CiteULike: Tag fluency

Multiword Lexical Units and Their Relationship to Impromptu Speech

Jeng-Yih Hsu — 2008-03-11T18:59:58-00:00

Online Submission (0 2007)

Public speaking can be very threatening to any native speakers of English, not to mention non-native EFL learners. Impromptu speech, perhaps the most challenging form of public speaking, is however being promoted in every city of the EFL countries. The case in Taiwan is no exceptional. Every year, dozens of impromptu speech contexts are held throughout the island. Over the past decade, many studies have investigated the strategies and techniques successful EFL impromptu speech contestants adapted. Hardly has any study touched upon the language used by the prize-winning contestants. Also at the same time, a growing number of studies on second language speaking acquisition have pinpointed that multiword lexical units (i.e., lexical collocations, fixed-/semi-fixed expressions, and idioms) could be the key to better speaking proficiency. Therefore, the study intends to examine the possible relationship between MLUs and impromptu speeches. Data of the current study draws on the biggest annual national impromptu speech contest of Taiwan where EFL contestants competed to show their language proficiency as well as skills in delivering spoken messages. The 11 participants are English majors of technological universities in Taiwan and have never lived in an English speaking country for more than 6 months. In the contest, each contestant selected a topic 15 minutes before going on the stage, and each had 3 minutes to deliver a speech in English. The researcher video-taped, transcribed, and analyzed all the impromptu speeches. The data were examined to answer the three research questions for correlations: (1) between the subjects' performance of impromptu speeches and their use of lexical collocations; (2) between the subjects' performance of impromptu speeches and their use of fixed-/semi-fixed expressions; and (3) between the subjects' performance of impromptu speeches and their use of idioms. By examining the correlations between MLUs and impromptu speeches, this study aims to find an additional way to help EFL learners to become a better speech constant in particular and improve college EFL learners' speaking proficiency in general. (Contains 4 tables and 6 footnotes.)

The Learned Interpretation of Cognitive Fluency

Christian Unkelbach — 2006-03-22T05:31:59-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 4. (April 2006), pp. 339-345.

Event-related brain potentials dissociate repetition effects of high- and low-frequency words.

MD Rugg — 2005-10-25T11:58:52-00:00

Mem Cognit, Vol. 18, No. 4. (July 1990), pp. 367-379.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects detected nonwords interspersed among sequences of words of high or low frequency of occurrence. In Phase 1, a proportion of the words were repeated after six intervening items. In Phase 2, which followed after a break of approximately 15 min, the words were either repeats of items presented in the previous phase or new. Unrepeated low-frequency words evoked larger N400 components than did high-frequency items. In Phase 1, this effect interacted with repetition, such that no frequency effects were observed on N400s evoked by repeated words. In addition, the post-500-msec latency region of the ERPs exhibited a substantial repetition effect for low-frequency words, but did not differentiate unrepeated and repeated high-frequency words. In Phase 2, ERPs evoked by "old" and "new" high-frequency words did not differ in any latency region, while those evoked by old and new low-frequency words differed only after 500 msec. The interactive effects of frequency and repetition suggest that these variables act jointly at multiple loci during the processing of a word. The specificity of the post-500-msec repetition effect for low-frequency words may reflect a process responsive to a discrepancy between words' intra and extraexperimental familiarity.

The evaluative connotation of processing fluency: Inherently positive or moderated by motivational context?

Antonio Freitas — 2005-10-11T17:57:59-00:00

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 41, No. 6. (November 2005), pp. 636-644.

A fundamental question for evaluation research is whether cues can impact evaluative responses directly or only in combination with contextual information. Focusing on the experience of processing fluency, the current work tested whether manipulating this cue's motivational context would moderate its evaluative impact. Because fluently processed stimuli can be assumed to communicate safety, owing to implicit signals of either familiarity (through processes monitoring perception-memory coordination), we reasoned that motivation to avoid negative events should heighten preferences for fluently processed stimuli. Following a motivation manipulation, prevention-focused, but not promotion-focused, participants preferred stimuli that they were able to process quickly (Experiment 2) and that were preceded by concordant primes (Experiment 1). These findings suggest that the value of fluent processing reflects its relation to contextual features, such as one's current motivational state.

The secret life of fluency

Daniel Oppenheimer — 2008-06-03T13:20:24-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 6. (June 2008), pp. 237-241.

Fluency - the subjective experience of ease or difficulty associated with completing a mental task - has been shown to be an influential cue in a wide array of judgments. Recently researchers have begun to look at how fluency impacts judgment through more subtle and indirect routes. Fluency impacts whether information is represented in working memory and what aspects of that information are attended to. Additionally, fluency has an impact in strategy selection; depending on how fluent information is, people engage in qualitatively different cognitive operations. This suggests that the role of fluency is more nuanced than previously believed and that understanding fluency could be of critical importance to understanding cognition more generally.

Discussions that Work: Task-centred Fluency Practice (Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers)

Penny Ur — 2008-03-13T04:53:56-00:00

(30 January 1981)

How can you make a discussion really work? What sort of activities produce genuine and enthusiastic exchanges of ideas? How can you prepare such exercises quickly and easily? These are some of the questions that Discussions that Work sets out to answer. The first part provides some general guidelines on the organisation of successful task-centred activities. The second part consists of some fifty practical examples which have been tried and found effective in the classroom. They range from fairly simple to complex and sophisticated, and can thus be used with a wide range of learners, from elementary to the most advanced, in both secondary and adult education.

