Search Results (76)

Large language-model chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek are quickly gaining traction as an easy, first-stop tool for trip planning because they offer instant, conversational advice that once required sifting through multiple websites or guidebooks. Yet little is known about the biases that shape the destination suggestions these systems provide. This study conducts a controlled, persona-based audit of the two models, generating 6480 recommendations for 216 traveller profiles that vary by origin country, age, gender identity and trip theme. Six observable bias families (popularity, geographic, cultural, stereotype, demographic and reinforcement) are quantified using tourism rankings, Hofstede scores, a 150-term cliché lexicon and information-theoretic distance measures. Findings reveal measurable bias in every bias category. DeepSeek is more likely than ChatGPT to suggest off-list cities and recommends domestic travel more often, while both models still favour mainstream destinations. DeepSeek also points users toward culturally more distant destinations on all six Hofstede dimensions and employs a denser, superlative-heavy cliché register; ChatGPT shows wider lexical variety but remains strongly promotional. Demographic analysis uncovers moderate gender gaps and extreme divergence for non-binary personas, tempered by a “protective” tendency to guide non-binary travellers toward countries with higher LGBTQI acceptance. Reinforcement bias is minimal, with over 90 percent of follow-up suggestions being novel in both systems. These results confirm that unconstrained LLMs are not neutral filters but active amplifiers of structural imbalances. The paper proposes a public-interest re-ranking layer, hosted by a body such as UN Tourism, that balances exposure fairness, seasonality smoothing, low-carbon routing, cultural congruence, safety safeguards and stereotype penalties, transforming conversational AI from an opaque gatekeeper into a sustainability-oriented travel recommendation tool. Full article

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to predict subjective human emotions by leveraging multimodal information. However, existing research inadequately utilizes explicit sentiment semantic information at the lexical level in text and overlooks noise interference from non-dominant modalities, such as irrelevant movements in visual modalities and background noise in audio modalities. To address this issue, we propose a multimodal sentiment analysis model based on knowledge enhancement and text-guided learning (MMKT). The model constructs a sentiment knowledge graph for the textual modality using the SenticNet knowledge base. This graph directly annotates word-level sentiment polarity, strengthening the model’s understanding of emotional vocabulary. Furthermore, global sentiment knowledge features are generated through graph embedding computations to enhance the multimodal fusion process. Simultaneously, a dynamic text-guided learning approach is introduced, which dynamically leverages multi-scale textual features to actively suppress redundant or conflicting information in visual and audio modalities, thereby generating purer cross-modal representations. Finally, concatenated textual features, cross-modal features, and knowledge features are utilized for sentiment prediction. Experimental results on the CMU-MOSEI and Twitter2019 dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the MMKT model. Full article

Background: Developmental dyslexia (DD) is the most common form of specific learning disorders (SLDs). From a neurocognitive point of view, dyslexic reading is associated with atypical neurofunctional patterns in the left hemisphere, mainly in the posterior areas linked to lexical access and phonological processing. Nowadays, rehabilitation treatments do not aim to fix the disorder but rather improve adaptive skills. On the other hand, the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has recently gained popularity in this field. In fact, a few studies have documented enhanced accuracy and speed after the tDCS over the parietal cortex, although the results were mainly limited to non-word reading. Methods: We conducted a single-case study employing an innovative multifocal eight-channel tDCS aimed at increasing the reading network activity in the left hemisphere and inhibiting the contralateral areas. The participant was a 9-year-old boy with a diagnosis of severe mixed-type specific learning disorder. The high-definition multifocal tDCS was administered over key areas of the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes (four 3.14 cm² electrodes per hemisphere) in conjunction with tachistoscope training over a span of 10 weeks, with three sessions per week for a total of thirty sessions. Standardized assessments of reading were carried out at the beginning, at the end of the treatment, and at one- and six-month follow-up. Results: The treatment led to a 77% improvement in the accuracy of passage reading and an 83% improvement in the reading of high-frequency short words, with stable results at the 1- and 6-month follow-up. By contrast, in line with the severity of the disorder, there were only slight improvements in the speed parameter. Conclusions: This is the first study to document such remarkable improvements in reading in a case of severe SLD: if confirmed, these promising findings could pave the way for an effective, non-invasive rehabilitation for SLDs using multifocal tDCS. However, future studies are needed to overcome the limitations of single-case studies, such as the lack of control conditions and quantifiable analysis. Full article

