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16504 papers
Using semantic dependency analysis, this study examines narrative productions from Mandarin-speaking preschool children aged three to six to investigate how semantic organization develops with age in early childhood. Four semantic dependency treebanks were constructed from a Chinese narrative corpus available in the CHILDES database. By comparing semantic dependency types and semantic dependency distances across the four age groups, we found that (1) semantic organization shifted from experiencer and classification relations toward agent and patient relations, situational-role relations (particularly those involving measurement, individuation, and direction), and structural relations; (2) mean semantic dependency distance (MSDD) increased with age, as adjacent dependencies decreased and longer dependencies became more frequent. This increase in MSDD indicates growing complexity in semantic organization and is largely driven by significant increases in the MSDD values of specific semantic dependency types. These findings provide new evidence for semantic organization development in preschool children.
This repository contains Anomaly Soul Kit, an open simulation framework for observing the emergence, persistence, and evolutionary inheritance of anomalous behavior in populations of LLM-driven agents. Each agent encodes a numeric internal state — vitality (H) and anomaly intensity (Z) — and expresses that state through LLM-generated text each generation. A detection layer scores each expression against the population across three axes: lexical divergence, structural divergence, and novel vocabulary. Agents whose expressions deviate from the population accumulate anomaly intensity, which feeds back into their fitness and is heritable across generations. The project does not claim these anomalies constitute mind or soul. It provides a reproducible kit for observing whether something — a persistent, evolving deviation — reliably emerges from this process, and what it looks like when it does. --- Update — February 2026 v2 of the anomaly detection layer has been released. Two structural issues identified in early testing have been addressed. First, anomaly score inflation: as the population evolved, an increasing proportion of agents were flagged as anomalous, eventually making the designation meaningless. This has been resolved by replacing absolute scoring with a dynamic baseline — scores are now normalized relative to the population median each generation, making it structurally impossible for the entire population to simultaneously score as anomalous. Second, convergence speed: the original selection pressure caused Z-awakening to saturate too quickly (~90% by generation 50). Scaling has been adjusted to allow slower, more observable divergence dynamics. Two new observational metrics have been added: new_normal_threshold tracks whether what was previously anomalous is becoming the new collective norm, and population_drift measures how much the group as a whole is shifting toward anomalous expression across generations.
This paper presents the steps taken to integrate data from the UD_Latin-PROIEL treebank into the LiLa Knowledge Base of interoperable linguistic resources for Latin.It describes how the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and citation information from the source was modeled using the Linked Open Data principles as adopted by the LiLa Knowledge Base.The process of linking tokens to the LiLa collection of Latin lemmas is detailed, addressing challenges such as ambiguities, new lemmas, and errors encountered in the source.The outcome is a syntactically annotated textual resource that is interoperable with the (meta)data of other Latin linguistic resources linked within the LiLa Knowledge Base.This integration enables new ways of analyzing linguistic information and using the content as a starting point to explore connections with other interlinked resources.A use case demonstrates this interoperability.
The paper is a qualitative literary study of how life choices and individualism intertwine in Robert Frost's 1916 poem "The Road Not Taken." The poem is considered one of Frost's most significant works. It uses symbolic division to question the problems of human choice, free will, and self-reflection, thereby dealing with the process of self-formation. Using thematic interpretation and close textual analysis, complemented by a systematic review of academic literature published since 1999, the study investigates how metaphor, imagery, tone, and structural ambiguity communicate the psychological, philosophical, and existential aspects of choice. The results show that Frost views life choices as ambiguous and consequential, with a focus on introspection, anticipation, and retrospective sense-making. The poem's main metaphor conveys the universality of the decision-making process and the individual responsibility taken in personal activity. A theme of individualism also develops, supported by lexical clues such as seldom and difference, which indicate the conflict between social norms and individual freedom. The reflection is inseparable from agency, and the analysis shows that people reconstruct the meaning of their decisions through memory and narrative. The comparative study also shows that the literary elements used by Frost, such as metaphor, ambiguity, and narrative point of view, shed light on both the cognitive and emotional aspects of decision-making, prompting the reader to engage in interpretation. In theory, this study broadens the application of literary, psychological, and philosophical theories to deepen understanding of autonomy, agency, and reflective cognition in poetry. In practice, the findings highlight the usefulness of the poem as an educational, counseling, and personal-development tool that fosters critical thinking about choice and responsibility. The weaknesses of the research are that it is qualitative and focused on textual analysis, and that the study lacks empirical evidence on reader responses, thereby indicating potential areas for future research that can utilize cross-cultural, longitudinal, or experimental research designs. On the whole, the paper has shown that The Road Not Taken has remained relevant in terms of its decision-making, individualism, and self-reflection, even in current human agency discourses.
We release a sentence-level genre layer for Universal Dependencies as a separate, joinable dataset, computed across UD revisions and linked back to the underlying treebanks via a release-aware composite key comprising treebank, split, sent_id, and UD release metadata.The annotations are derived rather than authoritative and are accompanied by provenance and uncertainty indicators, enabling downstream users to choose appropriate precision-coverage trade-offs and to re-run the pipeline as UD evolves.To support both parity tracking and deployment-oriented interpretation, we report results under two complementary regimes: a fixed-partition setting aligned with earlier protocols, and a language-grouped 10-fold generalisation setting that highlights cross-language heterogeneity and anchor sparsity as operational constraints.The resulting resource is intended to make genre a practical control variable for UD-based experimentation, including genre-stratified evaluation and training data selection for POS tagging and parsing, where performance varies substantially across text types.Finally, we note that reduced genre spaces aligned with recurring robustness profiles (e.g.transcribed speech versus interactional web/social text versus edited prose/news) appear pragmatically useful, but should be treated as a community coordination task implemented through explicit, versioned mapping tables.
This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized dependency (sub)trees and extract them from spoken and written Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks in two syntactically distinct languages, English and Slovenian. For each corpus, we analyze the size, diversity, and distribution of syntactic inventories, their overlap across modalities, and the structures most characteristic of speech. Results show that, across both languages, spoken corpora contain fewer and less diverse syntactic structures than their written counterparts, with consistent cross-linguistic preferences for certain structural types across modalities. Strikingly, the overlap between spoken and written syntactic inventories is very limited: most structures attested in speech do not occur in writing, pointing to modality-specific preferences in syntactic organization that reflect the distinct demands of real-time interaction and elaborated writing. This contrast is further supported by a keyness analysis of the most frequent speech-specific structures, which highlights patterns associated with interactivity, context-grounding, and economy of expression. We argue that this scalable, language-independent framework offers a useful general method for systematically studying syntactic variation across corpora, laying the groundwork for more comprehensive data-driven theories of grammar in use.
