Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
The article deals with interpretation of gender problems in amateur criticism of the German language. The goal of the study is to define specific features of gender-fair language forms, to detect the arguments of the discussion members as well as their linguistic explanation, and to consider the means of assessment used in discussion about gender-fair language. The materials examined were taken from German online-media for the period 2017 to 2021. The main research method is multifaceted discourse analysis which considers the trans-textual situation, intra-textual features and positions of the actors. The study is based on the achievements of feministic and gender linguistics. Examining gender-fair lexical units demonstrates their heterogeneity in form (natural and man-made) and content (gender specific and gender neutral). The arguments of the discussion members deal with important language problems, such as the possibility of a conscious change of language forms, the influence of language changes on the non-linguistic reality, understanding of grammar categories (gender of nouns), communicative function of the language, and problems of practical usage of language forms: intelligibility, reproducibility, compliance with mental and ethical norms. The analysis of evaluative vocabulary and keywords demonstrates conventionality and the reserve of assessments given by supporters of gender-fair language as well as the emotionality and figurativeness of assessments provided by opponents. The study of gender problems in amateur language criticism and their linguistic comprehension contributes to the development of modern scientific language criticism.
The article is devoted to topical issues of the culture of professional speech of representatives of the field of law, the level of which is an indicator of professionalism and general culture of the specialist in today's conditions. The purpose of the article is a comprehensive review of speech culture in the professional activities of lawyers at the present stage of development of Ukraine. In the research process, a descriptive method was used, as well as linguistic observation. The content of the concepts of “culture of speech”, “culture of speech”, “culture of professional speech”, “culture of professional speech of a jurist” is highlighted and delimited, and it is also determined that they are in a logical mutual dependence and interdependence. It is revealed that the main standards in the speech activity of a lawyer are correctness, accuracy, logic, clarity, purity, conciseness and expediency, where normativity plays a key role. The studied material demonstrates typical mistakes of irregularity of language norms (accentuation, spelling, lexical, morphological) in professional speech. The causes of these mistakes (primarily interference) are identified and ways to eliminate them are named. After analyzing the importance of language literacy and noting the importance of increasing its level for perfect mastery of the Ukrainian language standards and application in practice, it is emphasized that the culture of professional literacy today is the key to the success of a professional personality of a lawyer.
Background: In early stages, individuals with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) report language symptoms while scoring within norm in formal language tests. Early intervention is important due to the progressive nature of the disease. Method: We report a single case study of an individual with logopenic variant PPA (lvPPA). We tested whether letter fluency, used as a therapy task, can improve lexical retrieval when combined with tDCS to either the left inferior-frontal gyrus (IFG) or the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL), administered in two separate therapy phases separated by a wash-out period of three months. Outcomes and results: We observed increases in number of words retrieved during a letter fluency task in trained and untrained letters, when letter fluency therapy (LeFT) was administered with anodal tDCS. When LeFT was combined with left IFG stimulation, words produced in a letter fluency task were lower frequency and higher age of acquisition after treatment, compared to before treatment and there was also an increase in accuracy and response times in an untrained picture-naming task. Conclusions: The results indicate that letter fluency therapy combined anodal tDCS is effective in improving lexical retrieval, particularly when left IFG stimulation was used. Effects generalize beyond the trained task, albeit slowing down of responses in picture naming. This task may provide a useful clinical intervention strategy for patients with mild anomia, who are not challenged enough by traditional naming therapies.
Galician, one of Spain’s minority languages has existed for as long as Spanish, at least. Galician-Portuguese was a completely formed language with broadly homogenous written and spoken norms until two slightly different branches gradually emerged: Galician and Portuguese, starting in the thirteenth century. While Portuguese evolved and became one of today’s languages spoken across the world, Galician was confined and relegated to a regional vernacular, spoken in the province of Galicia and fringes of Asturias, in the Northwesternmost corner of Spain, bordering with Portugal. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Galician ceased to exist in the written form and when it reappeared, it had adopted the Spanish norms. It was only in the 1980’s modern Spain and its accession to the EEC (now EU), that Galician finally (re)gained the status of official minority language in coexistence with the national language, Spanish or Castilian. Yet, whilst enjoying the official status protection from the Spanish State and fostered by the Council of Europe in terms of corpus and policy planning, education, usage in the press, media all aimed at revitalisation, Galician has not only been losing status and being eroded in an ever shifting diglossia relationship with Spanish, but also lost L1 speakers in the past forty years, and younger generations are more and more likely to either speak Galician as L2 or worse, chose not to speak it at all. This situation presents a contradiction and is the cause of conflict between different factions of Galician speakers, the Galegofalantes. Why and how can it be that a language which was repressed for over four hundred years, starts declining precisely after it was given official support? What factors played or are still at play in the steady decline and erosion of Galician? A study into historical, social, economic, cultural, regional, and international factors, events and particularly politically motivated Language Planning Policies can partly explain the precariousness of the Galician language. The last forty years and particularly the new Millenium and the Internet, brought in fast-paced global changes with significant technological advances often requiring adaptation, and sometimes disintegration of traditional socio-cultural communities. The timing was unfavourable towards Galician, aided by consistent nationalist glottopolitics, the planned syntactic corpus fostered by the successive regional governments and most local authorities, led to further deterioration and stagnation of Galician whilst galvanising further lexical and semantic influx of Spanish into the Galician language. Access to education, libraries, study materials, publications, research tools on the Internet is often available in Spanish only. Higher education and academia are dominated by Spanish, as are public services, institutions, the judicial system, mass-media and communication at all levels in everyday life. Some Galicians are happy with the pro-Spanish language norm also known as Isolationism, seemingly oblivious of the language-shift and replacement even in remote, rural societies. Others demand a Galician spelling much closer to Portuguese, her natural sibling and see the official re-unification, or Reintegrationism, with the Lusophone world as the only way to save Galician from an impending death. With deep-rooted divisions and conflicts, a compromise between Isolationists and Reintegrationists seems unlikely, except if there is markedly political change and with that a reversed language shift will take place. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0895/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
This study presents the validation analysis of the European Portuguese version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory III (CDI-III-PT). The CDI-III-PT is a parental report measure allowing researchers to assess expressive vocabulary and the syntactic abilities of children aged 2;6-4;0. In this study, we present a version comprising a lexical subscale which follows the Swedish adaptation and an original syntactic subscale allowing us to include language-specific structures. The reports of 739 children were collected; in addition, a standardized measure of language was also administered to a sub-sample of these children and the reports of preschool teachers were collected for another sub-sample. The results indicate a high internal consistency of the lexical and syntactic subscales. As for sociodemographic variables often found to be predictors of language development, as measured by this type of instrument, the results indicate that age and maternal education are significant predictors of the scores, and that first-born children attain higher scores in vocabulary than later born children, but no significant gender differences were found. The scores of the CDI-III-PT are positively correlated with the ones obtained in the standardized language measure, thus supporting their validity. A high agreement between the reports of parents and teachers was also found. These findings indicate that the CDI-III-PT has adequate psychometric properties and that it can be a useful tool for research and clinical practice. The age-based norms that are now provided can be used to evaluate whether a child is performing poorly compared to their peers.
