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16504 papers
In questo articolo descriveremo il VIT, Treebank (Sintattico) dell’Italiano (dell’Università) di Venezia (Venice Italian Treebank) di 320.000 parole, creato dal Laboratorio di Linguistica Computazionale del Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio. Focalizzeremo la nostra attenzione sulle caratteristiche sintattico- semantiche del treebank che sono in parte legate al tagset adottato, in parte sono dovute alla teoria linguistica di riferimento, e infine sono, come per ogni treebank, legate alla lingua prescelta, l’italiano. Con esempi presi anche da treebank dispo- nibili per altre lingue, mostreremo quali sono le differenze e le motivazioni teori- che e pratiche dietro le scelte fatte. Dedicheremo infine una parte della nostra pre- sentazione all’analisi quantitativa dei dati del nostro treebank confrontandoli con gli altri. In generale si cercherà di dimostrare come l’apprendimento di una gram- matica o di un parser in maniera automatica da un treebank, non possa dare gli stessi risultati passando da un treebank all’altro, e come questo processo sia dipendente da fattori sostanziali come il quadro linguistico di riferimento adotta- to per la descrizione strutturale nonché in ultima analisi, la lingua descritta.
In this paper we compare two Machine Learning approaches to the task of pronominal anaphora resolution: a conventional classification system based on C5.0 decision trees, and a novel perceptron-based ranker. We use coreference links annotated in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 for training and evaluation purposes. The perceptron system achieves f-score 79.43% on recognizing coreference of personal and possessive pronouns, which clearly outperforms the classifier and which is the best result reported on this data set so far.
A known problem of WordNet is that it is too ne-grained in its sense denitions. For instance, it does not distinguish between homographs and polysemes. This distinction is crucial in many natural language processing tasks. In this paper we propose to distinguish only between homographs withinWordNet data while merging all polysemous senses. The ultimate goal of this exercise is to compute a more coarsegrained version of linguistic database. In order to achieve this task we propose to merge all polysemous senses according to similarity scores computed by a hybrid algorithm. The key idea of the algorithm is to combine the similarity scores produced by diverse semantic similarity algorithms. We implemented the algorithm and evaluated it on the dataset extracted from the WordNet. The evaluation results are promising in comparison to the other state of the art approaches.
Parallel grammars and parallel treebanks can be a useful method for studying linguistic diversity and commonality. We use this approach to study how arguments to similar predicates are realized across languages. To that end, we formulate formal principles for aligning at phrase and word levels based on translational correspondences at predicate-argument level. A first version of a new tool for creating, storing, visualizing and searching treebank alignment at different levels has been constructed. 1
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research. Design/methodology/approach English comments from a representative sample of public MySpace profiles were examined with a collection of exploratory analyses, using automatic data processing, quantitative techniques and content analyses. Findings Comments were normally for general friendship maintenance and were typically short, with 95 per cent having 57 or fewer words. They contained a combination of standard spelling, apparently accidental mistakes, slang, sentence fragments, “typographic slang” and interjections. Several new creative spelling variants derived from previous forms of computer‐mediated communication have become extremely common, including u, ur,:), haha and lol. The vast majority of comments (97 per cent) contained at least one non‐standard language feature, suggesting that members almost universally recognise the informal nature of this kind of messaging. Research limitations/implications The investigation only covered MySpace and only analysed English comments. Practical implications MySpace comments should not be written in, or judged by, standard linguistic norms and may cause special problems for information retrieval. Originality/value This is the first large‐scale study of language in social network comments.
This article focuses on every day communication in New Media with special regards to private writing on Instant Messaging. After brief introductory thoughts about writings beyond the linguistic norm in New Media we compare the specific circumstances of "new" writing via internet and mobile phone with "traditional" offline writing that can be realized by the use of a computer, a type writer or by hand. How this new writing is judged by the public, whether it is considered to be "good" or "bad" and how experts position themselves in this discussion, is shown in section 3. Section 4 takes a look at which linguistic theories might apply to the analysis of typed dialogues in computer mediated communication. The main focus here is on the theory of Interactional Linguistics which formerly had been applied only to the analysis of oral communication. Finally, language critical and linguistic aspects of writing in the New Media are discussed in a brief synopsis.
OBJECTIVES: To explore the effectiveness of acupressure and Montessori-based activities in decreasing the agitated behaviors of residents with dementia. DESIGN: A double-blinded, randomized (two treatments and one control; three time periods) cross-over design was used. SETTING: Six special care units for residents with dementia in long-term care facilities in Taiwan were the sites for the study. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred thirty-three institutionalized residents with dementia. INTERVENTION: Subjects were randomized into three treatment sequences: acupressure-presence-Montessori methods, Montessori methods-acupressure-presence and presence-Montessori methods-acupressure. All treatments were done once a day, 6 days per week, for a 4-week period. MEASUREMENT: The Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory, Ease-of-Care, and the Apparent Affect Rating Scale. RESULTS: After receiving the intervention, the acupressure and Montessori-based-activities groups saw a significant decrease in agitated behaviors, aggressive behaviors, and physically nonaggressive behaviors than the presence group. Additionally, the ease-of-care ratings for the acupressure and Montessori-based-activities groups were significantly better than for the presence group. In terms of apparent affect, positive affect in the Montessori-based-activities group was significantly better than in the presence group. CONCLUSION: This study confirms that a blending of traditional Chinese medicine and a Western activities program would be useful in elderly care and that in-service training for formal caregivers in the use of these interventions would be beneficial for patients
We adapt a semantic role parser to the domain of goal-directed speech by creating an artificial treebank from an existing text tree-bank. We use a three-component model that includes distributional models from both target and source domains. We show that we improve the parser's performance on utterances collected from human-machine dialogues by training on the artificially created data without loss of performance on the text treebank.
Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the syllable, whereas the data-driven paradigm tries to infer "new" syllabifications from examples assumed to be correctly syllabified already. This article compares the performance of several variants of the two basic approaches. Given the problems of definition, it is difficult to determine a correct syllabification in all cases and so to establish the quality of the "gold standard" corpus used either to evaluate quantitatively the output of an automatic algorithm or as the example-set on which data-driven methods crucially depend. Thus, we look for consensus in the entries in multiple lexical databases of pre-syllabified words. In this work, we have used two independent lexicons, and extracted from them the same 18,016 words with their corresponding (possibly different) syllabifications. We have also created a third lexicon corresponding to the 13,594 words that share the same syllabifications in these two sources. As well as two rule-based approaches (Hammond's and Fisher's implementation of Kahn's), three data-driven techniques are evaluated: a look-up procedure, an exemplar-based generalization technique, and syllabification by analogy (SbA). The results on the three databases show consistent and robust patterns. First, the data-driven techniques outperform the rule-based systems in word and juncture accuracies by a very significant margin but require training data and are slower. Second, syllabification in the pronunciation domain is easier than in the spelling domain. Finally, best results are consistently obtained with SbA.
Most of text mining techniques are based on word and/or phrase analysis of the text. The statistical analysis of a term (word or phrase) frequency captures the importance of the term within a document. However, to achieve a more accurate analysis, the underlying mining technique should indicate terms that capture the semantics of the text from which the importance of a term in a sentence and in the document can be derived. Incorporating semantic features from the WordNet lexical database is one of many approaches that have been tried to improve the accuracy of text clustering techniques. A new semantic-based model that analyzes documents based on their meaning is introduced. The proposed model analyzes terms and their corresponding synonyms and/or hypernyms on the sentence and document levels. In this model, if two documents contain different words and these words are semantically related, the proposed model can measure the semantic-based similarity between the two documents. The similarity between documents relies on a new semantic-based similarity measure which is applied to the matching concepts between documents. Experiments using the proposed semantic-based model in text clustering are conducted. Experimental results demonstrate that the newly developed semantic-based model enhances the clustering quality of sets of documents substantially.
In this paper we describe our participation at the EVALITA 2009 Con- stituency Parsing Task. We used the Berkeley Parser, obtaining the best F1, that is 78:73. This result corresponds to an increment of 15.85% with respect to the best result obtained at EVALITA 2007 by the Bikel's parser (F1 = 67:96). A further important advantage of the Berkeley parser is that it does not require any language adaptation in addition to the need of retraining it on the new treebank. For comparison, we also report the results obtained by the Bikel's parser on the 2009 treebank.
Dysfunctional emotional processing affects social functioning in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationship between emotional perception and response in social interaction has not been elucidated. Twenty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 27 normal controls performed a virtual reality social encounter task in which they introduced themselves to avatars expressing happy, neutral, or angry emotions while verbal response duration and onset time were measured and perception of emotional valence and arousal, and state anxiety were rated afterwards. Self-reported trait-affective scale scores and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) ratings were also obtained. Patient group significantly underestimated the valence and arousal of angry emotions expressed by an avatar. While valence and arousal ratings of happy avatars were comparable between groups, patient group reported significantly higher state anxiety in response to happy avatars. State anxiety ratings significantly decreased from encounters with neutral to happy avatars in normal controls while no significant decrease was observed in the patient group. The Social Anhedonia Scale and PANSS negative symptom subscale scores (blunted affect, emotional withdrawal, and passive/ apathetic social withdrawal items) were significantly correlated with state anxiety ratings of the encounters with happy avatars. These results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have interference with the experience of pleasure in social interactions which may be associated with negative symptoms.
This paper presents an on-going effort which aims to annotate the Wall Street Journal sections of the Penn Treebank with the help of a hand-written large-scale and wide-coverage grammar of English. In doing so, we are not only focusing on the various stages of the semi-automated annotation process we have adopted, but we are also showing that rich linguistic annotations, which can apart from syntax also incorporate semantics, ensure that the treebank is guaranteed to be a truly sharable, re-usable and multi-functional linguistic resource.
The NLP community has shown a renewed interest in deeper semantic analyses, among them automatic recognition of semantic relations in text. We present the development and evaluation of a semantic analysis task: automatic recognition of relations between pairs of nominals in a sentence. The task was part of SemEval-2007, the fourth edition of the semantic evaluation event previously known as SensEval. Apart from the observations we have made, the long-lasting effect of this task may be a framework for comparing approaches to the task. We introduce the problem of recognizing relations between nominals, and in particular the process of drafting and refining the definitions of the semantic relations. We show how we created the training and test data, list and briefly describe the 15 participating systems, discuss the results, and conclude with the lessons learned in the course of this exercise.
Calabrese, Relevant southern features here are NC > NN (monno vs mondo < MUNDUM ‘world’, piommo vs piombo < PLUMBUM ‘lead’); characteristic patterns of both tonic and atonic vowel development; use of postposed possessives (figliomo vs mio figlio ‘my son’); extensive use of the preterit; etc. A number of features mark off Tuscan from its neighbours: absence of metaphony (umlaut); -VriV-> -ViV-(IANUARIUM > gennaio, cf. Gennaro, patron saint of Naples); fricativisation of intervocalic voiceless stops – the socalled gorgia toscana ‘Tuscan throat’ – which yields pronunciations such as [la harta] la carta ‘the paper’, [kauo] capo ‘head’, [lo hiro] lo tiro ‘I pull it’; etc. Such divisions reflect both geographical and administrative boundaries. The La Spezia-Rimini line corresponds very closely both to the Apennine mountains and to the southern limit of the Archbishopric of Milan. The line between central and southern dialects approximates to the boundary between the Lombard Kingdom of Italy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and to a point where the Apennines broaden out to form a kind of mountain barrier between the two parts of the peninsula. The earliest texts are similarly regional in nature. The first in which undisputed vernacular material occurs is the Placito Capuano of 960, a Latin document reporting the legal proceedings relating to the ownership of a piece of land, in the middle of which an oath sworn by the witnesses is recorded verbatim: sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti ‘I know that those lands, within those boundaries which are here stated, thirty years the party of Saint Benedict owned them.’ The textual evidence gradually increases, and by the thirteenth century it is clear that there are wellrooted literary traditions in a number of centres up and down the land. These are touched on briefly by the Florentine Dante (1265-1321) in a celebrated section of this treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, but it is the poetic supremacy of his Divine Comedy, rapidly followed in the same city by the achievements of Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75), which ensured that literary, and thus linguistic, pre-eminence should go to Tuscan. There ensued a centuries-long debate about the language of literature – la questionedella lingua ‘the language question’, with Tuscan being kept in the forefront as a result of the theoretical writings of the influential Venetian (!) Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), especially his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). His ideas were adopted by the members of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1582-3, which produced its first dictionary in 1612 and which still survives as a centre for research into the Italian language. Meanwhile, although the affairs of day-to-day existence were largely conducted in dialect, the sociopolitical dimension of the question increased in importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assuming a particular urgency after unification in 1861. The new government appointed the author Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) – himself born in Milan but yet another enthusiastic non-native advocate of Florentine usage – to head a commission, which in due course recommended Florentine as the linguistic standard to be adopted in the new national school system. This suggestion was not without its critics, notably the great Italian comparative philologist, Graziadio Ascoli (1829-1907), and a number of the specific recommendations were hopelessly impractical, but in any case the core of literary usage was so thoroughly Tuscan that the language taught in schools was bound to be similar. Education was, of course, crucial since the history of standardisation is essentially the history of increased literacy. On the most conservative estimate only 2.5 per cent of the population would have been literate in any meaningful sense of the word in 1861, although a more recent and moreper had 91.5 per cent by 1961, the centenary of unification and the thousandth anniversary of the first text. Even so, there is no guarantee that those who can use Italian do so as their normal daily means of communication, and it was only in 1982 that opinion polls recorded a figure of more than 50 per cent of those interviewed claiming that their first language was the standard rather than a dialect. Yet the opposition language/dialect greatly oversimplifies matters. For most speakers it is a question of ranging themselves at some point of a continuum from standard Italian through regional Italian and regional dialect to the local dialect, as circumstances and other participants seem to warrant. Note too that the term dialect means something rather different when used of the more or less homogeneous means of spoken communication in an isolated rural community and when used to refer to something such as Milanese or Venetian, both of which have fully fledged literary and administrative traditions of their own, and hence a good deal of internal social stratification. Another significant factor in promoting a national language was conscription, firstbecause it brought together people from different regions, and second because the army is statutorily required to provide education equivalent to three years of primary school to anyone who enters the service illiterate. Indeed, it is out of the analysis of letters written by soldiers in the First World War that some scholars have been led to recognise italiano popolare ‘popular Italian’ as a kind of national substandard, a language which is neither the literary norm nor yet a dialect tied to a particular town or region. Among the features which characterise it are: the extension of gli ‘to him’ to replace le ‘to her’ and loro ‘to them’, and, relatedly, of suo ‘his/her’ to include ‘their’; a reduction in the use of the subjunctive in complement clauses, where it is replaced by the indicative, and in conditional apodoses, where the imperfect subjunctive is replaced by the conditional, and the pluperfect subjunctive is replaced by either the conditional perfect or the imperfect indicative (thus standard se fosse venuto, mi avrebbe aiutato (‘if he had come he would have helped me’) becomes either se sarebbe venuto, mi avrebbe aiutato or se veniva, mi aiutava, the latter having an imperfect indicative in the protasis too; the use of che ‘that’ as a general marker of subordination; plural instead of singular verbs after nouns like la gente ‘people’. Some of these uses – e.g. gli for loro, the reduction in the use of the subjunctive and the use of the imperfect in irrealis conditionals – have also begun to penetrate upwards into educated colloquial usage, and it is likely that the media, another powerful force for linguistic unification, will spread other emergent patterns in due course. Industrialisation, too, has had its effect in redrawing the linguistic boundaries, both social and geographical. In addition to the standard language, the dialects and the claimed existence of ita-liano popolare, there are no less than eleven other languages spoken within the peninsula and having, according to one recent but probably rather high estimate, a total of nearly 2.75 million speakers. Of these, more than two million represent speakers of other Romance languages: Catalan, French, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian. The remaining languages are: Albanian, German, Greek, Serbo-Croat and Slovene. Amidst this heterogeneity, the Italian national and regional constitutions recognise the rights of four linguistic minorities: French speakers in the autonomous region of the Valle d’Aosta (approx. 75,000), German speakers in the province of Bolzano (approx. 225,000), Slovene speakers in the provinces of Trieste and Gorizia (approx. 100,000), Ladin speakers in the province of Bolzano (approx. 30,000). Yet French (and Occitan – approx. 