Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
The creation of real texts in Latin can be regarded not only as the intellectual activity of the pastime of a limited number of enthusiasts, but also a long linguistic experiment. In this study, the product of such linguistic activity serves as a source of materials, primarily lexical and derivational innovations, for analyzing events that may arise in a "restored" language system. To reveal trends in the development of linguistic material and its potential, the data obtained from new Latin texts were compared with the results of studying Latin borrowings in English (in the natural conditions of a living language). Obviously, the choice of vocabulary and new terms to denote modern realities in these new Latin news texts are subject to the preferences of individual researchers and are sometimes arbitrary to a greater extent than in the case of creating text in a naturally developing language, where the speaker / user strongly dominates the usage norms. In addition, when developing innovations, the authors of the texts in question inevitably follow their native language of the L2 experience. As a result of innovation, the "New Latin Scheme" shows some features more typical of modern European languages, in addition, the main development trends in the group of Latin borrowings in English were different from those found in the lexicon of the new Latin.
The article is devoted to the study of lexical and structural characteristics of medical terminology in the English language instructions of medicines certified in Ukraine, and the means of its reproduction in the Ukrainian language translation. The analysis of the texts of English-language medical instructions shows that the medical terminology of the instructions relates to the medical condition. The problem of adequate and equivalent translation and instruction relates to the reproduction of a terminological pharmaceutical dictionary, cliche, formulas, abbreviations, and the like. The problem is illustrated by examples of grammatical, lexical, syntactic transformations in translations into Ukrainian (on the material of the preparation Panadol), where the calcula- tion makes up a third of the means. Prefixes have certain semantic functions; Productive for medical terminology of medical instructions are also suffixes. The translation of English-language instructions requires sufficient knowledge of translators in the relevant field and strict adherence to the norms of the Ukrainian language. English-language medical terminology in the text of the instructions for medical products has lexical, structural and other features that are reproduced in the relevant Ukrainian translations of the instructions of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. Traces of the formation of medical terminology of pharmaceutical texts, means of reproduction for an adequate equivalent translation are traced. The process of development of medical products, their discussion at international conferences and further implementation takes place, mainly in English. Thus, among the less well-researched and actual ones, there is the problem of adequate translation of the medical terminology vocabulary of the English language instructions of medical devices certified by Ukraine.
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying an appropriate sense for an ambiguous word. With the complexity of human languages in which a single word could yield different meanings, WSD has been utilized by several domains of interests such as search engines and machine translations. The literature shows a vast number of techniques used for the process of WSD. Recently, researchers have focused on the use of meta-heuristic approaches to identify the best solutions that reflect the best sense. However, the application of meta-heuristic approaches remains limited and thus requires the efficient exploration and exploitation of the problem space. Hence, the current study aims to propose a hybrid meta-heuristic method that consists of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simulated annealing to find the global best meaning of a given text. Different semantic measures have been utilized in this model as objective functions for the proposed hybrid PSO. These measures consis)
Introduction: Israel has absorbed >40,000 Eritrean undocumented migrants since 2007, while the majority live in the southern neighborhoods of Tel-Aviv. As non-citizens and citizens infants in Israel receive free preventive treatment at the mother and child health clinics (MCHC), this study aimed to compare development and growth achievements between children of Eritrean mothers (CE) to children of Israeli mothers (CI), and assess their compliance to routine follow-up and vaccination-timeliness. Methods: This cohort study included all Israeli-born CE between 2009 and 2011, compared with a random sample of CI and treated at the same MCHC and followed-up to the age of 30-months Dependent outcomes included anthropometric measurements, developmental achievements and adherence to immunization schedule. Results: Of all 271 CE who were compared with 293 CI, no statistically significant differences were found in birth anthropometric measurements. Yet, CE had increased weight and length than)
This paper focuses on a novel methodology of subjective speech quality measurement and repeatability of its results between laboratory conditions and simulated environmental conditions. A single set of speech samples was distorted by various background noises and low bit-rate coding techniques. This study aimed to compare results of subjective speech quality tests with and without a parallel task deploying the ITU-T P.835 methodology. Afterward, tests results performed with and without a parallel task were compared using Pearson correlation, CI95, and numbers of opposite pair-wise comparisons. The tests show differences in results in the case of a parallel task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may)
This paper analyzes distributional properties that facilitate the categorization of words into lexical categories. First, word-context co-occurrence counts were collected using corpora of transcribed English child-directed speech. Then, an unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm was used to categorize words into lexical categories. The categorization outcome was regressed over three main distributional predictors computed for each word, including frequency, contextual diversity, and average conditional probability given all the co-occurring contexts. Results show that both contextual diversity and frequency have a positive effect while the average conditional probability has a negative effect. This indicates that words are easier to categorize in the face of uncertainty: categorization works best for words which are frequent, diverse, and hard to predict given the co-occurring contexts. This shows how, in order for the learner to see an opportunity to form a category, there needs to)
This study examines Swedish morning TV’s framing of the phenomenon of exercising. Morgonstudion in SVT, and Nyhetsmorgon in TV4, is the morning shows that has been investigated. The aim of the study is to enlighten and enhance the understanding of how the phenomenon of exercising are framed in Swedish morning television, as well as to contribute to the theorization of media’s representation of exercise. A qualitative content analysis has been used to capture the language, to see how they present exercising and if they legitimate it. Theoretical framework applied are framing theory, representation, legitimize, healthism and public service vs commercial television. The research fields are health communication, exercise in media and morning television journalism. The result shows that Swedish morning television, through different methods and lexical choices, legitimize the phenomenon of exercise. SVT is more focused on exercise that suits everyone and that viewers can change their lifestyle by making small changes in their everyday life. For example, they have an idea of how to get the pulse up by exercises in the garden while TV4 is aiming at reaching out to those that is already exercising and specifies types of exercising during the show. They give advice on how to find out what training tools you need to complete a triathlon for example. Lexical choices reinforce that exercise is something positive and both the guests and hostess sees exercise as a norm. The elements of exercise differ between the programs, as well as the studio environment and the content. On the other hand, there are similarities such as the language that is used and they are both visited by experts.
