Individual differences in indirect speech act processing found outside the language network

Face-to-face communication requires skills that go beyond core language abilities. In dialog, we routinely make inferences beyond the literal meaning of utterances and distinguish between different speech acts based on e.g. contextual cues. It is however not known whether such communicative skills potentially overlap with core language skills or other capacities, such as Theory of Mind (ToM). In this fMRI study we investigate these questions by capitalizing on individual variation in pragmatic skills in the general population. Based on behavioral data from 201 participants, we selected participants with higher vs lower pragmatic skills for the fMRI-study (N = 57). In the scanner, participants listened to dialogs including a direct or an indirect target utterance. The paradigm allowed participants at the whole group level to (passively) distinguish indirect from direct speech acts, as evidenced by a robust activity difference between these speech acts in an extended language network including ToM areas. Individual differences in pragmatic skills modulated activation in two additional regions outside the core language regions (one cluster in the left lateral parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus and one in the precuneus). The behavioral results indicate segregation of pragmatic skill from core language and ToM. In conclusion, contextualized and multimodal communication requires a set of inter-related pragmatic processes that are neurocognitively segregated: (1) from core language and (2) partly from ToM.

Divergence and convergence of cortical encoding during word reading in bilinguals

Word reading includes a series of cognitive processes that convert low-level visual characteristics to neural representations. However, the consistency of the neural mechanisms for processing these cognitive components across different writing systems in bilinguals remains inconclusive. Here, we explored this question by employing representational similarity analysis with a semantic access task involving Chinese words, English words and Chinese pinyin. Divergent spatial distribution patterns were detected for each type of brain representation across ideographic and alphabetic languages, resulting in 100% classification accuracy. Meanwhile, convergent cognitive components processing was found in the core language-related regions in left hemisphere, including the inferior frontal gyrus, temporal pole, superior and middle temporal gyrus, precentral gyrus and supplementary motor areas. Broadly, our findings indicated that the neural basis for word recognition of different writing systems in bilinguals was divergent in spatial locations of neural representations but convergent in functions, which supported and enriched the assimilation-accommodation hypothesis.

Efficient compilation of algebraic effect handlers

The popularity of algebraic effect handlers as a programming language feature for user-defined computational effects is steadily growing. Yet, even though efficient runtime representations have already been studied, most handler-based programs are still much slower than hand-written code. This paper shows that the performance gap can be drastically narrowed (in some cases even closed) by means of type-and-effect directed optimising compilation. Our approach consists of source-to-source transformations in two phases of the compilation pipeline. Firstly, elementary rewrites, aided by judicious function specialisation, exploit the explicit type and effect information of the compiler’s core language to aggressively reduce handler applications. Secondly, after erasing the effect information further rewrites in the backend of the compiler emit tight code. This work comes with a practical implementation: an optimising compiler from Eff, an ML style language with algebraic effect handlers, to OCaml. Experimental evaluation with this implementation demonstrates that in a number of benchmarks, our approach eliminates much of the overhead of handlers, outperforms capability-passing style compilation and yields competitive performance compared to hand-written OCaml code as well Multicore OCaml’s dedicated runtime support.

Learning by Doing Intervention: Addressing Phonological Difficulties of Children through Audiolingual Method and Total Physical Response

Phonological awareness is a critical skill that children must master during the early foundations of literacy. It is considered a highly accurate predictor of a child’s success in learning to read. However, at the expected age, there are cases in which children have not developed phonological awareness that consequently result in poor reading skills. This case study sought to determine the alphabet knowledge of two seven-year-old children and address their difficulties in phonological awareness through the alphabetic code. The researchers conducted ten sessions of phonological interventions to children with identified language learning difficulties in reading. The data analysis and collection process included curriculum document reviews, diagnostic assessments, phonological interventions, and evaluation. Diagnostic results indicated that the children have difficulties in letter recognition of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) patterns, blending, and segmentation of phonemes. However, anchoring on the principles of learning-by-doing delivered through oral-situational as a core language approach, the interventions in this case study were found effective for phonics instruction. The audio-lingual method and the total physical response in learning phonics, or letter sounds, activated children’s basic phonological skills. Repetition, drilling, memorisation and performing language or vocabulary concepts using physical movement to react to verbal input can lessen the phonological difficulties of children. In light of the current global situation, no previous studies have applied a case study utilizing both audiolingualism and total physical response to address the phonological issues of non-readers. Hence, this study offers scientific and pedagogical implications.