INTRODUCTION: The experience of emotions is accompanied by distinct bodily sensations, consistent across cultures. Irritable bowel syndrome is characterized by altered interoceptive and affective processing, suggesting that individuals with IBS may experience emotions differently in their bodies. This study investigated whether so-called bodily maps of emotions differ between individuals with IBS and healthy controls (HC). METHODS: Forty-three individuals with IBS (Rome IV) and 54 HC used the topographical mapping tool EmBODY to color bodily silhouettes marking where sensations were perceived during 13 emotions and a neutral negative affective state. Region-based (abdomen, head, thorax) and whole-body pixel-wise analyses were performed on the resulting body maps to compare emotion-evoked sensations between individuals with IBS and HC using non-parametric one-way ANOVA. RESULTS: IBS participants showed consistently elevated abdominal sensations across emotional states, and emotional state only modulated abdominal sensations in HC (p < 0.001) but not in IBS (p = 0.17). After correcting for neutral activation, positive emotions (love, happiness) elicited smaller increases in abdominal activation in IBS than in HC (p < 0.03). IBS participants did not show greater abdominal activation during negative emotions relative to HC. Several positive emotions were associated with reduced head-region activation in IBS (p < 0.041), while no group differences emerged in the thorax region. CONCLUSION: Individuals with IBS demonstrate altered embodiment of emotional states, characterized by persistent abdominal sensations, limited emotional differentiation, and blunted emotion-specific modulation for positive emotions. Future studies should incorporate concurrent affect ratings and physiological measures to clarify emotion-body interactions in IBS.
This article examines transformations in the context of globalization.It notes that globalization has a profound impact on language, transforming not only vocabulary but also discursive structures, communicative practices, and linguistic identity.It is established that language functions as a social and cultural construct reflecting ideology, power relations, and global interconnectedness.This study examines how discourse develops in the context of globalization and how these transformations alter linguistic identity.Using qualitative discourse analysis of digital media texts and online communications, the study identifies key processes, including lexical borrowing, hybridization, code-switching, syntactic simplification, and multimodal integration.The results demonstrate that global linguistic elements are incorporated alongside local structures, creating context-dependent, multilayered identities.It is demonstrated that people balance between global and local norms, adapting language to express modernity, cultural affiliation, and social status.Thus, discourse has been shown to serve as a mechanism for identity reconstruction, demonstrating how language systems dynamically respond to social, technological, and cultural change.Language, as both a medium and a symbol of social interaction, is particularly affected by these global forces: beyond simple lexical borrowing or codeswitching, globalization reshapes discourse patterns, pragmatic norms, and stylistic conventions across multiple communicative domains.This study contributes to philology by linking discourse transformations to identity formation in contemporary societies and highlighting the importance of integrating sociolinguistic and digital perspectives in the study of language evolution.These findings are relevant for scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and applied philology, demonstrating that globalization alters rather than erases local linguistic practices.
Background: Emotion processing is critical in the neuropathology of major depressive disorder (MDD), while its relationship with clinical treatment remains unclear. This study aims to indicate the associations between emotion processing and treatment effects following a sequential dual-site accelerated repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) protocol. Methods: MDD patients were recruited to receive rTMS treatment with four sessions per day for four consecutive days, with stimulation sequentially delivered to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Symptoms were assessed at baseline, end of treatment, and week 4 using the Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS), and Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS). Emotional valence and arousal were evaluated with the Affect Rating Task (ART). Results: A total of 51 participants completed the clinical assessments and ART, with two excluded due to missing baseline data in the SHAPS and FSS. The linear mixed-effects models revealed significant improvement in depressive (p < 0.001, d = −0.343) and fatigue symptoms (p = 0.010, d = −0.572) following rTMS treatment. Neutral valence was correlated with MADRS scores at baseline (R2 = 0.096, p = 0.027). In addition, changes in arousal for positive images (p = 0.047, adjusted R2 = 0.097) and neutral images (p = 0.019, adjusted R2 = 0.160) at treatment end were significantly correlated with MADRS improvement at week 4. Conclusions: Our study highlights the association between changes in emotional arousal and improvement in MDD following accelerated dlPFC-dmPFC dual-site rTMS treatment.
Abstract Quranic Arabic has motivated sustained morphological and syntactic annotation, yet Quranic treebanks remain hard to compare and reuse in modern natural language processing (NLP) because they diverge in clitic segmentation, feature inventories, and syntactic formalisms. We present UD-Quran, a Universal Dependencies (UD) v2 conversion of the Extended Quranic Treebank with hybrid syntactic annotations (EQTB). The conversion treats EQTB morpho-syntactic segments as UD tokens, maps EQTB part-of-speech (POS) categories to 12 UD universal part-of-speech (UPOS) tags, derives UD features from explicit EQTB columns, and collapses EQTB dependency labels into a compact UD relation inventory with deterministic normalization aligned to UD content-head conventions. Two releases are provided: a surface variant aligned to the observable Quranic string by excluding analytically inserted nodes, and an augmented variant that retains inserted material to preserve EQTB’s modeling of ellipsis and implied pronominals. The surface release contains 11,693 sentences and 128,219 UD tokens; the augmented release contains 139,376 tokens. Conversion coverage is quantified by restricting unspecified dependency (dep) to 1,129 tokens (0.881% of surface tokens). UD-Quran includes fixed training/development/test (train/dev/test) splits (seed 42) and lightweight Stanza baselines scored with the CoNLL (Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning) 2018 UD evaluation script. On the test sets, parsing with gold tags reaches labeled attachment score (LAS) 80.66 (surface) and 82.47 (augmented), while the end-to-end pipeline reaches LAS 64.52 and 68.54. UD-Quran is intended as an interoperability layer that supports standard UD tooling while preserving sentence-level traceability to EQTB.
