BACKGROUND Referential delusions are the most common symptom of schizophrenia and offer an opportunity to examine the neural correlates of delusions because they occur in discrete episodes that can be studied in the scanner. The cortical midline structures (CMS) and subcortical regions, including the amygdala and striatum, are linked with self-reference in healthy adults. Less is known about th...

BACKGROUND Self-referential processing (i.e. linking internal and external stimuli to one's own self) has received scant attention thus far in schizophrenia. This type of processing is a key component of social cognition and thought to be important for adaptive social functioning. Memory studies in healthy subjects have shown that stimuli processed with reference to the self are better remember...

Over repeated reference conversational partners tend to converge on preferred terms or referential pacts. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by pragmatic difficulties that are best captured by less structured tasks. To this end we tested adults with ASD who did not have language or intellectual impairments, and neurotypical comparison participants in a referential communication t...

Using fMRI, we studied the neural correlates of self-referential processing by comparing BOLD signal changes during self and mother conditions of a self-reference effect (SRE) task. Conjunction analysis of these two conditions showed several common areas of significant activation, including the medial aspects of the superior frontal gyri, left inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral temporal poles, l...

We present an experiment to compare a standard, minimally distinguishing algorithm for the generation of relational referring expressions with two alternatives that produce overspecified descriptions. The experiment shows that discrimination which normally plays a major role in the disambiguation task is also a major influence in referential overspecification, even though disambiguation is in p...

It is widely known that closure operators on finite sets can be represented by sets of implications (also known as inclusion dependencies) as well as by formal contexts. In this paper we survey known results and present new findings concerning time and space requirements of diverse tasks for managing closure operators, given in contextual, implicational, or black-box representation. These tasks...

We can study dead forms from a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence. We can, however, enter into a relationship with living forms and, in making ourselves open to their movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to them, and in so doing, we can gain a sense of their character. In other words, from within our dialogically stru...

Most instances of real-life language use involve discourses in which several sentences or utterances are coherently linked through the use of repeated references. Repeated reference can take many forms, and the choice of referential form has been the focus of much research in several related fields. In this article we distinguish between three main approaches: one that addresses the ‘why’ quest...

Even the simplest narratives combine multiple strands of information, integrating different characters and their actions by expressing multiple perspectives of events. We examined the emergence of referential shift devices, which indicate changes among these perspectives, in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). Sign languages, like spoken languages, mark referential shift grammatically with a shift ...

This thesis presents Elliphant, a machine learning system for classifying Spanish subject ellipsis as either referential or non-referential. Linguistically motivated features are incorporated in a system which performs a ternary classification: verbs with explicit subjects, verbs with omitted but referential subjects (zero pronouns), and verbs with no subject (impersonal constructions). To the ...