scholarly journals Revisiting the Suffixing Preference: Native-Language Affixation Patterns Influence Perception of Sequences

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (9) ◽  
pp. 1107-1116
Author(s):  
Alexander Martin ◽  
Jennifer Culbertson
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Perceptual Similarity ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Rural Kenya ◽  
Similarity Judgments ◽  
Complex Words

Similarities among the world’s languages may be driven by universal features of human cognition or perception. For example, in many languages, complex words are formed by adding suffixes to the ends of simpler words, but adding prefixes is much less common: Why might this be? Previous research suggests this is due to a domain-general perceptual bias: Sequences differing at their ends are perceived as more similar to each other than sequences differing at their beginnings. However, as is typical in psycholinguistic research, the evidence comes exclusively from one population—English speakers—who have extensive experience with suffixing. Here, we provided a much stronger test of this claim by investigating perceptual-similarity judgments in speakers of Kîîtharaka, a heavily prefixing Bantu language spoken in rural Kenya. We found that Kîîtharaka speakers ( N = 72) showed the opposite judgments to English speakers ( N = 51), which calls into question whether a universal bias in human perception can explain the suffixing preference in the world’s languages.

scholarly journals Lawful relation between perceptual bias and discriminability

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (38) ◽  
pp. 10244-10249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue-Xin Wei ◽  
Alan A. Stocker
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Support ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
Contextual Modulation ◽  
Mathematical Relation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Optimal Encoding ◽  
Stimulus Value ◽  
Sensory Encoding ◽  
Perceptual Changes

Perception of a stimulus can be characterized by two fundamental psychophysical measures: how well the stimulus can be discriminated from similar ones (discrimination threshold) and how strongly the perceived stimulus value deviates on average from the true stimulus value (perceptual bias). We demonstrate that perceptual bias and discriminability, as functions of the stimulus value, follow a surprisingly simple mathematical relation. The relation, which is derived from a theory combining optimal encoding and decoding, is well supported by a wide range of reported psychophysical data including perceptual changes induced by contextual modulation. The large empirical support indicates that the proposed relation may represent a psychophysical law in human perception. Our results imply that the computational processes of sensory encoding and perceptual decoding are matched and optimized based on identical assumptions about the statistical structure of the sensory environment.

Perception Based Method for Measuring the Aesthetic Quality of the Urban Environment

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-19
Author(s):  
Hourakhsh Ahmad Nia ◽  
Resmiye Alpar Atun ◽  
Rokhsaneh Rahbarianyazd
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Values

This study assesses changing aesthetic values and their characteristics in urban environments based on human perception. With this in mind, a model for assessing the aesthetic values of the urban environment based on the three steps of human cognition has been developed to elaborate the user's perception in different urban environments. The results of the survey confirm that by changing urban morphology the aesthetic perception of the environment also changes. The finding of this research opens up a new window for urban planners to assess the aesthetic effects of the elements of urban spatial configuration for future urban development.

Invariance of edit-distance to tempo in rhythm similarity

2020 ◽  
pp. 030573562097103
Author(s):  
Matthew Moritz ◽  
Matthew Heard ◽  
Hyun-Woong Kim ◽  
Yune S Lee
Keyword(s):  
Edit Distance ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Perceptual Similarity ◽  
Music Psychology ◽  
Mantel Tests ◽  
Distance Model ◽  
Minimum Number ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similarity Ratings ◽  
Similarity Judgments

Despite the long history of music psychology, rhythm similarity perception remains largely unexplored. Several studies suggest that edit-distance—the minimum number of notational changes required to transform one rhythm into another—predicts similarity judgments. However, the ecological validity of edit-distance remains elusive. We investigated whether the edit-distance model can predict perceptual similarity between rhythms that also differed in a fundamental characteristic of music—tempo. Eighteen participants rated the similarity between a series of rhythms presented in a pairwise fashion. The edit-distance of these rhythms varied from 1 to 4, and tempo was set at either 90 or 150 beats per minute (BPM). A test of congruence among distance matrices (CADM) indicated significant inter-participant reliability of ratings, and non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) visualized that the ratings were clustered based upon both tempo and whether rhythms shared an identical onset pattern, a novel effect we termed rhythm primacy. Finally, Mantel tests revealed significant correlations of edit-distance with similarity ratings on both within- and between-tempo rhythms. Our findings corroborated that the edit-distance predicts rhythm similarity and demonstrated that the edit-distance accounts for similarity of rhythms that are markedly different in tempo. This suggests that rhythmic gestalt is invariant to differences in tempo.