Introduction Pitch variation, which refers to one's ability to vary fundamental frequency (F0) within or between syllables when speaking, has not been investigated in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). However, pitch variation plays an important role in tone languages, as varying F0 patterns communicate different lexical meanings. This study investigated pitch variation abilities in individuals with CAS via the tone-sequencing tasks (TSTs), focusing on task performance and the effects of syllable structure, lexical status, and tones. Method Three Cantonese-speaking children with CAS (aged 3;7-5;8 [years;months]) and six children without CAS participated in the study. Children without CAS were divided into two control groups, comprising those with speech and/or language impairment or typical development. TSTs consisted of 56 sets of five repetitions of stimuli. The stimuli varied in syllable structure, lexical status, and tones. Percentage of tones correct (PTC), consistency scores, F0 values, and acoustic repetition duration were measured. Results The CAS group performed more poorly than the control groups on the TST with respect to tone accuracy, consistency, and repetition duration. No interaction effects between group and syllable structure or group and lexical status were found. No significant difference was found on F0 values across time between Tone 1 and Tone 2 syllables in the CAS group. However, interaction effects between group and time points of F0 values on Tone 2 syllables were found. Discussion The results suggest that children with CAS have difficulty with pitch variation, which was revealed on the TST with respect to tone accuracy, consistency, and repetition duration. Moreover, children with CAS have difficulty in varying F0 values to produce high-rising tones and tend to use high-level tones to substitute. Clinically, the TST may be useful to assist in the diagnosis of CAS. Isolated vowel stimuli may be useful to test young children or children with severe impairment. Future investigations and development of a normed tool for children with CAS are suggested.
The purpose of the article is to identify the different types of interference in French in Ivory Coast, a West African country. The research paper focuses on a deep analysis of the linguistic processes that manifest themselves in the study under the influence of Ivorian indigenous languages and a complex set of factors. The article deals with the analysis of linguistic interference peculiarities at different levels of French from the indigenous languages of Ivory Coast. The authors pay special attention to the effects of phonetic, lexical and grammatical interference which occur to varying degrees on mesolect and basilect French variants and violate the speech norms of French in France. The practical work part is based on the analysis of the examples of phonetic, lexical and grammatical interference, presenting the specific features of Ivorian French. According to the research, lexical interference is often evident in changes of the meaning of the original lexeme and the words borrowing from Ivorian languages, reflecting cultural realities. On this basis, phonetic and grammatical interference is most pronounced in the language of basilect-dominant speakers.
Logotypes, as an independent genre, representing the country and its language, is considered as a part of the linguistic landscape. Therefore, logotypes may be chosen as a targeted, innovative way of language teaching. The use of logotypes could be understood as an example of a Game Based Learning strategy directed towards the learners as emergent readers. This kind of teaching was seen in other lessons too, for example, how logotypes were used as a teaching and learning material (cf. Colliander et al., 2018, 314) for other purposes into teaching artefacts. A logotype is defined as a specially designed original graphic image or symbol that performs the function of the emblem or trademark of the relevant company or event. Logotypes are characterised as a type of public writings aimed at informing and drawing attention. To create a suggestive logotype, actualisation tools, such as verbal and non-verbal, performing impact, educational and at the same time aesthetic functions are employed. The term ‘foregrounding’ was first used by Jan Mukarovsky and refers to the factors of deviating from linguistic and literary norms. In general, foregrounding can be realised on various linguistic levels, thus, it is possible to distinguish conceptual, functional, discourse and pragmatic devices, which can be represented by various formal means, for example, phonetic-phonological, morphological-syntactic, and lexical-pragmatic. The relation between the different kinds of foregrounding is language-specific (Gnanasekaran, 2018, 13). The multimodal use of verbal and non-verbal signs in logotypes enhances the learning capacity of a language learner at cognitive, cultural, and meta-cognitive levels. The learner is encouraged to perceive the concept expressed through image and word. In the digital age, multimodality has become central to communication, and this is especially true for language learners (Dressman, 2019).The aim of the research is to examine the multimodal expression of logotypes that can be adopted and applied to language teaching and learning. The report provides a detailed analysis of verbal and non-verbal actualised logotypes signs that perform the function of public and virtual spaces. Logotypes are studied from the point of view of the addressee. It is aimed to find out by which way the learner understands functions of the logotype, how interprets the meaning realised verbally and non-verbally.The analysis is performed according to the functional direction of the study, i.e., from function to form. It is observed which verbal and non-verbal signs are chosen to express the function. For the creation of Lithuanian company logotypes, the study reveals that the type of verbal signs (graphemes) actualisation is used most often, as the stylisation of which has been distinguished as influential, motivated and particularly suitable for game based language teaching and learning.
Постановка задачи. В статье рассматриваются средства выразительности в романе Дж. Джойса «Улисс», в тексте которого присутствуют практически все возможные стилистические приемы и фигуры речи. Базируясь на семантической двуплановости как отличительном признаке большинства образных средств, автор пытается проследить механизмы формирования языкового инструментария, характерного для модернистского произведения. Производится попытка понять, как происходит процесс порождения знаков в «Улиссе» и как их интерпретировать. Для этого особое внимание уделяется группе слов с большим семиотическим потенциалом. Результаты. Установлены некоторые языковые средства выразительности, характерные для романа «Улисс». Их отличительной особенностью является авторская индивидуальность, усиленная специфичностью романа «потока сознания», когда потенциал языка используется по-новому. Выводы. Образные средства способны придавать фигуральность любому художественному тексту. Однако создание модернистского романа «Улисс» потребовало от Джойса особых усилий в формировании языковых средств. Характерный признак данного произведения, поток сознания, спровоцировал использование лингвистического резерва несколько иным способом - бесконечными парадоксами, запутанными символами и ассоциациями. Нередко последнее связано с изменением семиозиса. Так, специфические средства создания образности в «Улиссе», заключающиеся в гротескности и эксцентричности, основываются на нарушении нормы языка, что приводит к многократному усилению эстетико-художественного эффекта в романе. Statement of the problem. The article examines the means of expression in J. Joyce's novel Ulysses, which contains virtually all possible stylistic devices: phonological, morphological, grammatical, syntactic and lexical. Based on the semantic duality as a distinctive feature of the majority of figurative means, the author tries to trace the mechanisms of the linguistic tools formation that could be characteristic of a modernist work. An attempt is made to understand how the process of generating signs in Ulysses takes place and thus how it can be interpreted. For this, special attention is paid to a group of words with great semiotic potential. Results. Some linguistic means of expressiveness characteristic of the novel Ulysses have been identified. Their main feature is the author's individuality reinforced by the specificity of the "stream of consciousness" novel, when the potential of the language is used in a new way. Conclusion. Different stylistic devices and expressive language means are able to make an impression and add figurativeness to any literary text. However, the creation of the modernist novel Ulysses required special efforts from Joyce in the formation of linguistic means. A distinctive feature of this work, the stream of consciousness, provoked the use of the linguistic potential in a slightly different way creating endless paradoxes, confusing symbols and associations. Often the latter is associated with the change in semiosis generation. Thus, the specific means of creating imagery in Ulysses lead to the language norm violation. In its turn, the grotesque and eccentricity bring multiple increase in the aesthetic and artistic effect in the novel.
.
