A Novel Sentence Completion System for Punjabi using Deep Neural Networks

Sentence completion systems are actively studied by many researchers which ultimately results in the reduction of cognitive effort and enhancement in user-experience. The review of the literature reveals that most of the work in the said area is in English and limited effort spent on other languages, especially vernacular languages. This work aims to develop state-of-the-art sentence completion system for the Punjabi language, which is the 10th most spoken language in the world. The presented work is an outcome of the results of the experimentation on various neural network language model combinations. A new Sentence Search Algorithm (SSA) and patching system are developed to search, complete and rank the completed sub-string and give a syntactically rich sentence(s). The quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics were utilized to evaluate the system. The results are quite promising, and the best performing model is capable of completing a given sub-string with more acceptability. Best performing model is utilized for developing the user-interface.

The Phenomenon of Cognitive Polyphasia in Social Representations on the Mentally

The present study is focused on the phenomenon of cognitive polyphasia in the context of representations of mentally ill people by different groups of society. The authors put at the forefront the problem of finding the conditions for the actualization of cognitive polyphasia. The study was aimed at identifying manifestations of cognitive polyphasia in the structure of social representations (SRs) of the mentally ill in the groups of Orthodox respondents and non-believers. The sample consisted of Orthodox Christians: N = 114 (49 males and 65 females) and non-believers: N = 113 (76 males and 37 females) in the age ranges 18-23, 40-45 and 60-65 years, permanently residing in Moscow. The survey of the respondents at the main stage of the research was carried out using: (1) the authors questionnaire developed on the basis of the results of the search stage and including 29 statements; (2) a scale of self-assessed degree of religiosity; (3) a modified D. Feldes Psychological Distance Scale; (4) a modified sentence completion method; (5) the Bubbles technique and (6) a question pool for obtaining socio-demographic information. The results showed that the emotional component of SRs of the mentally ill changed their modality depending on the survey methods used. When the respondents evaluated the statements of the questionnaire, the core of SRs in both groups contained elements that were extremely sympathetic towards the mentally ill, and the statements revealing negative emotions (the possibility of contracting a mental illness or the need to isolate these people from society) were on the periphery of their representations. At the same time, the data of the projective methods showed that the negative representation background (as compared to the positive one) in relation to mentally ill people significantly predominated among both believers and non-believers. The negative representation of the mentally ill is most pronounced in the group of non-believers and reaches the highest rates in the group of 60-65-year-old respondents. We regard such ambivalence as a manifestation of cognitive polyphasia and, in particular, its variety, i.e., selective prevalence.

Integral personal and interpersonal characteristics of parents of children with complex developmental disorders