Variability and consistency in late bilinguals’ morphology

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-214
Author(s):  
Anna Jessen ◽  
João Veríssimo ◽  
Harald Clahsen
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Brain Potentials ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Frontal Negativity ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
L1 English ◽  
Late Bilinguals

Abstract Speaking a late-learned second language (L2) is supposed to yield more variable and less consistent output than speaking one’s first language (L1), particularly with respect to reliably adhering to grammatical morphology. The current study investigates both internal processes involved in encoding morphologically complex words – by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during participants’ silent productions – and the corresponding overt output. We specifically examined compounds with plural or singular modifiers in English. Thirty-one advanced L2 speakers of English (L1: German) were compared to a control group of 20 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found an enhanced (right-frontal) negativity during (silent) morphological encoding for compounds produced from regular plural forms relative to compounds formed from irregular plurals, replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. The L2 speakers’ overt productions, however, were significantly less consistent than those of the L1 speakers on the same task. We suggest that L2 speakers employ the same mechanisms for morphological encoding as L1 speakers, but with less reliance on grammatical constraints than L1 speakers.

Free-Classification of Perceptually Similar Speakers With Dysarthria

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 2051-2064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaitlin L. Lansford ◽  
Julie M. Liss ◽  
Rebecca E. Norton
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
Perceptual Similarity ◽  
Articulation Rate ◽  
Classification Approach ◽  
Perceptual Judgments ◽  
Similarity Judgments ◽  
Vocal Quality ◽  
Free Classification ◽  
Perceptual Metrics

Purpose In this investigation, the construct of perceptual similarity was explored in the dysarthrias. Specifically, we employed an auditory free-classification task to determine whether listeners could cluster speakers by perceptual similarity, whether the clusters mapped to acoustic metrics, and whether the clusters were constrained by dysarthria subtype diagnosis. Method Twenty-three listeners blinded to speakers' medical and dysarthria subtype diagnoses participated. The task was to group together (drag and drop) the icons corresponding to 33 speakers with dysarthria on the basis of how similar they sounded. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling (MDS) modeled the perceptual dimensions underlying similarity. Acoustic metrics and perceptual judgments were used in correlation analyses to facilitate interpretation of the derived dimensions. Results Six clusters of similar-sounding speakers and 3 perceptual dimensions underlying similarity were revealed. The clusters of similar-sounding speakers were not constrained by dysarthria subtype diagnosis. The 3 perceptual dimensions revealed by MDS were correlated with metrics for articulation rate, intelligibility, and vocal quality, respectively. Conclusions This study shows (a) feasibility of a free-classification approach for studying perceptual similarity in dysarthria, (b) correspondence between acoustic and perceptual metrics to clusters of similar-sounding speakers, and (c) similarity judgments transcended dysarthria subtype diagnosis.

scholarly journals Extended Goal Recognition: Lessons from Magic

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peta Masters ◽  
Wally Smith ◽  
Michael Kirley
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Observer ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Face ◽  
Contradictory Evidence ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Goal Recognition ◽  
Practical Demonstration