Effective language processing relies on pattern detection. Spanish monolinguals predict verb tense through stress–suffix associations: a stressed first syllable signals present tense, while an unstressed first syllable signals past tense. Low-proficiency second language (L2) Spanish learners struggle to detect these associations, and we investigated whether they benefit from game-based training. We examined the effects of four variables on their ability to detect stress–suffix associations: three linguistic variables—verbs’ lexical stress (oxytones/paroxytones), first-syllable structure (consonant–vowel, CV/consonant–vowel–consonant, CVC), and phonotactic probability—and one learner variable—working memory (WM) span. Beginner English learners of Spanish played a digital game focused on stress–suffix associations for 10 days and completed a Spanish proficiency test (Lextale-Esp), a Spanish background and use questionnaire, and a Corsi WM task. The results revealed moderate gains in the acquisition of stress–suffix associations. Accuracy gains were observed for CV verbs and oxytones, and overall reaction times (RTs) decreased with gameplay. Higher-WM learners were more accurate and slower than lower-WM learners in all verb-type conditions. Our findings suggest that prosody influences word activation and that digital gaming can help learners attend to L2 inflectional morphology. Full article

Background/Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate letter processing in children with dyslexia and typically developing readers as a function of the type of orthographic context. Methods and Results: In Experiment 1A, children performed a two-alternative forced choice task (Reicher–Wheeler paradigm) using as probes either high-frequency words, pronounceable pseudo-words, or unpronounceable non-words. The group differences in letter recognition were clearly distinguished from those present in typical word and pseudo-word reading conditions (Experiment 1B), as a global factor was present only in the latter case. In Experiment 2, the two-alternative forced choice task required the child to search for the target letter in the subsequent multi-letter string (i.e., words, pseudo-words, or non-words), thus reducing the memory load. Detecting the target letter was more difficult in a word than in a pseudo-word or non-word array, indicating that the word form’s lexical activation interfered with the target’s analysis in both groups of children. In Experiment 3, children performed the two-alternative forced choice task with symbols (Greek letters) either in the Reicher–Wheeler mode of presentation (Experiment 3A) or in the search condition (Experiment 3B). Children with dyslexia performed identically to typically developing readers in keeping with the selectivity of their orthographic difficulties. Conclusions: The present data indicate that children with dyslexia suffer from an early deficit in making perceptual operations that require the conjunction analysis of a set of letters. Still, this deficit is not due to an inability to scan the letter string. The deficit is confined to orthographic stimuli and does not extend to other types of visual targets. Full article

Research has shown that first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers actively make predictions about upcoming linguistic information, though L2 speakers are less efficient. While prediction mechanisms are assumed to be qualitatively the same, quantitative prediction-driven processing differences may be modulated by individual differences We tested whether L2 proficiency and quality of lexical representation (QLR) impact the capacity of L2 readers to extract parafoveal information while reading, leading to quantitative differences in prediction. Using the same items as Slattery and Yates, we investigated the impact of predictability and length of a critical word on bottom-up parafoveal processing, measured by skipping rates, and top-down predictability processing, measured by reading times. Comparing our L2 English to their L1 English data, we found that L2 speakers skipped less and had longer gaze duration. However, both groups showed increased skipping rate and decreased gaze duration for predictable relative to unpredictable words and for shorter relative to longer words. We argue that L1 and L2 predictability mechanisms are qualitatively the same and quantitative differences stem from L2 speakers’ Reduced Capacity for Parafoveal Processing, the ReCaPP hypothesis. Full article

