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Artificial Grammar Learning
Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is a paradigm of study within cognitive psychology and linguistics. Its goal is to investigate the processes that underlie human language learning Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and ... by testing subjects' ability to learn a made-up grammar in a laboratory setting. It was developed to evaluate the processes of human language learning but has also been utilized to study implicit learning in a more general sense. The area of interest is typically the subjects' ability to detect patterns and statistical regularities during a training phase and then use their new knowledge of those patterns in a testing phase. The testing phase can either use the symbols or sounds used in the training phase or transfer the patterns to another set of symbols o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics. History Philosophically, ruminations on the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato had suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with innate ideas and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Encoding (memory)
Memory has the ability to encode, Storage (memory), store and Recall (memory), recall information. Memories give an organism the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows a perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from long-term memory. Working memory stores information for immediate use or manipulation, which is aided through hooking onto previously archived items already present in the long-term memory of an individual. History Encoding is still relatively new and unexplored but the origins of encoding date back to age-old philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato. A major figure in the history of encoding is Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909). Ebbinghaus was a pioneer in the field of memory research. Using himself as a subject he studied how we learn and forget information by repeating a list of nonsense syllables to the rhythm of a metron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology (linguistics), morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and #Theoretical frameworks, theoretical grammar. Fluency in a particular language variety involves a speaker internalizing these rules, many or most of which are language acquisition, acquired by observing other speakers, as opposed to intentional study or language teaching, instruction. Much of this internalization occurs during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves more direct instruction. The term ''grammar'' can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Grammatical Induction
Grammar induction (or grammatical inference) is the process in machine learning of learning a formal grammar (usually as a collection of ''re-write rules'' or '' productions'' or alternatively as a finite-state machine or automaton of some kind) from a set of observations, thus constructing a model which accounts for the characteristics of the observed objects. More generally, grammatical inference is that branch of machine learning where the instance space consists of discrete combinatorial objects such as strings, trees and graphs. Grammar classes Grammatical inference has often been very focused on the problem of learning finite-state machines of various types (see the article Induction of regular languages for details on these approaches), since there have been efficient algorithms for this problem since the 1980s. Since the beginning of the century, these approaches have been extended to the problem of inference of context-free grammars and richer formalisms, such as multip ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Adaptive Grammar
An adaptive grammar is a formal grammar that explicitly provides mechanisms within the Formal system, formalism to allow its own Production rule (formal languages), production rules to be manipulated. Overview John N. Shutt defines adaptive grammar as a grammatical formalism that allows rule sets (aka sets of production rules) to be explicitly manipulated within a grammar. Types of manipulation include rule addition, deletion, and modification. Early history The first description of grammar adaptivity (though not under that name) in the literature is generallyChristiansen, Henning, "Survey of Adaptable Grammars" ''ACM SIGPLAN Notices'', Vol. 25 No. 11, pp. 35-44, Nov. 1990.Shutt, John N., Recursive Adaptable Grammars', Master’s Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1993. (16 December 2003 emended revision.)Jackson, Quinn Tyler, Adapting to Babel: Adaptivity and Context-Sensitivity in Parsing', Ibis Publications, Plymouth, Massachusetts, March 2006. taken to be in a paper by A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Chomsky Hierarchy
The Chomsky hierarchy in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a formal language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. The linguist Noam Chomsky theorized that four different classes of formal grammars existed that could generate increasingly complex languages. Each class can also completely generate the language of all inferior classes (set inclusive). History The general idea of a hierarchy of grammars was first described by Noam Chomsky in "Three models for the description of language" during the formalization of transformational-generative grammar (TGG). Marcel-Paul Schützenberger also played a role in the development of the theory of formal languages; the paper "The algebraic theory of context free languages" describes the modern hierarchy, including context-free grammars. Independently, alongside linguis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
FMRI
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases. The primary form of fMRI uses the blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) contrast, discovered by Seiji Ogawa in 1990. This is a type of specialized brain and body scan used to map neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals by imaging the change in blood flow ( hemodynamic response) related to energy use by brain cells. Since the early 1990s, fMRI has come to dominate brain mapping research because it does not involve the use of injections, surgery, the ingestion of substances, or exposure to ionizing radiation. This measure is frequently corrupted by noise from various sources; hence, statistical procedures are used to extract the underlying signa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Peter Hagoort
Peter Hagoort (born January 19, 1954) is a Dutch neuroscientist who studies the neurobiology of language. Education and career Hagoort was born in Oudewater and studied psychology and biology at Utrecht University and experimental psychology at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he received his doctorate in 1990 under the supervision of Willem Levelt. He then worked as a project manager at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He has been a professor at the Institute for Cognition and Informatics of the Radboud University Nijmegen since 1999. He is a founding director of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen and also a director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen since 2006. His group uses imaging techniques such as PET, MEG and functional MRI to study language processing in the brain. For example, he examined how patients with language disorders (such as patients with aphasia, dyslexia, autism) compensate for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Broca's Area
Broca's area, or the Broca area (, also , ), is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant Cerebral hemisphere, hemisphere, usually the left, of the Human brain, brain with functions linked to speech production. Language processing in the brain, Language processing has been linked to Broca's area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior inferior frontal gyrus (pars triangularis) (BA45) of the brain. Since then, the approximate region he identified has become known as Broca's area, and the deficit in language production as Broca's aphasia, also called expressive aphasia. Broca's area is now typically defined in terms of the pars opercularis and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, represented in Korbinian Brodmann, Brodmann's Brodmann area, cytoarchitectonic map as Brodmann area 44 and Brodmann area 45 of the dominant hemisphere. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has show ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Agrammatism
Agrammatism is a characteristic of non-fluent aphasia. Individuals with agrammatism present with speech that is characterized by containing mainly content words, with a lack of function words. For example, when asked to describe a picture of children playing in the park, the affected individual responds with, "trees..children..run." People with agrammatism may have telegraphic speech, a unique speech pattern with simplified formation of sentences (in which many or all function words are omitted), akin to that found in telegraph messages. Deficits in agrammaticism are often language-specific, however—in other words, "agrammaticism" in speakers of one language may present differently from in speakers of another. Errors made in agrammatism depend on the severity of aphasia. In severe forms language production is severely telegraphic and in more mild to moderate cases necessary elements for sentence construction are missing. Common errors include errors in tense, number, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Semantics
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication. Lexical semantics is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines whether words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another. Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal semantics (natural language), Formal semantics relies o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Pragmatics
In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how Context (linguistics), context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance theory, relevance and Conversation analysis, conversation,Mey, Jacob L. (1993) ''Pragmatics: An Introduction''. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001). as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax, which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called ''pragmatic competence''. In 1938 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
