Complementing quantitative typology with behavioral approaches: Evidence for typological universals

<p>This study addressed the potential methodological issues effect of attentional condition on subsequent vocabulary development from a different perspective, which addressed several potential methodological issues of previous research that have been based on psycholinguistic notion of second language learner as a limited capacity processor. The issue of whether learners paying attention to the processing of input for meaning can simultaneously pay attention to process form remains methodologically unclear issue in the area of reactivity. A qualitative study was conducted on six intermediate English as a foreign language learners. Participants were assigned to one of the three types of reading comprehension tasks. Concurrent data of think aloud was employed to establish learners’ attention. Results showed that attending learners’ attention to processing of lexical forms while reading for meaning has an effect to induce the issue of reactivity effect on subsequent vocabulary development.</p>

Craparo, Ardino, Gori and Caretti recently published an interesting brief report in Psychiatry Investigation concerning the role of childhood trauma, dissociation, and alexithymia in alcohol dependence. Another interesting finding of the study concerned the negative correlation between the age of the first relational trauma and the severity of dissociative symptoms. This is consistent with a wealth of existing research emphasizing that adverse childhood experiences can alter the affect regulation circuits (alexithymia) and the possibility of integrating mental, somatic, and relational experiences (dissociation), thus constituting a risk-factor for the development of addictive disorders, including the so-called behavioral addictions such as pathological gambling 2 and Internet addiction. The study by Craparo and colleagues provides additional evidence in a growing field for the influence exerted by negative childhood environment and relationships in the development of addictive disorders. As the literature indicates, people suffering from addictive disorders may in fact use substances or excessive behaviors as an external regulator and a self medication for their dysregulated feelings and painful states of mind. This then supports a psychopathological model according to which

Predicting the progression of mild cognitive impairment using machine learning: A systematic, quantitative and critical review.

1. In order to establish biological and/or methodological explanations for the wide variability in recovery (50-100%) of labelled CO2 after administration of [13C]bicarbonate or [14C]bicarbonate, 34 human bicarbonate studies involving 480 subjects were analysed, and potential methodological issues were investigated in the laboratory. 2. Overall, continuous infusion studies reported a higher recovery than bolus studies (84 +/- 11% versus 69 +/- 12%; P < 0.001). No significant differences in recovery were found between 14C and 13C studies, children and adults, obese and lean subjects, or rest and exercise (steady state). Higher recoveries were found during feeding than during fasting (84 +/- 8% versus 74 +/- 7%; P < 0.001). Different methods used to analyse the results (0-10%) and different study protocols, which include differences in the duration of infusions and background drift in 13C enrichment (0-10%), contribute to the variability. 3. The laboratory studies suggest multiple sources of potential error, including loss of CO2 from the scintillation fluid (up to > 30%, but only in 14C studies in which the scintillation fluid is not alkalized), diffusion of CO2 through syringes and tubing (0 to > 10%), non-linearity of CO2 analysers (up to 8%), inaccuracies in the measurement of bicarbonate concentrations (13C studies) or the strength of CO2-trapping agents (14C studies; 0-8%). 4. It is concluded that much of the variability in the recovery of labelled bicarbonate is likely to be attributable to methodological differences, and that attention to these will ensure better interpretation of metabolic studies that involve oxidation of carbon-labelled substrates.