Immigration from collectivist cultures to Western countries often results in loss of social capital and changing family dynamics leading to isolation and acculturative stress. This study explored the impact of social and cultural changes experienced by seven migrant communities residing in Greater Western Sydney, Australia. It deconstructed the role of local community and networks in their initial settlement in absence of traditional forms of community support. Data were collected through fourteen focus group discussions (164 participants). Five major themes emerged: (i) changing gender roles and women empowerment; (ii) sending money home; (iii) culture shock and increased intercultural conflict; (iv) change in lifestyle from collective to individual culture; and (v) role of extended community in mitigating culture shock. These findings suggest that community interventions aimed at improving cultural and social engagement of migrants employ social capital framework. This will ensure e)
Language is a complex adaptive system, but how does it change? For investigating this process, four diachronic Chinese word co-occurrence networks have been built based on texts that were written during the last 2,000 years. By comparing the network indicators that are associated with the hierarchical features in language networks, we learn that the hierarchy of Chinese lexical networks has indeed evolved over time at three different levels. The connections of words at the micro level are continually weakening; the number of words in the meso-level communities has increased significantly; and the network is expanding at the macro level. This means that more and more words tend to be connected to medium-central words and form different communities. Meanwhile, fewer high-central words link these communities into a highly efficient small-world network. Understanding this process may be crucial for understanding the increasing structural complexity of the language system. [ABSTRACT FROM A)
Processing of nouns and action verbs can be differentially compromised following lesions to posterior and anterior/motor brain regions, respectively. However, little is known about how these deficits progress in the course of neurodegeneration. To address this issue, we assessed productive lexical skills in a patient with posterior cortical atrophy at two different stages of his pathology. On both occasions, he underwent a structural brain imaging protocol and completed semantic fluency tasks requiring retrieval of animals (nouns) and actions (verbs). Imaging results were compared with those of controls via voxel-based morphometry, whereas fluency performance was compared to age-matched norms through Crawford’s t-tests. In the first assessment, the patient exhibited atrophy of more posterior regions supporting multimodal semantics (medial temporal and lingual gyri), together with a selective deficit in noun fluency. Then, by the second assessment, the patient’s atrophy had progressed mainly towards fronto-motor regions (rolandic operculum, inferior and superior frontal gyri) and subcortical motor hubs (cerebellum, thalamus), and his fluency impairments had extended to action verbs. These results offer unprecedented evidence of the specificity of the pathways related to noun and action-verb impairments in the course of neurodegeneration, highlighting the latter’s critical dependence on damage to regions supporting motor functions, as opposed to multimodal semantic processes.
Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a truism across Northern democracies. Left unquestioned, this geography plays a central role in shaping electoral and referendum campaigns. In Europe and North America, observers identify recurring patterns dividing local populations during national votes. While much research describes those patterns in relation to ethnicity, religious affiliation, historic legacy and party affiliation, current approaches in political research lack the capacity to measure their evolution over time or other vote subsets. This article introduces “Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM), a transdisciplinary method to assess the evolution of geographic cleavages in vote outcomes by implementing a metric of agreement/disagreement through Network Analysis. Unlike ex)
This research assesses the evolution of lexical diversity in scholarly titles using a new indicator based on zipfian frequency-rank distribution tail fits. At the operational level, while both head and tail fits of zipfian word distributions are more independent of corpus size than other lexical diversity indicators, the latter however neatly outperforms the former in that regard. This benchmark-setting performance of zipfian distribution tails proves extremely handy in distinguishing actual patterns in lexical diversity from the statistical noise generated by other indicators due to corpus size fluctuations. From an empirical perspective, analysis of Web of Science (WoS) article titles from 1975 to 2014 shows that the lexical concentration of scholarly titles in Natural Sciences & Engineering (NSE) and Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) articles increases by a little less than 8% over the whole period. With the exception of the lexically concentrated Mathematics, Earth & Space, and P)
At the interface between scene perception and speech production, we investigated how rapidly action scenes can activate semantic and lexical information. Experiment 1 examined how complex action-scene primes, presented for 150 ms, 100 ms, or 50 ms and subsequently masked, influenced the speed with which immediately following action-picture targets are named. Prime and target actions were either identical, showed the same action with different actors and environments, or were unrelated. Relative to unrelated primes, identical and same-action primes facilitated naming the target action, even when presented for 50 ms. In Experiment 2, neutral primes assessed the direction of effects. Identical and same-action scenes induced facilitation but unrelated actions induced interference. In Experiment 3, written verbs were used as targets for naming, preceded by action primes. When target verbs denoted the prime action, clear facilitation was obtained. In contrast, interference was observed when)
This study demonstrates that rumination is reflected in two behavioural signals that both play an important role in face-to-face interactions and provides evidence for the negative impact of rumination on social cognition. Sixty-one students were randomly assigned either to a condition in which rumination was induced or to a control condition. Their task was to play a speech-based word association game with an Embodied Conversational Agent during which their word associations, pitch imitation and eye movements were measured. Two questionnaires assessed their ruminative tendencies and mind wandering thoughts, respectively. Rumination predicted differences in task-related mind wandering, polarity of lexical associations, pitch imitation, and blinks while mind wandering predicted differences in saccades. This outcome may show that rumination has a negative impact on certain aspects of social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of )
Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even though the model’s linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to)