Background/Objectives: Individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia demonstrate real-time sentence processing difficulties at the lexical and structural levels. Research using time-sensitive measures, such as priming and eye-tracking, have associated these difficulties with temporal delays in accessing semantic representations that are needed in real time during sentence structure building. In this study, we examined the real-time processing effort linked to sentence processing in individuals with aphasia and neurotypical, age-matched control participants as measured through pupil reactivity (i.e., pupillometry). Specifically, we investigated whether a semantically biased lexical cue (i.e., adjective) influences the processing effort while listening to complex noncanonical sentences. Methods: In this eye-tracking while listening study (within-subjects design), participants listened to sentences that either contained biased or unbiased adjectives (e.g., venomous snake vs. voracious snake) while viewing four images, three related to nouns in the sentence and one unrelated, but a plausible match for the unbiased adjective. Pupillary responses were collected every 17 ms throughout the entire sentence. Results: While age-matched controls demonstrated increased pupil response throughout the course of the sentence, individuals with aphasia showed a plateau in pupil response early on in the sentence. Nevertheless, both controls and individuals with aphasia demonstrated reduced processing effort in the biased adjective condition. Conclusions: Individuals with aphasia are sensitive to lexical–semantic cues despite impairments in real-time lexical activation during sentence processing. Full article

Background/Objectives: We examined the effects of cardiovascular exercise on verbal fluency using a between-groups design. Methods: Within our experimental (i.e., exercise) group, participants performed phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) before, during, and after a vigorous 30 min bout of cycling. Participants within our control group also completed these VFTs before, during, and after a non-physical activity. We compared the VFT performance of the experimental (exercise) and control (no-exercise) groups of participants in terms of the characteristics of the words that they produced within the VFTs. In addition, we examined these aspects of VFT performance for each participant group across time within the experiment session. Conclusions: From these comparisons, we see that exercise influenced VFT performance. Most notably, participants engaged in exercise changed their VFT performance over time, while control group participants did not. Exercising participants produced more words over the course of their exercise session that contained fewer letters over time and were lower in frequency during and after exercise as compared to before exercise. Additionally, topic switches in the VFTs increased after exercise as compared to before exercise. Participants in the control group did not change their VFT performance over time according to any of these measures. These findings indicate that exercise impacted participants’ lexical access and that these VFT performance changes were not due to practice effects. Full article

The Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, and the Israeli military response unleashed a catastrophic episode of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and exacerbated broader tensions in the region. This study compares Al Jazeera English (AJE) and BBC’s coverage of and discourse around key events in the early stages of the 2023 Israel–Gaza War. Using critical discourse analysis as an analytical framework, this study employs mixed methods to compare transitivity, intertextuality, and lexicalization as key discursive features in the two outlets’ coverage of the war. Counter to previous qualitative works, this study quantitatively reveals no variation between AJE and BBC’s use of active voice yet points to key qualitative differences in the discursive treatment of Palestinians and the reporting on death tolls. It further demonstrates drastic differences in the quoting patterns and negative lexicalization of the early phases of the war, with AJE taking a more balanced approach and BBC refraining from emphasizing accusations against Israel of committing “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, “terrorism”, and “war crimes”. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of differential discourses around the Gaza War and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in international media. Full article

The neuroscience of language processing in the human brain has a long history. Strings of letters that form meaningful words trigger lexical and semantic processing, which in turn lead to conscious awareness of what the words mean. However, it is still unclear how the brain processes normal words differently from number words and, more interestingly, how the brain processes number words differently from digits, both of which are meant to trigger quantity processing. While much of the literature deals with this topic, the time course of the respective differences in brain activity has been largely ignored. This may be because most studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is known to have limited temporal resolution. This study used electroencephalography (EEG), more specifically event-related potentials (ERPs), to investigate brain potential differences between visual presentations of words, non-words, number words and digits. This approach made it possible to describe the time course of brain activity evoked by these four stimulus categories. Starting at about 200 ms post-stimulus, digits elicited the strongest negative ERP in the right occipito-parietal cortical region. Peaking at around 300 ms after stimulus onset, number words elicited the most negative going ERP in the left occipito-parietal area. Finally, starting at about 400 ms after stimulus onset, digits elicited by far the most negative ERP in the left inferior fronto-temporal area. All of these findings are supported by analytical statistics across all study participants. It is noteworthy that the last effect in the left inferior fronto-temporal area can also be seen for number words, but it is much smaller and not statistically significant. In summary, we found clear differences between brain activity related to the processing of words, non-words, number words, and digits, providing evidence that the left inferior fronto-temporal cortical area is specialised for the processing of quantities. Furthermore, it can be concluded that digits are better symbols for mediating quantity processing in the human brain than number words. Full article