Thepurposeof the research is to study integral personal and interpersonal characteristics of parents bringing up children with complex developmental disorders. The article is based on the following psychodiagnostics methods: Parental Attitude Questionnaire (A. Varga & V. Stolin); Family Relationship Analysis (E. Eidemiller, V. Yustytskis); PARI (Parental Attitude Research Instrument) (E. Schaefer & Bell); Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI) for studying personal characteristics; N. Kurhanska & T.A. Nemchyn method to assess mental activation, interest, emotional tonus, tension, and comfort; “The semantic differential” (Ch.Osgood) for quantitative and qualitative value indexing; V. Kahan & I. Zhuravlova Inventory for Parental Attitudes to the Child’s Disease; “Sentence Completion Test.” (J. Sacks & L. Sidney). Factorization based on principal component analysis (PCA) followed by Varimax rotation of psychological scales has made it possible to gain a model of personal and interpersonal characteristics of parents bringing up children with complex developmental disorders. Researchresults. It has been specified personal characteristics in the form of dominant-aggressive, psychasthenic, extraversive, sthenic-introversive personal dispositions, which together form a marital subsystem. The research has outlined indulgent, authoritarian, constructive, phobic-indulgent, liberal-anxious educational systems that comprise a child-parent subsystem in the factor model of personal and interpersonal characteristics of par-ents. Conclusions. It is stated that substantial nature and particularities of integral personal and inter-personal factors, which have been noticed in parents bringing up children with complex developmental disorders, are personal predicators of the effectiveness of their psychological follow-up. Keywords:psychological follow-up, personal disposition, educational subsystem, interpersonal relations. Метоюстатті є дослідження інтегральних особистісних та міжособистісних характеристик батьків, які виховують дітей з комплексними порушеннями розвитку. Використано такі психодіагностичні методики: опитувальники для вимірювання параметрів батьківського ставлення (А.Варга, В.Ст олін); для аналізування сімейних взаємин (Е.Ейдеміллер, В.Юстицкіс); тест-опитувальник РАRІ (Е.Шефер, Р.Белл) для вивчення батьківських настановлень; Фрайбурзький багатофактор-ний особистісний опитувальник (FPI) для дослі-дженняособистісних характеристик; методику урганської, Т.А.Немчин для оцінки психічноїактивації, інтересу, емоційного тонусу, напруги та комфортності; “Семантичний диференціал” (Ч.Осгу д) для кількісного та якісного індексування значень; опитувальник В.Кагана та І.Журавльової для діагностики ставлення батьків до хвороби дитини; методика “Незакінчені речення” (Дж. Сакс, Л.Сідней). Факторизація методом головних компонент з наступним варімакс-обертанням матриці психологічних шкал дала змогу отримати модель особистісних та міжособистісних характеристик батьків дітей з комплексними порушеннями розвитку. Результатидослідження.З’ясовано особистісні характеристики у вигляді домінантно-агресивної, психастенічної, екстравертованої, стенічно-інтровертованої особистісних диспозицій, що разом утворюють шлюбну підсистему. Встановлено потуральну, авторитарну, конструктивну, фобічно-поблажливу, ліберально-тривожну виховні системи, які утворюють дитячо-батьківську підсистему у факторній моделі особистісних і міжособистісних характеристик батьків. Висновки. Констатовано, що змістовний характер і особливості інтегральних особистісних і міжособистісних чинників, які були з’ясовані у досліджуваних батьків дітей з комплексними порушеннями розвитку, є особистісними предикторами ефективності їх психологічного супроводу. Ключовіслова: психологічний супровід, особистісна диспозиція, виховна підсистема, міжособистісні взаємини.

Beier Sentence Completion Test Profiles of Adolescents and Emerging Adults With Internalizing and Externalizing Disorders

Background: Understanding adolescents' and emerging adults' psychiatric complaints and their relations with psychiatric disorders can be challenging. Beier Sentence Completion Test (BSCT), as a projective test, can be promising in this respect. However, relations between BSCT profiles and adolescent psychopathology are not well known. Aim: This study aimed to examine and compare BSCT profiles of adolescents and emerging adults with internalizing and externalizing disorders. As well as that, the relation of BSCT profiles with depression and anxiety scores was investigated. Objective: To achieve this aim, we retrospectively collected the hospital records of 300 adolescents and emerging adults (aged. 14-21) admitted to an Adolescent Psychiatry Outpatient Unit. Method: The psychiatric diagnosis of the patients was classified as Internalizing (n =100) and Externalizing (n = 100) disorder groups; the control group (n = 100) consisted of adolescents and young adults without any psychiatric diagnosis. BSCT, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) were administered on the first admission to all cases before psychiatric evaluation and treatment. BSCT total subfactor (positive, negative, neutral, and non-response) statement scores were compared between groups, and their correlations with BDI and BAI were investigated. Besides, multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted for estimating any diagnostic group differences, as well as bivariate logistic regression analyses for estimating BDI and BAI cutoff scores with models that included BSCT total subfactor statement scores. Results: It was revealed that lower positive and non-response statements were crucial for distinguishing externalizing and internalizing disorders and that positive and negative statements were correlated with depression and anxiety scores.In the multivariate regression model, these correlations were predictive only for the relationship between internalizing disorders group and low positive statement scores, not higher negative statement scores that can be associated with lack of positive emotional processing in this group. Also, nonresponse statement scores were found to be predictive for externalizing disorder groups. Similarly, BDI cut-off scores were predicted with low positive statement scores. Conclusion: BSCT profiles can be promising for understanding adolescents and emerging adults with internalizing and externalizing disorders. Lack of positive attributions to the self and other domains of life can be important for differentiating adolescent psychopathology.