Mounting evidence from both cognitive and neuropsychological research points to the importance of conceptual and lexical-semantic contributors to short-term memory performance. Nonetheless, a standardized and well-controlled measure to assess semantic short-term memory was only recently developed for English-speakers, and no parallel measure exists for Spanish-speakers. In the conceptual replication and extension reported here, we develop and validate a Spanish adaptation of the Conceptual Span task as a tool to measure the semantic component of short-term memory. Two versions of the task were validated, the Clustered and the Non-Clustered Conceptual Span task, both in separate samples of 64 and 105 Spanish-speaking university students. We found that both versions of the Conceptual Span task correlate well with another widely used standardized measure of working memory capacity, the Reading Span task. The two versions also correlated, as expected, with discrimination of linguistic con)
Classically, in the bouba-kiki association task, a subject is asked to find the best association between one of two shapes–a round one and a spiky one–and one of two pseudowords–bouba and kiki. Numerous studies report that spiky shapes are associated with kiki, and round shapes with bouba. This task is likely the most prevalent in the study of non-conventional relationships between linguistic forms and meanings, also known as sound symbolism. However, associative tasks are explicit in the sense that they highlight phonetic and visual contrasts and require subjects to establish a crossmodal link between stimuli of different natures. Additionally, recent studies have raised the question whether visual resemblances between the target shapes and the letters explain the pattern of association, at least in literate subjects. In this paper, we report a more implicit testing paradigm of the bouba-kiki effect with the use of a lexical decision task with character strings presented in round or )
This paper tests the new-dialect formation model of Peter Trudgill (1986 et seq) by examining several phonological features of Tibetan as spoken in the diaspora community of Kathmandu, Nepal. Established by an influx of migrants from many dialect regions beginning in 1959, this presents a unique opportunity to study koinéization, new dialect formation, in progress. Trudgill’s model predicts that a new dialect should largely emerge in the second generation born in the new region, exhibiting both simplification, the failure of marked variants to transmit across generations, and focusing, the selection of particular variants as a new norm for the community's new variety.Data from seventy-three sociolinguistic interviews was coded for phonological and lexical variables known to differ across Tibetan-speaking regions, and NeighborNets were constructed in SplitsTree. Results indicate that regionally marked variables were not transmitted into the first or second generation of Diaspora-raised speakers, but Diaspora speakers exhibited a high degree of variation comparable to that of speakers from the numerically- and socially-dominant U-Tsang region. That younger speakers have not yet converged on a single new variety suggests a role for additional factors to affect the rate of koinéization.
Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the suprasegmental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideophonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high t)
Introduction: Exploiting information in health-related social media services is of great interest for patients, researchers and medical companies. The challenge is, however, to provide easy, quick and relevant access to the vast amount of information that is available. One step towards facilitating information access to online health data is opinion mining. Even though the classification of patient opinions into positive and negative has been previously tackled, most works make use of machine learning methods and bags of words. Our first contribution is an extensive evaluation of different features, including lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based, sentiment-based and word embeddings features to represent patient-authored texts for polarity classification. The second contribution of this work is the study of polar facts (i.e. objective information with polar connotations). Traditionally, the presence of polar facts has been neglected and research in polarity classification has b)
Women are routinely exposed to images of extremely slim female bodies (the thin ideal) in advertisements, even if they do not necessarily pay much attention to these images. We hypothesized that paradoxically, it is precisely in such conditions of low attention that the impact of the social comparison with the thin ideal might be the most pronounced. To test this prediction, one hundred and seventy-three young female participants were exposed to images of the thin ideal or of women’s fashion accessories. They were allocated to either a condition of high (memorizing 10 digits) or low cognitive load (memorizing 4 digits). The main dependent measure was implicit: mean recognition latency of negative words, relative to neutral words, as assessed by a lexical decision task. The results showed that thin-ideal exposure did not affect negative word accessibility under low cognitive load but that it increased it under high cognitive load. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that )
The peculiar phenomenon in the field of mass communication is religious periodicals. On the one hand, it has common peculiarities by which periodicals are characterized, on the other hand it has a special communicative purpose and a range of topics covered. The aim of the article is to carry out a general analysis of the lexical composition of religious Christian periodical texts. The classification of the periodical religious publication lexical composition was carried out in the article on the publication of the newspaper «Volyn diocesan reports» (2004–2018). The specificity of the lexical composition is determined by topics of publications. In religious periodicals, first of all, problems of faith, spirituality, Christian ethics, norms of moral behavior of a Christian, church and religious life are violated, as a result of which the vocabulary on named realities designation becomes a stylish one. Among them, the vocabulary on the designation of the highest God’s people of the Christian religion, names of religious holidays, posts, memorable days is represented most quantitatively, as well as the vocabulary reflecting the organizational life of the church as an establishment and public institution (names of clergy posts, holy dignitaries, items of church use). Onomastic vocabulary and vocabulary on the designation of religious holidays are usually used in canonical forms, thus folk forms and newly created words are witnessed. Medical vocabulary is widely presented.A specific feature of the researched journal is that popular science materials about volyn shrines – icons are being constantly published in it, using a special art terminology.In religious periodical issues of political, social, economic, cultural life are actively discussed which determines the use of vocabulary denoting these realities.Religious periodicals, as well as secular media editions, demonstrate processes of a spoken vocabulary active usage.