The fast growth of artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, has dramatically reshaped the language usage, acquisition, and development in modern digital communities. The paper is an interdisciplinary synthesis of research to investigate the impact of AI-based applications, such as chatbots, machine translators, and machine writing aids, on linguistic practices in the domain of communication and education. Using meta-analytical research, corpus research and experimental research, the paper illuminates the dual nature of AI as a facilitator or regulator of language. The results suggest that AI-based interventions are found to be moderately to strong effective in second and foreign language acquisition, especially in vocabulary learning and speaking fluency, and the effect sizes were also provided in the recent meta-analyses. At the same time, AI mediated communication changes the linguistic nature, including sentiment, lexical difficulty, and interactional dynamics where the outcomes are frequently more positive and efficient in communication and the authenticity and trust issues are raised. Structurally, AI technologies affect the standardization of lexicon and the spread of majority language norms, especially English, but also provide a possible source of support to the maintenance of minority languages. The paper contends that AI is to be viewed as a socio-technical linguistic actor that codesigns meaning and redefines communicative standards. In this paper, I presented a consistent theoretical approach, which can be applied to the understanding of the impact of AI on language by piecing together disjointed strands of research and concentrating on the implication of AI to linguistic diversity, equity, and the future of the human communicative process.
BACKGROUND: L. (caraway) essential oils (EOs) on aging. First, we assessed, in 402 participants, the age-related changes in olfactory functions (odor threshold, discrimination, and identification), gustatory perceptions (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter taste), cognitive functions (focusing on attention, memory, language, and visuospatial/executive functions), and their possible correlations with aging. To achieve this, olfactory function, gustatory perception, and cognitive abilities were evaluated in healthy participants across different age groups. Then, to evaluate the age-related decrease in trigeminal function (59 participants), we used rosemary and caraway EOs that contain carvone, limonene, and 1,8-cineole, all of which are considered typical trigeminal stimuli. METHODS: Olfactory function was assessed with the Sniffin' Sticks test, gustatory function by the Taste Strips test, and rosemary and caraway EOs by the ratings of odor pleasantness, intensity, and familiarity using a labeled hedonic Likert-type scale. RESULTS: Olfactory function could be a potential early indicator of attentional, memory, language, and visuospatial/executive dysfunctions. Our data indicated that rosemary and caraway EOs were perceived without any significant decrease in odor pleasantness, intensity, and familiarity ratings in relation to aging. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest the potential bioactive effects of rosemary and caraway natural EOs as a new strategy to promote healthy aging.
Screen use pervades daily life, shaping work, leisure, and social connections while raising concerns for digital wellbeing. Yet, reducing screen time alone risks oversimplifying technology’s role and neglecting its potential for meaningful engagement. We posit self-awareness—reflecting on one’s digital behavior—as a critical pathway to digital wellbeing. We developed WellScreen, a lightweight probe that scaffolds daily reflection by asking people to estimate and report smartphone use. In a two-week deployment with college students (\(\mathtt {N}\)=25) focused on generating formative insights, we examined how discrepancies between estimated and actual usage shaped digital awareness and wellbeing. Participants often underestimated productivity and social media while overestimating entertainment app use. They showed a 10% improvement in positive affect, rating WellScreen as moderately useful. Interviews revealed that structured reflection supported recognition of patterns, adjustment of expectations, and more intentional engagement with technology. Our findings highlight the promise of lightweight reflective interventions for supporting self-awareness and intentional digital engagement, offering implications for designing digital wellbeing tools.
This article evaluates the integration of data extracted from a French syntactic lexicon, the Lexicon-Grammar (Gross, 1994), into a probabilistic parser. We show that by applying clustering methods on verbs of the French Treebank (Abeillé et al., 2003), we obtain accurate performances on French with a parser based on a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (Petrov et al., 2006).
Background and Aims: Most men consume pornography, with a small but significant percentage losing control over their use. Since ICD-11, problematic pornography use can be diagnosed as "compulsive sexual behavior disorder." Debate persists on whether problematic pornography use is an impulse-control disorder or a behavioral addiction. Mechanisms of learning and memory play a central role in addictive disorders but are presumably less relevant for impulse control disorders. Methods: One hundred thirty-nine heterosexual male users of pornography and gaming participated in our study which was part of a multi-center research project on internet use disorders in Germany. We focus on a subsample of fifty-eight non-problematic (n = 35) and problematic pornography users (n = 23, labeled pathological). FMRI data were collected during appetitive conditioning, extinction and recall. Pornographic, game, and money images served as unconditioned stimuli, geometric shapes as conditioned stimuli (CS). Results: During appetitive conditioning pathological pornography users showed a generally stronger response in ventral striatum to all CSs, whereas altered activations in extinction and recall were specific to the porn-associated CS. Greater activations in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex during extinction and in the medial orbitofrontal cortex during recall suggest persistence of appetitive memory for pornography in pathological users, supported by valence ratings and skin conductance responses (SCR). Sensitization to the monetary cue also emerged in SCR. Discussion and Conclusions: Based on these new neurobiological findings, which are consistent with current addiction theories about stimulus-specific altered reward sensitivity and appetitive memory, we argue that problematic pornography use should be considered a behavioral addiction.
Facial expressions are powerful signals of human emotion, shaping both human–human and human–computer interaction. As interactive technologies, from adaptive interfaces to emotion-aware agents, become more pervasive, systems are increasingly expected to recognize and respond to users’ emotions naturally. But what if a system misreads your face? Such misinterpretation is particularly likely when cultural differences in emotion perception are overlooked. This problem may be compounded by the fact that most facial emotion recognition (FER) models are trained on datasets that reflect the norms of a particular cultural group that assume universality, limiting their reliability in multicultural contexts. Surprise, in particular, is an emotion whose valence can be either positive or negative depending on context, making it a critical case for investigating cultural bias in FER. To address this, we examined how cultural background shapes the recognition and valence interpretation of surprise facial expressions among South Korean (N=36) and American (N=34) participants. Participants labeled 200 facial expressions (surprise and fear), rated their perceived valence, and described personal experiences of surprise. Results show that South Korean-labeled surprise expressions exhibited stronger negative Action Unit (AU) activation and lower valence ratings, whereas American-labeled ones showed more balanced or positive facial cues. Qualitative accounts further revealed that South Koreans framed surprise as tense or socially cautious, while Americans viewed it as open and situationally flexible. These findings bridge recognition and interpretation in cross-cultural emotion research and highlight the need for culturally adaptive FER systems that can interpret ambiguous emotions like surprise more inclusively.
