Evidence from behavioral studies demonstrates that spoken language guides attention in a related visual scene and that attended scene information can influence the comprehension process. Here we model sentence comprehension within visual contexts. A recurrent neural network is trained to associate the linguistic input with the visual scene and to produce the interpretation of the described event which is part of the visual scene. A feedback mechanism is investigated, which enables explicit utterance-mediated attention shifts to the relevant part of the scene. We compare four models - a simple recurrent network (SRN) and three models with specific types of additional feedback - in order to explore the role of the attention mechanism in the comprehension process. The results show that all networks learn not only successfully to produce the interpretation at the sentence end, but also demonstrate predictive behavior reflected by the ability to anticipate upcoming constituents. The SRN performs expectedly very well, but demonstrates that adding an explicit attentional mechanism does not lead to loss of performance, and even results in a slight improvement in one of the models.
Cieľ.V posledných rokoch sa na Slovensku rozvíja výskum rečovej ontogenézy u detí s normálnym aj narušeným vývinom reči, no porozumenie viet bolo zatiaľ skúmané len okrajovo. Cieľom štúdie je zmapovať porozumenie viet u slovensky hovoriacich intaktných detí vo veku od 6 do 10 rokov. Výskumný súbor a metóda. Vo výskume sa analyzuje porozumenie viet u 160 slovensky hovoriacich detí v mladšom školskom veku rozdelených po 40 do štyroch vekových kategórií. Autorky použili pri vyšetrovaní detí vlastný test a metódu priraďovania obrázka k počutej vete. Deti vyberali z dvoch obrázkov, na ktorých bola znázornená rovnaká činnosť, no na ktorých si účastníci deja vymieňali svoje roly. Hypotézy. Sledoval sa vplyv rôznych lingvistických faktorov, ako sú syntaktická štruktúra vety, dĺžka vety, prítomnosť morfologického kľúča na začiatku vety či poradie sémantických rolí. Výsledky. Výsledky ukazujú, že spracovávanie niektorých lingvistických faktorov dosahuje takmer stropové výkony už u najmladších detí. Na druhej strane pri iných faktoroch (napr. neprítomnosť morfologického kľúča v prvom podstatnom mene vo vete, nekanonické poradie sémantických rolí) s vekom detí narastá priemerný výkon. Na základe týchto výsledkov možno identifikovať „ťažšie“ lingvistické faktory vo vývine porozumenia ešte aj v mladšom školskom veku., Objectives. In the recent years in Slovakia, a research of the speech ontogenesis in typically developing children and children with language impairment begins the sentence comprehension so far, however, has been studied rarely. The aim of this study is to map the sentence comprehension in typically developing Slovak-speaking children at the age from 6 to 10 years. Sample and setting. The sentence comprehension is analysed in 160 Slovak-speaking children at the younger school age which were divided into four age categories, with 40 subjects in each category. The authors used for the assessment of children their own test and the method of picture-matching task to a heard sentence. Children chose one of two pictures in which the same activity was depicted with changed semantic roles of the main actors. Hypotheses. The influence of various linguistic factors such as the syntactic complexity, the length of the sentence, the presence of a morphological cue at the beginning of the sentence or the order of semantic roles was followed. Results. The results show that the processing of some linguistic factors is at the ceiling already in the youngest children. On the other hand, the average performance accrues with the increasing age of the children (for example, the absence of a morphological cue in the first noun of the sentence, the non-canonical order of semantic roles). On the ground of these results, it is possible to identify “the more difficult” linguistic factors in the development of comprehension still at the younger school age., Jana Marková, Marína Mikulajová., and Obsahuje seznam literatury