This article investigates the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable phrasal compound adjectives in pre-nominal position. Considered marginal by many existing studies, the phrasal compound is often said to be non-standard; phrasal compounding consists of the linking of several lexical elements linked together, usually by multiple hyphenation.First, this article will explore the ways in which this multi-faceted element is defined in the existing literature; I will seek to determine if the phrasal compound could potentially become part and parcel of the existing definitions and typologies of compounding. Finally, I will consider whether phrasal compound adjectives are still considered marginal when they occur in works of literature.
Formal thought disorder (TD) is a neuropathology manifest in formal language dysfunction, but few behavioural linguistic studies exist. These have highlighted problems in the domain of semantics and more specifically of reference. Here we aimed for a more complete and systematic linguistic model of TD, focused on (i) a more in-depth analysis of anomalies of reference as depending on the grammatical construction type in which they occur, and (ii) measures of formal grammatical complexity and errors. Narrative speech obtained from 40 patients with schizophrenia, 20 with TD and 20 without, and from 14 healthy controls matched on pre-morbid IQ, was rated blindly. Results showed that of 10 linguistic variables annotated, 4 showed significant differences between groups, including the two patient groups. These all concerned mis-uses of noun phrases (NPs) for purposes of reference, but showed sensitivity to how NPs were classed: definite and pronominal forms of reference were more affected th)
For nearly 50 years, psychologists have studied prospective memory, or the ability to execute delayed intentions. Yet, there remains a gap in understanding as to whether initial encoding of the intention must be elaborative and strategic, or whether some components of successful encoding can occur in a perfunctory, transient manner. In eight studies (N = 680), we instructed participants to remember to press the Q key if they saw words representing fruits (cue) during an ongoing lexical decision task. They then typed what they were thinking and responded whether they encoded fruits as a general category, as specific exemplars, or hardly thought about it at all. Consistent with the perfunctory view, participants often reported mind wandering (42.9%) and hardly thinking about the prospective memory task (22.5%). Even though participants were given a general category cue, many participants generated specific category exemplars (34.5%). Bayesian analyses of encoding durations indicated tha)
The aim of this study was to examine eye movements and postural control performance among dyslexic children while reading a text and performing the Landolt reading task. Fifteen dyslexic and 15 non-dyslexic children were asked to stand upright while performing two experimental visual tasks: text reading and Landolt reading. In the text reading task, children were asked to silently read a text displayed on a monitor, while in the Landolt reading task, the letters in the text were replaced by closed circles and Landolt rings, and children were asked to scan each circle/ring in a reading-like fashion, from left to right, and to count the number of Landolt rings. Eye movements (Mobile T2®, SuriCog) and center of pressure excursions (Framiral®, Grasse, France) were recorded. Visual performance variables were total reading time, mean duration of fixation, number of pro- and retro-saccades, and amplitude of pro-saccades. Postural performance variable was the center of pressure area. The resu)
Experiencing a syntactic structure affects how we process subsequent instances of that structure. This phenomenon, called structural priming, is observed both in language production and in language comprehension. However, while abstract syntactic structures can be primed independent of lexical overlap in sentence production, evidence for structural priming in comprehension is more elusive. In addition, when structural priming in comprehension is found, it can often be accounted for in terms of participants’ explicit expectations. Participants may use the structural repetition over several sentences and build expectations, which create a priming effect. Here, we use a new experimental paradigm to investigate structural priming in sentence comprehension independent of lexical overlap and of participants’ expectations. We use an outcome dependent variable instead of commonly used online measures, which allows us to more directly compare these effects with those found in sentence producti)
One of the activities of the members of Ukrainian human rights and national liberation movement in the 1960– 1970s was the protection of the rights of Ukrainian language for free development and functioning expansion as counteraction to the strengthening of Russification strategy in the USSR. In his journalistic and linguistic works, the human rights activist, dissident, and pedagogue Oleksa Tykhyi raised the problems of preserving and developing Ukrainian language as a major factor of national self-identification. He expressed concern about its status in Ukraine, clearly identified the reasons for this and seeked the ways to improve the situation. The goal of the paper is an attempt to comprehend and illuminate the vocabulary activity of O. Tykhyi, which was closely related to his teaching activity and active civil and ideological position as a defender of Ukrainian language. The paper uses the following methods: descriptive method, contextual analysis and structural analysis of linguistic units. The material of this study was the “Dictionary of Words Inappropriate to the Norms of Ukrainian Literary Language» by Oleksa Tykhyi. It is found out that the words, not compliant with the norms of Ukrainian language and recorded in the vocabulary, include lexical and morphological Russianisms, adoptions from other languages through the Russian language as well as word-forms copied from the Russian language. In general, the vocabulary contains about one and a half thousand lexical units that are not specific to the Ukrainian language, each one is presented with a synonymic number of Ukrainian equivalents. Most of them are lexical Russianisms, i. e. words directly transposed from the Russian language without phonetic adaptation that substituted specific Ukrainian words. Some of them functioned only in spoken language, while others were codified in lexicographic works. A number of Ukrainian synonyms provided to each of the analyzed tokens demonstrates the artificiality and unnecessity of such adoptions. Analysis of the material of the vocabulary of Oleksa Tykhyi shows the negative consequences of Russification for the lexical composition of Ukrainian language and for the level of the language culture of population.