Monolingualism, native-speakerism and standard language ideology have been identified as dominant ideologies in language teaching with severe effects on second language teacher identities. Such ideologies offer alleged certainties but also detach teachers from the actual uses and value of language in multilingual and multidialectal contexts. As a consequence, educators might feel constrained by rigid linguistic norms, hindering their capacity to re-evaluate their approaches to accommodate the diverse linguistic realities and communicative needs of English learners in an increasingly interconnected and multilingual global landscape. This chapter intends first to offer a broad perspective of how these ideologies have shaped language teaching and how they have clashed with research-based observations of multilingual and multidialectal communicative settings. We will give an overview of the relevant literature, ranging from foundational texts to more recent ones challenging the ‘ideal’ monolingual native speaker, and we will show how the above ideologies are still found in a rather pervasive way in the language teacher profession. This will be followed by an account of recent research conducted in teacher training environments aimed at showing ways to successfully gear future language teachers towards a new vision of language that contemplates diversity and hybridization as fundamental pillars on which teachers’ identities need to be based.
This study examines the impact of social media on the linguistic behavior of Jordanian Gen Z (born 1997–2012) through the lens of their daily use of colloquial speech as a reflection of sociocultural change. It delineates the dominant linguistic features of the language they use and attempts to address how these linguistic practices reflect the construction of identity and socio-cultural shifts among Jordanian Generation Z. Social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat heavily influence Generation Z's vernacular. This study employs a qualitative research approach to analyze pertinent data on code-switching, meme-driven expressions, and abbreviation combinations. Two primary methods of data collection were employed: social media data collection for discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews aimed at identifying the most frequently used expressions among Generation Z. Findings show that the vernacular of Jordanian Gen Z is dynamic, hybrid, and highly integrative in terms of global linguistic resources. This new digital Arabic sociolect poses numerous linguistic and cultural challenges for individuals. These include the necessity for extensive code-switching, the establishment of distinct online linguistic norms, the adaptation to cultural hybridity in language use, and the confrontation of linguistic divergence between generations.
Abstract Arousal and valence are fundamental dimensions of affective experience signifying levels of activation and pleasantness, respectively. These dimensions play a crucial role in shaping emotional responses and behaviors, with significant implications for psychopathology. Previous machine learning studies had some success decoding these states from brain activation patterns observed during task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but the results have varied across studies. Moreover, prior studies have often been limited by small sample sizes, weak decoding performance, and non-whole-brain analyses, leaving the neural representations of arousal and valence largely unresolved. Here we successfully decoded arousal and valence from whole-brain task-fMRI data collected from 132 participants during exposure to 300 unique emotional stimuli, including 150 movie clips and 150 text scenarios that reliably induced a wide range of arousal and valence states. Mass univariate general linear models identified block-level activation (emotion stimuli > washout) from all gray matter voxels. Multivariate regression analysis predicted arousal and valence ratings based on these gray matter activations. Patterns in the fMRI data underlying arousal and valence were robust, as they were successfully decoded across both induction modalities using five different linear multivariate regression models. Although significant, decoding from scenarios was less successful than from movies, likely due to their more imaginative nature. In particular, decoding arousal from scenarios only showed low predictive utility. Representations of arousal and valence were widespread throughout the brain, and we reveal cerebellar and brainstem contributions that have largely been absent in past fMRI decoding studies. These findings clarify the distributed neural basis of arousal and valence and provide a foundation for future clinical research on the role of these constructs in affective dysregulation.
While the influence of state-dependent factors on appetitive processing has received considerable attention, the role of stable personality traits remains comparatively unexplored. Extraversion, characterized by heightened positive emotionality, represents a compelling candidate in this regard, as it may shape individual differences in Positive Valence System (PVS) functioning. The present study examined how extraversion modulates neural and subjective responses to pleasant stimuli; the role of neuroticism was additionally explored, given its established association with affective reactivity. Sixty-eight Italian university students (40 females) completed an online version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI-44) before the laboratory session. Then, participants completed a passive viewing task of pleasant and neutral images while undergoing an electroencephalographic (EEG) recording. Appetitive stimulus processing was indexed by the peak amplitude of the P300-LPP complex and subjective SAM ratings. Results revealed that extraversion was positively associated with larger P300-LPP complex amplitudes to pleasant relative to neutral stimuli and with higher arousal ratings across both emotional categories. Additionally, neuroticism was associated with lower valence ratings regardless of stimulus category, with no significant effect on neural responses to emotional stimuli. These findings highlight extraversion as a stable personality trait shaping PVS functioning. Specifically, low extraversion was associated with reduced P300–LPP amplitudes and lower arousal ratings to pleasant stimuli, paralleling neural patterns documented in psychopathological conditions involving blunted PVS activation. These results underscore the utility of ERP-based measures in capturing personality-related differences in appetitive processing relevant to psychopathology risk.
BACKGROUND: Schools have the potential to promote equitable health from early life onwards yet require sufficient organizational capacity to achieve sustained action. Structured improvement approaches, such as PDSA cycles, may help strengthen this capacity by guiding systematic implementation processes. However, their potential in school health promotion remains insufficiently understood, particularly regarding the heterogeneous contextual factors shaping their application. This study examined which contextual determinants shape schools' perceived implementability of the PDSA cycle for health promotion and how these conditions differ across schools. METHODS: Nine German primary schools participating in a holistic health promotion program were purposively sampled to capture heterogeneity across federal states, socioeconomic contexts, and urban-rural settings. Semi-structured qualitative group interviews in a workshop format were conducted with school principals, teachers, and parents and analyzed using the framework method guided by the CFIR. To facilitate cross-case comparison, color-coded valence ratings (facilitator/barrier/mixed) were visualized in a Matrix Heat Map, enabling identification of contextual tendencies. RESULTS: Fifteen contextual factors emerged across the CFIR domains of Outer Setting, Inner Setting, and Individual. Schools with prior experience using structured processes similar to PDSA cycles reported more facilitators, such as established communication structures, while schools without such experience perceived more barriers, notably financial constraints. Common barriers across schools included limited parental engagement and staff shortages, whereas leadership support and compatibility of program components were consistent facilitators. Some factors interacted dynamically, with resource constraints reinforcing other barriers or with strong mission alignment amplifying engagement. CONCLUSION: Schools' prior structured experience seemed to be associated with how they perceived the implementability of PDSA cycles for health promotion implementation, with more experienced schools anticipating more facilitators and fewer barriers. While causality cannot be inferred, these exploratory findings are hypothesis-generating and suggest that prior structured experience may be an important factor to consider for tailoring implementation support and building organizational capacity. Beyond these insights, extending the framework method with a color-coded Matrix Heat Map proved valuable for visualizing contextual heterogeneity and revealing tendencies across cases. This combined approach may inspire further research on how contextual configurations shape the use of structured processes in complex, multi-site implementation settings.
