The current study investigated the roles of grammaticality and executive control on bilingual language selection by examining production speed and failures of language control, or intrusion errors (e.g., saying el instead of the), in young and aging bilinguals. Production of mixed-language connected speech was elicited by asking Spanish-English bilinguals to read aloud paragraphs that had mostl...

The language faculty, or better the apparent lack of anything quite like human language in other animals, is one of the most prominent phenomenon that Darwin’s theory of evolution has struggled to explain. Ever since Max Müller’s arguments for the language barrier in the 1860s, there have been heated debates about how natural selection could have produced human language, despite the famous atte...

We describe a text classification approach based on statistical language modeling. We show how this approach can be used for several natural language processing tasks in a virtual human system. Specifically, we show it can applied to language understanding, language generation, and character response selection tasks. We illustrate these applications with some experimental results.

Identifying and extracting subjective information from News, Blogs and other user generated content has lot of applications. Most of the earlier work concentrated on English data. But, recently subjectivity related research at sentence-level in other languages has increased. In this paper, we achieve sentence-level subjectivity classification using language independent feature weighing and sele...

This paper describes our participation in the TREC 2009 Blog Track. Our system consists of the query likelihood component and the news headline prior component, based on the language model framework. For the query likelihood, we propose several approaches to estimate the query language model and the news headline language model. We also suggest two approaches to choose the 10 supporting relevan...

In a seminal work, Tversky and Kahneman showed that in some contexts people tend to believe that a conjunction of events (e.g., Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement) is more likely to occur than one of the conjuncts (e.g., Linda is a bank teller). This belief violates the conjunction rule in probability theory. Tversky and Kahneman called this phenomenon the "conjunctio...

Language control refers to the cognitive mechanism that allows bilinguals to correctly speak in one language avoiding interference from the nontarget language. Bilinguals achieve this feat by engaging brain areas closely related to cognitive control. However, 2 questions still await resolution: whether this network is differently engaged when controlling nonlinguistic representations, and wheth...

INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... . SELECTIVE ATIENTION ......................................................................................... . Subcortical Gating ................................................................................................... . Early Auditory Selection .......................