Conventional metaphors (e.g., a firm grasp on an idea) are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases (e.g., a good understanding of an idea). To evaluate whether, when, and why this may be true, we created a new database of 180 English sentences consisting of conventional metaphors, literal paraphrases, and concrete descriptions (e.g., a firm grip on a doorknob). Extensive norming matched differences across sentence types in complexity, plausibility, emotional valence, intensity, and familiarity of the key phrases. Then, using pupillometry to study the time course of metaphor processing, we predicted that metaphors would elicit greater event-evoked pupil dilation compared to other sentence types. Results confirmed the predicted increase beginning at the onset of the key phrase and lasting seconds beyond the end of the sentence. When metaphorical and literal sentences were compared directly in survey data, participants judged metaphorical sentences to convey “richer meaning,” but not more information. We conclude that conventional metaphors are more engaging than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences in a way that is irreducible to difficulty or ease, amount of information, short-term lexical access, or downstream inferences.
This sociolinguistic study explores lexical innovations and variation in the lexemes of Nigerian English formed during the COVID-19Pandemic. The emergence and spread of the virus have significantly altered the societal norm to becoming what is called the new normal. The Nigerian linguistic landscape is not spared from the impact caused by the virus. Some new words peculiar to Covid-19 have been introduced into the day to day use of Nigerian English (NE) in some sectors of the society, such as education, social media, health, religion, and markets. There have also been lexical innovations as well as variations in the use of these vocabularies. Using the variationist model, this research investigates these COVID-19 vocabularies and how factors such as region, class, and situational contexts bring about linguistic variations in daily use. In doing this, it identifies and compiles the lexemes as being used and also describes their contextual usages in Nigerian English. This study adopts a descriptive survey design and collects data using questionnaires from two hundred Nigerian English speakers in SouthwestNigeria. The research shows that NE speakers use diverse morphological processes to create new lexemes based on the COVID-19 context. It also produces a COVID-19 vocabulary corpus that reveals Nigerian speakers’ linguistic and innovative ability of the English language and the effect of social experiences on language use. It will also help provide the correct contextual meanings of the new words related to COVID-19.
Category verbal fluency tasks, where participants are asked to produce words according to a semantic category, are typically noun-based (e.g., animals). While insights about the integrity and retrieval of semantic knowledge have been obtained by analyzing the ordinal variances of word production in these noun-based fluency tasks, focusing exclusively on noun categories ignores the semantic knowledge contributed by other semantic/grammatical categories, especially verbs. To better understand the representational differences of nouns and verbs within the mental lexicon, the current study conducted and contrasted different noun- and verb-based fluency tasks. By analyzing the use of different lexical information sources, including word frequency, and context and order similarity derived from a computational model of lexical semantics (BEAGLE; Jones &amp; Mewhort, 2007), and the use of perceptual information derived from the recently released sensorimotor norms (Lynott, Connell, Brysbaert, Brand, &amp; Carney, 2020), it was found that these information sources consistently distinguished noun and verb retrieval, signaling the underlying distributional and sensorimotor representational differences for these two semantic/grammatical categories. The results demonstrate the essential and integral role that distributional and grounded/embodied models play in understanding language and cognition, and highlight the usefulness of verbal fluency tasks in exploring theoretical questions in memory and psycholinguistics.
This article assesses language as a key component in the development of media linguistics. Given that the main purpose of “language criticism” is to identify and correct shortcomings, it is im-portant to critically assess both incorrect and correct options when dealing with language pro-ducts. The paper puts special emphasis on the language of the media which needs to be normative. The author explores the development of newspaper language in terms of lexical norm vio la tion in the 1920s and 1930s. This article discusses equivalents to non-normative use of words in the daily all-Ukrainian newspaper The Day, one of the most popular publications in the ranking of national media. On the basis of various monolingual dictionaries of Standard Ukrainian and bilingual Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries, the author analyzes the use of tokens/lexemes napruha ‘voltage’, vidbyvaty‘to reflect’, pizniše ‘later’ in newspaper publications. Thus, the word napruha ‘voltage’ should be used only as a technical, physical term; in other cases it is napružennia ‘tension’. When it comes to expression, reproduction, an embodiment in images, it is correct to use vidobražaty ‘to reflect, re-mind of’, viddzerkaluvaty ‘to mirror’ but not vidbyvaty ‘to reflect’. As for pizniše ‘later’, it indicates a period after the time mentioned. It differs in its lexical meaning from zhodom ‘afterwards’ (some time after something) and potim ‘later’ (happening after something, following in time or space, no clear indication of time). Keywords: non-normative use, lexeme, dictionaries, newspaper publications.
The paper analyses the position of Czech language as one of the two elements of diglossia in Slovak culture and literature between 1780 and 1843, when Ľudovít Štúr’s codification was adopted. It discusses the relationship between Czech and the first norm of standard Slovak, codified by Anton Bernolák in 1787. The focus is on linguistic tendencies that brought Czech closer to pre-standard forms of Slovak, based on Central Slovak dialects. An analysis is undertaken of orthographic, grammatical and lexical modifications of the Czech orthographic norm in the territory of today’s Slovakia, as well as their forms in literary texts by Slovak writers. The paper also introduces Slovak theoretical works that concentrate on researching adaptations of the Czech orthographic norm in the Slovak milieu. Linguistic and literary analyses of the situation in Slovak literature in the first half of the nineteenth century reveal a significant weakening of the position of Czech in Slovakia. This is confirmed by the strong Slovakisation of Czech in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as Štúr’s codification of standard Slovak in 1843, which concluded the process of the language integration of Slovaks.
Background and Aim Cross-linguistic adaptations of aphasia assessment tools in Turkey are needed to improve aphasia assessment and rehabilitation with individuals speaking languages other than well-resourced languages. Aligned with this need, we conducted several studies to propose an adaptation of “The Comprehensive Aphasia Test” (CAT) into Turkish.Methods During this adaptation process; (a) lexical/linguistic and visual stimuli in CAT’s Language Battery subtests were evaluated by examining their imageability, familiarity, and name agreement features through rating studies, and two pilot studies for (b) Cognitive Screening and (c) Language Battery sections were carried out. In the stimuli norming studies, 71 undergraduate students (aged 20–24) rated 236 words in the Imageability and Familiarity tasks; 40 participants (aged 30–60) named 244 pictures in the Name Agreement task. Two sections of the CAT-TR were administered to different groups of subjects with aphasia (PWA) and matched controls. Fourteen PWA (and 14 controls) were presented the Cognitive Screening section, and a different group (PWA = 20, controls = 20) completed the Language Battery section.Results The imageability and familiarity ratings of 236 words and name agreement (% – H statistic) values of 244 pictures were calculated. Imageability and familiarity ratings of the words had a positive strong correlation with each other. Items with a name agreement of 85% or more were considered high name agreement. As anticipated, the control groups both in the Cognitive Screening and the Language Battery sections performed better than the PWA group. As a result, no further adaptive changes were suggested for these sections.Conclusion Results of these studies have shown that the Comprehensive Aphasia Test-Turkish is culturally and linguistically appropriate for Turkish speakers with aphasia. Therefore, future studies should assess its validity and reliability, and establish norms for its clinical interpretation.