The “science of magic” has lately emerged as a new field of study, providing valuable insights into the nature of human perception and cognition. While most of us think of magic as being all about deception and perceptual “tricks”, the craft—as documented by psychologists and professional magicians—provides a rare practical demonstration and understanding of goal recognition. For the purposes of human-aware planning, goal recognition involves predicting what a human observer is most likely to understand from a sequence of actions. Magicians perform sequences of actions with keen awareness of what an audience will understand from them and—in order to subvert it—the ability to predict precisely what an observer’s expectation is most likely to be. Magicians can do this without needing to know any personal details about their audience and without making any significant modification to their routine from one performance to the next. That is, the actions they perform are reliably interpreted by any human observer in such a way that particular (albeit erroneous) goals are predicted every time. This is achievable because people’s perception, cognition and sense-making are predictably fallible. Moreover, in the context of magic, the principles underlying human fallibility are not only well-articulated but empirically proven. In recent work we demonstrated how aspects of human cognition could be incorporated into a standard model of goal recognition, showing that—even though phenomena may be “fully observable” in that nothing prevents them from being observed—not all are noticed, not all are encoded or remembered, and few are remembered indefinitely. In the current article, we revisit those findings from a different angle. We first explore established principles from the science of magic, then recontextualise and build on our model of extended goal recognition in the context of those principles. While our extensions relate primarily to observations, this work extends and explains the definitions, showing how incidental (and apparently incidental) behaviours may significantly influence human memory and belief. We conclude by discussing additional ways in which magic can inform models of goal recognition and the light that this sheds on the persistence of conspiracy theories in the face of compelling contradictory evidence.

scholarly journals Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben van de Vijver ◽  
Emmanuel Uwambayinema ◽  
Yu-Ying Chuang
Keyword(s):  
Data Sets ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Full Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
The One ◽  
Agglutinative Languages ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
Whole Word

How do speakers comprehend and produce complex words? In the theory ofthe Discriminative Lexicon this is hypothesized to be the results of mapping the phonology of whole word forms onto their semantics and vice versa, without recourse to morphemes. This raises the question whether this hypothesis also holds true in highly agglutinative languages, which are oǒten seen to exemplify the compositional nature of morphology. On the one hand, one could expect that the hypothesis for agglutinative languages is correct, since it remains unclear whether speakers are able to isolate the morphemes they need to achieve this. On the other hand, agglutinative languages have so many different words that it is not obvious how speakers can use their knowledge of words to comprehend and produce them.In this paper, we investigate comprehension and production of verbs in Kinyarwanda,an agglutinative Bantu language, by means of computational modeling within the theDiscriminative Lexicon, a theory of the mental lexicon, which is grounded in word andparadigm morphology, distributional semantics, error-driven learning, and uses insightsof psycholinguistic theories, and is implemented mathematically and computationallyas a shallow, two-layered network.In order to do this, we compiled a data set of 11528 verb forms and annotated for eachverb form its meaning and grammatical functions, and, additionally, we used our dataset to extract 573 verbs that are present in our full data set and for which meanings ofverbs are based on word embeddings. In order to assess comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs, we fed both data sets into the Linear Discriminative Learningalgorithm, a two-layered, fully connected network. One layer represent the phonological form and the layer represents meaning. Comprehension is modeled as a mapping from phonology to meaning and production is modeled as a mapping from meaning to phonology. Both comprehension and production is learned with high accuracy in all data and in held-out data, both for the full data set, with manually annotated semantic features, and for the data set with meanings derived from word embeddings.Our findings provide support for the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon:Words are stored as wholes, meanings are a result of the distribution of words in utterances, comprehension and production can be successfully modeled from mappings from form to meaning and vice versa, which can be modeled in a shallow two-layered network, and these mappings are learned in by minimizing errors.

scholarly journals Controversial stimuli: Pitting neural networks against each other as models of human cognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (47) ◽  
pp. 29330-29337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tal Golan ◽  
Prashant C. Raju ◽  
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Visual Recognition ◽  
Deep Neural Networks ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Natural Images ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Distribution Models ◽  
Adversarial Examples

