scholarly journals How valence affects language processing: Negativity bias and mood congruence in narrative comprehension

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 547-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Egidi ◽  
Richard J. Gerrig
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Narrative Comprehension ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Processing Negativity ◽  
Mood Congruence

scholarly journals Decoding the Neural Representation of Story Meanings across Languages

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morteza Dehghani ◽  
Reihane Boghrati ◽  
Kingson Man ◽  
Joseph Hoover ◽  
Sarah Gimbel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Semantic Space ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Narrative Comprehension ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
High Dimensional ◽  
Distributed Representations ◽  
Neural Data ◽  
A New Technique

Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion narratives whose meaning transcends that of their individual utterances. However, while brain regions that represent lower-level semantic units, such as words and sentences, have been identified, questions remain about the neural representation of narrative comprehension, which involves inferring cumulative meaning. To address these questions, we exposed English, Mandarin and Farsi native speakers to native language translations of the same stories during fMRI scanning. Using a new technique in natural language processing, we calculated the distributed representations of these stories (capturing the meaning of the stories in high-dimensional semantic space), and demonstrate that using these representations we can identify the specific story a participant was reading from the neural data. Notably, this was possible even when the distributed representations were calculated using stories in a different language than the participant was reading. Relying on over 44 billion classifications, our results reveal that identification relied on a collection of brain regions most prominently located in the default mode network. These results demonstrate that neuro-semantic encoding of narratives happens at levels higher than individual semantic units and that this encoding is systematic across both individuals and languages.

scholarly journals The Sentiment is in the Details: A Language-agnostic Approach to Sentence-level Sentiment Analysis in News Media

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Validity ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
News Media ◽  
Concurrent Validity ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Newspaper Article ◽  
Political News ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
The Individual

Determining the sentiment in the individual sentences of a newspaper article in an automated fashion is a major challenge. Manually created sentiment dictionaries often fail to meet the required standards. And while computer-generated dictionaries show promise, they are often limited by the availability of suitable linguistic resources. I propose and test a novel, language-agnostic and resource-efficient way of constructing sentiment dictionaries, based on word embedding models. The dictionaries are constructed and evaluated based on four corpora containing two decades of Danish, Dutch (Flanders and the Netherlands), English, and Norwegian newspaper articles, which are cleaned and parsed using Natural Language Processing. Concurrent validity is evaluated using a dataset of human-coded newspaper sentences, and compared to the performance of Polyglot dictionaries. Predictive validity is tested through two long-standing hypotheses on the negativity bias in political news. Results show that both the concurrent validity and predictive validity is good. The dictionaries outperform their Polyglot counterparts, and are able to detect a negativity bias, which is stronger for tabloids. The method is resource-efficient in terms of manual labor when compared to manually constructed dictionaries, and requires a limited amount of computational power.

Language processing is not a race against time

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giosuè Baggio ◽  
Carmelo M. Vicario
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Cognitive Functions ◽  
Memory Systems ◽  
Language System ◽  
Moderating Factors

AbstractWe agree with Christiansen & Chater (C&C) that language processing and acquisition are tightly constrained by the limits of sensory and memory systems. However, the human brain supports a range of cognitive functions that mitigate the effects of information processing bottlenecks. The language system is partly organised around these moderating factors, not just around restrictions on storage and computation.

Cognitive Processing of Miscommunication in Interactive Listening: An Evaluation of Listener Indecision and Cognitive Effort

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Roche ◽  
Arkady Zgonnikov ◽  
Laura M. Morett
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Cognitive Effort ◽  
Mouse Tracking ◽  
Computer Mouse ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Computer Mouse Tracking ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Processing Effort

Purpose The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the social and cognitive underpinnings of miscommunication during an interactive listening task. Method An eye and computer mouse–tracking visual-world paradigm was used to investigate how a listener's cognitive effort (local and global) and decision-making processes were affected by a speaker's use of ambiguity that led to a miscommunication. Results Experiments 1 and 2 found that an environmental cue that made a miscommunication more or less salient impacted listener language processing effort (eye-tracking). Experiment 2 also indicated that listeners may develop different processing heuristics dependent upon the speaker's use of ambiguity that led to a miscommunication, exerting a significant impact on cognition and decision making. We also found that perspective-taking effort and decision-making complexity metrics (computer mouse tracking) predict language processing effort, indicating that instances of miscommunication produced cognitive consequences of indecision, thinking, and cognitive pull. Conclusion Together, these results indicate that listeners behave both reciprocally and adaptively when miscommunications occur, but the way they respond is largely dependent upon the type of ambiguity and how often it is produced by the speaker.

Feel Thine Own Self – Mood Congruency Evaluation of Emotional State Adjectives

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Szczepan J. Grzybowski ◽  
Miroslaw Wyczesany ◽  
Jan Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Mood Induction ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Semantic Access ◽  
Current Mood ◽  
Component Time

Abstract. The goal of the study was to explore event-related potential (ERP) differences during the processing of emotional adjectives that were evaluated as congruent or incongruent with the current mood. We hypothesized that the first effects of congruence evaluation would be evidenced during the earliest stages of semantic analysis. Sixty mood adjectives were presented separately for 1,000 ms each during two sessions of mood induction. After each presentation, participants evaluated to what extent the word described their mood. The results pointed to incongruence marking of adjective’s meaning with current mood during early attention orientation and semantic access stages (the P150 component time window). This was followed by enhanced processing of congruent words at later stages. As a secondary goal the study also explored word valence effects and their relation to congruence evaluation. In this regard, no significant effects were observed on the ERPs; however, a negativity bias (enhanced responses to negative adjectives) was noted on the behavioral data (RTs), which could correspond to the small differences traced on the late positive potential.

Miscellaneous Studies in Language Processing

1985 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-44
Author(s):  
J. Kathryn Bock
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing

In Search of a Human Language Processing System

1985 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 529-531
Author(s):  
Patrick Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Processing System ◽  
Human Language
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document