Since the seminal work by David Dowty, much inspired by the earlier ideas of Generative Semantics, a number of proposals have been developed accounting for the internal constitution and interpretation of accomplishment event predicates like ‘open the door’ or ‘break the window’. Current theories of accomplishment event structure vary along a number of dimensions, including the subevental makeup of accomplishments and semantic relations connecting components of a complex eventuality description. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I take into account evidence from non-culminating readings of accomplishment predicates in Turkic languages and argue that this evidence supports the following generalizations about the structure and interpretation of accomplishments: (i) the activity subevent is to be represented independently from the change of state; (ii) different accomplishment predicates constrain the relation between subevents in different ways; (iii) accomplishments differ as to the internal constitution of the activity subevent. Second, I will suggest that restrictions on non-culminating readings observed with different types of accomplishments support a specific view of how non-culminating accomplishments are derived. I will propose that at least in languages like Turkic, a necessary condition for non-culminating predicates is as follows: the activity component of a complex eventuality description has to have temporal parts that make no substantial contribution into bringing the culmination about. What I will say about Turkic does not presuppose that all non-culmination phenomena cross-linguistically warrant a uniform analysis. Even though the Turkic pattern shows strict semantic parallelism in other languages, it is not unlikely that there is more than one way in which non-culminating accomplishments can be derived. But whether a variety of other cases discussed in the literature reduce to the same pattern is a separate empirical question I am not trying to answer. The paper is organized as follows. In Section one, I introduce relevant material from three Turkic languages, Karachay–Balkar, Chuvash, and Tuba Altai, and observe that accomplishments in these languages fall into three types. Some yield the failed attempt interpretation, others the partial success interpretation, yet others do not license non-culminating readings at all. Section two argues for a decompositional analysis of the accomplishment event structure, whereby activity and change of state subevents are kept representationally distinct. Two types of relations between these components of the accomplishment structure are identified; the failed attempt and partial success readings are reduced to the properties of these relations. Section three approaches the problem of why non-culminating interpretations are available for some but not for all accomplishments. It reviews a recent theory suggesting that the (un)availability of non-culminating readings is accounted for by the unique temporal arrangement of contextually salient subevents of the activity component, either lexically or contextually entailed. The concluding subsection of Section three presents a number of problematic cases for this view. Section four outlines an alternative to the unique temporal arrangement. It argues that non-culminating accomplishments describe a proper non-final part e of the activity component of an event description such that the distance to the culmination between the initial and final bounds of e is insignificant in the current context. This approach makes more accurate predictions about the attested distribution of non-culminating interpretations and successfully avoids the complications associated with the unique temporal arrangement hypothesis. After making the notion of distance to the culmination more formally explicit, in the concluding section I address a few related issues concerning the eventuality type of non-culminating accomplishments and their interaction with aspectual operators. Full article