Stochastic Text Generation

Jon Oberlander — 2007-05-30T12:17:03-00:00

Introduction: generation and understanding Natural Language Generation (NLG) research aims at systems which produce coherent natural language text from an underlying representation of knowledge. Systems must produce language|single sentences or more complex discourses|which (i) faithfully represents the relevant knowledge, and also (ii) does this in a naturalsounding way. These have been termed the delity and uency goals, respectively (Ward 1993). The uency goal leads to important dierences...

Progress in the Treatment of Fluency Disorders (Progress in Clinical Science Series)

Rustin — 2007-11-29T16:25:36-00:00

(01 November 1987)

Mind at Ease Puts a Smile on the Face: Psychophysiological Evidence That Processing Facilitation Elicits Positive Affect,

Piotr Winkielman — 2007-02-07T15:12:33-00:00

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 6. (December 2001), pp. 989-1000.

The affect system, in its position to monitor organismic-environmental transactions, may be sensitive to the internal dynamics of information processing. Hence, the authors predicted that facilitation of stimulus processing should elicit a brief, mild, positive affective response. In 2 studies, participants watched a series of neutral pictures while the processing ease was unobtrusively manipulated. Affective reactions were assessed with facial electromyography (EMG). In both studies, easy-to-process pictures elicited higher activity over the region of zygomaticus major, indicating positive affect. The EMG data were paralleled by self-reports of positive responses to the facilitated stimuli. The findings suggest a close link between processing dynamics and affect and may help understand several preference phenomena, including the mere-exposure effect. The findings also highlight a potential source of affective biases in social judgments.

Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency

Adam Alter — 2007-02-07T15:27:25-00:00

PNAS, Vol. 103, No. 24. (13 June 2006), pp. 9369-9372.

Three studies investigated the impact of the psychological principle of fluency (that people tend to prefer easily processed information) on short-term share price movements. In both a laboratory study and two analyses of naturalistic real-world stock market data, fluently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term. For example, in one study, an initial investment of $1,000 yielded a profit of $112 more after 1 day of trading for a basket of fluently named shares than for a basket of disfluently named shares. These results imply that simple, cognitive approaches to modeling human behavior sometimes outperform more typical, complex alternatives. 10.1073/pnas.0601071103

Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience?

R Reber — 2007-02-07T15:18:04-00:00

Pers Soc Psychol Rev, Vol. 8, No. 4. (2004), pp. 364-382.

We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties.

Prototypes Are Attractive Because They Are Easy on the Mind

Winkielman — 2006-09-19T21:44:53-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 9. (September 2006), pp. 799-806.

What do we mean by fluency?

Francine Chambers — 2008-03-06T02:28:22-00:00

System, Vol. 25, No. 4. (December 1997), pp. 535-544.

Fluency is a commonly used notion in foreign language teaching, frequently contrasted with accuracy especially in a communicative language teaching. In ordinary life it often has an extended meaning and is used as a synonym of overall oral proficiency. On the contrary, in the assessment of foreign language proficiency, it is one of several descriptors of oral performance. Despite the belief that we share a common definition as language teachers and researchers, there is some evidence that agreement cannot be taken for granted and various interpretations coexist. The purpose of this paper is to review recent research into the qualitative and quantitative aspects of fluency in order to arrive at a clearer definition of the word, both as a performance descriptor for oral assessment of foreign language learners and as an indicator of progress in language learning. It is suggested that research into temporal variables in speech production provides concrete evidence which can contribute to a more precise definition of fluency. However a purely quantitative definition of fluency does not enable us to discover how to facilitate efficient processes of speech productions. A qualitative, linguistic analysis of the language produced by advanced language learners reveals some of the links between linguistic knowledge and performance skills.

Cognitive mechanisms of switching in HIV-associated category fluency deficits

Jennifer Iudicello — 2008-03-13T18:06:37-00:00

Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, Vol. 99999, No. 1. (2008), pp. 1-8.

HIV infection is associated with deficits in category fluency, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms of such impairments have not been determined. Considering the preferential disruption of the structure and function of frontostriatal circuits in HIV disease, the present study evaluated the hypothesis that HIV-associated category fluency deficits are driven by impaired switching. Study participants were 96 HIV-infected individuals and 43 demographically comparable healthy comparison volunteers who were administered a standard measure of animal fluency and an alternating category fluency task (i.e., fruits and furniture) in a randomized order. Consistent with prior research on letter fluency, HIV infection was associated with greater impairments in switching, but not semantic clustering within the animal fluency task. Moreover, a significant interaction was observed whereby the HIV-associated deficits in switching were exacerbated by the explicit demands of the alternating fluency task. Across both fluency tasks, switching demonstrated generally small correlations with standard clinical measures of executive functions, working memory, and semantic memory. Collectively, these findings suggest that HIV-associated category fluency deficits are driven by switching impairments and related cognitive abilities (e.g., mental flexibility), perhaps reflecting underlying neuropathology within prefrontostriatal networks.

Google and the Mind: Predicting Fluency With PageRank

Griffiths — 2007-11-24T20:33:35-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 18, No. 12. (December 2007), pp. 1069-1076.

Two fluency heuristics (and how to tell them apart)

Bruce Whittlesea — 2008-02-05T20:49:20-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 49, No. 1. (July 2003), pp. 62-79.

People experience an illusion of familiarity when the fluency of their performance is enhanced without their knowledge. This illusion helps to reveal the source of appropriate feelings of familiarity occurring in the presence of repeated stimuli. That feeling might occur for one of two reasons: because of the increase in the absolute magnitude of fluency, or because the fluency becomes surprisingly great, relative to an expectation for that event. We demonstrate that people use each of these bases of decision, in different circumstances. We also offer a procedure that can be broadly applied to discriminate them.