We report an eye movement experiment that investigates the effects of collocation strength and contextual predictability on the reading of collocative phrases by L2 English readers. Thirty-eight Chinese English as foreign language learners read 40 sentences, each including a specific two-word phrase that was either a strong or weak adjective-noun collocation and was either highly predictable or unpredictable from the previous sentence context. Eye movement measures showed that L2 reading times for the collocative phrases were sensitive to both collocation strength (...) and contextual predictability. However, an interaction effect between these factors, which appeared relatively late in the eye movement record, additionally revealed that contextual predictability more strongly influenced time spent reading weak compared with strong collocations. This was most likely because the greater familiarity of strong collocations facilitated their integration, even in the absence of strong contextual constraint. We discuss the findings in terms of the value of collocations in second language learning. (shrink)

Accurate wind speed forecasting is an effective way to improve the safety and stability of power grid. A novel hybrid model based on twice decomposition, phase space reconstruction, and an improved multiverse optimizer-extreme learning machine is proposed to enhance the performance of short-term wind speed forecasting in this paper. In consideration of the nonstationarity of the wind speed signal, a twice decomposition based on improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise, fuzzy entropy, and variational mode decomposition is proposed (...) to reduce the nonstationarity of the original signal firstly. Then the PSR based on C-C method is employed to reconstitute the decomposed signal as the input of the prediction model. Lastly, an improved multiverse optimizer is proposed to improve the stability and efficiency of ELM which is used as prediction model. Furthermore, two experiments are designed to verify the performance of the proposed method; the results indicate that the wind speed forecasting with twice decomposition of original wind speed signal is better than other once-decomposition methods and much better than forecasting without decomposition; the C-C-PSR method can determine the input dimension of ELM and improve the prediction accuracy of ELM; the IMVO has improved the stability of ELM, and the optimization efficiency is better than other comparison optimization methods. The results show that the proposed hybrid approach is a useful tool for short-term wind speed forecasting. (shrink)

Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient homophone was visually (...) presented, the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation. (shrink)