Background/Objectives: The Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) posits that individuals generate internal prosodic representations during silent reading, mirroring those produced in spoken language. While converging behavioral evidence supports the IPH, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain largely unknown. Therefore, this study investigated the neurophysiological markers of sensitivity to speech rhythm cues during silent word reading. Methods: EEGs were recorded while participants silently read four-word sequences, each composed of either trochaic words (stressed on the first syllable) or iambic words (stressed on the second syllable). Each sequence was followed by a target word that was either metrically congruent or incongruent with the preceding rhythmic pattern. To investigate the effects of metrical expectancy and lexical stress type, we examined single-trial event-related potentials (ERPs) and time–frequency representations (TFRs) time-locked to target words. Results: The results showed significant differences based on the stress pattern expectancy and type. Specifically, words that carried unexpected stress elicited larger ERP negativities between 240 and 628 ms after the word onset. Furthermore, different frequency bands were sensitive to distinct aspects of the rhythmic structure in language. Alpha activity tracked the rhythmic expectations, and theta and beta activities were sensitive to both the expected rhythms and specific locations of the stressed syllables. Conclusions: The findings clarify neurocognitive mechanisms of phonological and lexical mental representations during silent reading using a conservative data-driven approach. Similarity with neural response patterns previously reported for spoken language contexts suggests shared neural networks for implicit and explicit speech rhythm processing, further supporting the IPH and emphasizing the centrality of prosody in reading. Full article

This study examines the influence of Tamil (L1) on the processing of English (L2) collocations during reading for Tamil-English bilingual children. Building on existing research in formulaic language, we used an online processing tool to investigate whether cross-linguistic transfer can be extended beyond single lexical items to collocations in bilingual children, a population that is underrepresented in this research area. Fifty-eight children aged 9–10 years from a school in Chennai, India, took part. Using self-paced reading, children’s reading times were measured for both congruent (with equivalent in L2) and incongruent (without equivalent in L2) English collocations embedded in short passages. There were two reading modes (single and chunk), which allowed reading times for the whole collocations and the individual words of the collocations to be examined. Results showed that children read congruent collocations more quickly than incongruent collocations in both modes. For congruent collocations, children read the second word more quickly than the first word, but the reverse was true for incongruent collocations. These results suggest that the L1 (Tamil) is activated during the processing stage of reading English collocations for Tamil-English bilingual children in this context. Full article

Previous research has established that bilinguals automatically activate lexical items in both of their languages in a nonselectivemanner, even when processing linguistic information in the second language (L2) alone. However, whether this co-activation extends to the sub-lexical level remains debated. In this study, we investigate whether bilinguals access sub-lexical information while processing in their L2. Thirty-two Chinese–English bilinguals and thirty-one English monolinguals completed an EEG-based semantic relatedness task, during which they judged whether pairs of English words were related in meaning or not (±S). Unbeknownst to the participants, the form (±F) of the Chinese translations in half of the pairs shared a sub-lexical semantic radical. This leads to four conditions: +S+F, +S−F, −S+F, and −S−F. This design, along with the comparison to English monolinguals, allows us to examine if bilinguals’ native language is activated at the sub-lexical level when they are exposed only to L2. The results revealed that both groups showed sensitivity to semantic relatedness, as evidenced by a greater N400 for semantic unrelated pairs than related pairs, with monolinguals eliciting a more pronounced difference. Bilinguals, on the other hand, exhibited a greater P200 difference compared to monolinguals, indicating greater sensitivity to the hidden Chinese radical/form manipulation. These results suggest that highly proficient bilinguals automatically engage in lexical co-activation of their native language during L2 processing. Crucially, this co-activation extends to the sub-lexical semantic radical level. Full article

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients are impaired in word production when the word has to be selected among competing alternatives requiring higher attentional resources. In PD, word selection processes are correlated with the structural integrity of the inferior frontal gyrus, which is critical for response selection, and the uncinate fasciculus, which is necessary for processing lexical information. In early PD, we investigated the role of the main cognitive large-scale networks, namely the salience network (SN), the central executive networks (CENs), and the default mode network (DMN), in word selection. Eighteen PD patients and sixteen healthy controls were required to derive nouns from verbs or generate verbs from nouns. Participants also underwent a resting-state functional MRI. Functional connectivity (FC) was examined using independent component analysis. Functional seeds for the SN, CENs, and DMN were defined as spheres, centered at the local activation maximum. Correlations were calculated between the FC of each functional seed and word production. A significant association between SN connectivity and task performance and, with less evidence, between CEN connectivity and the task requiring selection among a larger number of competitors, emerged in the PD group. These findings suggest the involvement of the SN and CEN in word selection in early PD, supporting the hypothesis of impaired executive control. Full article