The Neighborhood Effect on Keeping Non-Commuting Journeys within Compact and Sprawled Districts

The neighborhood effect on keeping non-commuting trips inside neighborhoods has not yet been investigated in developing countries. The modeling of non-commuting trips inside neighborhoods helps understand how to avoid unnecessary journeys by car into different parts of the city. This paper, therefore, attempts to clarify (1) the similarities and differences in the socioeconomic characteristics and the perceptions of people in sprawled and compact neighborhoods, (2) correlations between, on the one hand, the choice of destinations of non-commuting trips for shopping and entertainment activities and, on the other, the socioeconomic features, travel behavior, and perceptions of residents in the two large Pakistani cities of Lahore and Rawalpindi, (3) the similarities and differences in the determinants of non-commuting destinations inside neighborhoods in compact and sprawled districts. The paper develops four Binary Logistic (BL) regression models, with two models for each type of neighborhood. The findings show that trips to shopping areas inside compact districts are correlated with a sense of belonging to the neighborhood, frequency of public transport use, residential location, and mode choice of non-commuting trips to destinations both inside and outside the neighborhood. On the other hand, the number of non-commuting trips, mode choice for non-commuting trips outside the neighborhood, frequency of public transport use, the attractiveness of shops, and monthly income (please see the Note) are significant determinants for trips to the shopping area in sprawled districts. Age, gender, possession of a driver’s license, income, number of non-commuting trips, mode choice for non-commuting trips outside of the neighborhood, car ownership, and attractiveness of shops in a neighborhood are correlated with trips to entertainment locations inside the neighborhood in compact districts. Finally, the attractiveness of shops, quality of social and recreational facilities, a sense of belonging to a neighborhood, choice of residential location, gender, age, possession of a driver’s license, number of cars in the household, and income are determinants of trips to entertainment locations in sprawled districts. A chi-square test confirms the differences across gender, daily activity, monthly income, frequency of public transport use, residential location choice, and the quality of social and recreational facilities for sprawled and compact districts in Pakistan.

Speech Perception: Phonological Neighborhood Effects on Word Recognition Persist Despite Semantic Sentence Context

This study tested the hypothesis that two lexical properties, both phonological neighborhood density (ND) and neighborhood frequency (NF), influence the recognition of target words when preceded by either a semantically congruent or semantically neutral context. Our study is the first to test this hypothesis using a language other than English (i.e., Spanish). We used highly familiar bisyllabic nouns with medium-frequency occurrence as target words, and we expected recognition accuracy to increase as ND and NF decreased in both semanticallly congruent and semantically neutral sentences. We presented 48 undergraduate listeners with a set of 80 words, differing in ND and NF, within these two sentence contexts (i.e., 160 sentences). We then tested the relationships between ND, NF, and variations in semantic sentence context within a linear logistic model and found that words with a low frequency of neighbors were more likely to be correctly recognized in both sentence contexts. Thus, during word recognition, the influence of phonological competition outweighed semantic sentence context even when words were presented in Spanish.

BasiScript

This short paper introduces BasiScript, a 9-million-word corpus of contemporary Dutch texts written by primary school children. The data were collected over three years with 17,216 children contributing texts throughout this period. Each word token in the corpus is annotated with the correct orthographical form, the associated lemma and the part of speech. The most frequent polysemous words have been annotated for word meaning, while all words in the lexicon that was derived from the BasiScript corpus have been annotated for corpus and subcorpora frequency, dispersion, length, family size, family frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, and orthographic neighborhood frequency. Images of the texts are available to researchers. The present article describes the corpus and presents a comparison of BasiScript with BasiLex (a Dutch corpus with texts primary school children are likely to read, completed in 2015) by means of frequency profiling.

Influence of Lexical Factors on Word-Finding Accuracy, Error Patterns, and Substitution Types

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 66 children with/without word-finding difficulties (WFD) had difficulty naming, and the types of errors they made. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors (LFs) that might influence naming performance: word frequency, familiarity, length, phonotactic probability, and lexical neighborhood. For the most part, LFs similarly affected the word finding of children with/without WFD. Target word frequency predicted word-finding success for both groups, and word substitutions and error patterns were affected by the LFs under study. Children tended to produce substitutions that were shorter and higher in frequency, neighborhood frequency, and phonotactic probability than the target word. LFs also influenced children’s error patterns. Low word frequency led to form-related blocked errors for both groups, and low neighborhood frequency predicted form- and segment-related phonologic errors for children with WFD only. Theoretical and practical implications of these preliminary findings are discussed.

The Special Role of Higher-Frequency Neighbors at the Phonological Level: An Event-Related Potential Study of Chinese Character Naming

The present study explored the time course of neighborhood frequency effect at the early processing stages, examining whether orthographic neighbors with higher frequency exerted an influence on target processing especially at the phonological stage by using the event-related potential (ERP). Thirteen undergraduate students were recruited in this study, and they were required to covertly name Chinese characters with or without higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs); meanwhile, their brain activity was recorded. Results showed that the effect of neighborhood frequency was significant in frontocentral P2 amplitude, with a reduction for naming characters with HFNs compared to those without HFNs; while there was no effect in posterior N1 amplitude. The only neighborhood frequency effect in P2 component suggested a special role for the HFNs in phonological access of Chinese characters. The decrease in amplitude for naming with-HFN characters might be associated with the phonological interference of higher-frequency neighbors due to their different pronunciations from the target characters.

Predicting Word-Recognition Performance in Noise by Young Listeners with Normal Hearing Using Acoustic, Phonetic, and Lexical Variables

Purpose: To analyze the 50% correct recognition data that were from the Wilson et al (this issue) study and that were obtained from 24 listeners with normal hearing; also to examine whether acoustic, phonetic, or lexical variables can predict recognition performance for monosyllabic words presented in speech-spectrum noise. Research Design: The specific variables are as follows: (a) acoustic variables (i.e., effective root-mean-square sound pressure level, duration), (b) phonetic variables (i.e., consonant features such as manner, place, and voicing for initial and final phonemes; vowel phonemes), and (c) lexical variables (i.e., word frequency, word familiarity, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency). Data Collection and Analysis: The descriptive, correlational study will examine the influence of acoustic, phonetic, and lexical variables on speech recognition in noise performance. Results: Regression analysis demonstrated that 45% of the variance in the 50% point was accounted for by acoustic and phonetic variables whereas only 3% of the variance was accounted for by lexical variables. These findings suggest that monosyllabic word-recognition-in-noise is more dependent on bottom-up processing than on top-down processing. Conclusions: The results suggest that when speech-in-noise testing is used in a pre- and post-hearing-aid-fitting format, the use of monosyllabic words may be sensitive to changes in audibility resulting from amplification.