An investigation of the dependency of subject-verb agreement on inhibitory control processes in sentence production

Agreement attraction, i.e., the production or acceptance of a verb that agrees with a noun other than the subject of the sentence, can be viewed as a process in which conflicting cues activate competing representations. The aftermath of such competition, in terms of cognitive processes, remains unclear. Using a novel referential communication task for eliciting agreement errors and both group-level manipulation of control demands and a detailed analysis of individual differences, we provide converging evidence for the role of monitoring and inhibitory control processes in agreement attraction for singular-subject sentences. We further demonstrate the dependence of producing plural verbs on such processes, suggesting the singular form is the prepotent default form. Collectively, these findings provide a clear demonstration for the role of monitoring and control processes in agreement computations, and more generally syntactic operations in sentence production.

Paradigmatic Uniformity: Evidence from Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Subject-verb agreement mismatches have been reported in the L2 and heritage literature, usually involving infinitives, analyzed as default morphological forms for fully specified T-heads. This article explores the mechanisms behind these mismatches, testing two hypotheses: the default form and the surface-similarity hypotheses. It compares non-finite and finite S-V mismatches with subjects with different persons, testing whether similarity with other paradigmatic forms makes them more acceptable, controlling for the role of verb frequency. Participants were asked to rate sentences on a Likert scale that included (a) infinitive forms with first, second and third person subjects, and (b) third person verbal forms with first, second and third person subjects. Two stem-stressed verbs (e.g., tra.j-o ‘brought.3p.past’) and two affix-stressed verbs (e.g., me.ti-o ‘introduced.3p.past’), varying in frequency were tested. Inflectional affixes of stem-stressed verbs are similar to other forms of the paradigm both phonologically and in being unstressed (tra.j-o ‘brought.3p.past’ vs. trai.g-o ‘bring.1 p.pres’), whereas affixes of affix-stressed verbs have dissimilar stress patterns (me.ti-o ´introduced.3p.past’ vs. me.t-o ‘introduce.1p.pres’). Results show significantly higher acceptability for finite vs. non-finite non-matching, and for 1st vs. 2nd person subjects. Stem-stressed verbs showed higher acceptability ratings than affix-stressed ones, suggesting a role for surface-form correspondence, partially confirming previous findings.

Contemporary Supportive Therapy: A Review of History, Theory, and Evidence

Supportive psychotherapy interventions were developed as a part of psychodynamic psychotherapy work, and supportive psychotherapy was historically considered to be the default form of therapy only for lower-functioning patients. These roots unfortunately have resulted in supportive psychotherapy being viewed as an inferior form of treatment. In reality, supportive psychotherapy is a practical and flexible form of psychotherapy that helps patients with a wide range of psychiatric illnesses, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, and substance use disorders. In addition, supportive psychotherapy can be well-suited to higher-functioning patients, as well as to patients who are chronically lower-functioning. There is also evidence to support the use of supportive psychotherapy in patients with certain medical illnesses, including coronary artery disease, some gastrointestinal illnesses, HIV infection, and certain types of cancer. The goals of supportive psychotherapy include helping patients to understand emotional experiences, improving affective regulation and reality-testing, making use of their most effective coping strategies, and engaging in collaborative problem solving to reduce stressors and increase effective engagement with support systems.

