No abstract

Interest in personality is growing in a wide range of disciplines, but only in a few systems it is possible to assess the survival value of personality. Field studies looking at the relationship between personality and survival value early in life are greatly hampered by the fact that personality can at present only be assessed after individuals become independent from their parents. In passerines, for example, this is often after a period of intensive selection for the survival on fledglings. The main aim of this study is therefore to develop a method to measure personality before this period of selection. For this purpose, we developed the handling stress (HS) test. We measured HS in 14‐d‐old great tit nestlings by counting the number of breast movements (breath rate) in four subsequent 15‐s bouts for 1 min; before and after they were socially isolated from their siblings for 15 min. To calculate the repeatability of HS, we repeated the test 6 mo later. To assess the relationship between HS and exploratory behaviour, we correlated the outcome of both tests. We ran tests both on birds of lines selected for extreme personality and on wild birds from a natural population. We found that birds selected for fast exploration reacted more to HS compared with birds selected for slow exploration and that HS was repeatable in different life phases. We confirmed this by finding an increase in the HS with increasing exploratory scores in wild birds. These results show that we can use the HS test as a measurement of personality, making it a potential tool for studying the relationship between personality and survival value early in life.

Variation in reactions to aposematic prey is common among conspecific individuals of bird predators. It may result from different individual experience but it also exists among naive birds. This variation may possibly be explained by the effect of personality-a complex of correlated, heritable behavioural traits consistent across contexts. In the great tit (Parus major), two extreme personality types have been defined. 'Fast' explorers are bold, aggressive and routine-forming; 'slow' explorers are shy, non-aggressive and innovative. Influence of personality type on unlearned reaction to aposematic prey, rate of avoidance learning and memory were tested in naive, hand-reared great tits from two opposite lines selected for exploration (slow against fast). The birds were subjected to a sequence of trials in which they were offered aposematic adult firebugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus). Slow birds showed a greater degree of unlearned wariness and learned to avoid the firebugs faster than fast birds. Although birds of both personality types remembered their experience, slow birds were more cautious in the memory test. We conclude that not only different species but also populations of predators that differ in proportions of personality types may have different impacts on survival of aposematic insects under natural conditions.

This paper introduces a new bilingual Czech-English verbal valency lexicon (called CzEngVallex) representing a relatively large empirical database. It includes 20,835 aligned valency frame pairs (i.e., verb senses which are translations of each other) and their aligned arguments. This new lexicon uses data from the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank and also takes advantage of the existing valency lexicons for both languages: the PDT-Vallex for Czech and the EngVallex for English. The CzEngVallex is available for browsing as well as for download in the LINDAT/CLARIN repository.The CzEngVallex is meant to be used not only by traditional linguists, lexicographers, translators but also by computational linguists both for the purposes of enriching theoretical linguistic accounts of verbal valency from a cross-linguistic perspective and for an innovative use in various NLP tasks.

This paper presents a resource and the associated annotation process used in a project of interlinking Czech and English verbal translational equivalents based on a parallel, richly annotated dependency treebank containing also valency and semantic roles, namely the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank. One of the main aims of this project is to create a high-quality and relatively large empirical base which could be used both for linguistic comparative research as well as for natural language processing applications, such as machine translation or cross-language sense disambiguation. This paper describes the resulting lexicon, CzEngVallex, and the process of building it, as well some interesting observations and statistics already obtained.