
Aki-Juhani KyröläinenUniversity of Turku | UTU
Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen
PhD
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44
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Publications (44)
What makes a literate person? What leads to literacy gains and losses within and between individuals and countries? This paper provides new evidence that helps answer these questions. The present comparative analysis of literacy is based on large representative samples from the Survey of Adult Skills conducted in 33 countries, with 25–65 year old p...
Emotions play a fundamental role in language learning, use, and processing. Words denoting positivity account for a larger part of the lexicon than words denoting negativity, and they also tend to be used more frequently, a phenomenon known as positivity bias. However, language experience changes over an individual's lifetime, making the examinatio...
There is a consensus that loneliness correlates with an increased risk of cognitive impairment and rapid cognitive decline. However, it has yet to be determined how loneliness influences cognitively healthy aging. This study makes use of the large, nationally representative Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging (CLSA) to address this question. Based...
The topic of affective development over the lifespan is at the forefront of psychological science. One of the intriguing findings in this area is superior emotion regulation and increased positivity in older rather than younger adults. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical base of studies on the role of affect in cognition. We report a new...
This paper presents the Cognitive and Social WELL-being (CoSoWELL) project that consists of two components. One is a large corpus of narratives written by over 1000 North American older adults (55+ years old) in five test sessions before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other component is a rich collection of socio-demographi...
This volume highlights the ways in which recent developments in corpus linguistics and natural language processing can engage with topics across language studies, humanities and social science disciplines.
New approaches have emerged in recent years that blur disciplinary boundaries, facilitated by factors such as the application of computational m...
Objectives:
In view of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychologists face a challenge to document the pandemic-related change in emotional well-being of individuals and groups and evaluate the emotional response to this fallout over time.
Methodsp:
We contribute to this goal by analyzing the new CoSoWELL corpus (version 2.0), an 1.8 millio...
The reported psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures included a decline in cognitive functioning in older adults. Cognitive functioning is known to correlate with the lexical and syntactic complexity of an individual's linguistic productions. We examined written narratives from the CoSoWELL corpus (v 1.0), c...
When exploring the characteristics of a discourse domain associated with texts, keyword analysis is widely used in corpus linguistics. However, one of the challenges facing this method is the evaluation of the quality of the keywords. Here, we propose casting keyword analysis as a prediction problem with the goal of discriminating the texts associa...
This article examines the automatic identification of Web registers, that is, text varieties such as news articles and reviews. Most studies have focused on corpora restricted to include only preselected classes with well-defined characteristics. These corpora feature only a subset of documents found on the unrestricted open Web, for which register...
Psychological research, including research into adult reading, is frequently based on convenience samples of undergraduate students. This practice raises concerns about the external validity of many accepted findings. The present study seeks to determine how strong this student sampling bias is in literacy and numeracy research. We use the national...
Personhood is a complex concept in gerontological research. It is often used to explore the maintenance or reconstruction of self-identity. Narrative analysis has commonly explored how the stories that older individuals living with cognitive impairment(s) produce preserve the personhood that is perceived to be threatened by cognitive decline. This...
The Internet offers great possibilities for many scientific disciplines that utilize text data. However, the potential of online data can be limited by the lack of information on the genre or register of the documents, as register—whether a text is, e.g., a news article or a recipe—is arguably the most important predictor of linguistic variation (s...
In recent years, several methods have been proposed for explaining individual predictions of deep learning models, yet there has been little study of how to aggregate these predictions to explain how such models view classes as a whole in text classification tasks. In this work, we propose a method for explaining classes using deep learning models...
Is it possible that silent reading rate is the same as the most efficient listening rate? The hypothesis has been formulated in the past, but never got much traction because silent reading is almost twice as fast as typical speech. On the other hand, several studies have shown that listening comprehension retains high quality for spoken materials p...
This cross-linguistic study investigates the impact of spelling errors on reading behavior in five languages (Chinese, English, Finnish, Greek, and Hebrew). Learning theories predict that correct and incorrect spelling alternatives (e.g., tomorrow and tommorrow) provide competing cues to the sound and meaning of a word: the closer the alternatives...