A population can only acquire new genes either through the immigration of individuals from surrounding populations. One of the greatest advantages of microsatellite marker is that DNA sequence information is needed to perform the assay. Thus, a study was carried out to evaluate genetic similarity and distance in strains of Clariid species (Clarias gariepinus and Heterobranchus longifilis). In achieving this, 25 blood samples were gotten from Clarias gariepinus and 10 from Heterobranchus longifilis for DNA extraction. DNA was extracted, amplified and scored using seven microsatellite markers. The markers were Cga01, Cga02, Cga03, Cga05, Cga06, Cga09 and Cga10. The gel images were then subjected to molecular analysis using Genalex software to determine their base pairs and evaluate their genetic variability. The populations examined were Clarias gariepinus of River Dudusingaya (CgD), Ghari (CgG), Thomas (CgT), Karaye (CgK), Bagwai (CgB); and Heterobranchus longifilis of River Bagwai (HlB) and Ghari (HlG). Among the populations sampled, the genetic similarity ranged from 0.018 for CgD and CgT populations to 0.079 for CgT and HlG populations. The genetic distance observed in the populations ranged from 0.112 for CgG and CgB populations to 0.998 for CgT and CgK populations. The Clariid species that were closer indicated that the river locations shared tributaries and the Clariid species exchanged genetic materials over a long period of time. On the other hand, those that were farther apart indicated that they shared little or no tributaries. It can be concluded that the studied populations were not genetically pure but heterogeneous with varying degrees of genetic similarity and distance therefore, there were no. exhibition of genetic uniqueness and the populations were not isolated.

I. The Problem: Childhood Obesity—A Burgeoning Epidemic e490II. Childhood Obesity Research Summit.........e490III. Pathophysiology and Morbidity ofChildhood Obesity e490A. Pathophysiology of Obesity e490B. Medical Consequences of Childhood Obesity. . .e490C. Psychosocial and Societal Consequences ofChildhood Obesity e490IV. Current Healthcare Practices in ChildhoodObesity Prevention and Treatment e492A. Lifestyle Assessment: Diet and Physical Activity . . . .e492B. Clinical Assessment e493C. Psychosocial/Behavioral Assessment .......e493D. Implementing Effective Prevention andTreatment Options: Diet e494E. Implementing Effective Prevention and TreatmentOptions: Exercise and Sedentary Behaviors . . . .e495F. Implementing Effective Prevention TreatmentOptions: Family and Behavioral Approaches . . .e496G. Behavioral Management e497H. Medical and Pharmacological Management. . . .e497I. Surgical Management e498V. Barriers to Optimum Care e498A. Healthcare System Factors e4981. Preparedness of Providers e4982. Models of Coverage and Care e4993. Uninsurance and Underinsurance AmongChildren and Families e5004. Healthcare Providers and Settings asRole Models e500B. The Challenge of Behavior Change ........e5011. Motivational Interviewing for Pediatric Obesity. .e5012. Psychosocial Factors InfluencingBehavior Change e5023. Environmental Factors InfluencingBehavioral Change e503VI. Practice-Based Resources for Preventionand Management e503A. Models From Other Disciplines e5031. Adult Chronic Care Model e5032. Treatment of Heart Failure e5043. Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus .....e5044. Treatment of Childhood Asthma.........e505B. Public Health Measures forChildhood Obesity e5061. Tobacco Control: Implications forChildhood Obesity e506C. Specific Research Issues e5061. Specifying Priorities in the Context of aComplex, Multifactorial Problem ........e5062. Taking a Developmental Approach .......e5073. Engaging Stakeholders e5074. Targeting the Appropriate Outcome .......e508VII. Research Challenges e509A. Research in the Busy Practice e509B. Bring Research Into Practices: Web-BasedAssessment for the PediatricObesity Clinic e509C. Research Agenda: NHLBI and thePediatric Heart Network e510D. Research Agenda: The Children’sOncology Group e510E. Research Agenda: CDC e511F. Research Agenda: Foundations e511VIII. Research and Policy: KnowledgeTranslation e512A. From Practice to Policy to Practice ........e512IX. Concluding Remarks e512Appendix A: Planning Committee e513Appendix B: Presenters e513

