Two experiments examined the effects of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density on word learning by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Nonwords orthogonally varying in probability and density were taught with learning and retention measured via picture naming. Experiment 1 used a within-story probability/across-story density exposure context. Experiment 2 used an across-story probability...

The universality of higher female religiousness and insufficiency of any social explanation have led to proposals that it is a product of psychological or physiological differences. However, the female advantage in religiousness is not universal. Distinguishing Affective (personal piety) from Active (organizational participation) religiousness, in a third of nations (World Values Survey) women ...

We give estimates of the distance between the densities of the laws of two functionals F and G on the Wiener space in terms of the Malliavin-Sobolev norm of F −G. We actually consider a more general framework which allows one to treat with similar (Malliavin type) methods functionals of a Poisson point measure (solutions of jump type stochastic equations). We use the above estimates in order to...

The rate of convergence for gradient descent algorithms, both batch and stochastic, can be improved by including in the weight update a “momentum” term proportional to the previous weight update. Several authors [1, 2] give conditions for convergence of the mean and covariance of the weight vector for momentum LMS with constant learning rate. However stochastic algorithms require that the learn...

The classical Kaczmarz iteration and its randomized variants are popular tools for fast inversion of linear overdetermined systems. This method extends naturally to the setting of the phase retrieval problem via substituting at each iteration the phase of any measurement of the available approximate solution for the unknown phase of the measurement of the true solution. Despite the simplicity o...

Weak lensing measurements are starting to provide statistical maps of the distribution of matter in the universe that are increasingly precise and complementary to cosmic microwave background maps. The probability distribution (PDF) provides a powerful tool to test non-Gausian features in the convergence field and to discriminate the different cosmological models. In this letter, we present a n...

This paper investigates the asymptotics of Kullback-Leibler divergence between two probability distributions satisfying a Central Limit Theorem property. The basic problem is as follows. Let Xi, i ∈ N, be a sequence of independent random variables such that the sum Sn = ∑n i=1 Xi has the same expected value and satisfies the CLT under each probability distribution. Then what are the asymptotics...

We demonstrate quantitatively that, as predicted by evolutionary theory, sequences of homologous proteins from different species converge as we go further and further back in time. The converse, a non-evolutionary model can be expressed as probabilities, and the test works for chloroplast, nuclear and mitochondrial sequences, as well as for sequences that diverged at different time depths. Even...