Nymph Piss and Gravy Orgies: Local and Global Contrast Effects in Relational Humor

How does the relation between two words create humor? In this paper, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local context of the words within the word pairs (local contrast). Global contrast was operationalized as lexical-semantic norms for single-words and local contrast was operationalized as the orthographic, phonological, and semantic distance between the two words in the pair. Through crowdsourced (Study 1) and best-worst (Study 2) ratings of the humor of a large set of word pairs (i.e., compounds), we find evidence of both global and local contrast on compound-word humor. Specifically, we find that humor arises when there is a violation of expectations at the local level, between the individual words that make up the word pair, even after accounting for violations at the global level relative to the entire language. Semantic variables (arousal, dominance, concreteness) were stronger predictors of word pair humor whereas form-related variables (number of letters, phonemes, letter frequency) were stronger predictors of single-word humor. Moreover, we also find evidence for the specific ways in which semantic dissimilarity can increase humor, by using local contrast to defuse the impact of low-valence words by making them seem amusing, or to enhance the incongruence of highly imageable pairs of concrete words.

Does the color of your letters depend on your language? The influence of regulatory factors in grapheme-color synesthesia across seven languages.

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are influenced by linguistic properties (letter frequency, phonetic similarity, etc.), and plausibly reveal the characteristics of underlying letter representations. Despite their clear linguistic origin, these influences (termed “Regulatory Factors”, RFs) are almost always studied in a single language, typically English. Here, we measure the influence of three RFs (previously examined only in English) in Dutch, English, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish synesthetes. For two RFs, effect size significantly differed between languages. In contrast, an RF which we predicted to be universal (because it is shaped by prelinguistic shape-color associations) did not differ between languages. Our results suggest that monolingual synesthesia studies should be interpreted with caution. Furthermore, they show how synesthetic associations offer an exceptional opportunity to study linguistic and prelinguistic influences on letter representations in different languages.

Letter Frequency In Indonesian Language Using Proportion Estimation

Cryptanalysis is a process of finding weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms and using these weaknesses to decipher the ciphertext without knowing the secret key. One technique of cryptanalysis is frequency analysis, using the frequency of letters to translate ciphertext to plaintext. Frequency analysis is usually used to test the success of an encryption algorithm. Every language in the world has its own property in letter frequency. This made every language had a different aspect to make sure the algorithm working properly for securing plaintext. This makes it important to know the frequency analysis in Indonesian. The method that was used in this research paper is the proportion estimate to estimate the error from the result and the data we collected is from 10,000 articles that were scrapped from the internet. The result of this paper is the frequency of each letter in the Indonesian language.

Sound-Color-Symbolic Perception of Poetic Texts by Synesthets

Introduction. The article is devoted to discussing complex synesthets’ capability of sound-colour-symbol analysis of poetic texts in order to investigate their perception depending on subconsciousness which activity manifests itself in the form of symbolic images of the unconscious (Jung, 1968). Research methods. Synesthets were offered the text and the recording of R. L. Stivenson’s poem “The Land of Counterpane” in original and variants of its translation by V. Brjusov and О. Mandelstam (the last one with recording). The tasks were as follws: to read aloud or to listen to the poems trying not to take into account meaning of words, to describe the colour of the texts depending on sound/letter frequency and to report us their image-symbol associations based on sound-colour of the texts. These data were analyzed from the point of view of Jung’s depth analytical psychology and psychology of colour. Results and their discussion. Sound-colour analysis executed by respondents show that their perception of sound frequency differs depending on individual peculiarities of synesthesia. Synesthets’ spontaneous incidental image-symbol associated with sound and colour of the same poems have a tendency to be different in most cases and rarely coincide. Various metaphoric images can have close symbolic meaning determined by poet’s primary motivation with help of phonetic means of language expression. Received data show that synesthets’ perception depends on the language, the text is written in, and emotionality/inemotionality (characteristic feature offered by one respondent) of reader’s manner of reciting in the recording. Image symbols evoked while reading and listening to English and Russian texts can be the same in case the tested person regards the translation more successful. Conclusion. Image symbols associated by complex synesthts with sound and colour of poetic texts appear in the subconscious on the ground of synesthemia (co-sensation and co-emotion). Sound-colour-symbol perception is determined by individual peculiarities of synesthesia and synesthets’ personal experience.

Frequency effects on spelling in Hebrew-speaking younger and older adults

Previous research has documented conflicting findings regarding the effect of word frequency on spelling in older adults. The current study examines spelling in Hebrew, in which it is easier to define the type of likely misspellings in each word. Younger and older Hebrew speakers spelled 120 single words that differed in word and letter frequency. Results show that all participants made more phonological substitutions of target letters on low-frequency words and on words with low-frequency letters. Yet, younger adults had a lower percentage of correct responses than did older adults, especially on low-frequency words. Vocabulary knowledge eliminated this age effect. We suggest that aging leads to greater reliance on full lexical retrieval of spelling instead of on sublexical phoneme-to-grapheme processing, due to years of exposure to written language, increase in vocabulary, and consolidation of orthographic representations.

Letter Frequency Analysis of Languages Using Latin Alphabet

The evaluation of the peculiarities of alphabets, particularly the frequency of letters is essential when designing keyboards, analysing texts, designing alphabet-based games, and doing some text mining. Thus, it is important to determine what might be useful for designers of text input tools, and of other technologies related to sets of letters. Knowledge of common features among different languages gives an opportunity to take advantage of the experience of other languages. Nowadays an increasing amount of texts is published on the Internet. In order to adequately compare the frequencies of letters in different languages used in the online space, Wikipedia texts have been selected as a source material for investigation. This paper presents the Method of the Adjacent Letter Frequency Differences in the frequency line, which helps to evaluate frequency breakpoints. This is a uniform evaluation criterion for 25 main languages using Latin script in order to highlight the similarities and differences among them. Research focuses on the letter frequency analysis in the area of rarely used native letters and frequently used foreign letters in a particular language. The frequency of the letters is one of the factors that determines the location of the keys for the language specific letters on the keyboard.