The Relationship Between Word Length and Average Information Content in Japanese.

Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson analyzed a large-scale web-scraping corpus (the Google 1T dataset) and reported that word length is independently predicted from average information content (surprisal) calculated by a 2- to 4-gram model (hereafter, longer-span surprisal) across 11 Indo-European languages, namely, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish. However, a recent article by Meylan and Griffiths suggested the importance of preprocessing for studies with large-scale corpora and reanalyzed the same databases. After their preprocessing, the results in Piantadosi et al.

Predicting the Structure of a Lexical Environment from Properties of Verbal Working Memory.

We analyzed a Japanese lexical database to investigate the structure of the lexical environment based on the hypothesis that the lexical environment is optimized for the functioning of verbal working memory. Our prediction was that, as a consequence of the cultural transmission of language, low-imageable meanings tend to be represented by frequent phonological patterns in the current vocabulary rather than infrequent phonological patterns. This prediction was based on two findings of previous laboratory studies on verbal working memory.

Effectiveness of a Parent Training Programme for Parents of Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Aiming to Improve Daily Living Skills.

Parent training (PT) has been well established in younger children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but is less well studied in adolescents. This study examined the effects of attempting PT to enhance the daily living skills (DLSs) of adolescents with ASD. Twenty-five parents of adolescents with ASD participated in either the immediate- or delayed-treatment control condition.

Alchemical free energy calculations via metadynamics: Application to the theophylline-RNA aptamer complex.

We propose a computational workflow for robust and accurate prediction of both binding poses and their affinities at early stage in designing drug candidates. Small, rigid ligands with few intramolecular degrees of freedom, for example, fragment-like molecules, have multiple binding poses, even at a single binding site, and their affinities are often close to each other. We explore various structures of ligand binding to a target through metadynamics using a small number of collective variables, followed by reweighting to obtain the atomic coordinates.

The interaction between temporal grouping and phonotactic chunking in short-term serial order memory for novel verbal sequences.

The current study investigated the ways long-term memory contributes to short-term serial order memory of novel verbal sequences, focusing on long-term knowledge of bi-element frequency, that is, co-occurrence frequency of two consecutive elements in a linguistic environment. Participants performed two types of immediate serial recall of nine-element (nine-mora) sequences: low bi-mora frequency sequences where all eight associations between the nine morae were low frequency, and mixed bi-mora frequency sequences, with high-frequency associations for six of the eight bi-morae. Experiment 1 confirmed the bi-directional bi-mora frequency effect, meaning better recall performance for morae having high-frequency association with either the preceding mora (forward association) or the following mora (backward association).