| 1. |
- Lindroos, Robert, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Perceptual odor qualities predict successful odor identification in old age
- 2022
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Ingår i: Chemical Senses. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0379-864X .- 1464-3553. ; 47
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Odor identification is a common assessment of olfaction, and it is affected in a large number of diseases. Identification abilities decline with age, but little is known about whether there are perceptual odor features that can be used to predict identification. Here, we analyzed data from a large, population-based sample of 2,479 adults, aged 60 years or above, from the Swedish National study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen. Participants performed both free and cued odor identification tests. In a separate experiment, we assessed perceived pleasantness, familiarity, intensity, and edibility of all odors in the first sample, and examined how odor identification performance is associated with these variables. The analysis showed that high-intensity odors are easier to identify than low-intensity odors overall, but also that they are more susceptible to the negative repercussions of old age. This result indicates that sensory decline is a major aspect of age-dependent odor identification impairment, and suggests a framework where identification likelihood is proportional to the perceived intensity of the odor. Additional analyses further showed that high-performing individuals can discriminate target odors from distractors along the pleasantness and edibility dimensions and that unpleasant and inedible odors show smaller age-related differences in identification. Altogether, these results may guide further development and optimization of brief and efficient odor identification tests as well as influence the design of odorous products targeted toward older consumers.
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| 2. |
- Hörberg, Thomas, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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A parosmia severity index based on word-classification predicts olfactory abilities and impairment
- 2023
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Ingår i: European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology. - : Springer Nature. - 0937-4477 .- 1434-4726. ; 280:8, s. 3695-3706
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Parosmia is an olfactory disorder that involves distortions of specific odors that may co-occur with anosmia, loss of smell of other odors. Little is known about which odors frequently trigger parosmia, and measures of parosmia severity are lacking. Here, we present an approach to understand and diagnose parosmia that is based on semantic properties (e.g., valence) of words describing odor sources (“fish”, “coffee”, etc.). Using a data-driven method based on natural language data, we identified 38 odor descriptors. Descriptors were evenly dispersed across an olfactory-semantic space, which was based on key odor dimensions. Parosmia patients (n = 48) classified the corresponding odors in terms of whether they trigger parosmic or anosmic sensations. We investigated whether these classifications are related to semantic properties of the descriptors. Parosmic sensations were most often reported for words describing unpleasant odors of inedibles that are highly associated to olfaction (e.g., “excrement”). Based on PCA modeling, we derived the Parosmia Severity Index—a measure of parosmia severity that can be determined solely from our non-olfactory behavioral task. This index predicts olfactory-perceptual abilities, self-reported olfactory impairment, and depression. We thus provide a novel approach for investigating parosmia and establishing its severity that does not require odor exposure. Our work may enhance our understanding of how parosmia changes over time and how it is expressed differently across individuals.
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| 3. |
- Raj, Rohan, 1996-, et al.
(författare)
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Odor identification errors reveal cognitive aspects of age-associated smell loss
- 2023
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Ingår i: Cognition. - : Elsevier. - 0010-0277 .- 1873-7838. ; 236
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Human olfaction can be extraordinarily sensitive, and its most common assessment method is odor identification (OID), where everyday odors are matched to word labels in a multiple-choice format. However, many older persons are unable to identify familiar odors, a deficit that is associated with the risk of future dementia and mortality. The underlying processes subserving OID in older adults are poorly understood. Here, we analyzed error patterns in OID to test whether errors could be explained by perceptual and/or semantic similarities among the response alternatives. We investigated the OID response patterns in a large, population-based sample of older adults in Sweden (n = 2479; age 60–100 years). Olfaction was assessed by a ‘Sniffin ́ TOM OID test with 16 odors; each trial involved matching a target odor to a correct label among three distractors. We analyzed the pattern of misidentifications, and the results showed that some distractors were more frequently selected than others, suggesting cognitive or perceptual factors may be present. Relatedly, we conducted a large online survey of older adults (n = 959, age 60–90 years) who were asked to imagine and rate the perceptual similarity of the target odors and the three corresponding distractors (e.g. “How similar are these smells: apple and mint?”). We then used data from the Swedish web corpus and the Word2Vec neural network algorithm to quantify the semantic association strength between the labels of each target odor and its three distractors. These data sources were used to predict odor identification errors. We found that the error patterns were partly explained by both the semantic similarity between target-distractor pairs, and the imagined perceptual similarity of the target-distractor pair. Both factors had, however, a diminished prediction in older ages, as responses became gradually less systematic. In sum, our results suggest that OID tests not only reflect olfactory perception, but also likely involve the mental processing of odor-semantic associations. This may be the reason why these tests are useful in predicting dementia onset. Our insights into olfactory-language interactions could be harnessed to develop new olfactory tests that are tailored for specific clinical purposes.
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| 4. |
- Brandtler, Johan, et al.