Distinct scientific theories can make similar predictions. To adjudicate between theories, we must design experiments for which the theories make distinct predictions. Here we consider the problem of comparing deep neural networks as models of human visual recognition. To efficiently compare models’ ability to predict human responses, we synthesize controversial stimuli: images for which different models produce distinct responses. We applied this approach to two visual recognition tasks, handwritten digits (MNIST) and objects in small natural images (CIFAR-10). For each task, we synthesized controversial stimuli to maximize the disagreement among models which employed different architectures and recognition algorithms. Human subjects viewed hundreds of these stimuli, as well as natural examples, and judged the probability of presence of each digit/object category in each image. We quantified how accurately each model predicted the human judgments. The best-performing models were a generative analysis-by-synthesis model (based on variational autoencoders) for MNIST and a hybrid discriminative–generative joint energy model for CIFAR-10. These deep neural networks (DNNs), which model the distribution of images, performed better than purely discriminative DNNs, which learn only to map images to labels. None of the candidate models fully explained the human responses. Controversial stimuli generalize the concept of adversarial examples, obviating the need to assume a ground-truth model. Unlike natural images, controversial stimuli are not constrained to the stimulus distribution models are trained on, thus providing severe out-of-distribution tests that reveal the models’ inductive biases. Controversial stimuli therefore provide powerful probes of discrepancies between models and human perception.

scholarly journals To Epenthesize or Not? Adaptations of English Coda [m] in Standard Mandarin Loanwords

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ho-Hsin Huang ◽  
Yen-Hwei Lin
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Results ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Perceptual Similarity ◽  
Perceptual Cues ◽  
Loanword Adaptation ◽  
Vowel Epenthesis ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Experimental Strategies ◽  
Adaptation Data

This study investigates how English coda [m] is adapted into Standard Mandarin (SM) loanwords both in the existing corpora and in perceptual similarity adaptation data from monolingual SM and bilingual SM-English speakers. The nasal [m] in coda position is prohibited in SM. Deletion, nasal place change ([m]-->[n]/[ŋ]) and vowel epenthesis are the possible repair strategies. The generalizations identified in the corpora indicate that deletion never occurs (cf. Preservation Principle from Paradis 1996, Paradis & Lacharité 1997). Vowel epenthesis appears in SM when English coda [m] is in word-medial and word final positions. Nasal place change appears when English coda [m] is followed by a labial obstruent.  Variable adaptations happen when English coda [m] is followed by an obstruent. The experimental results show that (i) the bilingual experimental strategies for nonce word adaptations are similar to the patterns observed in the SM loanwords corpora and (ii) monolinguals’ adaptation patterns are more variable due to greater dependence on perceptual cues. The fact that monolinguals and bilinguals differ in the extent to which they employ perceptual cues and phonological features/constraints for loanword adaptations challenges a pure perception-based account of loanword adaptation. 

scholarly journals English and Chinese children’s motion event similarity judgments

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinglin Ji ◽  
Jill Hohenstein
Keyword(s):  
Visual Motion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Match To Sample ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Motion Event ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Similarity Judgments

AbstractThis study explores the relationship between language and thought in similarity judgments by testing how monolingual children who speak languages with partial typological differences in motion description (English and Chinese) respond to visual motion event stimuli. Participants were either Chinese- or English-speaking, 3-year-olds, 8-year-olds and adults (32 in each group) who judged the similarity between caused motion scenes in a match-to-sample task. The results suggest, first of all, that the two younger groups of 3-year-olds are predominantly path-oriented, irrespective of language, as evidenced by their significantly longer fixation on path-match videos rather than manner-match videos in a preferential looking scheme. Using categorical measurement of overt choices, older children and adults also showed a shared tendency of being more path-oriented. However, the analysis using continuous measurement of reaction time revealed significant variations in spatial cognition that can be related to linguistic differences: English speakers tended to be more manner-oriented while Chinese speakers were equally manner- and path-oriented. On the whole, our findings indicate a likelihood that children’s non-linguistic thought is similar prior to internalising the lexicalisation pattern of motion events in their native languages, but shows divergences after such habitual use, thus suggesting that the pattern of non-linguistic thought may be linked, among other things, to linguistic structure.

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