In Time with the Beat: Entrainment in Patients with Phonological Impairment, Apraxia of Speech, and Parkinson’s Disease

In the present study, we investigated if individuals with neurogenic speech sound impairments of three types, Parkinson’s dysarthria, apraxia of speech, and aphasic phonological impairment, accommodate their speech to the natural speech rhythm of an auditory model, and if so, whether the effect is more significant after hearing metrically regular sentences as compared to those with an irregular pattern. This question builds on theories of rhythmic entrainment, assuming that sensorimotor predictions of upcoming events allow humans to synchronize their actions with an external rhythm. To investigate entrainment effects, we conducted a sentence completion task relating participants’ response latencies to the spoken rhythm of the prime heard immediately before. A further research question was if the perceived rhythm interacts with the rhythm of the participants’ own productions, i.e., the trochaic or iambic stress pattern of disyllabic target words. For a control group of healthy speakers, our study revealed evidence for entrainment when trochaic target words were preceded by regularly stressed prime sentences. Persons with Parkinson’s dysarthria showed a pattern similar to that of the healthy individuals. For the patient groups with apraxia of speech and with phonological impairment, considerably longer response latencies with differing patterns were observed. Trochaic target words were initiated with significantly shorter latencies, whereas the metrical regularity of prime sentences had no consistent impact on response latencies and did not interact with the stress pattern of the target words to be produced. The absence of an entrainment in these patients may be explained by the more severe difficulties in initiating speech at all. We discuss the results in terms of clinical implications for diagnostics and therapy in neurogenic speech disorders.

The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.

Lexical Competition Effects in Aphasia

<p>Some aphasic patients show single word production deficits in some situations where object naming is required (e.g., they perform well when objects are presented in unrelated groups (e.g., Cat, Fork, Bread...), but deteriorate when the same items are presented in semantically related groups (e.g., Cat, Cow, Dog...)) (see Wilshire & McCarthy, 2002). We investigated whether context-sensitive single-word production impairments reflect an impaired ability to resolve lexical competition. Three groups of participants (non-fluent aphasics, fluent aphasics, and older controls) completed four tasks that manipulated lexical competition: 1) A category exemplar task, where a high competition condition involved generating items from broad categories (e.g., Animals: "Cat. Dog" etc.), and a low competition condition involved generating items from narrow categories (e.g., Pets: Cat. Dog" etc); 2) A verb generation task, where participants were presented with objects and were required to generate related verbs. The high competition objects were related to a range of verbs (e.g., Penny: Spend"/"Pay"/"Buy" etc), and the low competition objects were related to one dominant verb (e.g., Scissors: "Cut"); 3) A name agreement task where a high competition condition involved naming low name agreement objects (e.g., Artist/Painter), and a low competition condition involved naming of high name agreement objects (e.g., Anchor), and; 4) A sentence completion task, where extrinsic competition was introduced via presentation of auditory distracters. The low competition distracters did not make sense (e.g., Barry wisely chose to pay the RANGE: "Bill"/"Cashier" etc), whereas the high competition distracters did (e.g., Barry wisely chose to pay the FINE: "Bill"/Cashier" etc). Our first hypothesis was that all participants would show high competition costs in increased response latencies and/or decreased accuracy. At the group level, this hypothesis was supported in all four tasks. At the individual level, there was mixed support as some participants showed predicted effects on the verb generation, name agreement, and sentence completion tasks. The second hypothesis was that exaggerated competition costs would occur in some or all non-fluent aphasics. At the group level this hypothesis was not clearly supported on any task. At the individual level there was mixed support, with some indications that non-fluents may be more likely to show significant competition effects than fluents. The third hypothesis was that non-fluent aphasics with relatively well preserved single word production but relatively impaired sentence production may be most likely to show exaggerated lexical competition effects. There was little support for this hypothesis. It was concluded that the data do not support the hypothesis that context-sensitive single-word production impairments are symptomatic of an impaired ability to resolve lexical competition. However, we have gained information on how heterogeneous aphasics perform on tasks that manipulate lexical competition, and we have gained some insights that may direct future research down a path towards more informative results, and increased knowledge on the complex process of speech production.</p>

The Significance of Semantic Hierarchy and Canonicity in Sentence Comprehension: A Study of Persian-speaking Patients With Alzheimer

Introduction: A lot of research in diverse languages has tried to scrutinize the impact of canonicity upon the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Regarding the gap in the Persian setting, this study tried to delve into the nature of this deficit in patients with Alzheimer. Materials and Methods: This is a case series study, and our subjects included 2 Persian- speaking monolingual patients with Alzheimer and 5 healthy elderly individuals matched with each other according to parameters like educational degree, vernacular tongue, and homeland. The categories to be tested included subject agentive, subject experiencer, object experiencer, and object cleft constructions. Results: The results of the sentence completion task demonstrated that problems would emerge when patients with Alzheimer try to comprehend the syntactic structures belonged to 2, 3, and 4 categories. Conclusion: Our findings would demonstrate that patients with Alzheimer have many challenges when trying to map syntactic representation onto semantic realization. This type of deficit escalates when patients attempt to assign thematic roles to psychological predicates. As for the clinical implication of the research, it was recommended that the type of structures utilized by neuropsychiatrists for the communicative purpose be chosen from utterances that are in line with the mapping strategy.

