an advanced robot nurse is ordered by a doctor to forcefully medicate an unwilling patient. Participants were more accepting of a human nurse's than a robot nurse's forceful medication of the patient, and more accepting of (human or robot) nurses who respected patient autonomy rather than those that followed the orders to forcefully medicate (Study 2). The findings were robust against the perceived competence of the robot (Study 3), moral luck (whether the patient lived or died afterwards; Study 4), and command chain effects (Study 5; fully automated supervision or not). Thus, people prefer robots capable of disobeying orders in favour of abstract moral principles like valuing personal autonomy. Our studies fit in a new era in research, where moral psychological phenomena no longer reflect only interactions between people, but between people and autonomous AIs.

Funding Information: This study was a part of the Miracles of Development research project supported by the Academy of Finland (R-LP, #3266413), an individual grant from the Academy of Finland for JL (#323845), and an individual grant from the Finnish Brain Foundation for MI. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2022 Ilomäki, Lindblom, Salmela, Flykt, Vänskä, Salmi, Tolonen, Alho, Punamäki and Wikman. Exposure to early life stress (ELS) is associated with a variety of detrimental psychological and neurodevelopmental effects. Importantly, ELS has been associated with regional alterations and aberrant connectivity in the structure and functioning of brain regions involved in emotion processing and self-regulation, creating vulnerability to mental health problems. However, longitudinal research regarding the impact of ELS on functional connectivity between brain regions in the default mode network (DMN) and fronto-limbic network (FLN), both implicated in emotion-related processes, is relatively scarce. Neuroimaging research on ELS has mostly focused on single nodes or bi-nodal connectivity instead of functional networks. We examined how ELS is associated with connectivity patterns within the DMN and FLN during rest in early adulthood. The participants (n = 86; 47 females) in the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study were young adults (18–21 years old) whose families had participated in a longitudinal study since pregnancy. ELS was assessed both prospectively (parental reports of family relationship problems and mental health problems during pregnancy and infancy) and retrospectively (self-reported adverse childhood experiences). Inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA) and multivariate distance matrix regression (MDMR) were used to analyze the association between ELS and the chosen networks. The IS-RSA results suggested that prospective ELS was associated with complex alterations within the DMN, and that retrospective ELS was associated with alterations in the FLN. MDMR results, in turn, suggested that that retrospective ELS was associated with DMN connectivity. Mean connectivity of the DMN was also associated with retrospective ELS. Analyses further showed that ELS-related alterations in the FLN were associated with increased connectivity between the prefrontal and limbic regions, and between different prefrontal regions. These results suggest that exposure to ELS in infancy might have long-lasting influences on functional brain connectivity that persist until early adulthood. Our results also speak for the importance of differentiating prospective and retrospective assessment methods to understand the specific neurodevelopmental effects of ELS.

SU(2) gauge theory with Nf=24 massless fermions is non-interacting at long distances, i.e. it has an infrared fixed point at vanishing coupling. With massive fermions the fermions are expected to decouple at energy scales below the fermion mass, and the infrared behaviour is that of confining SU(2) pure gauge theory. We demonstrate this behaviour non-perturbatively with lattice Monte Carlo simulations by measuring the gradient flow running coupling., 12 pages, 10 figures, appendix added

Accumulating evidence suggests that ultrasound visual feedback increases the treatment efficacy for persistent speech sound errors. However, the available evidence is mostly from English. This is a feasibility study of ultrasound visual feedback for treating distortion of Finnish [r]. We developed a web-based application for auditory-perceptual judgement. We investigated the impact of listener’s experience on perceptual judgement and the intra-rater reliability of listeners. Four boys (10–11 years) with distortion of [r], otherwise typical development, partook in eight ultrasound treatment sessions. In total, 117 [r] samples collected at pre- and post-intervention were judged with visual analogue scale (VAS) by two listener groups: five speech and language therapists (SLTs) and six SLT students. We constructed a linear mixed-effects model with fixed effects for time and listener group and several random effects. Our findings indicate that measurement time had a significant main effect on judgement results, χ2 = 78.82, p < 0.001. Effect of listener group was non-significant, but a significant main effect of interaction of group × time, χ2 = 6.33, p < 0.012 was observed. We further explored the effect of group with nested models, and results revealed a non-significant effect of group. The average intra-rater correlation of the 11 listeners was 0.83 for the pre-intervention samples and 0.92 for post-intervention showing a good or excellent degree of agreement. Finnish [r] sound can be evaluated with VAS and ultrasound visual feedback is a feasible and promising method in treatment for distortion of [r], and its efficacy should be further assessed.

Inter-brain synchronization during social interaction has been linked with several positive phenomena, including closeness, cooperation, prosociality, and team performance. However, the temporal dynamics of inter-brain synchronization during collaboration are not yet fully understood. Furthermore, with collaboration increasingly happening online, the dependence of inter-brain phase synchronization of oscillatory activity on physical presence is an important but understudied question. In this study, physically isolated participants performed a collaborative coordination task in the form of a cooperative multiplayer game. We measured EEG from 42 subjects working together as pairs in the task. During the measurement, the only interaction between the participants happened through on-screen movement of a racing car, controlled by button presses of both participants working with distinct roles, either controlling the speed or the direction of the car. Pairs working together in the task were found to have elevated neural coupling in the alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands, compared to performance matched false pairs. Higher gamma synchrony was associated with better momentary performance within dyads and higher alpha synchrony was associated with better mean performance across dyads. These results are in line with previous findings of increased inter-brain synchrony during interaction, and show that phase synchronization of oscillatory activity occurs during online real-time joint coordination without any physical co-presence or video and audio connection. Synchrony decreased during a playing session, but was found to be higher during the second session compared to the first. The novel paradigm, developed for the measurement of real-time collaborative performance, demonstrates that changes in inter-brain EEG phase synchrony can be observed continuously during interaction.

Building on the experience of [A. Hietanen et al., Phys. Rev. D 79, 045018 (2009)], we develop a formalism to construct operators for higher derivatives of the pressure in hot QCD with respect to the quark chemical potential μ. We provide formulas for the operators up to the sixth derivative, and obtain continuum-extrapolated results from lattice electrostatic QCD (EQCD) at zero and finite μ and at six different pairs of temperature T and number of massless quark flavors nf. Our data is benchmarked against full-QCD lattice and perturbative results, allowing us to judge the quality of the perturbative series expansion in EQCD and the dimensional reduction procedure as a whole.