This thesis examines the linguacultural features of the concept of masculinity in advertising texts. The study analyzes the linguistic and cultural mechanisms used to represent masculine identity in modern advertising discourse. Special attention is paid to lexical units, stylistic devices, slogans, metaphorical expressions, and persuasive strategies that create masculine images associated with power, confidence, leadership, and social success. The research also explores the influence of globalization and digital communication on the transformation of traditional masculine stereotypes. The findings show that advertising discourse not only reflects cultural perceptions of masculinity but also actively shapes gender norms and consumer behavior. The study concludes that masculinity in advertising is a dynamic linguacultural concept influenced by social values, media development, and cultural traditions.
This dataset contains electroencephalogram (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings from 17 healthy participants during an affective music brain-computer interface training study. Participants listened to 40-second music clips (20s per emotional state) designed to induce specific emotional states across three sessions, with self-reported valence and arousal ratings. The data supports the development and validation of music-based brain-computer interfaces for monitoring and inducing affective states. This is the training session dataset; two additional datasets cover system calibration and online real-time control phases.
This dataset contains imageability and familiarity ratings for Ukrainian and English work-related proverbs collected from Ukrainian university students. The data were gathered as part of a cross-linguistic study examining how bodily grounding influences the mental imagery associated with proverbial expressions in a first language (L1) and a second language (L2). The participants (N = 49) were students at Vasyl’ Stus Donetsk National University. Ukrainian was their first language (L1), and English was their second language (L2). Participants evaluated Ukrainian and English work-related proverbs using 7-point Likert scales measuring imageability and familiarity. The stimulus set consisted of two proverb categories: body-based (BOD) proverbs containing explicit references to bodily actions, body parts, or sensorimotor experiences, and abstract (ABS) proverbs expressing work-related meanings without direct bodily imagery. Ratings were collected separately for Ukrainian and English proverb sets. The dataset includes raw participant responses, worksheet-level calculations, category means, language-specific means, and derived variables used for hypothesis testing. Statistical calculations included comparisons between BOD and ABS proverb categories as well as between L1 and L2 proverb processing. All participant data are fully anonymized. No personally identifiable information is included. The dataset may be useful for research on embodied cognition, conceptual metaphor theory, psycholinguistics, figurative language processing, proverb comprehension, imageability, familiarity, and cross-linguistic studies of language representation. File contents • Raw imageability ratings for Ukrainian proverbs • Raw imageability ratings for English proverbs • Raw familiarity ratings for Ukrainian proverbs • Raw familiarity ratings for English proverbs • Calculated category means (BOD and ABS) • Derived variables for hypothesis testing (H1–H3) • Statistical summary tables Variables Participant_ID – anonymous participant identifier Proverb_Rating – participant rating assigned to a proverb Imageability – perceived ease of forming a mental image (1–7) Familiarity – perceived familiarity with the proverb (1–7) Language – Ukrainian (L1) or English (L2) Category – Body-Based (BOD) or Abstract (ABS) Mean_Score – average score calculated for a participant, proverb category, or language condition License CC BY 4.0
This dataset contains imageability and familiarity ratings for Ukrainian and English work-related proverbs collected from Ukrainian university students. The data were gathered as part of a cross-linguistic study examining how bodily grounding influences the mental imagery associated with proverbial expressions in a first language (L1) and a second language (L2). The participants (N = 49) were students at Vasyl’ Stus Donetsk National University. Ukrainian was their first language (L1), and English was their second language (L2). Participants evaluated Ukrainian and English work-related proverbs using 7-point Likert scales measuring imageability and familiarity. The stimulus set consisted of two proverb categories: body-based (BOD) proverbs containing explicit references to bodily actions, body parts, or sensorimotor experiences, and abstract (ABS) proverbs expressing work-related meanings without direct bodily imagery. Ratings were collected separately for Ukrainian and English proverb sets. The dataset includes raw participant responses, worksheet-level calculations, category means, language-specific means, and derived variables used for hypothesis testing. Statistical calculations included comparisons between BOD and ABS proverb categories as well as between L1 and L2 proverb processing. All participant data are fully anonymized. No personally identifiable information is included. The dataset may be useful for research on embodied cognition, conceptual metaphor theory, psycholinguistics, figurative language processing, proverb comprehension, imageability, familiarity, and cross-linguistic studies of language representation. File contents • Raw imageability ratings for Ukrainian proverbs • Raw imageability ratings for English proverbs • Raw familiarity ratings for Ukrainian proverbs • Raw familiarity ratings for English proverbs • Calculated category means (BOD and ABS) • Derived variables for hypothesis testing (H1–H3) • Statistical summary tables Variables Participant_ID – anonymous participant identifier Proverb_Rating – participant rating assigned to a proverb Imageability – perceived ease of forming a mental image (1–7) Familiarity – perceived familiarity with the proverb (1–7) Language – Ukrainian (L1) or English (L2) Category – Body-Based (BOD) or Abstract (ABS) Mean_Score – average score calculated for a participant, proverb category, or language condition License CC BY 4.0
Lote is an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea with which the author conducted brief field research in 2022. Although the language had already been relatively well described, it lacked full coverage in grammatical and lexical databases, which are valuable tools for typologists and historical linguists. This paper has two aims. The first is to present data on Lote that can be used to fill gaps in linguistic databases. The second is to offer suggestions to other linguists on how to help expand comparative databases, especially with data pertaining to languages of the Pacific.
Background: By studying how individuals in an "at-risk" state of psychosis learn about threat and safety cues – specifically, how they develop and unlearn fear responses to neutral cues - we might better understand the mechanisms leading to heightened arousal and fear that are characteristic of acute psychotic episodes.Methods: At-risk individuals (N = 88; of which 28 fulfilled ultra-high-risk criteria on the Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States interview and 60 scored above a predefined threshold in the Community assessment of Psychic Experiences questionnaire) and healthy controls (N = 44) underwent a standardized and validated differential fear conditioning paradigm including an acquisition, generalization, and extinction phase. The main outcomes of interest were the late positive potential, fear-potentiated startle, and self-reported ratings of valence, arousal, fear, and expectancy elicited by the conditioned stimuli (CS).Results: The at-risk group exhibited diminished fear learning, evident in significantly reduced differentiation between the CS+ vs. CS- in the valence ratings, compared to controls. Additionally, they demonstrated impaired fear extinction, evident in valence and arousal ratings, in which their CS differentiation showed a slower reduction than the controls. There were no group differences in late positive potential responses.Conclusion: At risk mental states appear to be associated with problems in distinguishing dangerous from safe stimuli and a diminished ability to adjust affective responses to conditioned stimuli based on new information, while the late-positive potential and fear-potentiated startle are unaltered. Early interventions could focus on recalibrating subjective emotional evaluations of fear-associated events.