Netflix Disrupting Dubbing

In 2017, English dubbing entered the mainstream on the initiative of the subscription video-on-demand service (SVoD) Netflix. Recent English dubs have taken advantage of the largely convention-free English dubbing industry and, in 2019, dubs outsourced by Netflix to VSI London saw the introduction of linguistic variation into the dubs of Spanish originals, such as Alta Mar (High Seas) (Campos and Neira 2019–) and, most notably, Hache (Torregrossa and Trullols 2019–). In these series, a myriad of British accents is used for characterisation as an alternative to standardisation strategies that conflate cultural identities into one, which are prevalent in many consolidated dubbing industries. In addition to the lack of industry precedents and an argued associated malleability of viewers, the diegetic quality of dubbed dialogue seems to have allowed the implausibility of linguistic variation to be accepted by viewers in an extended “suspension of linguistic disbelief” (Romero-Fresco 2009: 49). In this paper, I explore accents as “unit[s] of cultural transmission” aka “memes” (Dawkins 1976: 206), and the specific sets of connotations associated with accents i.e. dialectal memes that are evoked in the original and dubbed versions of the aforementioned series. Emerging norms in UK dubs of Spanish originals are then elucidated. Lay summary For over sixty years now, subtitling has been the default form of translation when bringing foreign films into English-speaking countries. However, Netflix has recently disrupted this practice by providing the alternative option of watching many of its non-English films and series dubbed into English, i.e. the voices of the original actors are replaced with those of voice actors who perform in English instead of, say, Spanish. In many countries where dubbing has long been the default translation practice, such as Spain, the accents used in original versions to create different character identities are dubbed into one standardised Spanish accent, which makes it difficult to distinguish between characters’ social class, among other qualities attached to accent. In the English dubs on Netflix, however, accents are being used for characterisation. In this article, I analyse the use of British accents in Netflix’ dubs of the Spanish-original series Hache and Alta Mar (High Seas), and compare character identities in the original and dubbed versions, according to the cultural connotations triggered by the different accents used in each. I apply theories from the Translation Studies discipline to help understand and support the use of accents in English dubs, as a valid alternative to standardisation strategies in dubbing. Given a significant amount of Netflix’ foreign products are in Spanish, the analysis in this article can be used in future to track changes in English dubs generally and especially English dubs of Spanish-language originals on Netflix, which might use different strategies to English dubs of Danish products, or Spanish products on other streaming platforms, for example.

Alterations in Religious Rituals Due to COVID-19 Could Be Related to Intragroup Negativity: A Case of Changes in Receiving Holy Communion in the Roman Catholic Community in Poland

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected various domains of everyday life, including important religious rituals. In the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, the reception of Holy Communion was substantially altered. The suggestion of the Polish Episcopal Conference and diocesan bishops was to receive Holy Communion on the hand during the pandemic, while receiving on the tongue had been the default form before the pandemic. The present studies investigated whether alterations in the form of receiving Holy Communion during the pandemic resulted in intragroup negativity. A total of 376 Polish Roman Catholics participated in two online studies. The most ambivalent emotions toward their religious community were experienced by the followers who recognized reception of Holy Communion on the hand only. Intergroup bias occurred within the “hand only” and the “mouth only” groups and consisted in out-group favoritism (within the “hand only”) and out-group derogation (“mouth only”) in their perception of religious orientation. Intergroup empathy bias occurred in the “hand only” and “spiritual reception” groups, which reported less empathy toward those of the out-group (“mouth only”) infected with SARS-CoV-2. The highest legitimacy of the Church authority was agreed upon by the supporters of both forms of receiving Holy Communion.

A Multiple Default Domain: a Semantics- Based Account

The objective of this study is to examine the use of the Masculine Sound Plural (MSP) as a default inflection in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Twenty-six fourth-year university students in the department of Arabic language and literature participated in the experiment and they were required to provide the plural inflection for 30 derived noun forms in MSA. The data used in this study consists of agentive derived forms that indicate human action meaning. The descriptive statistics approach (mean and standard deviation) was used to investigate the data; the results of the current study showed that MSP inflection was produced in a higher rate of frequency than the other possible forms of the irregular plural inflectional forms-broken plural (BP)- inflection that can also be actual part of the lexicon or schemata or background knowledge. The findings of this study support the accounts provided by the combinatorial processing mechanism with a suffixation formation that is more predictable than any other BP forms. The results of this study also provide more concrete evidence on the idea that there is initial mapping between the semantic features and the emergence of the default inflection which primarily motivates the emergence of the default form, and this semantic mapping is expected to add more to the properties that make the multidefault scenario more possible.