The English language has evolved dramatically throughout its lifespan, to the extent that a modern speaker of Old English would be incomprehensible without translation. One concrete indicator of this process is the movement from irregular to regular (-ed) forms for the past tense of verbs. In this study we quantify the extent of verb regularization using two vastly disparate datasets: (1) Six years of published books scanned by Google (2003–2008), and (2) A decade of social media messages posted to Twitter (2008–2017). We find that the extent of verb regularization is greater on Twitter, taken as a whole, than in English Fiction books. Regularization is also greater for tweets geotagged in the United States relative to American English books, but the opposite is true for tweets geotagged in the United Kingdom relative to British English books. We also find interesting regional variations in regularization across counties in the United States. However, once differences in population ar)
In this study, we investigated the effects of context-related semantic anomalies on the fixation-related brain potentials of 12–13-year-old Finnish children in grade 6 during sentence reading. The detection of such anomalies is typically reflected in the N400 event-related potential. We also examined whether the representation invoked by the sentence context extends to the orthographic representation level by replacing the final words of the sentence with an anomalous word neighbour of a plausible word. The eye-movement results show that the anomalous word neighbours of plausible words cause similar first-fixation and gaze duration reactions, as do other anomalous words. Similarly, we observed frontal negativity in the fixation-related potential of the unrelated anomalous words and in the anomalous word neighbours. This frontal negativity was larger in both anomalous conditions than in the response elicited by the plausible condition. We thus show that the brain successfully uses cont)
Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked priming lexical decision task was conducted manipulating for the first time the degree of orthographic overlap of the L2 word as a whole, as well as of their morphemic constituents (bases and suffixes). Thirty-four European Portuguese-English bilinguals (16 intermediate and 18 high-proficient) and 16 English native-speaking controls performed the task in English. Results revealed that both groups of bilinguals decomposed words as the native control group. Importantly, results also showed that morphological priming effects were sensitive not only to cross-language similarities of words as a whole, but also to their morphemic constituents (especiall)
Background: In practical research, it was found that most people made health-related decisions not based on numerical data but on perceptions. Examples include the perceptions and their corresponding linguistic values of health risks such as, smoking, syringe sharing, eating energy-dense food, drinking sugar-sweetened beverages etc. For the sake of understanding the mechanisms that affect the implementations of health-related interventions, we employ fuzzy variables to quantify linguistic variable in healthcare modeling where we employ an integrated system dynamics and agent-based model. Methodology: In a nonlinear causal-driven simulation environment driven by feedback loops, we mathematically demonstrate how interventions at an aggregate level affect the dynamics of linguistic variables that are captured by fuzzy agents and how interactions among fuzzy agents, at the same time, affect the formation of different clusters(groups) that are targeted by specific interventions. Results:)
The author’s attention is drawn to two problem areas of modern linguistics: the study of lexical compatibility and further development of the concept of national variability of the German language. Collocations are chosen as an object of research. They are considered on the one hand as a basic phenomenon of lexical combinatorics, and on the other hand, as a special type of phraseological units, reflecting the features of all system levels of language or language variant. Based on the comparative analysis of Austrian, Swiss and German collocations extracted from lexicographical sources, the author shows that the norms of lexical compatibility in the German language of Germany, Austria and Switzerland in a number of aspects do not coincide. It is noted that national language standards have a significant number of collocations that are unknown and / or uncommon in other regions of the German-speaking area and in many cases have ethnocultural conditionality. As another kind of nationally specific collocations, the author considers the collocations that have common structural and semantic properties in all three national variants of the German language, but differ in the design of the base or collocator. It is argued that the revealed differences are due to either inventory and semantic differences in the lexical content of the phrases, or the variability of the use of general German components. In addition, the author points out that the national features of collocations are also manifested in the specifics of the syntactic organization, especially in the use of prepositions. Thus, it is shown that the peculiarities of Austrian and Swiss collocations are due to the originality of the national variants of the German language at different levels of the language system.
We examined the effect of language proficiency on the status and dynamics of proactive inhibitory control in an occulo-motor cued go-no-go task. The first experiment was designed to demonstrate the effect of second language proficiency on proactive inhibitory cost and adjustments in control by evaluating previous trial effects. This was achieved by introducing uncertainty about the upcoming event (go or no-go stimulus). High- and low- proficiency Hindi-English bilingual adults participated in the study. Saccadic latencies and errors were taken as the measures of performance. The results demonstrate a significantly lower proactive inhibitory cost and better up-regulation of proactive control under uncertainty among high- proficiency bilinguals. An analysis based on previous trial effects suggests that high- proficiency bilinguals were found to be better at releasing inhibition and adjustments in control, in an ongoing response activity in the case of uncertainty. To further understand )
The paper studies the issue of the concept of a norm in the literary Azerbaijani language. The definition of language norm is given, and its leading role in speech culture is deduced. The author identifies the specifics of literary language and pays attention to the language ability to change in the process of evolution of the society and a human. The influence of dialects and borrowings on the formation of linguistic norms is indicated. Three types of norms of literary language are considered in detail: phonetic, lexical, and grammatical. Within the phonetic norm, the norms of pronunciation and spelling norms are considered, the causes of variability arising within the speech process are indicated. The author analyzes the examples of lexical norm violations and their consequences for the language and considers the significant aspects of the grammatical norm, in which the morphological and syntactic norms are distinguished as well. The aspect is taken into account that the syntactic norms regulate the formation of word-combinations and sentences, and that, within the word-combinations format, this norm is divided into three parts: concord, adjunction, and government. The author studies the issue of proper arrangement of words in a sentence, gives various examples where the words take intentionally the incorrect place in its structure in order to perform a certain function. The role of classification of norms of literary language for understanding the processes of change taking place in it is determined. From the above materials, the author concludes that due to the norm, the language becomes clear and the most effective tool for communication since the norm, keeping the speech traditions, meets the actual needs of public speech.