BACKGROUND: The use of standardized tests specifically designed for and normed on bilingual groups is crucial for the accurate diagnosis and language profiling of bilingual speakers with aphasia. Currently, there is a dearth of norms and supporting psychometric data for the few available bilingual aphasia assessments. The only available aphasia test for Korean-English (KE) bilinguals is the Korean-English Bilingual Aphasia Test (KE-BAT). The absence of bilingual normative data for the KE-BAT limits its clinical and research utility. AIMS: (1) To revise the original screening KE-BAT to clarify ambiguities in its instructions and stimuli; and (2) to examine subtest and item performance across the two languages for the revised screening KE-BAT with a local sample of highly proficient KE bilinguals. METHODS & PROCEDURES: The original screening KE-BAT was first revised to replace unrecognizable drawings, address ambiguities in the instructions and stimuli, and increase the number of items on naming subtests. This revised test is henceforth referred to as the adapted screening KE-BAT (AS KE-BAT). A total of 21 neurologically healthy, highly proficient and college-educated KE bilinguals (19-34 years old) were recruited from a large city in the United States. Participants completed three measures of language proficiency and the AS KE-BAT including the KE translation test (Part C). Total and subtest scores were compared across the two languages, and individual item accuracy was calculated. Incorrect responses of low scoring items were examined. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Performance was comparable across Korean and English for all subtests, except for the spontaneous speech subtest. The item accuracy of 17 items (7% of total items) in the AS KE-BAT fell to < 80%, and four items (1.6% of total items) had an accuracy < 60%. Incorrect responses of low scoring items were caused by phoneme misperception, lexical substitution and morphosyntactic L2 patterns. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The results of the study highlight the importance of empirically examining the performance of neurotypical bilinguals on bilingual aphasia assessments to establish their psychometric properties. Based on the small-sized local bilingual normative sample obtained in this study, appropriate cut-off criteria, recommendations for clinical interpretation and further modifications of the AS KE-BAT are proposed. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject The pair of English and Korean aphasia assessments (e.g., Western Aphasia Battery-Revised; WAB-R) (Kertesz 2012) and Korean Western Aphasia Battery (Kim and Na 2001) cannot be used to assess language impairments in KE bilinguals with aphasia since these tests have not been designed for and normed on the bilingual group. Clinical utility of the Korean-English Bilingual Aphasia Test (KE-BAT), which is the only resource currently available to assess KE bilinguals with aphasia, is greatly compromised by the lack of KE bilingual normative data. What this study adds to existing knowledge This study provides cut-off scores, comparability of test performance and item difficulty metrics and it identifies additional ways in which items and spontaneous speech scoring of the adapted screening KE-BAT (AS KE-BAT) could be modified. Suggested guidelines allow improved interpretations of the linguistic performance of local KE bilinguals with aphasia who have a similar demographic and linguistic background. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The AS KE-BAT with cut-off criteria of 95% for Part B and 80% for Part C is suitable for the language assessment of highly proficient and young KE bilinguals with a high level of education and it yields comparable performance across the two languages. Clinicians may decide to adjust spontaneous speech scoring criteria if the client's language history is suggestive of code-switching and use the item difficulty data to guide test item selection for this group of bilinguals.
This article is devoted to filling the lexical gaps in the Uzbek language with dialectisms. The article shows the norms and criteria for enriching lexical gaps in modern Uzbek literary language with dialectics. The mechanisms of application of these criteria are explained by examples. These principles are specific to most languages and are formed in a particular language on the basis of the literary norms of that language. In the course of the research, the gaps identified in the process of comparing the lexicon of the Uzbek literary language and folk dialects were analyzed. That is, the idea of literaryizing dialectisms that express concepts that are lexical lacunae in literary language was considered. Dialectisms common in the Turkic-Kaltatay dialect have been studied to delineate and define the object of study. The meaning of dialectisms deemed appropriate for literaryization is explained and sentences related to their application are given. It is based on the need to introduce dialectisms, which are actively used in folk dialects, into the lexicon of literary language. Recommendations were made to continue working in this direction. In conclusion, it is emphasized that serious attention should be paid to filling lexical gaps with dialectics in order to maintain the purity of language and ensure its development.
This article is devoted to the analysis of the evolution of the linguistic views of A. Krymskyi in the process of his scientific communication with B. Grinchenko, P. Zhytetskyi and I. Franko (late XIX – early XX centuries). Different contradictory moments in the scientific researches of linguists from the different regions of Ukraine during the period of formation of the Ukrainian literary language were revealed. Various issues of linguistic discussions during the late XIX – early XX centuries, in which prominent linguists from Galicia and Upper Dnieper Ukraine participated, are characterized. In this context, the most interesting in terms of coverage of various linguistic problems was the correspondence of A. Krymskyi with B. Grinchenko, which lasted for seventeen years (1891–1908). The attitude of scholars to the formation of the criteria of literary word usage and principles of language formation is clarified. It was found out that the main criteria for correct word usage for linguists of Upper Dnieper Ukraine was the presence of a word in the vernacular language and in literary texts, which is confirmed by the materials of the first academic Russian-Ukrainian dictionary edited by A. Krymskyi (1924–1933) and the Dictionary of Ukrainian language compiled by B. Grinchenko (1907–1909). The scientific value of different linguistic ideas expressed by these scholars in their epistolary, especially on the usage of individual words and grammatical forms, as well as the ways of development of Ukrainian literary language, was noted. Their views on formation of the single version of literary language based on the language use of Upper Dnieper Ukraine are outlined. The desire of these linguists to promote the unification of the norms of the Ukrainian language through the creation of grammatical and lexicographical works is characterized. Based on the analysis of epistolary texts by A. Krymskyi and B. Grinchenko, it is stated out that their ideas contributed to the emergence of valuable grammatical and lexicographical works that contain huge lexical and phraseological material from the Ukrainian classical literature and folklore sources. The fruitful scientific and literary work of these scholars became an integral component of the process of development and unification of literary norms of Ukrainian language.
Numerous studies showed the effect of negative affective and pain-related semantic primes enhancing the perceived intensity of successive painful stimuli. It remains unclear whether and how painful primes are able to influence semantic stimuli in a similar way. Therefore, we investigated the effects of noxious primes on the perception of the valence of subsequent semantic stimuli. In two experiments, 48 healthy subjects were asked to give their valence ratings regarding different semantic stimuli (pain-related, negative, positive, and neutral adjectives) after they were primed with noxious electrical stimuli of moderate intensity. Experiment 1 focused on the existence of the effect, experiment 2 focused on the length of the effect. Valence ratings of pain-related, negative, and positive words (not neutral words) became more negative after a painful electrical prime was applied in contrast to no prime. This effect was more pronounced for pain-related words compared to negative, pain-unrelated words. Furthermore, the priming effect continued to affect the valence ratings even some minutes after the painful priming had stopped. So, painful primes are influencing the perception of semantic stimuli as well as semantic primes are influencing the perception of painful stimuli.
Emerging research seeks to apply vibrotactile stimulation in physical therapy to improve diminished limb function. However, for these systems to be accepted, prospective users must find the stimulation tolerable or even pleasant. Prior studies on affective response to stimulation focus on healthy, younger users; older users of new therapeutic applications have different sensory perception than these younger users. Here we queried older adults with and without history of stroke to understand their experience of vibration on the arm at several amplitude-frequency settings and patterns. None of our stimuli were perceived as painful by participants, including two with allodynia who perceive some tactile stimuli as noxious. Individuals with history of stroke reported significantly lower valence ratings but higher arousal ratings than individuals without history of stroke. Lower amplitude stimulation was rated with lower arousal by all participants. Some participants expressed a preference for perceivable or strong stimulation. Reported sensations included tickling, tingling, and numbness.
<ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Background:</ns4:bold> In this study we measured the affective appraisal of sounds and video clips using a newly developed graphical self-report tool: the EmojiGrid. The EmojiGrid is a square grid, labeled with emoji that express different degrees of valence and arousal. Users rate the valence and arousal of a given stimulus by simply clicking on the grid. </ns4:p> <ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Methods:</ns4:bold> In Experiment I, observers (N=150, 74 males, mean age=25.2±3.5) used the EmojiGrid to rate their affective appraisal of 77 validated sound clips from nine different semantic categories, covering a large area of the affective space. In Experiment II, observers (N=60, 32 males, mean age=24.5±3.3) used the EmojiGrid to rate their affective appraisal of 50 validated film fragments varying in positive and negative affect (20 positive, 20 negative, 10 neutral). </ns4:p> <ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Results:</ns4:bold> The results of this study show that for both sound and video, the agreement between the mean ratings obtained with the EmojiGrid and those obtained with an alternative and validated affective rating tool in previous studies in the literature, is excellent for valence and good for arousal. Our results also show the typical universal U-shaped relation between mean valence and arousal that is commonly observed for affective sensory stimuli, both for sound and video. </ns4:p> <ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Conclusions:</ns4:bold> We conclude that the EmojiGrid can be used as an affective self-report tool for the assessment of sound and video-evoked emotions. </ns4:p>
This paper describes how bootstrapping was used to extend the development of the Urdu Noisy Text dependency treebank. To overcome the bottleneck of manually annotating corpus for a new domain of user-generated text, MaltParser, an opensource, data-driven dependency parser, is used to bootstrap the treebank in semi-automatic manner for corpus annotation after being trained on 500 tweet Urdu Noisy Text Dependency Treebank. Total four bootstrapping iterations were performed. At the end of each iteration, 300 Urdu tweets were automatically tagged, and the performance of parser model was evaluated against the development set. 75 automatically tagged tweets were randomly selected out of pre-tagged 300 tweets for manual correction, which were then added in the training set for parser retraining. Finally, at the end of last iteration, parser performance was evaluated against test set. The final supervised bootstrapping model obtains a LA of 72.1%, UAS of 75.7% and LAS of 64.9%, which is a significant improvement over baseline score of 69.8% LA, 74% UAS, and 62.9% LAS
Linguistically annotated treebanks of Greek documentary papyri. The data was produced and is used by the project ”Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri (PapyGreek)”. The platform for annotating, managing, and downloading annotations: https://papygreek.hum.helsinki.fi/.
Failures to cognitively downregulate negative emotions are a crucial risk factor for mental disorders. Previous studies provide evidence for a stress-induced improvement of cognitive emotion regulation possibly mediated via glucocorticoid actions. Cortisol can initialize immediate non-genomic as well as delayed genomic effects on cognitive control functioning, but its distinct effects on emotion regulation processes remain to be shown. Here, we sought to characterize time-dependent effects of oral cortisol administration on cognitive emotion regulation outcomes. We expected cortisol to improve emotion regulation success. Possible interactions with the delay between cortisol treatment and emotion regulation, strategy use and intensity of the emotional stimuli were examined. Eighty-five healthy men received either 10 mg hydrocortisone or a placebo in a double-blind, randomized design 30 or 90 min prior to an emotion regulation paradigm, in which they were asked to downregulate their emotional responses towards low and high intensive negative pictures via reappraisal or distraction. Affective ratings and pupil dilation served as outcome measures. Reduced arousal, enhanced valence ratings as well as increases in pupil dilations indexing the cognitive regulatory effort indicated successful downregulation of negative emotions evoked by high intensive but not low intensive negative pictures. Cortisol significantly reduced arousal ratings when downregulating high intensive negative emotions via distraction and (at a trend level) via reappraisal, independent of timing, demonstrating a beneficial effect of cortisol on subjective regulatory outcomes. Taken together, this study provides initial evidence suggesting that cortisol promotes the cognitive control of high intensive negative emotions both, 30 and 90 min after treatment.
Emotion sensing using physiological signals in real-life situations can be practically valuable. Previous studies have developed wearable devices that record autonomic nervous system activity, which reflects emotional arousal. However, no study determined whether emotional valence can be assessed using wearable devices. To this end, we developed a wearable device to record facial electromyography (EMG) from the corrugator supercilii (CS) and zygomatic major (ZM) muscles. To validate the device, in Experiment 1, we used a traditional wired device and our wearable device, to record participants' facial EMG while they were viewing emotional films. Participants viewed the films again and continuously rated their recalled subjective valence during the first viewing. The facial EMG signals recorded using both wired and wearable devices showed that CS and ZM activities were, respectively, negatively and positively correlated with continuous valence ratings. In Experiment 2, we used the wearable device to record participants' facial EMG while they were playing Wii Bowling games and assessed their cued-recall continuous valence ratings. CS and ZM activities were correlated negatively and positively, respectively, with continuous valence ratings. These data suggest the possibility that facial EMG signals recorded by a wearable device can be used to assess subjective emotional valence in future naturalistic studies.
Linguistically annotated treebanks of Greek documentary papyri. The data was produced and is used by the project ”Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri (PapyGreek)”. The platform for annotating, managing, and downloading annotations: https://papygreek.hum.helsinki.fi/.
Emotional perceptions of math-related information can have profound effects on attitudes about math, which, in turn, may lead to decreased math achievements. A large body of research has documented that females have less positive attitudes and more negative affectivity to math than males. This study examined emotional valence ratings of math-related verbal stimuli among adults and performed a pioneering investigation of gender differences in emotional perceptions. A random sample of 290 adults completed a battery of online affect questionnaires designated to measure the relations of various math-related words to the field of mathematics (i.e., math loading) and compared the emotional valence of these words to words known to have negative and neutral valence. Results revealed that: (1) math-related words were rated as less threatening than words with negative valence, but more threatening than neutral words; (2) math loading ratings were the strongest and most significant predictor of the emotional valence ratings of math-related words; and (3) females rated math-related words and words with negative, but not neutral, valence as more threatening than males. The study concludes that negative affective valence is linked with math-related information, especially among females, and this finding has implications for researchers, parents, and educators.
in excess of.9, in studies 1a and 1b), which challenges the idea that these 2 constructs are distinct. In contrast, motivational intensity ratings were not consistently positively related to arousal ratings, with only a moderate relationship found with avoidance motivation. In Study 2 we used an implicit measure of motivational intensity and valence and asked participants to classify their motivational intensity and valence in response to 100 pictures from Study 1. A high degree of correspondence was found between motivational intensity and valence on this measure. Overall, our findings are at odds with proposals in the literature that arousal can be used as a proxy for motivational intensity across the full approach-avoidance spectrum. Furthermore, these studies suggest that the cognitive effects attributed to motivational intensity in previous literature are best explained by valence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Abstract How we perceive the world is not solely determined by our experiences at a given moment in time, but also by what we have experienced in our immediate past. Here, we investigated whether such sequential effects influence the affective appraisal of food images. Participants from 16 different countries ( N = 1278) watched a randomly presented sequence of 60 different food images and reported their affective appraisal of each image in terms of valence and arousal. For both measures, we conducted an inter-trial analysis, based on whether the rating on the preceding trial(s) was low or high. The analyses showed that valence and arousal ratings for a given food image are both assimilated towards the ratings on the previous trial (i.e., a positive serial dependence). For a given trial, the arousal rating depends on the arousal ratings up to three trials back. For valence, we observed a positive dependence for the immediately preceding trial only, while a negative (repulsive) dependence was present up to four trials back. These inter-trial effects were larger for males than for females, but independent of the participants’ BMI, age, and cultural background. The results of this exploratory study may be relevant for the design of websites of food delivery services and restaurant menus.