Embedded YARA rules: strengthening YARA rules utilising fuzzy hashing and fuzzy rules for malware analysis

The YARA rules technique is used in cybersecurity to scan for malware, often in its default form, where rules are created either manually or automatically. Creating YARA rules that enable analysts to label files as suspected malware is a highly technical skill, requiring expertise in cybersecurity. Therefore, in cases where rules are either created manually or automatically, it is desirable to improve both the performance and detection outcomes of the process. In this paper, two methods are proposed utilising the techniques of fuzzy hashing and fuzzy rules, to increase the effectiveness of YARA rules without escalating the complexity and overheads associated with YARA rules. The first proposed method utilises fuzzy hashing referred to as enhanced YARA rules in this paper, where if existing YARA rules fails to detect the inspected file as malware, then it is subjected to fuzzy hashing to assess whether this technique would identify it as malware. The second proposed technique called embedded YARA rules utilises fuzzy hashing and fuzzy rules to improve the outcomes further. Fuzzy rules countenance circumstances where data are imprecise or uncertain, generating a probabilistic outcome indicating the likelihood of whether a file is malware or not. The paper discusses the success of the proposed enhanced YARA rules and embedded YARA rules through several experiments on the collected malware and goodware corpus and their comparative evaluation against YARA rules.

Form Factors of an Economically Valuable Sal Tree (Shorea robusta) of Nepal

The accurate prediction of the volume of standing trees is a prerequisite for planning and decision making in sustainable forest management. In Nepal, limited information on form factor (i.e. the ratio of the volume of a tree to the product of its basal area and height) is available for economically important tree species. Thus, current management plans consider a simple approximation for all species irrespective of their height and diameter, which hampers the estimation of a sustainable harvest rate. Therefore, this study elaborates the form factor for Sal (Shorea robusta), an economically valuable tree of Nepal based on a random selection of 100 individual trees representing a wide range of diameters between 10 and 100 cm. Diameter and bark thickness were measured at every 1-meter interval of the length of the stem and branches until the diameter reached 10 cm. The analysis allowed for the estimation of an average form factor for Sal wood with 0.407 over bark and 0.336 under bark, while the form factor for the stem was 0.335 over bark and 0.281 under bark. The results indicate an increasing form factor until 70 cm diameter and a decreasing value for larger diameters, because of the large crowns of the mature Sal trees. We conclude that the default form factor of Sal (0.5) used in management planning results in an overestimation of standing tree volume. Using form factor according to diameter classes will allow a more accurate prediction of the standing volume.

Combination of fast hybrid classification and k value optimization in k-nn for video face recognition

Nowadays, the need for face recognition is no longer include images only but also videos. However, there are some challenges associated with the addition of this new technique such as how to determine the right pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification methods to obtain excellent performance. Although nowadays the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) is widely used, high computational costs due to numerous features of the dataset and large amount of training data makes adequate processing difficult. Several studies have been conducted to improve the performance of k-NN using the FHC (Fast Hybrid Classification) method by optimizing the local k values. One of the disadvantages of the FHC Method is that the k value used is still in the default form. Therefore, this research proposes the use of k-NN value optimization methods in FHC, thereby, increasing its accuracy. The Fast Hybrid Classification which combines the k-means clustering with k-NN, groups the training data into several prototypes called TLDS (Two Level Data Structure). Furthermore, two classification levels are applied to label test data, with the first used to determine the n number of prototypes with the same class in the test data. The second classification using the optimized k value in the k-NN method, is employed to sharpen the accuracy, when the same number of prototypes does not reach n. The evaluation results show that this method provides 86% accuracy and time performance of 3.3 seconds.

Le rapport entre changement et acquisition illustré au moyen du système du futur

The future tense system in French has undergone important reorganisations during the period from Middle to Modern French. During this period the synthetic future (parlera ‘will talk’) has changed from a system in which it expressed two semantic values to a system in which it expresses one single value. At the same time, the analytic future (va parler ‘is going to talk’) has undergone the opposite evolution having thus expanded its domain of use and covers nowadays a part of the domain formerly belonging to the synthetic future. At the same time, it is interesting to observe a parallel between the change of the grammatical forms of the future tenses and their acquisition by learners of FLE. Indeed, the learners seem to master the future tense form in progression (i.e. the analytic future) earlier than the future tense form in the process of reduction (i.e. the synthetic future). Furthermore, they tend to use the analytic future as their default form. In this contribution, three major factors are proposed as an explanation of this order of acquisition: 1. The frequency of the future tense forms in the oral and written input that the students receive in and outside the classroom; 2. The transfer from the students’ native language (Danish) which only possesses an analytical future form (will + infinitive); 3. The relation between the form and the function of the two future tenses. Finally, it is discussed to which extent the linguistic forms in the process of reduction should be taught.