This study presents linguistically augmented models of phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) using different linguistic features (factors) on the top of the source surface form. The architecture addresses two major problems occurring in machine translation, namely the poor performance of direct translation from a highly-inflected and morphologically complex language into morphologically poor languages, and the data sparseness issue, which becomes a significant challenge under low-resource conditions. We use three factors (lemma, part-of-speech tags, and morphological features) to enrich the input side with additional information to improve the quality of direct translation from Arabic to Chinese, considering the importance and global presence of this language pair as well as the limitation of work on machine translation between these two languages. In an effort to deal with the issue of the out of vocabulary (OOV) words and missing words, we propose the best combination of factors and models based on alternative paths. The proposed models were compared with the standard PBSMT model which represents the baseline of this work, and two enhanced approaches tokenized by a state-of-the-art external tool that has been proven to be useful for Arabic as a morphologically rich and complex language. The experiment was performed with a Moses decoder on freely available data extracted from a multilingual corpus from United Nation documents (MultiUN). Results of a preliminary evaluation in terms of BLEU scores show that the use of linguistic features on the Arabic side considerably outperforms baseline and tokenized approaches, the system can consistently reduce the OOV rate as well.

Language teacher agency (LTA) remains understudied in ESL, EFL, and bilingual contexts. Less is known about affordances and constraints of diverse methodologies that are used to explore this concept. This study, therefore, aims to examine how collaborative autoethnography as a methodology plays a role in LTA research. Specifically, three language teachers, through writing reflection journals and conducting group meetings, reflected upon and discussed the use of collaborative autoethnography to examine LTA. This study explores the following research question: What are the affordances and constraints of collaborative autoethnography as a research methodology to examine LTA? The findings demonstrate that collaborative autoethnography can be a productive tool to yield meaningful findings regarding LTA, as shown in the three emerging themes: (1) promoting intentional reflections on teaching and positioning, (2) promoting rigorous research process, and (3) posing potential methodological and ethical issues. Implications regarding research and professional development are also discussed.

The influence of spatio-temporal factors on genetic variation of infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) is an active area of research. Using host-isolate pairs collected from 1966 to 2004 for 237 IHNV isolates from California and southern Oregon, we examined genetic variation of the mid-G gene of IHNV that could be quantified across times and geographic locations. Information hypothesized to influence genetic variation was environmental and/or fish host demographic factors, viz. location (inland or coastal), year of isolation, habitat (river, lake, or hatchery), the agent factors of subgroup (LI or LII) and serotype (1, 2, or 3), and the host factors of fish age (juvenile or adult), sex (male or female), and season of spawning run (spring, fall, late fall, winter). Inverse distance weighting (IDW) was performed to create isopleth maps of the genetic distances of each subgroup. IDW maps showed that more genetic divergence was predicted for isolates found inland (for both subgroups: LI and LII) than for coastal watershed isolates. A mixed-effect beta regression with a logit link function was used to seek associations between genetic distances and hypothesized explanatory factors. The model that best described genetic distance contained the factors of location, year of isolation, and the interaction between location and year. Our model suggests that genetic distance was greater for isolates collected from 1966 to 2004 at inland locations than for isolates found in coastal watersheds during the same years. The agreement between the IDW and beta regression analyses quantitatively supports our conclusion that, during this time period, more genetic variation existed within subgroup LII in inland watersheds than within coastal LI isolates.

In the postgenomic era, the large-scale data, such as genome sequences, mRNA sequences, and protein sequences, increase rapidly. It is desired to develop the computational approaches that can derive and analyze useful information from them to promote the development of biomedicine and drug design. Meanwhile, in order to understand how proteinprotein interactions and other complex interactions in a living system get integrated in complex nonlinear networks and regulate cell function, a new discipline, called "Systems Biology", is created.

HLA alleles have been determined in individuals from the Republic of Macedonia by DNA typing and sequencing. HLA-A, -B, -DR, -DQ allele frequencies and extended haplotypes have been for the first time determined and the results compared to those of other Mediterraneans, particularly with their neighbouring Greeks. Genetic distances, neighbor-joining dendrograms and correspondence analysis have been performed. The following conclusions have been reached: 1) Macedonians belong to the "older" Mediterranean substratum, like Iberians (including Basques), North Africans, Italians, French, Cretans, Jews, Lebanese, Turks (Anatolians), Armenians and Iranians, 2) Macedonians are not related with geographically close Greeks, who do not belong to the "older" Mediterranenan substratum, 3) Greeks are found to have a substantial relatedness to sub-Saharan (Ethiopian) people, which separate them from other Mediterranean groups. Both Greeks and Ethiopians share quasi-specific DRB1 alleles, such as *0305, *0307, *0411, *0413, *0416, *0417, *0420, *1110, *1112, *1304 and *1310. Genetic distances are closer between Greeks and Ethiopian/sub-Saharan groups than to any other Mediterranean group and finally Greeks cluster with Ethiopians/sub-Saharans in both neighbour joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses. The time period when these relationships might have occurred was ancient but uncertain and might be related to the displacement of Egyptian-Ethiopian people living in pharaonic Egypt.