Previous research has produced conflicting findings on how sleep affects emotional memories, suggesting it can either strengthen or weaken their emotional intensity. Rather than having a uniform effect, sleep's influence may depend on factors that determine the most adaptive outcome. To explore this, we examined whether the future importance of an emotional experience shapes how sleep alters the emotional intensity of the associated memory. Emotional memories were induced using a novel evaluative learning paradigm featuring a short film clip depicting an acted version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Some of the actors playing the evaluative panel with a critical or neutral demeanour were then introduced as committee members during the participant's own presentation a week later, thereby assigning future relevance or future irrelevance to the formed memories. We recorded changes in emotional responses to memory cues subjectively (valence and arousal ratings) and objectively (skin conductance) after a 12-h period of either daytime wakefulness (N = 32) or containing nighttime sleep (N = 34) and again one week later. Learning was effective, as indicated by more negative feelings and subjective arousal (but not physiological measures) in response to memory cues of the aversive committee members. Regardless of sleep, arousal decreased over 12 h and one week for the future-irrelevant compared to the future-relevant negative memory cue. Valence ratings remained unchanged. These findings suggest that future relevance influences emotional memories independently of sleep. While the benefits of healthy sleep may be subtle, emotional memory processing might be more vulnerable to disruption from poor sleep quality.
Background: By studying how individuals in an "at-risk" state of psychosis learn about threat and safety cues – specifically, how they develop and unlearn fear responses to neutral cues - we might better understand the mechanisms leading to heightened arousal and fear that are characteristic of acute psychotic episodes. Methods: At-risk individuals (N = 88; of which 28 fulfilled ultra-high-risk criteria on the Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States interview and 60 scored above a predefined threshold in the Community assessment of Psychic Experiences questionnaire) and healthy controls (N = 44) underwent a standardized and validated differential fear conditioning paradigm including an acquisition, generalization, and extinction phase. The main outcomes of interest were the late positive potential, fear-potentiated startle, and self-reported ratings of valence, arousal, fear, and expectancy elicited by the conditioned stimuli (CS). Results: The at-risk group exhibited diminished fear learning, evident in significantly reduced differentiation between the CS+ vs. CS- in the valence ratings, compared to controls. Additionally, they demonstrated impaired fear extinction, evident in valence and arousal ratings, in which their CS differentiation showed a slower reduction than the controls. There were no group differences in late positive potential responses. Conclusion: At risk mental states appear to be associated with problems in distinguishing dangerous from safe stimuli and a diminished ability to adjust affective responses to conditioned stimuli based on new information, while the late-positive potential and fear-potentiated startle are unaltered. Early interventions could focus on recalibrating subjective emotional evaluations of fear-associated events.
This study investigates the influence of three biophilic interior design variables: natural light, interior vegetation (vertical green wall), and biomorphic form (biomorphic wall panel) on affective and physiological responses in a design studio interior utilizing immersive virtual reality (IVR) and wearable biofeedback technology. This study was a within-participant 23 factorial design that included one baseline and eight IVR studio conditions. Participants experienced all conditions while reporting affects using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) valence and arousal scales, electrodermal activity (EDA), and skin temperature (ST). Cybersickness was measured with the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) and presence was assessed using the Igroup Presence Questionnaire and Slater-Usoh-Steed presence measures (IPQ, SUS), while baseline anxiety (STAI) was controlled. The results demonstrated a significant primary influence of natural light on SAM valence ratings: conditions with natural light were evaluated as more pleasant than the non-variable and baseline condition, whereas interior vegetation and biomorphic form had smaller, context-dependent effects that were most evident when layered with natural light. Differences in SAM arousal ratings were modest and non-systematic. EDA did not differentiate, and ST showed only small shifts, indicating that during calm exploratory monitoring, subjective affect was more responsive. The circumplex findings guided to an activity-specific zoned interior rather than a single uniform design studio.
This dataset contains the results of a computational operationalization of Greenberg's Universal 45 applied to the Universal Dependencies (UD) corpus (version 2.14). The data covers 339 treebanks across 186 languages. For each treebank and Universal POS tag (UPOS) category, the dataset records whether gender distinctions are present in singular and/or plural tokens, and whether this combination constitutes a violation of the implication universal. The dataset also includes aggregated counts of gender-marked tokens by treebank, language, and UPOS category.
Existing neurocognitive reading models highlight a left-lateralized brain network supporting word- to discourse-level processing, but they largely overlook emotion. Although emotion-related brain regions are active during discourse processing, the role of arousal (i.e., emotional intensity) remains underexplored. Prior neuroimaging work has shown that isolated words or whole passages varying in arousal evoke activity in brain regions associated with emotion and situation model processing. However, how arousal at the phrase level within passages may modulate neural activity is unclear, nor have studies investigated how individual differences in arousal responsiveness may be linked to reading comprehension ability, particularly in developing readers. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural correlates of lexical arousal in 86 third-graders as they read passages. A parametric modulation analysis, using phrase-level arousal ratings from a validated lexical database, was used to investigate how fluctuations in arousal during passage reading correlated with neural activity. We demonstrated that phrase-level arousal was associated with increased activity in regions implicated in emotional processing and situation model construction: the right amygdala, striatum, and posterior insula, and the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Additionally, dmPFC activity was associated with better reading comprehension ability, aligning with prior literature linking dmPFC to situation model building. This work highlights the importance of integrating lexical emotional dimensions into cognitive models of reading and supports the idea of using emotionally engaging materials to enhance comprehension for developing readers of all abilities.