Methods in Linguistics is a collection of articles presenting a broad variety of methods and approaches in the field of linguistics. It offers structure to the spectrum of methodological possibilities and helps the reader to identify the field of application as well as the strengths and weaknesses of different methods.
The article is publicly avai...
Emotions play a fundamental role in language learning, use and processing. Words denoting positivity account for a larger part of the lexicon than words denoting negativity,
and they also tend to be used more frequently, a phenomenon known as positivity bias. However, language experience changes over an individual’s lifetime making the
examination...
This paper brings new insight to poverty and social exclusion through an analysis of how poverty-related issues are commented on in the largest online discussion forum in Finland: Suomi24 ('Finland24'). For data, we use 32,407 posts published in the forum in 2014 that contain the word köyhä ('poor') or a predefined semantically similar word. We app...
Language processing is incremental and inherently predictive. Against this theoretic backdrop, we investigated the role of upcoming structural information in the comprehension of the English dative alternation. The use of eye-tracking enabled us to examine both the time course and locus of the effect associated with (a) structural expectations base...
This article examines the influence of gradient foreign accentedness on lexical competition during spoken word recognition. Using native and Mandarin-accented English words ranging in degree of foreign accentedness, we investigate the effect of increased accentedness on (a) the size of the competitor space and (b) the strength and duration of compe...
This article presents dependency profiles (DPs) as an empirical method to investigate linguistic elements and their application to the study of 24 discourse connectives in the 3.7-billion token Finnish Internet Parsebank ( http://bionlp-www.utu.fi/dep_search/ ). DPs are based on co-occurrence patterns of the discourse connectives with dependency sy...
The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) is used to study online spoken language processing and produces time-series data. The data present challenges for analysis and they require significant preprocessing and are by nature nonlinear. Here, we discuss VWPre, a new tool for data preprocessing, and generalized additive mixed modeling (GAMM), a relatively new...
The analysis was based on a large-scale corpus of tweets in English in the Twitter discussion with the hashtag #jesuisCharlie. The analysis was conducted sequentially with mixed methods: language technology method, quantitative analysis of modality, and digital discourse analysis of the opinions expressed in the tweets. The data contained multiple...
Intuitively, some predicates have a better fit with certain arguments than others. Usage-based models of language emphasize the importance of semantic similarity in shaping the structuring of constructions (form and meaning). In this study, we focus on modeling the semantics of transitive constructions in Finnish and present an autoencoder-based ne...
This study presents a methodological toolbox for big data analysis of linguistic constructions by introducing dependency profiles, i.e., co-occurrences of linguistic elements with syntax information. These were operationalized by reconstructing sentences as delexicalized syntactic biarcs, subtrees of dependency analyses. As a case study, we utilize...
In Standard Finnish, the case marking of the S argument in existential clauses alternates between the nominative and the partitive, while A arguments of transitive clauses are always in the nominative. In actual usage, however, the partitive is used occasionally to mark some A arguments as well (the partitive A). We extracted data from the Finnish...
Focus marking is an important function of prosody in many languages. While many phonological accounts concentrate on fundamental frequency (F0), studies have established several additional cues to information structure. However, the relationship between these cues is rarely investigated. We simultaneously analyzed five prosodic cues to focus—F0 ran...
The variability of subject expression has been extensively investigated across languages. We present a large-scale multivariate statistical analysis of the choice of subject expression in the 1st person singular in spontaneous Finnish conversation, with a focus on the choice between pronominal and zero subject. Spoken Finnish represents an interest...
In this study, we examined speaker-dependent (acoustic) and speaker-independent (lexical) linguistic influences on perceived foreign accentedness. Accentedness ratings assigned to Chinese-accented English words were analyzed, taking accentedness as a continuum. The speaker-dependent variables were included as acoustic distances, measured in relatio...
Data visualization is an integral part of scientific inquiry in order to represent data and communicate findings. Recent developments such as the rise of large-scale corpora show that techniques to relate linguistically informed analysis and spatial data visualization have become increasingly important for quantitative analysis. Although spatial da...
This volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic, syntactic and discourse features, such as animacy, agentivity, topicality, referenti...