Background : As digital data in multiple languages increases, analyzing multilingual legal texts has become increasingly important. However, existing models often struggle with the complexity of legal language and cross-lingual understanding, making accurate classification and interpretation challenging. Objective : The study aims to develop a natural language processing multilingual legal data model (NMLDM) to address domain-specific legal terminology, adversarial and prompt injection attacks, data sparsity, and the interpretability and transparency of legal text classification. Methodology : The proposed NMLDM introduces XRXNet, a hybrid model combining XLM-R and XLNet transformer-based language models for robust multilingual legal text analysis. NMLDM integrates data collection, executes preprocessing with an improvised mBERT tokenizer, and performs feature extraction using legal-specific lexicons and linguistic features. XRXNet combines cross-lingual understanding and long-range dependency modeling to classify legal documents accurately while mitigating adversarial and prompt injection attacks. Results : The proposed framework shows exceptional performance across several metrics after evaluating NMLDM with existing models. The simulation results show that NMLDM attained an accuracy of 99.66%, highlighting its competence. Thus, the proposed model shows promise for analyzing multilingual legal documents.

I used DNA fingerprinting to provide the first analysis of the genetic composition of western pond turtle (Clemmys marmorata( populations in Washington, Oregon, and California. Populations of the western pond turtle in Washington and northern Oregon are rapidly approaching extinction. Genetic similarity within the largest northern populations, which are located inland, is high. An analysis of population substructure (Fst ) revealed significant genetic divergence between inland populations, indicating a lack of dispersal and gene flow between sites. In contrast, northern coastal sites are not genetically distinct, but there are few if any viable populations remaining in this region. Genetic variability within southern California populations is a great deal higher than in northern inland sites. Similarly, a low Fst value indicated a lack of genetic differentiation between southern sites. An inter-regional analysis of population substructure (Fst = 0.24) revealed a significant degree of genetic divergence between geographical regions throughout the range. In addition, an estimate of western pond turtle phylogeny showed a genetic break in the species between northern and southern populations. Both population subdivision and phylogenetic analyses suggest a lack of appreciable gene flow between geographical regions for a considerable period of time. Genetic analyses support traditional subdivision based solely on the morphological variation of Clemmys marmorata into two subspecies: northern Clemmys marmorata marmorata and southern Clemmys marmorata pallida. Recovery of dwindling northern populations must combine demographic and genetic considerations. A first step should be to preserve local gene pools while augmenting population numbers, with the goal of preventing the extinction of this genetically and morphologically distinct subspecies. La falta de variación genetica en poblaciones norteñas de la tortuga de agua dulce del oeste (Clemmys marmorata).

Social scientists are frequently interested in how populations evolve over time. Creating poststratification weights for surveys, for example, requires information on the weighting variables’ joint distribution in the target population. Typically, however, population data are sparsely available across time periods. Even when population data are observed, the content and structure of the data—which variables are observed and whether their marginal or joint distributions are known—differ across time, in ways that preclude straightforward interpolation. As a consequence, survey weights are often based only on the small subset of auxiliary variables whose joint population distribution is observed regularly over time, and thus fail to take full advantage of auxiliary information. To address this problem, we develop a dynamic Bayesian ecological inference model for estimating multivariate categorical distributions from sparse, irregular, and noisy data on their marginal (or partially joint) distributions. Our approach combines (1) a Dirichlet sampling model for the observed margins conditional on the unobserved cell proportions; (2) a set of equations encoding the logical relationships among different population quantities; and (3) a Dirichlet transition model for the period-specific proportions that pools information across time periods. We illustrate this method by estimating annual U.S. phone-ownership rates by race and region based on population data irregularly available between 1930 and 1960. This approach may be useful in a wide variety of contexts where scholars wish to make dynamic ecological inferences about interior cells from marginal data. A new R package estsubpop implements the method.

