Journal

Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 31, 2015)

4 articles

• Brain Mapping of Lexico-Semantic Functions in Bilinguals
  by Angela Grant & P¡ng Li
  J. CS. 2015, 16(1), 1-15;
  Abstract In a typical cognitive experiment, you may be shown an image of a dog and asked to name it. As a monolingual, you have several options: “dog” “poodle” “canine”, and so on. As a bilingual, however, your options are doubled. Consequently, how bilinguals select and utter the correct word for a particul... [Read more].
  Abstract In a typical cognitive experiment, you may be shown an image of a dog and asked to name it. As a monolingual, you have several options: “dog” “poodle” “canine”, and so on. As a bilingual, however, your options are doubled. Consequently, how bilinguals select and utter the correct word for a particular object has been carefully studied in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Many neuroimaging studies over the past several years have focused on the spatial aspect of this question, but other aspects, such as the developmental time course and differences between individuals, remain largely uninvestigated. In this article we provide a brief review of the literature, along with some pointers to new directions of research concerning individual variability and the development of lexico-semantic functions in bilinguals. [Collapse]
• Autism Spectrum Disorders and Psychopathy: Clinical and Criminal Justice Considerations
  by Zoltan Boka & Faith H. Leibman
  J. CS. 2015, 16(1), 17-40;
  Abstract This paper acts as a corrective to Fitzgerald (2011), which conflated autistic disorder with Asperger’s disorder when exploring the small portion of this population that engages in serious criminal activities. Fitzgerald suggested that autistic psychopathy and Asperger’s syndrome are one and the sam... [Read more].
  Abstract This paper acts as a corrective to Fitzgerald (2011), which conflated autistic disorder with Asperger’s disorder when exploring the small portion of this population that engages in serious criminal activities. Fitzgerald suggested that autistic psychopathy and Asperger’s syndrome are one and the same and implied that individuals on the autism spectrum are likely to exhibit psychopathic behavior and commit antisocial criminal activities. We expand upon and modify Fitzgerald’s work, distinguishing between autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and psychopathy. We assert that individuals with ASD do not perform acts with the same malice, intent, and deception as psychopaths. Our ultimate goal in the paper is to provide possible future direction for research in the issue of criminality in individuals diagnosed with ASD. [Collapse]
• The Role of Linguistic Frequency Effects in Shaping Metaphorical Systems
  by Daniel R. Sanford
  J. CS. 2015, 16(1), 41-59;
  Abstract The functionalist view of language has arisen from analysis of the effect of repetition on the storage and processing of language at a variety of levels of linguistic structure. Applied to metaphor, the approach places metaphorical conventionalization at the center of our understanding of metaphor, ... [Read more].
  Abstract The functionalist view of language has arisen from analysis of the effect of repetition on the storage and processing of language at a variety of levels of linguistic structure. Applied to metaphor, the approach places metaphorical conventionalization at the center of our understanding of metaphor, explaining several important aspects of metaphorical systems (their internal systematicity, the gradedness of metaphor, the idiosyncracy of conventionalized metaphorical utterances, and others) as arising from the cumulative effect, over time, of frequency effects at the level of both conceptual mappings and utterances. Ray Gibbs has argued that such a view of metaphor ignores the essential contribution to our understanding of metaphorical systems that comes from semantic factors, and above all else the nature of metaphor as following from embodied cognition. In this article, I respond to several of Gibbs’ major objections to Emergent Metaphor Theory. In responding to these concerns, I take the position that embodiment and other cognitive factors must indeed be included in a full accounting of metaphor. I argue that a frequency-based account of metaphor is fully compatible with semantic factors, and moreover that the aspects of metaphor which follow from frequency effects are essential, defining attributes of metaphorical systems. [Collapse]
• The entropic brain: effortful speech reflected in organisation of the network graph
  by Jeong-Sug Kyong, Chun Kee Chung, & June Sic Kim
  J. CS. 2015, 16(1), 61-72;
  Abstract Uncertainty of incoming information increases the amount of mental effort. Scientists might have been interested in quantifying the amount of this mental effort, as evidenced by the great amount of research devoted to computing the energy used to deal with the uncertainty of an event. One of these m... [Read more].
  Abstract Uncertainty of incoming information increases the amount of mental effort. Scientists might have been interested in quantifying the amount of this mental effort, as evidenced by the great amount of research devoted to computing the energy used to deal with the uncertainty of an event. One of these measures is Shannon’s entropy, which was initially used as a measure of the level of uncertainty with respect to the outcome of an event (Shannon, 1948). As defined by Shannon, entropy is expected to increase as the level of disorder (uncertainty or task complexity) increases. Therefore, to evaluate how the brain deals with entropy, one could either locate the focal area showing activity that is positively correlated with the degree of uncertainty or consider information transfer. We speculated that a functionally effective brain would modulate its network to fit to the varying entropy, since computation in the brain is probabilistic. Therefore, we put forward two hypotheses: 1) the functional brain architecture will reflect the varying entropy, and 2) the entropy will be modality-specific. In order to test these hypotheses, we estimated several network properties of the magnetoencephalography time-series signals obtained from healthy monolingual listeners. We particularly focused on whether entropy reflects the modality-specific processing load, especially when the degrees of the processing load of the two events were similar in terms of the rate of accuracy and the length of response time between tasks. In order to manipulate both entropy and modality, we varied the processing complexity (easy vs.difficult) in either a linguistic or non-linguistic (pitch change detection vs. word intelligibility test) task. Using graph-theoretical measures, the global organisation measures of the network, such as its small-worldness, correlationcoefficient, global efficiency, and characteristic path-lengths, were compared within the network extracted as a set of 78 brain atlas nodes. The results showed a significant main effect of task complexity on the brain network properties, demonstrating that task load is indeed ubiquitous regardless of task modality. Equally importantly, we also found a pronounced task-specific difference in the network properties between linguistic and non-linguistic modalities. Regardless of modality, in the effortful tasks, the characteristic path-length and the correlation-coefficient were significantly larger, whereas the linguistic tasks resulted in significantly higher small-worldness, with the hubs located at the usual language nodes. Our findings collectively suggest that task loadisubiquitous butisalso modality-specific in the brain network properties, as evidenced by the specific network graph measures. [Collapse]