In Experiment 1, the symbol interdependency hypothesis was tested with both concrete and abstract stimuli. Symbolic (i.e., semantic neighbourhood distance) and embodied (i.e., iconicity) factors were manipulated in two tasks—one that tapped symbolic relations (i.e., semantic relatedness judgment) and another that tapped embodied relations (i.e., iconicity judgment). Results supported the symbol interdependency hypothesis in that the symbolic factor was recruited for the semantic relatedness task and the embodied factor was recruited for the iconicity task. Across tasks, and especially in the iconicity task, abstract stimuli resulted in shorter RTs. This finding was in contrast to the concreteness effect where concrete words result in shorter RTs. Experiment 2 followed up on this finding by replicating the iconicity task from Experiment 1 in an ERP paradigm. Behavioural results continued to show a reverse concreteness effect with shorter RTs for abstract stimuli. However, ERP results p)
This chapter explores the written performance of Arabic native speakers (NSs) and upper-level/advanced learners of Arabic via a presentation of descriptive statistics of a number of direct measures of written complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). It discusses that upper-level learners indeed resemble NSs in many ways, although NSs are shown to be more complex, accurate, and fluent writers. Issues of Arabic literacy and literacy development are of critical importance to Arabic learners, educators, and millions of native speakers. Instances of NS production that were coded as an error involved departures from the morpho-syntactic norms of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) rather than the use of colloquial lexical items or common spelling variants. The CAF framework is typically employed in relation to Skehan's trade-off hypothesis, in which learners are assumed to possess finite attentional resources available for devotion to either linguistic complexity, accuracy, or fluency in their L2 production.
Text representation can map text into a vector space for subsequent use in numerical calculations and processing tasks. Word embedding is an important component of text representation. Most existing word embedding models focus on writing and utilize context, weight, dependency, morphology, etc., to optimize the training. However, from the linguistic point of view, spoken language is a more direct expression of semantics; writing has meaning only as a recording of spoken language. Therefore, this paper proposes the concept of a pronunciation-enhanced word embedding model (PWE) that integrates speech information into training to fully apply the roles of both speech and writing to meaning. This paper uses the Chinese language, English language and Spanish language as examples and presents several models that integrate word pronunciation characteristics into word embedding. Word similarity and text classification experiments show that the PWE outperforms the baseline model that does not i)
Different societies have different rules/norms governing communication. What works in one society may fail to work in another. This scenario raises a host of fundamental questions: What happens when individuals from different cultural groups interact? Is there a possibility that miscommunication may occur in the course of communication? If so what is the nature of miscommunication and how does it affect social relations of individuals or groups? In what ways can miscommunication be minimized during intercultural communication? This paper explores cross cultural communication within an African context. Specifcally the paper seeks to unearth the lexical variations that exist in the language of two cultural groups in Baringo County, Kenya. Two cohorts of Tugen speakers (the initiated and uninitiated) form the sample of this study. Tugen is a dialect of the Kalenjin language. In order to graduate into adulthood Tugens have to undergo a traditional form of circumcision. During circumcision, the initiates are taught a new register, which serves to distinguish them from the uninitiated members of the community. This paper therefore investigates the speech of initiated and uninitiated speakers of Tugen and unearths a number of lexical items that vary. After interviewing 80 purposively sampled subjects the paper established the existence of systematic variation in lexical items from two cultural groups in Tugen. It is apparent from the results presented here that a better understanding of a group’s culture enriches theunderstanding of cross cultural communication. Therefore, knowledge of existing variations in Tugen and other languages/dialects minimizes incidences of miscommunication. Since effects of miscommunication are often very costly, it is therefore important that more studies be conducted in this area. The world has become a global village and cross cultural communication is a now a daily engagement for many of us who live in the modern world.
