When learning language young children are faced with many formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determining their lexical category. We performed a two-step an...

Social computation is a paradigm in which a software application supports social interaction, but whose real purpose is the data trail that is left by that interaction, such as tags, recommendations, and so on. We explore a possible imperfection in the data that is generated by these games. Specifically, we investigate whether the data generated by previous participants influences the data that...

Current models of spoken-word recognition assume automatic activation of multiple candidate words fully or partially compatible with the speech input. We propose that listeners make use of this concurrent activation in word play such as punning. Distortion in punning should ideally involve no more than a minimal contrastive deviation between two words, namely a phoneme. Moreover, we propose tha...

In the celebration of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute centenary, we wanted to stress our concern with the relationship between two of its missions: research and education. What are the educational bases required for science and technology activities on health sciences for the future years? How can scientists collaborate to promote the popularization of academic knowledge and to improve a basic educa...

Primitive words, or strings over a finite alphabet that cannot be written as a power of another string, play an important role in formal language theory, coding theory, and combinatorics on words to name a few. In this paper, we extend some fundamental results about primitive words to primitive partial words. Partial words are strings that may have a number of “do not know” symbols. © 2005 Else...