Search results for "Semantic"

Report of the Scientific Committee of the Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN) on the presence and safety of plastics as contaminants…

2020

* This record is given in both English and Spanish. The use of plastics is widespread in both industry and domestic life as food packaging material and as a material that comes into contact with food. Therefore, plastics and their environmental impact, especially in the marine environment, arouse great interest and concern. Microplastics have been the focus of most of the studies carried out so far due to their growing presence in the natural environment and their potential to be transferred between trophic levels. It is necessary not only to make an exhaustive assessment of the presence of microplastics in the environment and food, but also of their effects on human’s health. This report a…

Semantic structures of timbre emerging from social and acoustic descriptions of music

2011

The perceptual attributes of timbre have inspired a considerable amount of multidisciplinary research, but because of the complexity of the phenomena, the approach has traditionally been confined to laboratory conditions, much to the detriment of its ecological validity. In this study, we present a purely bottom-up approach for mapping the concepts that emerge from sound qualities. A social media ( http://www.last.fm ) is used to obtain a wide sample of verbal descriptions of music (in the form of tags) that go beyond the commonly studied concept of genre, and from this the underlying semantic structure of this sample is extracted. The structure that is thereby obtained is then evaluated th…

Space (Adpositions)

2014

Think globally: Cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension

2011

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003 ; Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identi…

Does the proportion of associatively related pairs modulate the associative priming effect at very brief stimulus-onset asynchronies?

2002

A number of experiments have shown that the magnitude of the associative priming effect increases substantially when there is a high proportion of associatively related pairs in the list when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and target is long (more than 400 ms). In the present series of experiments we manipulated the proportion of associatively related pairs when the SOA was very brief (less than 200 ms). If processing of a target word is facilitated automatically by the prior presentation of a related prime, the occurrence of priming should be unaffected by the proportion of related pairs in the list. Experiment 1 showed a robust relatedness proportion effect obtained in …

The influence of scene and object orientation on the scene consistency effect

2019

Abstract Contextual regularities help us make sense of our visual environment. In scenes, semantically consistent objects are typically better recognized than inconsistent ones (e.g., a toaster vs. printer in a kitchen). What is the role of object and scene orientation in this so-called scene consistency effect? We presented consistent and inconsistent objects either upright (Experiment 1) or inverted (rotated 180°; Experiment 2) on upright, inverted, and scrambled background scenes. In Experiment 1, on upright scenes, consistent objects were recognized with higher accuracy than inconsistent ones, and we observed N300/N400 event-related potentials (ERPs) reflecting object-scene semantic pro…

Safety signs on agricultural machinery: Pictorials do not always successfully convey their messages to target users.

2015

This study investigated the extent to which a sample of Italian users comprehended safety pictorials used on agricultural machinery. A questionnaire with 12 safety pictorials was administered to 248 users of agricultural machinery. For each of the pictorials, the participants were asked to select the most appropriate description of four written choices. The investigated safety pictorials were, in general, not well comprehended. Two different classes of participants were identified, each with a different level of comprehension. The participants with better comprehension were characterized by the regular use of agricultural machinery and frequent previous exposure to pictorials. The need for …

The picture superiority effect in associative memory: A developmental study.

2018

We tested whether semantic relatedness between to-be-remembered items and item presentation format (pictorial vs. verbal) affects associative recall. Fifty-nine children (11-13 years old) and forty young adults (age 18-30) completed a learning and recall task for semantically related (e.g., padlock-key) and unrelated (e.g., lemon-piano) picture-picture, word-picture, and word-word pairs. The data revealed memory advantage for semantically related item pairs, and for pictures compared to words. A picture superiority effect was found exclusively for pure picture pairs. Despite pronounced differences in memory accuracy, the effect of semantic relatedness and the picture superiority effect were…

Psycholinguistic norms for 320 fixed expressions (idioms and proverbs) in French

2018

International audience; We provide psycholinguistic norms for a new set of 160 French idiomatic expressions and 160 proverbs: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. Different analyses (reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The norms can be downloaded as supplemental material.

Can Word Puzzles be Tailored to Improve Different Dimensions of Verbal Fluency? A Report of an Intervention Study

2016

Verbal fluency is commonly used as a proxy measure of executive functioning, as it involves cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. Previous research has demonstrated that crosswords can be a useful means of improving verbal fluency, results consistent with the cognitive reserve hypothesis; the form of verbal fluency affected has, however, differed across studies. The present study sought to assess the extent to which it was possible to target phonemic (PVF) and semantic verbal fluency (SVF) separately through word puzzles designed to focus on semantic/thematic and structural clues respectively. Fifty-three university students were randomly assigned to one of three gr…