National character stereotypes, or beliefs about the personality characteristics of the members of a nation, present a paradox. Such stereotypes have been argued to not be grounded in the actual personality traits of members of nations, yet they are also prolific and reliable. Stereotypes of Canadians and Americans exemplify the paradox; people in both nations strongly believe that the personality profiles of typical Canadians and Americans diverge, yet aggregated self-reports of personality profiles of Canadians and Americans show no reliable differences. We present evidence that the linguistic behavior of nations mirrors national character stereotypes. Utilizing 40 million tweets from the microblogging platform Twitter, in Study 1A we quantify the words and emojis diagnostic of Canadians and Americans. In Study 1B we explore the positivity of national language use. In Studies 2A and 2B, we present the 120 most nationally diagnostic words and emojis of each nation to naive participan)
Linguistic bias is the differential use of linguistic abstraction (as defined by the Linguistic Category Model) to describe the same behaviour for members of different groups. Essentially, it is the tendency to use concrete language for belief-inconsistent behaviours and abstract language for belief-consistent behaviours. Having found that linguistic bias is produced without intention or awareness in many contexts, researchers argue that linguistic bias reflects, reinforces, and transmits pre-existing beliefs, thus playing a role in belief maintenance. Based on the Linguistic Category Model, this assumes that concrete descriptions reduce the impact of belief-inconsistent behaviours while abstract descriptions maximize the impact of belief-consistent behaviours. However, a key study by Geschke, Sassenberg, Ruhrmann, and Sommer [2007] found that concrete descriptions of belief-inconsistent behaviours actually had a greater impact than abstract descriptions, a finding that does not fit e)
Research on sensemaking in organisations and on linguistic relativity suggests that speakers of the same language may use this language in different ways to construct social realities at work. We apply a semantic theory of survey response (STSR) to explore such differences in quantitative survey research. Using text analysis algorithms, we have studied how language from three media domains–the business press, PR Newswire and general newspapers–has differential explanatory value for analysing survey responses in leadership research. We projected well-known surveys measuring leadership, motivation and outcomes into large text samples from these three media domains significantly different impacts on survey responses. Business press language was best in explaining leadership-related items, PR language best at explaining organizational results and “ordinary” newspaper language seemed to explain the relationship among motivation items. These findings shed light on how different public arena)
Anatomical atlases have been developed to improve the targeting of basal ganglia in deep brain stimulation. However, the sole anatomy cannot predict the functional outcome of this surgery. Deep brain stimulation is often a compromise between several functional outcomes: motor, fluency and neuropsychological outcomes in particular. In this study, we have developed anatomo-clinical atlases for the targeting of subthalamic and medial globus pallidus deep brain stimulation. The activated electrode coordinates of 42 patients implanted in the subthalamic nucleus and 29 patients in the medial globus pallidus were studied. The atlas was built using the representation of the volume of tissue theoretically activated by the stimulation. The UPDRS score was used to represent the motor outcome. The Stroop test was represented as well as semantic and phonemic fluencies. For the subthalamic nucleus, best motor outcomes were obtained when the supero-lateral part of the nucleus was stimulated whereas )
Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. lagoon). While this prominent feature of human language has always been creatively deployed in art and poetry, it is still largely unknown whether the sound of a word in itself makes any contribution to the word’s meaning as perceived and interpreted by the listener. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words’ meaning (i.e. affective meaning) and words’ sound (i.e. affective sound); both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). We tested the hypothesis that the sound of a word possesses affective iconic characteristics that can implicitly influence listeners when evaluating the affective meaning of that word. The results show that a significant portion of the variance in affective meaning ratings of printed words depends on a number of spe)
Methods for representing the meaning of words in vector spaces purely using the information distributed in text corpora have proved to be very valuable in various text mining and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these methods still disregard the valuable semantic relational structure between words in co-occurring contexts. These beneficial semantic relational structures are contained in manually-created knowledge bases (KBs) such as ontologies and semantic lexicons, where the meanings of words are represented by defining the various relationships that exist among those words. We combine the knowledge in both a corpus and a KB to learn better word embeddings. Specifically, we propose a joint word representation learning method that uses the knowledge in the KBs, and simultaneously predicts the co-occurrences of two words in a corpus context. In particular, we use the corpus to define our objective function subject to the relational constrains derived from the KB. We fu)
Inflectional types within first conjugation in standard Bulgarian The article presents the modulation models in some first conjugation verbs in the Bulgarian language based on a certain set of classification characteristics and diagnostic forms. The inflection types within one of the nine classes in which the Bulgarian verbal vocabulary are distinguished according to a procedure which comprises three levels of categorization: 1) by a morphological criterion; 2) by types of morphological (regressive) changes encoded in word-forming or grammatical forms, and 3) by a normative criterion (presence of doublets). Also considered is the combinatorics of the grammatical morphs in the set of verb forms. The presentation of formal types is done in terms of normative grammar, taking into account the dynamism of the norm. The model aims to cover the entire verbal vocabulary by uniting different lexical-grammatical classifications of the Bulgarian verbs. Typy fleksyjne w ramach pierwszej koniugacji w literackim języku bułgarskim W artykule przedstawiono propozycję zmodyfikowania klasyfikacji niektórych czasowników pierwszej koniugacji w języku bułgarskim w oparciu o pewien zestaw cech klasyfikacyjnych i form diagnostycznych. Procedura, według której bułgarskie czasowniki jednej z dziewięciu klas formalnych podzielone zostają na typy fleksyjne, składa się z trzech poziomów kategoryzacji: 1) według kryterium morfologicznego, 2) według rodzajów zmian morfologicznych (regresywnych) zakodowanych w formach słowotwórczych lub gramatycznych, 3) według kryterium normatywnego (obecność dubletów). Uwzględniana jest również kombinatoryka morfów w zbiorze form czasownika. Prezentacja cech formalnych odbywa się w gramatyce normatywnej przy uwzględnieniu dynamiki normy. Model ma na celu opracowanie wszystkich czasowników bułgarskich poprzez kombinację różnych kryteriów leksykalno-gramatycznych klasyfikacji.
Themass media as a sphere of speech activity represent a certain style of material presentation, the purpose of which is to inform and captivate the addressees. The functioning of dialecticisms in the texts are usually studied in comparision with the stylistic norms of the literary language and considered as stylization aimed at interaction with the reader, approaching to his worldview. Intensive use of territorially specific language elements not only in modern fiction works but also in the language of the regional periodicals and radio broadcasting caused an increase of interest to the scientific studies of functional-stylistic peculiarities of the dialectal words in the language of modern mass media.