This is a small hand-annotated partial treebank of Tibetan, primarily in CoNLL-U format. It builds upon the following corpus: Hill, Nathan W., & Garrett, Edward. (2017). A part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus of Classical Tibetan [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.574878 This corpus differs from the above in three ways: The tagset has been converted from the SOAS tag system to the Universal Dependency part-of-speech tagset. We have added dependency relations between verbs and their argument. For some of the texts, English translations were available in digital form. These translations were manually aligned to the Tibetan texts and included in the CoNLL-U files. It was created as part of the AHRC-funded project <em>Lexicography in Motion </em>(PI Ulrich Pagel, 2017-2021).
The categorical approach to cross-cultural emotion perception research has mainly relied on constrained experimental tasks, which have arguably biased previous findings and attenuated cross-cultural differences. On the other hand, in the constructionist approach, conclusions on the universal nature of valence and arousal have mainly been indirectly drawn based on participants' word-matching or free-sorting behaviors, but studies based on participants' continuous valence and arousal ratings are very scarce. When it comes to self-reports of specific emotion perception, constructionists tend to rely on free labeling, which has its own limitations. In an attempt to move beyond the limitations of previous methods, a new instrument called the Two-Dimensional Affect and Feeling Space (2DAFS) has been developed. The 2DAFS is a useful, innovative, and user-friendly instrument that can easily be integrated in online surveys and allows for the collection of both continuous valence and arousal ratings and categorical emotion perception data in a quick and flexible way. In order to illustrate the usefulness of this tool, a cross-cultural emotion perception study based on the 2DAFS is reported. The results indicate the cross-cultural variation in valence and arousal perception, suggesting that the minimal universality hypothesis might need to be more nuanced.
The gleam-glum effect is a novel sound symbolic finding that words with the /i:/-phoneme (like gleam) are perceived more positive emotionally than matched words with the /Λ/-phoneme (like glum). We provide data that not only confirm the effect but also are consistent with an explanation that /i:/ and /Λ/ articulation tend to co-occur with activation of positive versus negative emotional facial musculature respectively. Three studies eliminate selection bias by including all applicable English words from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) and the Warriner et al. (2013) database and every possible Mandarin Pinyin combination that differ only in the middle phoneme (/i:/ vs /Λ/). In Study 1, 61 U.S. undergraduates rated monosyllabic English /i:/ words as robustly more positive than matched /Λ/ words. Study 2 analyzed the Warriner et al. (2013) valence ratings, extending the gleam-glum effect to all applicable words in the database. In Study 3, 38 U.S. participants (using English) and 37 participants in China (using Mandarin Pinyin) rated word pairs under three conditions that moderate musculature activity: Read aloud (Enhance), read silently (Control), and read silently while chewing gum (Interfere). Indeed, the effect was both replicated and was significantly larger when facial musculature was enhanced than when interfered with, and the two language populations did not significantly differ. These findings confirm a robust gleam-glum effect, despite semantic noise, in English and Mandarin Pinyin. Furthermore, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that this type of sound symbolism arises from the overlap in muscles used both in articulation and emotion expression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
People routinely wear face masks during the pandemic, but little is known about their impact on body perception. In this online study, we presented female body images of Caucasian avatars in common dress sizes displaying happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions with and without face masks, and asked women to rate the perceived body attractiveness and body size. In comparison with mask-off condition, mask-on decreased body attractiveness ratings for happy avatars but did not affect ratings for neutral avatars irrespective of avatar dress sizes. For avatars displaying angry expressions, mask-on increased body attractiveness ratings for slimmer avatars but did not affect ratings for larger avatars. On the other hand, body size estimation was not systematically affected by face masks and facial expressions. It appears that face masks mainly show an expression-dependent influence on body attractiveness judgement, possibly through suppressing the perceived facial expressions.
The aim of this article is to discuss the lemmatisation process of Old English adverbs inflected for the superlative from a corpus-based perspective. This study has been conducted on the basis of a semi-automatic methodology through which the inflectional forms have been automatically extracted from The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and The York Toronto- Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry whereas the task of assigning a lemma has been completed manually. The list of adverbial lemmas amounts to 1,755 and has been provided by the lexical database of Old English Nerthus. Additionally, the resulting lemmatised list has been checked against the lemmatised forms compiled by the Dictionary of Old English and Seelig’s (1930) work on Old English comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs. Through this comparison it has been possible to verify doubtful forms and incorporate new ones that are unattested by the YCOE. This pilot study has implemented for the first time a methodology for the lemmatisation of a non-verbal class and can be further applied to those categories that are still unlemmatised, namely nouns and adjectives.
DeutschDas Nomen bezeichnet die zahlreichste und am haufigsten gebrauchte Wortklasse im Deutschen und ist dementsprechend umfassend erforscht worden. Allerdings ziehen die relevanten Untersuchungen nur selten grosere Mengen realsprachlichen Materials in Betracht, was es ihnen ermoglichen wurde, Regelmasigkeiten und Muster des realen Sprachgebrauchs mit quantitativen Methoden zu erschliesen. Auf der Grundlage der begrifflichen Werkzeuge der Dependenzgrammatik und mit Ruckgriff auf die Hamburger Dependenzbaumbank ruckt dieser Artikel die syntaktischen Beziehungen in einem grosen realsprachlichen Korpus in den Fokus, um so die syntaktischen Merkmale der Nomen zu bestimmen und dabei bisherige Forschungsbefunde empirisch zu bestatigen und zu erganzen. EnglishAs the most numerous and frequently used word class in German, the noun has been studied extensively. However, relevant discussions rarely take into account a large amount of real language material, which with the help of the quantitative method can help to find out the regularities of real language use. Using the conceptual tools of dependency grammar and the language corpus provided by the Hamburg dependency treebank, the present article especially considers the syntactic relations involving nouns in a large amount of real language material to determine the syntactic characteristics of nouns, and at the same time, to prove and supplement existing conclusions.
When meeting someone at zero acquaintance, we make assumptions about each other that encompass emotional states, personality traits, and even cognitive abilities. Evidence suggests individuals can accurately detect psychopathic personality traits in strangers based on short video clips or photographs of faces. We present an in-depth examination of this ability. In two studies, we investigated whether high psychopathy traits are perceivable and whether other traits affect ratings of psychopathic traits in the sense of a halo effect. On the perceiver’s end, we additionally examined how cognitive abilities and personality traits of the responders affect these ratings. In two studies (n1 = 170 community adults from the USA, n2 = 126 students from Australia), participants rated several targets on several characteristics of psychopathy, as well as on attractiveness, masculinity, sympathy, trustworthiness, neuroticism, intelligence, and extraversion. Results show that responders were generally able to detect psychopathy. Responders generally came to a consensus in their ratings, and using profile similarity metrics, we found a weak relation between ratings of psychopathy and the targets’ psychopathy level as determined by the Psychopathy Checklist: Short Version. Trait ratings, though, were influenced by the ratings of other traits like attractiveness. Finally, we found accuracy in the perception of psychopathy was positively related to fluid intelligence but unrelated to emotion perception ability.
Corpus-driven valency (subcategorization) lexicon automatically extracted from the Ancient Greek Treebank.