Lexical Competition Effects in Aphasia

<p>Some aphasic patients show single word production deficits in some situations where object naming is required (e.g., they perform well when objects are presented in unrelated groups (e.g., Cat, Fork, Bread...), but deteriorate when the same items are presented in semantically related groups (e.g., Cat, Cow, Dog...)) (see Wilshire & McCarthy, 2002). We investigated whether context-sensitive single-word production impairments reflect an impaired ability to resolve lexical competition. Three groups of participants (non-fluent aphasics, fluent aphasics, and older controls) completed four tasks that manipulated lexical competition: 1) A category exemplar task, where a high competition condition involved generating items from broad categories (e.g., Animals: "Cat. Dog" etc.), and a low competition condition involved generating items from narrow categories (e.g., Pets: Cat. Dog" etc); 2) A verb generation task, where participants were presented with objects and were required to generate related verbs. The high competition objects were related to a range of verbs (e.g., Penny: Spend"/"Pay"/"Buy" etc), and the low competition objects were related to one dominant verb (e.g., Scissors: "Cut"); 3) A name agreement task where a high competition condition involved naming low name agreement objects (e.g., Artist/Painter), and a low competition condition involved naming of high name agreement objects (e.g., Anchor), and; 4) A sentence completion task, where extrinsic competition was introduced via presentation of auditory distracters. The low competition distracters did not make sense (e.g., Barry wisely chose to pay the RANGE: "Bill"/"Cashier" etc), whereas the high competition distracters did (e.g., Barry wisely chose to pay the FINE: "Bill"/Cashier" etc). Our first hypothesis was that all participants would show high competition costs in increased response latencies and/or decreased accuracy. At the group level, this hypothesis was supported in all four tasks. At the individual level, there was mixed support as some participants showed predicted effects on the verb generation, name agreement, and sentence completion tasks. The second hypothesis was that exaggerated competition costs would occur in some or all non-fluent aphasics. At the group level this hypothesis was not clearly supported on any task. At the individual level there was mixed support, with some indications that non-fluents may be more likely to show significant competition effects than fluents. The third hypothesis was that non-fluent aphasics with relatively well preserved single word production but relatively impaired sentence production may be most likely to show exaggerated lexical competition effects. There was little support for this hypothesis. It was concluded that the data do not support the hypothesis that context-sensitive single-word production impairments are symptomatic of an impaired ability to resolve lexical competition. However, we have gained information on how heterogeneous aphasics perform on tasks that manipulate lexical competition, and we have gained some insights that may direct future research down a path towards more informative results, and increased knowledge on the complex process of speech production.</p>

EXPLORING ALEXITHYMIA IN SOMATIZATION USING RORSCHACH PSYCHODIAGNOSTICS

It has been classically postulated that alexithymia is related to a pervasive inability of emotional recognition and expression. This leaves some individuals little choice but to somatise unprocessed emotions commonly caused by internal conflicts. The present study thus aimed to explore the nature of conflicts, controls and stress tolerance, affect, self-perception, and interpersonal perception and behavior in somatization patients with alexithymia. 30 individuals of both sexes and of the age range 20-50 years, diagnosed with somatization disorder and alexithymia, were purposively undertaken for the study. Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20, Sack’s Sentence Completion Test and the Rorschach Test – Exner’s Comprehensive System were used to screen for alexithymia, to measure conflicts and the other aforementioned domains respectively. Results revealed that conflicts related to self-concept, sex, and family were primarily present in this sample. Characteristic patterns of underlying vulnerabilities seemed to account for poor stress tolerance, affective complications, negative self-perception, and maladaptive interpersonal functioning. It is suggested that alexithymia and a tendency to develop conflicts in somatization are based on the foundation of certain fundamental personality predispositions. Identifying said personality patterns could aid in appropriate and effective goal-setting in psychotherapy, specific to this otherwise treatment-resistant patient population.