200,000) and German speakers outside the stated areas are not protected in the same way. Norof closely related the two in turn being sub-branches of the Rhaeto-Romance group. The recognised linguistic minorities are, not surprisingly, in areas where the borders of the Italian state(s) have oscillated historically. In contrast, the southern part of the peninsula is peppered with individual villages which preserve linguistically the traces of that region’s turbulent past. It is here that we find Italy’s 100,000 Albanian, 20,000 Greek and 3,500 SerboCroat speakers, as well as a number of communities whose northern dialects reflect the presence of mediaeval settlers and mercenaries. Sardinia too contains a few Ligurian-speaking villages and 20,000 Catalan speakersin the port of Alghero as evidence of former colonisation. More importantly, the island has almost 1,000,000 speakers of Sardinian, a separate Romance language which has suffered undue neglect ever since Dante said of the inhabitants that they imitated Latin tanquam simie homines ‘as monkeys do men’. What he was referring to was the way in which Sardinian, both in structure and vocabulary, reveals itself to be the most conservative of the Romance vernaculars. Thus, we find a vowel system with no mergers apart from the loss of Latin phonemic vowel length; an absence of palatalisation of k and g; preservation of final s (with important morphological consequences); a definite article su, sa, etc. which derives from Latin IPSE rather than ILLE. Old Sardinian also maintained direct reflexes of the Latin pluperfect indicative and imperfect subjunctive. and the language is one of the few not to retain a future periphrasis from Latin infinitive + HABEO, using instead a reflex of Latin DEBERE ‘to have to’, e.g. des essere ‘you will be’. On the lexical side we have petere ‘to ask’, imbennere ‘to find’ (cf. Lat. INVENIRE), domo/domu ‘house’, albu ‘white’, etc. (contrast It. chiedere, trovare, casa, bianco). The presence of Italian outside the boundaries of the modern Italian state is due totwo rather different types of circumstance. First, it may be spoken in areas either geographically continuous with or at some time part of Italy, as in the independent Republic of San Marino (population 30,000), enclosed within the region of Emilia-Romagna, and in Canton Ticino (population approx. 325,000), the entirely italophone part of Switzerland. Both have local dialects, Romagnolo in San Marino and Lombard in Ticino, as well as the standard language of education and administration. Elsewhere, the historical continuity is reflected at the level of dialect, but with the superimposition of a different standard language. Thus, in Corsica (population approx. 280,000) the dialects are either Tuscan (following partial colonisation from Pisa in the eleventh century) or Sardinian in type, but the official language has since 1769 been French. The same situation obtains for those Italian dialects spoken in the areas of Istria and Dalmatia now part of Slovenia and Croatia. The second circumstance arises when Italian, or more often Italian dialects, has beencarried overseas, mainly to the New World. In the USA about one million Italian speakers constitute the second largest linguistic minority (after Hispano-Americans). They are concentrated for the most part either in New York, where they are mainly of southern origin and where a kind of southern Italian dialectal koine has emerged, and in the San Francisco Bay area, where northern and central Italians predominate, and where the peninsular standard has had more influence. Italian language media include a number of newspapers, radio stations and television programmes. The current signs of a reawakening of interest in their linguistic heritage amongst Italo-Americans are paralleled in Canada and Australia, each with about half a million Italian speakers according to official figures. There were also in excess of three million émigrés to South America, mostly to Argentina, and this has led, on the River Plate, to the developmentItalian in the Australia had its origins in the language of an underprivileged and often uneducated immigrant class, in Africa – specifically Ethiopia and Somalia and until recently Libya – Italian survives as a typical relic of a colonial situation. Ethiopia also has the only documented instance of an Italian-based pidgin, used not only between Europeans and local inhabitants but also between speakers of mutually unintelligible indigenous languages. The position of Italian in Malta is similarly due to penetration at a higher rather than a lower social level. Research is only now beginning into the linguistic consequences of the postwar migration of, again mainly southern, Italian labour as ‘Gastarbeiter’ in Switzerland and Germany. Finally, two curiosities are the discovery by a group of Italian ethnomusicologists in 1973 in the village of S˘tivor in northern Bosnia of a community of 470 speakers of a dialect from the northern Italian province of Trento, and the case of a group of émigrés from two coastal villages near Bari in Puglia, who settled in Kerch in the Crimea in the 1860s and whose dialectophone descendants died out only in the late twentieth century.
Lexical fluency tests are frequently used in clinical practice to assess language and executive function. As part of the Spanish multicenter normative studies (NEURONORMA project), we provide age- and education-adjusted norms for three semantic fluency tasks (animals, fruit and vegetables, and kitchen tools), three formal lexical tasks (words beginning with P, M, and R), and three excluded letter fluency tasks (excluded A, E, and S). The sample consists of 346 participants who are cognitively normal, community dwelling, and ranging in age from 50 to 94 years. Tables are provided to convert raw scores to age-adjusted scaled scores. These were further converted into education-adjusted scaled scores by applying regression-based adjustments. The current norms should provide clinically useful data for evaluating elderly Spanish people. These data may also be of considerable use for comparisons with other international normative studies. Finally, these norms should help improve the interpretation of verbal fluency tasks and allow for greater diagnostic accuracy.
All too often work in computational linguistics on the acquisition of conceptual descriptions takes place in isolation from work on concepts in psychology and neural science. We feel this is a mistake as evidence from these related disciplines can provide us with better ways of evaluating our results. In the talk I will present work in CIMEC on using cognitive evidence to evaluate the results of lexical acquisition work - specifically, using feature norms to evaluate the acquisition of features, and using EEG data to evaluate the results of categorization experiments.
This paper studies the nature of the BEI-construction in Cantonese, with Mandarin as the standard language of comparison. Although the BEI-construction has been much studied in Mandarin, the same in not true for Cantonese. Although this construction has traditionally been termed a "passive", I will show that it can have a different range of semantic interpretations in Cantonese. I argue that BEI is not confined to passive, but is used under certain circumstances to form a causative construction as well. The differences in behaviour between passive-BEI and causative-BEI can be seen in tests with anaphoric binding. I conclude that while the passive structure is mono-clausal, the causative structure must be bi-clausal. The Cantonese BEI-constructions have an obligatory agent-phrase which cannot be dropped. This differs from Mandarin and the challenge is to find an account for this phenomenon, especially if we are to claim that this construction is a passive. The optionality of the agent phrase is characteristic of passives and yet Cantonese deviates from this norm. I argue that passive in Cantonese is a syntactic process and predict that only transitive verbs may participate in this construction. I utilize the universal v-VP structure on transitive verbs, proposed by Chomsky (1995), to guarantee that the external theta role must be retained. I also examine the much debated status of BEI which is used in the BEI-construction. Although this construction can be used to derive both a passives and a causatives, it does not necessarily mean that two separate BEIs must be posited. I conclude that BEI can be treated as a category-neutral element which can interact in both causative and passive structures. To support this proposal I appeal to the functional versus lexical distinction of categories and projections.
