Describing complex sounds with words is a difficult task. In fact, previous studies have shown that vocal imitations of sounds are more effective than verbal descriptions [Lemaitre and Rocchesso (2014). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 862-873]. The current study investigated how vocal imitations of sounds enable their recognition by studying how two expert and two lay participants reproduced four basi...

A fundamental property of language is that it allows us to establish triadic joint attention to a referent, for instance by the use of spatial demonstratives. Traditional accounts of demonstrative choice focused on the physical proximity of the referent to the interlocutors. However, recent work taking into account the multimodal context in which spatial demonstrative use is generally embedded ...

BACKGROUND The risk of ventricular arrhythmia with citalopram and escitalopram is controversial. In this study we investigated the association between these two drugs and the risk of ventricular arrhythmia. METHODS We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study of older adults (mean age 76 years) from 2002 to 2012 in Ontario, Canada, newly prescribed citalopram (n = 137 701) or es...

Traditional database resources and semantic Web technology face problems when there is a need to keep track of individuals in reality as these individuals undergo changes of various sorts. We describe an application which implements the referent tracking paradigm in which each real world entity has its own unique ID. The application is designed to be able to store relationships between tracked ...

As referents are more accessible in discourse, they can be referred to with more attenuated expressions, such as pronouns. Accessibility is known to be affected by the referent’s saliency in the linguistic context, but much less is known about the effect of saliency in the visual context. In this paper, we investigate whether a referent’s visual saliency affects the choice of referring expressi...

This paper presents a referent-tracking and pronoun resolution system for Finnish, a free-word-order, articleless language that poses a challenge for algorithms designed for languages like English that have definite/indefinite articles. To track referents and interpret pronouns in Finnish, this algorithm uses the pragmatically-motivated word order tendencies of Finnish to create an ordered regi...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the effectiveness of a new high-performance Australian medical sheepskin (meeting Australian Standard 4480.1-1998) in preventing pressure ulcers in a general hospital population at low to moderate risk of these ulcers. DESIGN Open-label randomised controlled clinical trial. SETTING A large metropolitan teaching hospital in Melbourne, Victoria, in 2000. PARTICIPANTS 4...

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pur...

Previous research suggests that preschool-aged children use novel information about talkers’ preferences (e.g. favorite colors) to guide on-line language processing. But can children encode information about talkers while simultaneously learning new words, and if so, how is talker information encoded? In five experiments, children learned pairs of early-overlapping words (geeb, geege); a partic...

Using a referent detection paradigm, we examined whether listeners can determine the object speakers are referring to by using the temporal alignment between the motion speakers impose on objects and their labeling utterances. Stimuli were created by videotaping speakers labeling a novel creature. Without being explicitly instructed to do so, speakers moved the creature during labeling. Traject...