Despite growing understanding of the ways in which sexual disgust operates, significant gaps remain, particularly around the prevalence of participation in sexual behaviours perceived to be disgusting, how this differs by type of behaviour and involvement of fluids (e.g., blood, semen) and barriers (e.g., condoms), as well as factors surrounding participation in these behaviours. Furthermore, no research has examined the direct relationship between disgust and arousal ratings of the same behaviour, how this differs by gender, and how this relationship relates to past participation in and desire to avoid a certain behaviour. The proposed project aims to address these gaps, which will advance knowledge about the prevalence of suboptimal sexual experiences and potential failures of the sexual inhibition and excitation system. The primary research questions are: (1.1 & 1.2) To what extent does past participation converge or diverge from behaviours that individuals indicate they would want to avoid? Does the rate of overlap differ for certain behaviours as compared to others? (2.1 & 2.2) How do the disgust and arousal ratings of a behaviour relate to one another? Does this differ for men and women? (3) How do the disgust and arousal ratings of a behaviour predict past participation or a desire to avoid? And (4.1 & 4.2) What contexts and motivations surround sexual experiences that are perceived to be disgusting? Do people have different experiences for different sexual behaviours?
Following the death of Jeffrey Epstein, the subreddit r/conspiracy experienced a significant visibility shock that brought mainstream users into direct contact with established conspiracy narratives. In this work, we explore how large-scale surges in public attention reshape participation and discourse within online conspiracy communities. We ask whether a sudden increase in exposure changes who join r/conspiracy, how long they stay, and how they adapt linguistically, compared with users who arrive through organic discovery. Using a computational framework that combines toxicity scores, survival analysis, and lexical and semantic measures over a period of 12 months, we find that mainstream visibility functions as a selection mechanism rather than a simple amplifier. Users who discover the conspiracy community through more organic pathways tend to integrate more quickly into its linguistic and thematic norms and show more stable engagement over time. By contrast, users who arrive during the height of public visibility remain semantically distant from core discourse and participate more briefly. Overall, we find that mainstream visibility is connected with changes in audience size, community composition, and linguistic cohesion. However, incidental exposure during attention shocks does not typically produce durable, integrated community members. These results provide a more nuanced understanding of how external events and platform visibility influence the growth and evolution of conspiracy spaces, offering insights for the design of responsible and transparent recommendation systems.
Syntactic annotation is time-and resource-consuming, especially for historical and heterogeneous data.The Universal Dependencies (UD) framework provides a stable and cross-linguistically consistent annotation scheme, offering a crucial backbone for diachronic corpus studies.However, ensuring internal consistency within historical UD treebanks remains challenging due to syntactic variation and parser errors.We address this issue for Medieval and Early Modern French by integrating valency information into our corrections to support UD treebank maintenance.Valency frames were extracted from the Profiterole treebank (v.2.7) and used to enrich OFrLex with structured valency information for Medieval French.Existing lexical resources such as Lefff are also exploited for Contemporary French.These valency frames are used to detect and correct inconsistencies in automatically annotated data through batch operations, thereby reinforcing UD guideline compliance and improving annotation coherence across diachronic stages.Preliminary experiments on Medieval French and exploratory annotation of Early Modern French data suggest that lexicon-informed error mining can reduce manual revision effort while strengthening the diachronic continuity enabled by the UD framework.
Abstract Background Something in discourse with a person experiencing psychosis often “feels off” before formal assessment is completed, yet this disturbance has not been quantified at the level of ongoing dyadic conversation. Prior work has largely treated patient speech in isolation, limiting our capacity to measure how communicative disruption emerges within clinical exchange. Methods We applied a three-level decomposition of conversational alignment in 109 patients with psychotic disorders (26 female) and 60 healthy controls (22 female) at baseline and 12 months ( n = 115). Register divergence (dAUC norm ) captured lexical distance between interviewer and patient; embedding-based synchrony (r embed ) measured semantic trajectory coupling; within-speaker coherence was computed separately for each speaker. We used linear mixed-effects models adjusted for timepoint and participant clustering. Results Patients showed significantly greater lexical-semantic divergence from the interviewer ( d = 0.48, p <.001) and reduced embedding-based synchrony ( d = −0.59, p <.001), both effects replicating at each timepoint. Critically, the interviewer’s within-speaker coherence was reduced during conversations with patients ( d = −0.33, p =.016), indicating that the disruption extends beyond the patient to the interaction itself. Register divergence tracked impoverished thinking and synchrony tracked disorganized thinking (both FDR-corrected q =.038). Group differences were persistent at 12 months, indicating a partially stable profile. Conclusions Conversational alignment in psychosis reveals a dyadic failure of semantic coordination that destabilizes the interviewing clinician’s coherence even when patient narrative continuity is preserved. These transcript-derived alignment metrics offer a scalable approach to quantifying interpersonal communicative function from routine clinical encounters.
The paper proposes annotation guidelines for syntactic dependencies that span across speaker turns -including collaborative coconstructions proper, wh-question answers, and backchannels -in spoken language treebanks within the Universal Dependencies framework.Two representations are proposed: a speaker-based representation following the segmentation into speech turns, and a dependency-based representation with dependencies across speech turns.New propositions are also put forward to distinguish between reformulations and repairs, and to promote elements in unfinished phrases.
This page contains behavioral data of an encoding and a temporal memory task in two experiments. Experiment 2 also includes an emotional valence rating that was conducted at the end of the experiment. For information about the study, please see the published manuscript in Psychological Research.
We describe the UppsalaNLP submission to the EvaLatin dependency parsing shared task.We explore using an out-of-the-box parser in combination with multi-treebank training on Latin and multilingual training on other ancient languages.Adding additional languages yields only small gains, but the results vary across treebanks and genres, with the largest positive effect for poetry.Our systems perform best in the shared task for prose but are less competitive for poetry, indicating the need for genre adaptation.
Reproducibility bundle for the study "Owning Our Own Language: Managerial Convergence in Arts and Humanities Research-Impact Writing." The study analyses 1,546 REF 2021 impact case studies from six Units of Assessment (Art & Design, Performing Arts, Media Studies, Computer Science, Physics, Business & Management) and measures how each is written. A word-frequency classifier identifies a case study's subject 82% of the time; but once subject-specific vocabulary is removed, art and design impact narratives argue in the same register as Business and Management. Two further reference corpora (contemporary art writing and museum annual reports) are scored against validated psycholinguistic norms (Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms; concreteness; NRC) to trace a register gradient from concrete, sensory arts writing toward the abstract register of assessment.This item contains: the filtered corpus, all analysis code (feature extraction, classification, topic modelling, within-corpus and rewrite tests, and the reference-corpus register gradient), intermediate result tables, and all figures (PDF and PNG). Every step is deterministic (fixed random seed) and reproduces exactly. See README.md for full instructions, data provenance and licensing.Data provenance: the REF 2021 impact case studies are Crown Copyright, released under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and re-published by Research England under CC BY 4.0. Reference corpora are rebuilt by the released scripts rather than redistributed (museum accounts are OGL documents from GOV.UK; art-writing texts remain under publishers' copyright, with only derived per-window features shared; psycholinguistic norms are downloaded at run time from their sources).