You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Mar 2009Making a Case for Language SamplingAssessment and Intervention With (Spanish-English) Second Language Learners Raul Rojas andMA, CCC-SLP Aquiles IglesiasPhD, CCC-SLP Raul Rojas Google Scholar, MA, CCC-SLP and Aquiles Iglesias Google Scholar, PhD, CCC-SLP https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR1.14032009.10 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Despite nationwide efforts to reduce an academic achievement gap among various racial-ethnic groups, the reading gap between Hispanics and whites has not changed significantly—it has measured more than 25 points in each of the last 17 years (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008). The gap is partly attributed to the fact that many Hispanic children were assessed in a language they had not yet mastered: 10% of all fourth-graders were English-language learners (ELLs), and 40% of ELLs were Hispanics. Further, approximately 80% of the Hispanic ELLs were tested without accommodations such as extended time and directions read in both English and the student's native language. The gap clearly indicates that many second-language learners are not performing at a level expected for academic success in an English-only environment. The lack of apparent academic progress often results in referrals to speech-language pathologists. SLPs are expected to determine if the child's lack of academic progress is due to a language disorder or to low linguistic skills in English. What is the SLP to do when confronted with such cases? Bilingual Language Acquisition Research shows that although the speech and language development of bilingual children is similar to that of monolingual children, it is not parallel (Genesee & Nicoladis, 2007). For example, past tense in Spanish is acquired earlier than in English because of its phonological salience (Bedore & Peña, 2008). In an effort to assist clinicians, ASHA has developed practice policy documents to inform them of appropriate service delivery to culturally and linguistically diverse populations (ASHA, 2004). One of the recommended practices is to assess a bilingual child in both languages (i.e., native language and second language) following least-biased assessment principles (Goldstein, 2006). A second recommendation is that materials (formal and informal) and instructions used during assessment and intervention with bilingual learners should be culturally and linguistically appropriate. Given the paucity of assessments specifically developed for bilingual populations, alternative assessment approaches have been recommended. One alternative assessment approach is the use of language samples. Although in practice these samples are often secondary to the use of norm-based tests, it is suggested that the samples constitute an integral component of the assessment protocol (Paul, 2006). Using language samples with school-age children presents two major advantages, particularly during elementary school. First, the task is more congruent with the requirements and challenges of schooling such as demonstrating the ability to comprehend and produce narrative structure (e.g., introduction, character development, referencing) in oral and written form. Second, analyses can directly inform the target of any necessary intervention. Although language samples can be obtained across a variety of genres (e.g., conversational, expository), sampling using fictional storytelling is the most appropriate, given our present research base. Language skills produced during story retelling have been shown to be positively related to bilingual reading achievement (Miller, Heilmann, Nockerts, Iglesias, Fabiano, & Francis, 2006). Narrative language sampling and analyses, however, are not always used in clinical practice because of the lack of standardized protocols, the perceived time requirement for analysis, and limited comparison data (Miller, Rojas, & Nockerts, 2008). Over the last eight years, significant progress has been made in addressing these concerns, making language sampling a more viable assessment alternative. Development of a standardized protocol for elicitation and analyses addresses ASHA practice policy documents and current research on first and second language acquisition, and yields reliable data that clinicians can use to determine the presence or absence of a true language disorder. The protocol takes into consideration clinicians' time constraints and most clinicians' lack of fluency in Spanish. It also is compliant with federal and local requirements for alternative assessments. Narrative Language Sampling Narrative language samples should be elicited using a procedure similar to that developed by Strong (1998): story retelling using a wordless picture book, such as Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). During assessment the examiner should sit across from the child to promote child language, minimize pointing, and encourage use of explicit labels of characters, objects, and actions. While looking at the book with the clinician or a Spanish-speaking interpreter, the examiner reads a pre-scripted narrative of the story in Spanish. Once finished, the examiner gives the child the book and requests that the child retell the story ("Ahora, cuéntame lo que pasó en este cuento"). The child should use the pictures in the book as an aid in the retelling. The examiner should provide only back-channel responses ("Aha," "Sí") or restate the child's last utterance. Approximately a week later, the same procedure should be repeated using the pre-scripted English story. Children should first be tested in their native or most frequently used language (e.g., Spanish) to increase familiarity with the narrative retelling task. The narratives should be digitally recorded and transcribed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; Miller & Iglesias, 2008) transcription format modified to account for Spanish and Spanish-influenced English (Rojas & Iglesias, 2006). If the clinician is not fluent in Spanish, support personnel (e.g., interpreters, assistants who speak the target language) should be used to elicit and transcribe the samples. Computerized language analysis eases the time requirement and guarantees consistency of transcription and analyses. Brief three- to five-minute language samples, typically averaging 10 or more utterances, are adequate for analysis (Miller et al., 2006). Work from our research laboratory, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Houston, has resulted in a set of narrative language sample databases (Bilingual S/E Story Retell Databases) composed of 2,070 U.S. bilingual children (K-3) retelling Mercer Mayer's (1969) wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? in Spanish and English. The Bilingual S/E Story Retell Databases provide a comparison data set for assessment purposes of Spanish-English bilingual children that permits matching by grade, age, gender, and/or sample length in utterances or words. More importantly, the database incorporates best practices by allowing clinicians to compare the oral language skills of bilingual children to the oral language skills of other bilingual (not monolingual) children following the identical protocol. Although narrative language sampling generates a wide range of measurable oral language skills, three dialect-neutral language measures are recognized indicators of children's oral language development: Mean length of utterance in words (MLUw)—a measure of syntactic complexity Number of different words (NDW)—a measure of lexical diversity and productivity Words per minute (WPM)—a measure of verbal fluency MLUw maintains cross-language consistency and comparability and is recommended in cross-linguistic and bilingual research (Gutiérrez-Clellen, Restrepo, Bedore, Peña, & Anderson, 2000). NDW (i.e., total number of different uninflected word roots), which estimates the diversity of the participant's vocabulary (Golberg, Paradis, & Crago, 2008), is a developmentally sensitive measure of narrative productivity for Spanish-English bilingual children (Uccelli & Páez, 2007). WPM, suggested as a measure of language proficiency for second-language learners (Riggenbach, 1991), has been correlated with age and increasing second-language proficiency (Miller & Heilmann, 2004). Given a properly transcribed language sample, the software program automatically calculates MLUw, NDW, and WPM. These three oral language measures are included in the Bilingual S/E Story Retell Databases. Although your assessment protocol will probably include administration of formal diagnostic tools, least-biased assessment principles need to be incorporated. This incorporation may mean some adaptations or modifications to the standardized protocol, or perhaps the administration of only certain subtests. Bilingual narrative language sampling can enhance any bilingual assessment by providing spontaneous language sample measures that can supplement and clarify