scholarly journals When lexical statistics and the grammar conflict: learning and repairing weight effects on stress

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Duarte Garcia

In weight-sensitive languages, stress is influenced by syllable weight. As a result, heavy syllables should attract, not repel, stress. The Portuguese lexicon, however, presents a case where weight seems to negatively impact stress: antepenultimate stress is more frequent in light antepenultimate syllables than in heavy ones. This pattern is phonologically unexpected, and appears to contradict the typology of weight and stress: it is a case where lexical statistics and the grammar conflict. Portuguese also contains gradient, not categorical, weight effects, which weaken as we move away from the right edge of the word. In this paper, I examine how native speakers’ grammars capture these subtle weight effects, and whether the negative antepenultimate weight effect is learned or repaired. I show that speakers learn the gradient weight effects in the language, but do not learn the unnatural negative effect. Instead, speakers repair this pattern, and generalize a positive weight effect to all syllables in the stress domain. This study thus provides empirical evidence that speakers may not only ignore unnatural patterns, but also learn the opposite pattern.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Duarte Garcia

In the vast majority of languages that are sensitive to weight, syllable weight is binary, i.e., a syllable is either light or heavy (see Gordon (2007) for a comprehensive review). In suchlanguages, heavy syllables are more likely to attract stress. This is the case for Latin and English, for example. As well, if a language is weight-sensitive, weight cannot have a negative effect on stress, by definition. In Portuguese, however, a lexical pattern exists where a heavy syllable seems to repel stress. In this paper, I show that such a pattern is not generalized by native speakers.


Author(s):  
Marc Ouellet ◽  
Julio Santiago ◽  
Ziv Israeli ◽  
Shai Gabay

Spanish and English speakers tend to conceptualize time as running from left to right along a mental line. Previous research suggests that this representational strategy arises from the participants’ exposure to a left-to-right writing system. However, direct evidence supporting this assertion suffers from several limitations and relies only on the visual modality. This study subjected to a direct test the reading hypothesis using an auditory task. Participants from two groups (Spanish and Hebrew) differing in the directionality of their orthographic system had to discriminate temporal reference (past or future) of verbs and adverbs (referring to either past or future) auditorily presented to either the left or right ear by pressing a left or a right key. Spanish participants were faster responding to past words with the left hand and to future words with the right hand, whereas Hebrew participants showed the opposite pattern. Our results demonstrate that the left-right mapping of time is not restricted to the visual modality and that the direction of reading accounts for the preferred directionality of the mental time line. These results are discussed in the context of a possible mechanism underlying the effects of reading direction on highly abstract conceptual representations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efrain Garcia-Sanchez ◽  
Nelson Molina Valencia ◽  
Estefanía Buitrago ◽  
Zabdi Sanz ◽  
Valentina Ramírez ◽  
...  

El autoritarismo es un constructo ampliamente estudiado en psicología para investigar comportamientos políticos. Para su medición se suele usar la escala de autoritarismo de derechas (RWA), la cual tiene variaciones en sus propiedades psicométricas según cada contexto. En este artículo traducimos y adaptamos una versión reducida del autoritarismo de derechas al contexto colombiano. En dos estudios (NEstudio1=417;NEstudio2=396), identificamos tres dimensiones: agresión-autoritaria, sumisión-autoritaria y convencionalismo; y encontramos que la RWA estuvo asociada positivamente con: dominancia social, deshumanización del adversario, apoyo al conflicto, patriotismo, sexismo, homofobia y la prohibición de políticas sociales consideradas como liberales (e.g., aborto, matrimonio igualitario, eutanasia). Se aporta evidencia empírica a favor de las propiedades psicométricas de la escala de RWA en el contexto colombiano. Authoritarianism is widely used construct to study political behaviors.For its measurement, researchers usually use the right authoritarianism scale (RWA), which has variations in its psychometric properties according to each context. In this article we translate and adapt a reduced version of RWA to the Colombian context. In two studies (NStudy1=417; NStudy2=396), we identified three dimensions: authoritarian-aggression, authoritarian-submission,and conventionalism. We also found that RWA was positively associated with: social dominance, dehumanization of the adversary, support for conflict, patriotism, sexism, homophobia and the prohibition of social policies considered liberal (e.g., abortion, equal marriage, euthanasia). Empirical evidence is provided in favor of the psychometric properties of the RWA scale in the Colombian context


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aslı Eker ◽  
Meltem Aydın Besen ◽  
Mine Yurdakul

Background: Every working woman has the right to continue to live as a healthy individual. The working environment has important effects on general health status and reproductive health of women. If menopouse period of women is not taken into consideration and if appropriate arrangements are not made at workplaces, their work performance and productivity decrease. It is important to have detailed knowledge about factors creating risk for health in order to develop effective policies and programs directed towards preventing them. Objective: This study was performed to determine perceived effects of menopause on work life and attitudes of an institution towards menopausal women. Methods: The study population included 419 women aged 45-55 years and working at a university. Out of 419 women, 291 could be contacted. Data were collected with a questionaire composed of questions about descriptive characteristics, effects of menopause on work life and support from and attitudes of the institution about menopause. Data collected to reveal menopausal women’s experiences at work were analyzed with statistical methods frequency, percentages and mean. Results: The mean age at which menopause started was 47 years and 89.7% of the women experienced menopausal complaints. Conclusions: Physical conditions at work and stressors were found to increase menopausal complaints and had a negative effect on work performance.


Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Fridland

AbstractThis paper provides an account of the strategic control involved in skilled action. When I discuss strategic control, I have in mind the practical goals, plans, and strategies that skilled agents use in order to specify, structure, and organize their skilled actions, which they have learned through practice. The idea is that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. More specifically, skilled agents are able formulate and modify, adjust and adapt their practical intentions in ways that are appropriate, effective, and flexible given their overall goals. Further, to specify the kind of action plans that are involved in strategic control, I’ll rely on empirical evidence concerning mental practice and mental imagery from sports psychology as well as evidence highlighting the systematic differences in the cognitive representations of skills between experts and non-experts. I’ll claim that, together, this evidence suggests that the intentions that structure skilled actions are practical and not theoretical, that is, that they are perceptual and motor and not abstract, amodal, or linguistic. Importantly, despite their grounded nature, these plans are still personal-level, deliberate, rational states. That is, the practical intentions used to specify and structure skilled actions are best conceived of as higher-order, motor-modal structures, which can be manipulated and used by the agent for the purpose of reasoning, deliberation, decision-making and, of course, the actual online structuring and organizing of action.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN HÖGSTRÖM

AbstractIt has been argued that economic development and democracy create new opportunities and resources for women to access political power, which should increase gender equality in politics. However, empirical evidence from previous research that supports this argument is mixed. The contribution of this study is to expand the research on gender equality in politics through an in-depth examination of the effect of development and democracy on gender equality in cabinets. This has been completed through separate analyses that include most of the countries in the world across three levels of development (least-developed, developing, and developed) and across different types of political regimes (democracies, royal dictatorships, military dictatorships, and civilian dictatorships). The results demonstrate that economic development and democracy only affect gender equality in cabinets positively in a few environments. Accordingly, the context is important and there seem to be thresholds before development and democracy have any effect. Development has a positive effect in developed countries and in democracies, but it has a negative effect in dictatorships, and the negative effect is strongest in military dictatorships. The level of democracy has a positive effect mainly in dictatorships, and the strongest effect is in civilian dictatorships. The article demonstrates the importance of dividing samples into subsets to increase understanding of what affects women's representation in cabinets in different environments, and I ask scholars to subset samples and run separate analyses more often in comparative studies.


1986 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
N.J. Williams ◽  
J. Sewel ◽  
F. Twine

ABSTRACTIt has been argued that council house sales will contribute towards a more general process of residualization of public sector housing. Empirical evidence is presented in this context derived from surveys of purchasers and non-purchasers of council dwellings in the city of Aberdeen. This evidence confirms that purchasers and non-purchasers exhibit different socio-economic characteristics and after only four years of the Right to Buy legislation significant numbers of households in social classes I, II and III have left the public sector via the mechanism of sales. The small number of sales relative to the stock as a whole, however, has meant that the overall contribution of sales towards residualization has been small. This evidence from Aberdeen is compared to evidence from elsewhere and related to the varying pattern of sales across the country as a whole.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-18
Author(s):  
Botond L. Márton ◽  
Dóra Istenes ◽  
László Bacsárdi

Random numbers are of vital importance in today’s world and used for example in many cryptographical protocols to secure the communication over the internet. The generators producing these numbers are Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNGs) or True Random Number Generators (TRNGs). A subclass of TRNGs are the Quantum based Random Number Generators (QRNGs) whose generation processes are based on quantum phenomena. However, the achievable quality of the numbers generated from a practical implementation can differ from the theoretically possible. To ease this negative effect post-processing can be used, which contains the use of extractors. They extract as much entropy as possible from the original source and produce a new output with better properties. The quality and the different properties of a given output can be measured with the help of statistical tests. In our work we examined the effect of different extractors on two QRNG outputs and found that witg the right extractor we can improve their quality.


Author(s):  
Hyun-ju Kim

This study presents empirical evidence that the accent patterns in novel words do not originate from analogy to phonetically similar familiar words. Rather, the accent pattern of novel words reflects statistical patterning in the lexicon. A corpus study showed that lexical distribution of North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) accent patterns is phonologically patterned: penultimate accent is common where all the syllables are light; final accent is more frequent where the final syllable is heavy. Lexical statistics revealed probabilistic structure-sensitive patterning in the lexicon even if exceptions obscure the patterning. This study will show that the accent patterns in novel words actually match this statistical patterning in the lexicon. This indicates that NKK speakers have implicit knowledge of the statistical patterning and apply it to novel words which lack lexical specification.


Author(s):  
Eva Hýblová ◽  
Jaroslav Sedláček ◽  
Zuzana Křížová

One of consequences of the substantial market globalization is company transformations, which essentially affect the creation, existence or dissolution of companies; their number has been on the increase in recent years. They are mergers and acquisitions; mergers represent a combination of companies, whereas acquisitions involve selling, purchase or investments of companies. The main reason for a merger is economic growth which can be provided in various ways: these are e.g. decreases in costs, strengthening of a position in the market or access to new markets, decrease in prices and thus gaining new customers, access to knowledge or diversification of risks.The process of a merger is a highly demanding matter which includes the economic view (a choice of the right partner, setting merger objectives, preparation of merger project) and the legal view as the merger involves commercial law, reporting and taxation legislation. Discrepancies in the legal, reporting and taxation procedures in the area can have a negative effect on the process of merger and economic practice. The development of mergers and acquisitions and their success rate is related to the development of the economic and legislative environment. An important aspect is also the successfulness of mergers in the following year which will confirm (or not) the quality of all previous decisions.Research studies conducted in this field focus on mergers with the aim to evaluate procedures during mergers. An important part of research is an analysis of the effect of a merger on the evaluation of the successor company’s performance, changes in capital and capital structure of the entities. The aim of the paper is to publish first partial results in this direction of research. The first part of the research focuses on the creation of a database of companies as this is essential for practical verification of the results of the theoretical research. Due to the fact that there is no similar official statistics in the Czech Republic, its creation needs to be devoted great attention. It is also vital to define the transactions which will be included in the total number so that the results are relevant.


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