(författare)
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Subjektet – en svårplacerad mittfältare : Om den relativa ledföljden mellan subjekt och negation i modern svenska
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- I beskrivningar av svenskans ledföljd har subjektet normalt sin plats före satsadverbial i satsens mittfält (se t.ex. SAG IV:12). Samtidigt är det välkänt att den inbördes ordningen mellan subjekt och satsadverbialkan variera:"Om allting klaffar reagerar inte revisorerna ≈ Om allting klaffar reagerar revisorerna inte" (SAG IV:19). I tidigare studier har ofta informationsstrukturella faktorer lyfts fram för att förklara variationen, men sådana slutsatser bygger ofta på ganska begränsade empiriska material — åtminstone vad substantiviska subjekt anbelangar eftersom pronominella subjekt är så totalt dominerade i naturligt språkbruk. Som exempel kan nämnas att en korpus som SUC med en omfattning om drygt 74 000 meningar inte ens innehåller 200 exempel där växlingen mellan substantiviska subjekt och negation kan studeras. För att närmare frilägga olika orsaker till variationen blir det därför nödvändigt att undersöka mycket stora material. I vårt föredrag ska vi presentera resultatet av en omfattande korpusstudie, där vi med hjälp av statistiska metoder analyserar växlingen mellan subjekt och adverbial i satsens mittfält i ett stort empiriskt material (cirka 1,7 miljoner meningar). Vi visar att subjektets placering påverkas av ett komplext samspel mellan en rad olika faktorer— såväl grammatiska som pragmatiska. Genom logistisk regressionsanalys (Paolillo 2002) beräknar vi vidare de olika faktorernas inflytande på valet av variant, och visar bl.a. att både faktorer som LÄNGD och DEFINITHET har signifikant inverkan på valet av ledföljd i modern svenska. Utifrån våra resultat vill vi först och främst föra diskussion om variations-möjligheterna i satsens mittfält i svenskan och de nordiska språken, men resultaten kommer också att kunna ge ett bidrag till vår förståelse av samspelet mellan syntax och informationsstrukturpå ett mer generellt plan. Med ’informationsstruktur’ avses normalt en mängd samverkande faktorer, men genom att vi kan visa i vilken utsträckning som olika faktorer faktiskt bidrar till valet av en viss språklig variant kan de olika faktorernas enskilda betydelse isoleras vilket i förlängningen kan bidra till en djupare förståelse av informationsstrukturens betydelse för ledföljden i de nordiska språken.
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| 5. |
- Gerholm, Tove, et al.
(författare)
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A protocol for a three-arm cluster randomized controlled superiority trial investigating the effects of two pedagogical methodologies in Swedish preschool settings on language and communication, executive functions, auditive selective attention, socioemotional skills and early maths skills
- 2018
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Ingår i: BMC Psychology. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2050-7283. ; 6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BackgroundDuring the preschool years, children develop abilities and skills in areas crucial for later success in life. These abilities include language, executive functions, attention, and socioemotional skills. The pedagogical methods used in preschools hold the potential to enhance these abilities, but our knowledge of which pedagogical practices aid which abilities, and for which children, is limited. The aim of this paper is to describe an intervention study designed to evaluate and compare two pedagogical methodologies in terms of their effect on the above-mentioned skills in Swedish preschool children.MethodThe study is a randomized control trial (RCT) where two pedagogical methodologies were tested to evaluate how they enhanced children’s language, executive functions and attention, socioemotional skills, and early maths skills during an intensive 6-week intervention. Eighteen preschools including 28 units and 432 children were enrolled in a municipality close to Stockholm, Sweden. The children were between 4;0 and 6;0 years old and each preschool unit was randomly assigned to either of the interventions or to the control group. Background information on all children was collected via questionnaires completed by parents and preschools. Pre- and post-intervention testing consisted of a test battery including tests on language, executive functions, selective auditive attention, socioemotional skills and early maths skills. The interventions consisted of 6 weeks of intensive practice of either a socioemotional and material learning paradigm (SEMLA), for which group-based activities and interactional structures were the main focus, or an individual, digitally implemented attention and math training paradigm, which also included a set of self-regulation practices (DIL). All preschools were evaluated with the ECERS-3.DiscussionIf this intervention study shows evidence of a difference between group-based learning paradigms and individual training of specific skills in terms of enhancing children’s abilities in fundamental areas like language, executive functions and attention, socioemotional skills and early math, this will have big impact on the preschool agenda in the future. The potential for different pedagogical methodologies to have different impacts on children of different ages and with different backgrounds invites a wider discussion within the field of how to develop a preschool curriculum suited for all children.