Case, Word Order, and Language Learnability: Insights from Connectionist Modeling Gary Lupyan (il24@cornell.edu) Morten H. Christiansen (mhc27@cornell.edu) Department of Psychology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 USA Abstract How does the existence of case systems, and strict word order patterns a↵ect the learnability of a given language? We present a series of connectionist sim- ulations, suggesting that both case and strict word order may facilitate syntactic acquisition by a se- quential learning device. Our results are consis- tent with typological data concerning the frequen- cies with which di↵erent type of word order pat- terns occur across the languages of the world. Our model also accommodates patterns of syntactic de- velopment across several di↵erent languages. We conclude that non-linguistic constraints on general sequential-learning devices may help explain the re- lationship between case, word order, and learnabil- ity of individual languages. Introduction In language acquisition, children are faced with many formidable tasks, yet they normally acquire most of their native language within the first five years of life. One of the most difficult of these tasks involves mapping a sequence of words onto some sort of interpretation of what that sequence is supposed to mean. That is, in order for the child to under- stand a sentence, she needs to determine the gram- matical roles of the individual words so that she can work out who did what to whom. Although the chil- dren appear to bring powerful statistical learning mechanisms to bear on the acquisition tasks (e.g., Sa↵ran, Aslin, & Newport 1996), the existence of linguistic universals common across radically di↵er- ent languages (Greenberg 1963) points to the pres- ence of innate constraints on such learning. Without such constraints, it becomes difficult to explain why there are few, if any, Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) languages (van Everbroeck, 1999) even though in principle such a language appears to be as good as any other. In this paper, we propose that these con- straints may arise from non-linguistic limitations on the sequential learning of statistical structure, and examine how this perspective may shed light on how children learn to map the words in sentences onto their appropriate grammatical roles. There are two major ways in which languages signal syntactic rela- tionships and grammatical roles—word order (WO), and case markings. In a strict WO language like En- glish, declarative sentences follow a Subject-Verb- Object (SVO) pattern. It is the occurrence of the subject in the first position, and the object in the second, that allows the hearer to comprehend who did what to whom. In contrast, languages such as Russian or Japanese allow multiple word orders and rely on case markings to disambiguate subjects from objects. For instance, Masha lubit Petyoo (SVO), Petyoo lubit Masha (OVS), and Lubit Petyoo Masha (VOS) are all grammatical in Russian and all mean Mary loves Peter (albeit with di↵erent emphases on the constituents), due to the nominative -a, and ac- cusative -u case markers. While long-standing theories describe acquisition of language through an innate language acquisition device (e.g., Pinker, 1995), an alternative approach that is gaining ground is the adaptation of linguistic structures to the human brain rather than vice versa (e.g., Christiansen, 1994; Kirby, 1998). On this ac- count, language universals may reflect non-linguistic cognitive constraints on learning and processing of sequential structure, rather than constraints pre- scribed by an innate universal grammar. Previ- ous work has shown that sequential-learning devices with no language-specific biases are better able to learn more universal aspects of language as com- pared to aspects encountered in rare languages (e.g., Ellefson & Christiansen, 2000; Christiansen & De- vlin, 1997; Van Everbroeck, 1999, 2001). Here, we examine the ways in which case markings and word order may function as cues for a sequen- tial learning device acquiring syntactic structure. In simulation 1, we model di↵erent word orders, and hypothesize that typologically common languages should be easier to learn by a sequential-learning device than the more rare ones. We expand on this idea in simulation 2 by studying the performance of networks trained on languages of varying degrees of case markings and flexibility. Finally, in simulation 3, we establish that our trained networks are able to mimic syntactic performance of children learn- ing English, Italian, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian (Slobin and Bever, 1982).