 The purpose of the research is to analyze the stylistic motivation of the use of dialectal elements in the language of the periodicals, to find out the genre specification of the penetration of regional spoken units into the language of periodicals and their stylistic function.
 The article considers the use of the dialectal elements in the language of regional periodical “Volyn” as a means of emotionally-colored attitude of the authors of publications towards certain objects. The importance is placed on the mechanism of comparison, harping different lexical units of the national language in order to achieve artistic and aesthetic effect in journalism. It is proved that the use of geographically differentiated language elements is determined by the expressive function of language in the media. It has the effect of immediacy, informality, communicative interaction with the reader in his own language. Colloquial lexical items in journalism are a manifestation of updating verbalness in the newspaper discourse. The orientation of the media to the daily/spoken language patterns allows to bring the content of the texts closer to the reader's perception.
 The analytical and journalistic materials of the newspaper «Volyn» use live linguistic units (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, rarely –numerals) in order to reproduce the regional linguistic flavour, the linguistic characteristics of the subjects of publications. Territorially differentiated units in journalism are a convincing manifestation of the implementation of verbal stylistic means in the newspaper discourse. Dialect and colloquial tokens help to identify the individual elements of the ethno-cultural picture of the world of the inhabitants of Volyn in the language of the regional printed editions.
The article analyses the structure, semantics and word building of the early grammatical terminology as a reflection of spiritual cultural values of the ethnos. The attempts and ways of the authors of the “Grammar book” are shown in order to form native scientific tradition of the definitions of the parts of speech and their categories. The actuality of the subject is stipulated by the necessity to clarify the role of the ancient grammatical science in the development of national peculiarities of the formation of terms, comprehension of the reception of the work of Greek-Roman grammatical science in the formation of Ukrainian morphological terminology. The aim of the work is to study the structure of terms, the regularities of their creation, the study of systemic relations between the units of the terminological vocabulary and the formation of the Ukrainian grammatical terminology in the aspect of modern national terminology through the prism of the ancient reception. Research methods. Descriptive scientific method was used to characterize extralinguistic factors of the development of Ukrainian linguistics, comparative-historical in order to find out the origin of terminological lexemes and historical changes in their semantic structure, comparable was used to determine the relationship between the names of parts of the language at the time of antiquity and in the period of the formation of Ukrainian grammatical science, its tracing ways, etc. The parts of speech are relevant in the same relation to a grammatical and lexical description of the language. The theory of the parts of speech is the foundation for grammar because all grammar books are built as a description of the parts of speech by their morphological, mainly word-changing, characteristics. Ukrainian grammatical theory was considerably affected by the Greek-Latin canon of a grammatical description. According to ancient tradition, in the first Ukrainian grammar book there were eight parts of speech to distinguish and the names of the categories often arose by copying the corresponding Latin accidents. Conclusions.Constructional characteristics taken into grammatical description of the Ukrainian language modeled the tendencies of the further grammatical abstraction as to the norms of the Ukrainian language, including specific specialization of the grammatical characteristics directed to the disclosure of the ethnical essence of the native literary language.
Mouse-tracking is an increasingly popular method to trace cognitive processes. As is common for a novel method, the exact methodological procedures employed in an individual study are still relatively idiosyncratic and the effects of different methodological setups on mouse-tracking measures have not been explored so far. Here, we study the impact of one commonly occurring methodological variation, namely whether participants have to initiate their mouse movements to trigger stimulus presentation (dynamic starting condition) or whether the stimulus is presented automatically after a fixed delay and participants can freely decide when to initiate their movements (static starting condition). We compared data from a previous study in which participants performed a mouse-tracking version of a Simon task with a dynamic starting condition to data from a new study that employed a static starting condition in an otherwise identical setup. Results showed reliable Simon effects and Congruency Sequence effects on response time (RT) and discrete trial-level mouse-tracking measures (i.e., average deviation) in both starting conditions. In contrast, within-trial continuous measures (i.e., extracted temporal segments) were weaker and occurred in a more temporally compressed way in the static compared to the dynamic starting condition. This was in line with generally less consistent movements within and across participants in the static compared to the dynamic condition. Our results suggest that studies that use within-trial continuous measures to assess dynamic aspects of mouse movements should apply dynamic starting procedures to enhance the leakage of cognitive processing into the mouse movements.
This study tested the hypothesis that object-based attention modulates the discrimination of level increments in stop-consonant noise bursts. With consonant-vowel-consonant (CvC) words consisting of an ≈80-dB vowel (v), a pre-vocalic (Cv) and a post-vocalic (vC) stop-consonant noise burst (≈60-dB SPL), we measured discrimination thresholds (LDTs) for level increments (ΔL) in the noise bursts presented either in CvC context or in isolation. In the 2-interval 2-alternative forced-choice task, each observation interval presented a CvC word (e.g., /pæk/ /pæk/), and normal-hearing participants had to discern ΔL in the Cv or vC burst. Based on the linguistic word labels, the auditory events of each trial were perceived as two auditory objects (Cv-v-vC and Cv-v-vC) that group together the bursts and vowels, hindering selective attention to ΔL. To discern ΔL in Cv or vC, the events must be reorganized into three auditory objects: the to-be-attended pre-vocalic (Cv–Cv) or post-vocalic burst pa)