The goal of this investigation was the assessment of acoustic infant vocalizations by laypersons. More specifically, the goal was to identify (1) the set of most salient classes for infant vocalizations, (2) their relationship to each other and to affective ratings, and (3) proposals for classification schemes based on these labels and relationships. The assessment behavior of laypersons has not yet been investigated, as current infant vocalization classification schemes have been aimed at professional and scientific applications. The study methodology was based on the Nijmegen protocol, in which participants rated vocalization recordings regarding acoustic class labels, and continuous affective scales valence, tense arousal and energetic arousal. We determined consensus stimuli ratings as well as stimuli similarities based on participant ratings. Our main findings are: (1) we identified 9 salient labels, (2) valence has the overall greatest association to label ratings, (3) there is a strong association between label and valence ratings in the negative valence space, but low association for neutral labels, and (4) stimuli separability is highest when grouping labels into 3 - 5 classes. We finally propose two classification schemes based on these findings.
Opioid use disorder (OUD) has been linked to exaggerated attentional, affective, and arousal responses to opioid-related stimuli, as well as altered responses to other affective (eg, naturally rewarding or aversive) stimuli, particularly blunted responses to pleasant/rewarding stimuli. Both exaggerated responses to drug-related stimuli and reduced response to pleasant stimuli may influence the course of OUD and its treatment, however interpretation of studies thus far is limited by methodological issues. In the present study, we examined subjective ratings, and attenuation of the P3 component of the acoustic startle-evoked event-related potential (as a measure of attention), while viewing neutral, pleasant, unpleasant, and drug-related images. Participants prescribed opioid agonist treatment (OAT) for OUD (n = 82) were compared to a carefully-matched control group (n = 33) and to recently-abstinent participants with OUD (n = 22). Relative to controls, participants prescribed OAT gave higher positive valence ratings of drug images, and blunted valence responses to other affective images, but groups did not differ in terms of arousal ratings or P3 amplitude. Within the OAT group, linear modeling of associations between frequency of recent illicit opioid use and startle P3 amplitude found an association between increased recent illicit opioid use and reduced attention to pleasant, relative to unpleasant, images. The latter finding may have implications for interventions targeting cognitive biases in people with substance use disorder. In particular, they suggest that enhancing attention to pleasant stimuli may be as, if not more important, than the typical approach of trying to reduce attentional bias to drug-related stimuli.
Episodes with an emotional component preoccupy memory formation and this advantage facilitates their preservation and mitigates the impact of interfering episodes. The present study examined the relation of the emotional dimensions of original and interfering episodes to the memory outcome, using a reconsolidation paradigm. In a between-subjects design, 102 healthy young adults were presented with an emotional or neutral image and learned either an emotional or neutral story, respectively (day 1). On day 2, experimental groups were presented with an image of the opposite emotionality, reactivated the original story, and learned a story of the opposite emotionality. On day 3, experimental and control groups were tested for their memory on target and filler clues of the original story and rated both stories for arousal and valence. Overall, there was evidence of interference on the long-term retention of target clues only for the neutral story (i.e. when the interfering story was emotional), and of filler clues for both types of stories. Moreover, individual target clue retention rates correlated with the arousal ratings for both the original neutral story and the interfering emotional story, while they were not related to arousal ratings for the original emotional story or the interfering neutral one.
Abstract This article contributes to Old English lexicography by providing a list of lemmas and inflectional forms for the Old English derived verbs (prefixed verbs) of gān ‘to go’. Entries for these lemmas, if listed by Old English dictionaries, are often incomplete, but, more importantly, they are not based on a lemmatised corpus. This is particularly problematic in the case of languages like Old English that are rife with morphological variation. The methodology followed in this study comprises searches on a lexical database and manual revision of the hits. The searches are launched on the lemmatiser Norna, and the hits are checked with available lexicographical sources, secondary sources and annotated corpora. Finally, ambiguous cases are examined in their context. The final list of lemmas and inflectional forms amounts to 104 inflectional forms which are attributed to 14 different lemmas, including one lemma and up to 61 inflectional forms never before listed by dictionaries. Special attention is paid to the contrast between what is attested in the Old English corpora and what is available from the sources. In addition to providing insights into the inventory of lemmas and inflectional forms for the derivatives (prefixed verbs) of the verb gān as attested in The Dictionary of Old English Corpus, which was not available until now from lexicographical sources, this article contributes recommendations for the linguistic analysis of Old English using corpus-based lexical databases.
Automatic coreference resolution is understudied in Danish even though most of the Danish Dependency Treebank This paper describes a conversion of its partial, yet well-documented, coreference relations into coreference clusters and the training and evaluation of coreference models on this data. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first publicly available neural coreference models for Danish. We also present a new entity linking annotation on the dataset using Wiki-Data identifiers, a named entity disambiguation (NED) dataset, and a larger automatically created NED dataset enabling wikily supervised NED models. The entity linking annotation is benchmarked using a state-of-the-art neural entity disambiguation model.
Mechanisms of visual selective attention and motor-response control have affective consequences for associated stimuli. For example, images that are ignored or from which a response is withheld subsequently receive more negative affective ratings than the targets of attention/response. Although such effects have been observed in a variety of cognitive-behavioural paradigms (e.g., visual search, visual-memory search, Go/No-go, Think/No-Think, task-switching), leading accounts posit that the difference in stimulus ratings across experimental conditions is due to the effects of just one or two mechanisms that operate to either enhance or suppress visual stimulus/response representations (and thereby enhance or depress affective ratings) in each of these tasks. This suggests that there should be a reliable correspondence in the difference between ratings of stimuli from conditions involving active attending/responding and those involving ignoring/response-avoidance across alternate visual tasks. To test this, we asked participants to complete in a single session the two different tasks most commonly used to assess the affective consequences of cognitive control—visual search and Go/No-go. Visual ‘monster’ cartoons that were ignored (search distractors) or from which a response had been withheld (No-go items) were rated more negatively than those that were the focus of attention (search targets) or response (Go-items). And there was a significant (albeit modest) correlation between the magnitude of the target vs. distractor rating difference and the Go vs. No-go rating difference obtained in the different tasks. Our investigation also examined the extent to which these visually-evoked affective responses are linked to common cognitive-control mechanisms or other distinct factors by including a series of cognitive and affective individual-difference measures. Taken together, our results are consistent with the view that affective ratings of visual stimuli are determined primarily by the influences of one or two cognitive-control mechanisms that remain consistent across task-types, but may also be influenced by additional cognitive and affective factors that may be unique to specific tasks.
WordNet lexical-database groups English words into sets of synonyms called "synsets." Synsets are utilized for several applications in the field of text-mining. However, they were also open to criticism because although, in reality, not all the members of a synset represent the meaning of that synset with the same degree, in practice, they are considered as members of the synset, identically. Thus, the fuzzy version of synsets, called fuzzy-synsets (or fuzzy word-sense classes) were proposed and studied. In this study, we discuss why (type-1) fuzzy synsets (T1 F-synsets) do not properly model the membership uncertainty, and propose an upgraded version of fuzzy synsets in which membership degrees of word-senses are represented by intervals, similar to what in Interval Type 2 Fuzzy Sets (IT2 FS) and discuss that IT2 FS theoretical framework is insufficient for analysis and design of such synsets, and propose a new concept, called Interval Probabilistic Fuzzy (IPF) sets. Then we present an algorithm for constructing the IPF synsets in any language, given a corpus and a word-sense-disambiguation system. Utilizing our algorithm and the open-American-online-corpus (OANC) and UKB word-sense-disambiguation, we constructed and published the IPF synsets of WordNet for English language.
