It is now known that cognitive functions tend to decline with age. Executive functions (EF) are among the first abilities to decline with aging. A subcomponent of the EF is abstract reasoning. The Test of Proverbs is an instrument that can be used to evaluate the capacity of abstract reasoning. Objective To examine the association of performance in interpretation of proverbs, with education a...

Drawing on the methodology and previous results of Rassi et al. (2014) on the automatic identification of Brazilian Portuguese proverbs, this paper reports on an extension of that experiment, but now focused on the identification of the European Portuguese proverbs and their variants. Based on a large collection of over 56 thousand Portuguese proverbs and their variants, a database of proverb t...

The present study investigates the culture of development in Hawrami proverbs. Analysis of development-related variables is the basis of sociology. As collective phenomena, proverbs are part of the oral culture of a society and their investigation can sociologically explain cultural and social foundations of the society. This research attempts to specify 6 development-related parameters in Hawr...

This article presents the task of automatic detection of proverbs in Brazilian Portuguese, from the intersection of the regular syntactic structure of proverbs and their core elements. We created finite-state automata that enabled us to look for these word combinations in running texts. The rationale behind this method consists in the fact that although proverbs may have a normal sentence struc...

The changing pattern of Indian proverbs is very much reflected in various literary creations, especially in modern Indian poetry. Proverbs are used in poetry as a mode of creative process which entails change. Indeed, it is mostly expressed in a poetic style of narration which may be termed as the style of ‘lokaabharan’. Various types of folk elements are used in the creative process and amongs...

Natural languages are full of idiomatic uses, which while translating through present NLP system do not extract variations of idioms and proverbs. To overcome this problem, a new method to extract idioms / proverbs is proposed in this paper. The proposed methodology uses statistical method to automatically extract idioms and proverbs from the text along with their variations. The system is upda...

Recent event related brain potential (ERP) results show that figurative interpretations of proverbial phrases (e.g., lightning never strikes the same place twice) elicit sustained slow cortical potentials that are more negative over the front of the head than for literal interpretations of the same phrases (Ferretti, Schwint, & Katz, under review). We extend this research by examining the influ...

Recent cognitive research has revealed better source memory performance for familiar relative to novel stimuli. Here we consider two possible explanations for this finding. The source memory advantage for familiar stimuli could arise because stimulus novelty induces attention to stimulus features at the expense of contextual processing, resulting in diminished overall levels of contextual proce...

According to an Anglo-Saxon pun, "gout is the king of diseases and the disease of Kings". In fact, it is well-known that in past times a quantity of famous persons, including Kings and Popes, were affected with this rheumatic disorder. In this paper biographical anecdotes on several Popes (Pius III, Julius II, Julius III, Clement VIII, Innocent XI, Clement XII and Pius VIII), King George IV and...

In this paper, we experiment with a resource consisting of metaphorically annotated proverbs on the task of word-level metaphor recognition. We observe that existing feature sets do not perform well on this data. We design a novel set of features to better capture the peculiar nature of proverbs and we demonstrate that these new features are significantly more effective on the metaphorically de...