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into daily life, in roles ranging from high-stakes decision support to companionship, understanding their behavioral dispositions becomes critical. A growing literature uses psychometric inventories and cognitive paradigms to profile LLM dispositions. However, these approaches cannot determine whether behavioral differences reflect stable, stimulus-specific individuality or global response biases and stochastic noise. Here, we apply crossed random-effects models -- widely used in psychometrics to separate systematic effects -- to 74.9 million ratings provided by 10 open-weight LLMs for over 100,000 words across 14 psycholinguistic norms. On average, 16.9% of variance is attributable to stimulus-specific individuality, robustly exceeding a statistical null model. Cross-norm prediction analyses reveal this individuality as a coherent fingerprint, unique to each model. These results identify individual differences among LLMs that cannot be attributed to response biases or stochastic noise. We term these differences machine individuality.
The paper presents a prototype of a web-app designed to automatically generate verb valency lexica based on the Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks.It offers an overview of the structure of the app, its core functionality, and functional extensions designed to handle treebank-specific features.Besides, the paper highlights the limitations of the prototype and the potential of its further development.
Abstract Word frequency databases like SPALEX and SUBTLEX-ESP treat Spanish as a uniform language, but prior studies and an initial survey (Experiment 1) revealed significant lexical differences between Spanish in Spain and Latin American countries, especially Chile. To establish subjective frequencies of Spanish word usage, an extended survey (Experiment 2) was conducted with Chilean participants, categorizing words by usage area: General, Spain, Chile, and Latin America. Consistent with the initial survey, Chilean participants assigned subjective higher ratings to General and Chilean words. In a lexical decision experiment (Experiment 3), participants responded faster and more accurately to words from these categories. Using survey data, simulations with Multilink+ (Experiment 4) revealed that subjective word ratings better predicted Chilean reaction times than frequencies from existing databases. These findings emphasize the need to address Spanish dialectal differences in research, with word ratings offering a more accurate measure of region-specific lexical nuances than current databases.
Abstract In this paper, I aimed to develop a neural parser for Bangla based on simplified Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) with neural network-based models. The initial stage in natural language processing is to break down the text into separate tokens. When the text corpus is huge, covering all words is inefficient regarding size of vocabulary. The effectiveness of a specific tokenization method varies on various factors, such as size of the dataset, the nature of the task, and the morphological complexity of the dataset. Due to the lack of existing HPSG-compliant treebanks for Bangla, we utilized syntactically annotated resources from existing Bangla corpora and modified them to align with simplified HPSG rule-based restructuring and data permutation. After that we modified a neural parser architecture originally designed for the Penn Treebank, replacing its encoder with multilingual pre-trained models such as XLM-RoBERTa and IndicBERT to better capture the syntactic and lexical entries of Bangla. We conducted experimental evaluations on the modified dataset, and the parser demonstrated promising results in both constituency and dependency parsing tasks. Our extensive experiments showed that the simplified HPSG Neural Parser achieved a new state-of-the-art for constituency parsing when using the same predicted part-of-speech (POS) tags as the self-attentive constituency parser. Additionally, it outperformed previous studies in dependency parsing with a higher Unlabeled Attachment Score (UAS). However, our parser remained lower Labeled Attachment Score (LAS) scores likely due to integrating HPSG with neural approaches for Bangla syntax parsing and underscoring the importance of linguistically informed treebank development in low-resource languages. Lastly, the research findings of this paper suggest that simplified HPSG should be given more attention to linguistic experts when developing treebanks for Bangla Natural Language Processing (BNLP).
The majority of secondary school pupils in Tanzania are multilingual, speaking at least three languages which include: ethnic community language (there are currently more than 120 of them), (Ki)swahili, the national and first official language and, at varying levels of competency, English which is accorded the status of second official language. A very small number of pupils have access to French, since the language is taught only in a few schools as an optional subject. In public primary schools, pupils are generally bilingual, speaking their ethnic community language and (Ki) swahili. Due to their bilingual/multilingual knowledge, they are expected to activate each of the languages in their repertoire according to the situation of communication and to its level of formality as well as to the purpose of communication, the participants and their various characteristics, identity factors, etc. However, in certain institutional settings, the activation of the language repertoire is determined by the norms established by the schools. This paper is intended to: firstly, describe the formation of the bi/multilingual repertoire of Tanzanian primary and secondary school pupils and the nature of their language practices outside of school settings; secondly, indicate how the language practices are modified by the school and, thirdly, explain the ideological and/or pedagogical origins of the linguistic norms set by schools. The conclusion will attempt to explain the impact of the linguistic norms on the perception that the pupils have about the different languages in contact.
The study examines the microstructural Russian narrative competence of native Chinese speakers studying Russian outside the Russian-speaking environment. The relevance of the study stems from the need for an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms underlying the development of written speech production in a foreign language and the identification of specific difficulties of Chinese learners producing written narratives. The research is aimed at identifying the key microstructural characteristics of Chinese students’ written narratives, classify their typical deviations from the Russian linguistic norm, and establish systematic links between microstructural features and different types of errors. The material includes 60 narratives produced by Chinese learners during an experiment with MAIN. The methodology combined quantitative and qualitative approaches: microstructural features markup, error classification, statistical procedures, and correlation analysis. The results show that text length does not correlate with the number of errors, whereas low lexical diversity is associated with higher error frequency. The research demonstrates that the most problematic area is morphology; the most frequent errors include “frozen” initial and oblique forms, and errors in aspect, case, and gender. Graphic errors are also frequent and are caused by indistinction of consonant pairs and an underdeveloped orthographic word image. Lexical difficulties primarily concern verbs of motion. Correlation analysis reveals stable error clusters that reflect different sublevels of acquisition of the target language system. The written speech of Chinese learners outside the language environment is characterized by certain difficulties which are not typical for other learners of Russian as a foreign language. The findings may enhance teaching, particularly in the aspect of paradigms, verb aspects, and verbs of motion.