In this paper we describe our participation in the Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) shared task of SemEval 2021, which involved predicting subjective ratings of complexity for English single words and multi-word expressions, presented in context. Our approach relies on a combination of distributional models, both context-dependent and contextindependent, together with behavioural norms and lexical resources.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart. —Nelson Mandela In this issue of Topics in Language Disorders, guest issue editors Mark Guiberson and Linda Rosa-Lugo asked authors to present work that investigates and/or supports the language and literacy development of English learners. As the aforementioned quote from the late Nelson Mandela suggests, individuals whose first language is other than English benefit from the comfort, connection, and support that communication using that language conveys. Dual language and English learners, particularly those who also have language delays or disorders, likely will have more meaningful and impactful educational experiences if those experiences incorporate their first language to the greatest extent possible because not only their minds but their hearts will be engaged. The authors of this group of articles surely would agree with this statement, and their collective work offers practitioners many practices, techniques, and strategies to support vocabulary and discourse skills in English language learners, many of which incorporate the child's first language. In the first article, Guiberson employs convergent parallel mixed-methods to identify culturally consistent early literacy support strategies for caregivers of 2- to 3-year-old dual language learners. The first portion of his article presents a descriptive study in which caregivers and their preschool-aged children (about a third of whom exhibited early language delay) engaged in a Spanish-language book reading task and the interactions among the dyads were observed and coded. Several behaviors were found to occur occasionally (two to three times) or frequently (four or more times) during the book reading episode in at least 70% of the dyads in the categories of enhancing attention to text and promoting interactive reading and supporting comprehension, whereas behaviors in the category using literacy strategies were infrequently observed in a majority of the dyads. The caregivers of the oldest preschoolers used literacy strategies significantly more often than the caregivers of children with early language delay, but otherwise the dyads with preschoolers who exhibited delay and those with preschoolers who displayed typical language development were comparable. Next, he presents findings from an integrative review of the literature in which caregivers use language and/or literacy support strategies with young Spanish-speaking dual language learners and in which identified practices and strategies were rated for evidence strength. A total of 26 strategies were identified (with overlap with the behaviors noted in the descriptive study), 15 of which showed compelling strength of evidence. Next, Fiestas and her colleagues present a pilot study that evaluates the feasibility of the Language and Literacy Together intervention to address semantic and narrative skills in 13 bilingual first graders at risk for developmental language disorder. In the intervention, (a) narrative and expository texts provide the context for learning vocabulary and narrative skills, (b) there is a focus on Tier 1 (common vocabulary words used in conversation) and Tier 2 (vocabulary words that occur across subject areas but may differ in meaning depending on the academic subject) vocabulary presented in thematic units, (c) Spanish–English cognates are intentionally highlighted to promote cross-language transfer, (d) vocabulary are presented in oral and written forms, defined using contextual clues, and mapped onto functions with visual representations for word types, and (e) narrative comprehension and production are reinforced through cued retells and questioning activities. Pretest and posttest evaluations of semantics and narrative comprehension and production in Spanish and English using standardized, norm-referenced measures revealed the participants experienced significant gains over 8 weeks in both semantics and narrative skills, in both the language of the intervention (Spanish) and English, suggesting cross-language transfer effects. The largest gains were observed for Spanish narrative comprehension and English narrative production, whereas modest gains in vocabulary breadth (raw score changes only) were realized though gains in vocabulary depth were more robust. Roseberry-Mckibbin discusses in the third article research-supported means of supporting academic vocabulary learning in English learners who exhibit developmental language disorder. These include supporting a bilingual approach to intervention, teaching content-area cognates, facilitating multiple exposures and active engagement, teaching Tier 2 vocabulary words, and incorporating phonological awareness tasks to reinforce lexical storage and retrieval of vocabulary words. She presents an instructional hierarchy to guide intervention efforts, moving from simple recognition to using a target word in a written text to dissecting the sound structure of the target word. Then, Ehren and her colleagues present an adapted version of the promising Vocabulary Scenario Technique to assist English learners with Tier 2 vocabulary learning. This technique uses direct and explicit instruction with multiple encounters with words in diverse contexts to facilitate word learning and word consciousness. In addition, student-friendly explanations and connections to students' prior knowledge are employed, as are multiple opportunities for scaffolding when necessary. The major feature of instruction is the use of scenarios in which the target word is defined and used meaningfully in a relatable context. The adaptation for English learners involves presenting the scenario in the child's first language, except for the target word itself, which is presented in English. In this way, other professionals, caregivers, and community members can become involved with intervention when they have proficiency in the first language and are willing to assist in the development and even presentation of the scenarios used for instruction. Although preliminary research on the adapted version of the Vocabulary Scenario Technique did not result in greater gains than other intensive vocabulary instruction characterized by greater instructional time and word exposures (as might be expected), this work is in its infancy. Thus, the authors make the case that more research is needed to validate this technique with English learners and an increase in the number of exposures to target vocabulary is likely to yield positive findings. Finally, Peker and Rosa-Lugo present findings from a pilot study that examined speech–language pathology graduate students' self-efficacy beliefs before and after engaging with a TeachLivE simulation in which they practiced using questioning strategies and specific leveled questions they had prepared beforehand with English learner avatars with varied English proficiency levels. The simulation experience offers an alternative to typical clinical education with live clients when and where there is not enough opportunity to work with live clients who represent a specific population. Although there were no significant gains in the graduate students' self-efficacy for using questioning strategies for beginning or intermediate English learners, there was a statistically significant increase in their self-efficacy for using questioning strategies with advanced English learners (perhaps reflecting a better match between the students' language skills and those of the avatar). Moreover, there was a significant increase in self-efficacy for administering evaluation procedures following the simulation activity, and the posttest scores for self-efficacy for questioning strategies and administering evaluations were positively and significantly related. Written reflections on the simulation experience revealed the graduate students (1) felt the simulation was realistic, safe, and provided multiple practice opportunities, (2) were more confident in using questions effectively and appreciated more nuance in their communicative interactions and requisite adaptations as these intersect culture, language proficiency, and other personal attributes (e.g., engagement), and (3) desired more guidance regarding the nature of the simulation experience due to its novelty. Overall, the simulation experience led to a greater awareness of major issues in evaluating and questioning English learners for the speech–language pathology graduate students. It is our hope that readers will find this set of articles helpful in guiding their work with preschool and school-aged English learners, including those who are at risk for or who display language learning difficulties. —Gary A. Troia, PhD, CCC-SLP —Sarah E. Wallace, PhD, CCC-SLP Co-Editors
The work is focused on specific underived nouns that are functioning in the Smolensk patois and in the Belarusian language at the present stage of the existence of these language systems and are quite close, but not identical formations in semantic and structural terms. The subject of the study is the volume of lexical meaning and potential derivational connections of nouns recorded in two synchronous language formations. The relevance of the study is determined by the complex history of the Russian and Belarusian borderland, which is reflected both in the Smolensk patois and in the Belarusian language, which had been created on the dialect basis. The vocabulary of the Russian and Belarusian borderland belongs to a single cultural and historical continuum de-termined by the history of the region, it reflects the diverse material and spiritual ties of the two language idioms’ speakers. The complexity of the historical relations between the two language systems, one of which is codified and has the status of an official language (Belarusian language), and the second exists only in an oral form and has a norm due to internal language laws of devel-opment (Smolensk patois), has led to the fact that when studying two language formations at the present stage, it is possible to speak not only about unambiguous types of relations between words, but also about peripheral types, about zones of various transitions, changes in lexical and grammatical semantics, which can potentially be points of development of two idioms in the future and are therefore valuable for study.