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| 6. |
- Hörberg, Thomas, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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A Rational Model of Incremental Argument Interpretation : The Comprehension of Swedish Transitive Clauses
- 2021
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A central component of sentence understanding is verb-argument interpretation, determining how the referents in the sentence are related to the events or states expressed by the verb. Previous work has found that comprehenders change their argument interpretations incrementally as the sentence unfolds, based on morphosyntactic (e.g., case, agreement), lexico-semantic (e.g., animacy, verb-argument fit), and discourse cues (e.g., givenness). However, it is still unknown whether these cues have a privileged role in language processing, or whether their effects on argument interpretation originate in implicit expectations based on the joint distribution of these cues with argument assignments experienced in previous language input. We compare the former, linguistic account against the latter, expectation-based account, using data from production and comprehension of transitive clauses in Swedish. Based on a large corpus of Swedish, we develop a rational (Bayesian) model of incremental argument interpretation. This model predicts the processing difficulty experienced at different points in the sentence as a function of the Bayesian surprise associated with changes in expectations over possible argument interpretations. We then test the model against reading times from a self-paced reading experiment on Swedish. We find Bayesian surprise to be a significant predictor of reading times, complementing effects of word surprisal. Bayesian surprise also captures the qualitative effects of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic cues. Additional model comparisons find that it—with a single degree of freedom—captures much, if not all, of the effects associated with these cues. This suggests that the effects of form- and meaning-based cues to argument interpretation are mediated through expectation-based processing.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Hörberg, Thomas, 1979-
(författare)
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Data-Driven and Survey-Based Approaches to Obtaining the Semantic Organization of Olfactory Vocabularies
- 2023
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Ingår i: 2023 Monell Spring Colloquium. ; , s. 17-
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Odor experiences are hard to verbalize (Olofsson & Gottfried 2015), partly because most languages lack dedicated vocabularies for describing odor qualities (compared to, e.g., color vocabulary) (Majid 2021). Odors are instead described on the basis of their sources (e.g., woody), with reference to abstract properties (e.g., musty), with cross-modal sensory metaphors (e.g., sweet) or by hedonic evaluation (e.g., pleasant) (e.g., Poulton 2020). Since most of these descriptors are frequently used in other situations, odor vocabularies tend to be fuzzy and not clearly defined or differentiated. Thus, it is often unclear which set of words constitute the olfactory vocabulary within a language. In this talk, I present two approaches that identify the most frequently used odor descriptors in a given language and map the semantic organization of those descriptors. The first method is based on large-scale natural language data (Hörberg et al. 2022) and the second on web-based surveys. I give examples of the semantic organization of the odor vocabularies of a couple of languages that have been derived on the basis of these methods (Hörberg et al. 2022; Wnuk et al. 2020). If time permits, I will also present a practical application of the first approach in the domain of parosmia evaluation.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Hörberg, Thomas, 1979-
(författare)
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Expectation-based processing of grammatical functions in Swedish
- 2019
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Much research indicate that language processing is expectation-based, drawing on statistical patterns in the input (MacDonald 2013). In this talk, I present evidence for this idea from experimental and corpus-based studies on the comprehension and production of grammatical functions (GFs) in Swedish transitive sentences. The preferred word order in such sentences is SVO. However, Swedish also allows for OVS word ordering, with the object placed sentence-initially and the subject post-verbally. Since the NP argument GFs of such sentences may not be correctly determined from the sentence constituent order (i.e., NPs and verb), they are potentially ambiguous. They can therefore be costly to comprehend when the initial NP lacks case marking. In such cases, comprehenders need to revise their initial sentence interpretation as subject-initial upon encountering the disambiguating post-verbal subject NP (Hörberg et al. 2013).However, corpus-based and typological research shows that GFs correlate with prominence-based (e.g., animacy and definiteness) and verb-semantic (e.g., volitionality) information, both in the frequency distributions in language use within individual languages (e.g., Bouma 2008), and the grammatical encoding of GFs across languages (e.g., Aissen 2003), creating complex statistical regularities in the distribution of prominence-based, morphosyntactic and verb-semantic properties. These properties and their interplay may be utilized during encoding and decoding of GFs in production and comprehension in order to overcome potential ambiguity problems.I will present results from a corpus study of written Swedish investigating the distribution of these properties in subject-initial, object-initial and passive sentences. I will argue that writers tend to balance their use of these properties in order to avoid GF ambiguities. In particular, writers less frequently use OVS sentences when other morphosyntactic or animacy-based information about GFs are unavailible (Hörberg 2018). In such cases, writers more frequently use the unambiguous passive construction.I will then present an expectation-based model of processing difficulty during incremental GF assignment in Swedish transitive sentences, based upon the statistical regularities observed in the corpus data (Hörberg 2016). Processing difficulty is quantified as the on-line change in the expectation of a particular GF assignment (subject- or object-initial) upon encountering the properties of a constituent (e.g., NP2) with respect to the previously encountered properties (e.g., NP1 and verb(s)) in terms of Bayesian surprise.I will finally provide empirical evidence for this expectation-based model on the basis of a self-paced reading experiment, testing some of the most prominent model predictions. Here, by-region reading times converged with the region-specific Bayesian surprise predicted by the model. For example, NP2 reading times in ambiguous OVS sentences were mitigated when NP1 animacy and its interaction with verb class bias towards an object-initial word order.These findings provide evidence for the expectation-based account in that they indicate that language users are sensitive to statistical regularities in their language during both production and comprehension of GFs. During production, writers seem to balance their use of morphosyntactic and prominence-based cues to GFs in a manner that accommodates comprehension. During comprehension, incremental GF assignment draws upon statistical regularities in the distribution of morphosyntactic, prominence-based and verb-semantic properties.
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