diagnostic information obtained by standardized assessments. Diagnostic reports used to report standard scores with a subjective interpretation of spontaneous language largely guided by clinical judgment can now be bolstered by objective, automatically calculated oral language data in each language that are compared to databases on bilingual children. Bilingual Intervention A core principle of intervention is to track progress of treatment goals over successive treatment sessions (Roth & Worthington, 2005). Narrative language sampling and analyses can be utilized to profile progress accurately over time for bilingual clients working on expressive language goals. Oral language measures obtained at baseline can be compared at different points in time to measure progress. Although this article includes only three specific oral language measurement analyses, the software program offers an extended range of analyses (e.g., word production difficulties, lexical inventories, etc.) that can be used to further explore difficulties and specify goals. Providing appropriate speech-language services to second-language learners is complex. We recommend obtaining language samples following the established protocol and, ideally, analyzing the data using software programs that yield comparative data. Author Disclosure Raúl Rojas and Aquiles Iglesias have been integral in the development of Spanish-language transcription and analyses capacity for the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) from 1998 until the present. The continued involvement of both authors in the ongoing development of SALT for bilingual language sampling has been solely directed at advancing research methods and clinical application. Web/Telephone Seminar Raquel Anderson, associate professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University, will host a web/telephone seminar, "Assessing Children Who Speak Spanish: Milestones in Spanish Grammar Development," on May 12, 3–5 p.m. ET. To register, go the ASHA online store and search on "Anderson." Case Studies: Evaluations of Two Second-Language Learners Table 1 [PDF] The following two cases involve second-language learners referred for an evaluation because of "difficulty with English that interferes with academic progress." These two cases will illustrate clinical solutions for assessment and intervention with Spanish-English second-language learners. Case #1: Elizabeth Elizabeth is a 7.3-year-old first-grader. Elizabeth's teacher indicated overall poor classroom and homework performance, with the exception of arithmetic, which appears to be her strength. The teacher mentioned that "Elizabeth is very shy and timid, rarely makes eye contact with me, and speaks in Spanish with other Spanish-speakers in the classroom." As reported by her father, Elizabeth's older sibling had problems learning language, expressing ideas, and learning to read and received speech-language intervention services during elementary school. Elizabeth was exposed to approximately 85% Spanish and 15% English up to age 3; her daycare was monolingual English. For the last four years, Elizabeth has been exposed mostly to Spanish in the home. During the school year, she is exposed to approximately 20% Spanish and 80% English. A home-language survey indicated that Elizabeth's mother and father speak Spanish only. The older sibling speaks English and Spanish with Elizabeth, but only Spanish with the parents. Elizabeth speaks only Spanish to her parents and older sibling. Elizabeth was reported to have normal hearing and cognitive skills. Case #2: Rosemary Rosemary is a 7.4-year-old first-grader. Rosemary's teacher reported that Rosemary performs considerably below expectations in comparison to her peers, and that she demonstrates difficulties even following simple directions. Rosemary's mother indicated "having a hard time at school when I was little, but I got better." Rosemary's mother did not receive special education services for academic difficulties. Aside from the anecdotal information, no family history of academic or speech-language problems was reported. Rosemary was exposed to approximately 90% Spanish and 10% English up to age 5; she did not attend daycare. At school, she is exposed to approximately 70% Spanish and 30% English. According to a home-language survey, Rosemary's mother and father are monolingual Spanish speakers; the children speak to their parents in Spanish only. Rosemary and both siblings speak in Spanish and English with one another. Rosemary has normal hearing. A bilingual school psychologist is to assess cognitive function by the end of the academic year. Assessment Strategies and Solutions Putting recommendations into practice is best exemplified with narrative language sampling and analyses to highlight the dichotomy between a language difference and a language disorder in bilingual (Spanish-English) children. Elizabeth and Rosemary are two native Spanish-speaking students. Rosemary began acquiring English as a second language; Elizabeth was raised in a bilingual environment. Narrative language samples in Spanish and English were elicited from Elizabeth and Rosemary, transcribed (20 minutes per sample, 40 minutes total per child), and analyzed and compared with the Bilingual S/E Story Retell Databases using age- and grade-matching. The results of the bilingual language samples and analyses for Elizabeth and Rosemary are outlined in the accompanying table. Based on case history alone, Rosemary is similar to many of the sequential bilingual children encountered daily in clinical practice. Elizabeth and Rosemary both demonstrated difficulties in their spontaneous language in English, which had a negative effect on their academic progress in school. The results of their narrative assessment indicated that their performance in English, even when compared to the English of other age- and grade-matched bilingual children, was low. Without any further evidence, the results would indicate possible language disorders for both children. Examination of their results in Spanish provides a different picture. Elizabeth's language skills, compared to the performance in Spanish of bilingual children matched by age and grade, are age-appropriate. Although of some concern, her performance in English appears to be associated with second-language acquisition. In contrast, Rosemary's linguistic skills, especially her lexical diversity, are of concern in English and Spanish. Rosemary clearly evidenced delayed oral language skills in both her native language (Spanish) and her second language (English). Elizabeth is, therefore, a strong candidate for English as a second language (ESL) services and the clinician could work collaboratively with the ESL teacher to identify areas in which to focus (ASHA, 1998). Rosemary should be considered for speech-language treatment and ESL services. Following assessment and enrollment in speech-language services, baseline measures are obtained to determine Rosemary's initial level of function and ability in the different domains of language. Treatment goals that involve increasing Rosemary's mean length of utterance in words in words or morphemes, expanding the lexicon, demonstrating appropriate verbal fluency to improve communicative effectiveness, and developing overall narrative skills are all well-suited to progress-monitoring via narrative language sampling. If not done as part of a bilingual assessment, obtaining a baseline sample for these language domains can be done within one or two treatment sessions by eliciting a narrative language sample in Spanish and another one in English, and using the bilingual database to compare baseline performance. Indirect or direct approaches can be implemented over the course of Rosemary's treatment to target her expressive language goals. Treatment may be provided using either the bilingual approach, which improves speech and language skills shared across both languages, or the cross-linguistic approach, which selects targets for treatment specific to each language. The appropriate approach will be determined by the languages spoken by the client and the clinician (Kohnert & Derr, 2004). These approaches will differ from client to client and from clinician to clinician. Regardless of the approach used, targeting of expressive language goals will involve adaptations of materials and techniques such as sequencing cards, picture vocabulary stimuli, board games, and storybooks. Although Elizabeth and Rosemary would have appeared delayed based on standardized testing in English, bilingual language sampling clarified that Rosemary exhibited difficulties in both languages, and Elizabeth displayed difficulties only in her second language. References American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (1998). Provision of instruction in English as a second language by speech-language pathologists [Technical Report]. Available from www.asha.org/policy. Google Scholar American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2004). Knowledge and skills needed by speech-language pathologists and audiologists to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services [Knowledge and Skills]. Available from www.asha.org/policy. Google Scholar Bedore L.M., & Peña E.D. (2008). Assessment of bilingual children for identification of language impairment: Current findings and implications for practice.International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11(1), 1–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Genesee F., & Nicoladis E. (2007). Bilingual acquisition.In Hoff E. & Shaltz M. (Eds.), Handbook of language development (pp. 324–342). Oxford: Blackwell. Google Scholar Golberg H., Paradis J., & Crago M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority first language children learning English as a second language.Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 41–65. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Goldstein B. A. (2006). Clinical implications of research on language development and disorders in bilingual children.Topics in Language Disorders, 26(4), 305–321. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Gutiérrez-Clellen V. F., Restrepo M. A., Bedore L., Peña E., & Anderson R. (2000). Language sample analysis in Spanish-speaking children: Methodological considerations.Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 31, 88–98. LinkGoogle Scholar Kohnert K., & Derr A. (2004). Language intervention with bilingual children.In Goldstein B. (Ed.), Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish-English speakers (pp. 53–76). Baltimore: Brookes. Google Scholar Mayer M. (1969). Frog, where are you?: New York: Dial Press. Google Scholar Miller J. F., & Heilmann J. (2004, February). Bilingual language project update. Paper presented at the Department of Communicative Disorders Colloquium, Madison, WI. Google Scholar Miller J., Heilmann J., Nockerts A., Iglesias A., Fabiano L., & Francis D. (2006). Oral language and reading in bilingual children.Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 21, 30–43. Google Scholar Miller J. F., & Iglesias A. (2008). Systematic analysis of language transcripts (SALT), Bilingual SE Version 2008 [Computer software]. SALT Software, LLC. Google Scholar Miller J. F., Rojas R., & Nockerts A. (2008, February). Assessing language production of bilingual (Spanish-English) children. Seminar presented at the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, San Antonio, TX. Google Scholar National Center for Education Statistics (2008). Long term trend version of the NAEP data explorer. Retrieved November 14, 2008, from NCES Web site: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/lttnde/. Google Scholar Paul R. (2006). Language disorders from infancy through adolescence: Assessment and intervention (3rd edition). St. Louis: Mosby. Google Scholar Riggenbach H. (1991). Toward an understanding of fluency: A microanalysis of nonnative speaker conversations.Discourse Processes, 14, 423–441. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Rojas R., & Iglesias A. (2006). Bilingual (Spanish-English) narrative language analyses: Why and how?.Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, 13(1), 3–8. ASHAWireGoogle Scholar Roth F., & Worthington C. (2005). Treatment resource manual for speech-language pathology (3rd edition). San Diego: Singular. Google Scholar Strong C. J. (1998). The Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure. Eau Claire, Wis.: Thinking Publications. Google Scholar Uccelli P., & Páez M. M. (2007). Narrative and vocabulary development of bilingual children from kindergarten to first grade: Developmental changes and associations among English and Spanish skills.Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 38, 225–236. LinkGoogle Scholar Author Notes Raul Rojas, MA, CCC-SLP, is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University. Contact him at [email protected]. Aquiles Iglesias, PhD, CCC-SLP, is professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University. Contact him at [email protected]. Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetailsCited ByLanguage, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools53:2 (511-531)11 Apr 2022Tell or Retell? The Role of Task and Language in Spanish–English Narrative Microstructure PerformanceMary Claire Wofford, Jessica Cano, J. Marc Goodrich and Lisa FittonJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research64:9 (3533-3548)14 Sep 2021An Evaluation of Expedited Transcription Methods for School-Age Children's Narrative Language: Automatic Speech Recognition and Real-Time TranscriptionCarly B. Fox, Megan Israelsen-Augenstein, Sharad Jones and Sandra Laing GillamLanguage, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools51:1 (103-114)8 Jan 2020Using Computer Programs for Language Sample AnalysisMollee J. Pezold, Caitlin M. Imgrund and Holly L. StorkelLanguage, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools51:1 (144-164)8 Jan 2020The Classification Accuracy of a Dynamic Assessment of Inferential Word Learning for Bilingual English/Spanish-Speaking School-Age ChildrenDouglas B. Petersen, Penny Tonn, Trina D. Spencer and Matthew E. FosterAmerican Journal of Speech-Language Pathology29:3 (1116-1132)4 Aug 2020Beyond Scores: Using Converging Evidence to Determine Speech and Language Services for Language Lisa Bedore, Raúl Rojas, Restrepo and Elizabeth of the ASHA Jan for Language and B. Speech, and Hearing Services in Apr English and in Language of and L. Speech, and Hearing Services in in the English Narrative of Language and Raúl Speech, and Hearing Services in Jan Language and in School-Age Bilingual and Speech, and Hearing Services in Role of in the Narrative Story of English Language D. and Journal of Speech-Language Aug and as of Language in the of Spanish–English A and R. to your in Mar & American Speech-Language-Hearing
Four experiments employed a priming methodology to investigate different mechanisms of stress assignment and how they are modulated by lexical and sub-lexical mechanisms in reading aloud in Italian. Lexical stress is unpredictable in Italian, and requires lexical look-up. The most frequent stress pattern (Dominant) is on the penultimate syllable [laVOro (work)], while stress on the antepenultimate syllable [MAcchina (car)] is relatively less frequent (non-Dominant). Word and pseudoword naming responses primed by words with non-dominant stress - which require whole-word knowledge to be read correctly - were compared to those primed by nonwords. Percentage of errors to words and percentage of dominant stress responses to nonwords were measured. In Experiments 1 and 2 stress errors increased for non-dominant stress words primed by nonwords, as compared to when they were primed by words. The results could be attributed to greater activation of sub-lexical codes, and an associated tendency)
The embodied cognition hypothesis suggests that motor and premotor areas are automatically and necessarily involved in understanding action language, as word conceptual representations are embodied. This transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study explores the role of the left primary motor cortex in action-verb processing. TMS-induced motor-evoked potentials from right-hand muscles were recorded as a measure of M1 activity, while participants were asked either to judge explicitly whether a verb was action-related (semantic task) or to decide on the number of syllables in a verb (syllabic task). TMS was applied in three different experiments at 170, 350 and 500 ms post-stimulus during both tasks to identify when the enhancement of M1 activity occurred during word processing. The delays between stimulus onset and magnetic stimulation were consistent with electrophysiological studies, suggesting that word recognition can be differentiated into early (within 200 ms) and late (within 40)
The article deals with the features of spoken language in the written discourse of live text commentary, a modern genre of online journalism. After locating the new genre at the intersection of spoken live commentary, computer-mediated communication and everyday conversation, it identifies some of the features conveying spokenness on the phonological/graphological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic levels. Based on data from recent sports reports, the article argues that orality represents an unstated norm in the interactive subtype of LTC found, for instance, in the online British newspaper the Guardian. Spoken features and the pseudo-conversational structure of the reports are devices whereby the authors of the texts create a sense of immediacy in their reports, on the one hand, and construct and enhance the illusion of an interpersonal speech event, on the other. The linguistic characteristics of LTC, which reflect the hybrid nature of the genre, can be seen as serving the purpose of social bonding within the virtual group of readers.
Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an octave in the mid-range of hearing [1], in principle a very large number of tone combinations could have been used for this purpose. Nonetheless, compositions in Western classical, folk and popular music as well as in many other musical traditions are based on a relatively small number of scales that typically comprise only five to seven tones [2-6]. Why humans employ only a few of the enormous number of possible tone combinations to create music is not known. Here we show that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series. These findings suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral characteristics of conspecific vocalizations. The analysis also highlights the spectral similar)
Real networks, including biological networks, are known to have the small-world property, characterized by a small ''diameter'', which is defined as the average minimal path length between all pairs of nodes in a network. Because random networks also have short diameters, one may predict that the diameter of a real network should be even shorter than its random expectation, because having shorter diameters potentially increases the network efficiency such as minimizing transition times between metabolic states in the context of metabolic networks. Contrary to this expectation, we here report that the observed diameter is greater than the random expectation in every real network examined, including biological, social, technological, and linguistic networks. Simulations show that a modest enlargement of the diameter beyond its expectation allows a substantial increase of the network modularity, which is present in all real networks examined. Hence, short diameters appear to be sacrifice)
Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of human language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how our brains process information and how we, as a society, organize and share it. Among these regularities, only Zipf's law has been explored in depth. Other basic properties, such as the existence of bursts of rare words in specific documents, have only been studied independently of each other and mainly by descriptive models. As a consequence, there is a lack of understanding of linguistic processes as complex emergent phenomena. Beyond Zipf's law for word frequencies, here we focus on burstiness, Heaps' law describing the sublinear growth of vocabulary size with the length of a document, and the topicality of document collections, which encode correlations within and across documents absent in random null models. We introduce and validate a generative model that explains the simultaneous emergence of all these patterns from simple rules. As a r)
Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. ''close friends'' ''high lord''). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex's known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space. [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 )
Measurements of people’s causal and explanatory models are frequently key dependent variables in investigations of concepts and categories, lay theories, and health behaviors. A variety of challenges are inherent in the pen-and-paper and narrative methods commonly used to measure such causal models. We have attempted to alleviate these difficulties by developing a software tool, ConceptBuilder, for automating the process and ensuring accurate coding and quantification of the data. In this article, we present ConceptBuilder, a multiple-use tool for data gathering, data entry, and diagram display. We describe the program’s controls, report the results of a usability test of the program, and discuss some technical aspects of the program. We also describe ConceptAnalysis, a companion program for generating data matrices and analyses, and ConceptViewer, a program for viewing the data exactly as drawn.
You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Oct 2009Bilingualism: Consequences for Language, Cognition, Development, and the Brain Viorica Marian, PhD Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah, PhD, CCC-SLP Margarita Kaushanskaya, PhD Henrike K. Blumenfeld andPhD Li ShengPhD Viorica Marian Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD, Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD, CCC-SLP, Margarita Kaushanskaya Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD, Henrike K. Blumenfeld Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD and Li Sheng Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR2.14132009.10 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Every year, thousands of middle- and upper-class American children study a foreign language for enrichment. These children, their parents, and their teachers are guided by the belief that knowing another language “is good for you.” At the same time (and sometimes in the same schools) thousands of other children—usually from immigrant and lower-class backgrounds—are discouraged from and sometimes forbidden to speak their native language. Their families are told that communication in their native languages will prevent them from mastering English and that raising children with more than one language will “confuse” them and have long-lasting, detrimental effects. Given these two contradictory perspectives, what does research say about the consequences of bilingualism? Cognitive Development Empirical evidence suggests that bilingualism in children is associated with increased meta-cognitive skills and superior divergent thinking ability (a type of cognitive flexibility), as well as with better performance on some perceptual tasks (such as recognizing a perceptual object “embedded” in a visual background) and classification tasks (for reviews, see Bialystok, 2001; Cummins, 1976; Diaz, 1983, 1985). Other studies report that bilingualism has a negative impact on language development and is associated with delays in lexical acquisition (e.g., Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller, 1993; Umbel & Oller, 1995) and a smaller vocabulary than that of monolingual children (Verhallen & Schoonen, 1993; Vermeer, 1992). Bilingual children score on par with their monolingual counterparts on tests of verbal ability by middle school, and well-controlled studies provide no evidence for lower intellectual abilities of bilingual children compared to monolinguals (Baker & Jones, 1998; Cook, 1997; Hakuta, 1986). The early differences in linguistic performance of bilingual children can be attributed to a somewhat different language development pattern. Bilingual children learn earlier than their monolingual counterparts that objects and their names are not the same and that one object can have more than one name. Understanding that language is a symbolic reference system is advantageous for metacognitive development; it does not, however, necessarily translate to improved performance on early vocabulary development tests. Those vocabulary test results are due, in part, to the way language assessment usually takes place. If a monolingual child has three lexical labels for three semantic items (“milk,” “grandma,” and “dog”), and a bilingual child has two lexical labels in English (“milk” and “grandma”) and two in Spanish (“leche” and “abuela,” the Spanish words for “milk” and “grandma”), the monolingual child’s vocabulary will be counted as three words and the bilingual child’s vocabulary will be counted as two words—because vocabulary size is counted not as the number of lexical items known, but as the number of conceptual representations that have lexical labels. Therefore, even though the bilingual child has four words, they map onto two conceptual representations, compared with the three conceptual representations of the monolingual child. This assessment technique frequently places bilingual children at a disadvantage. Bilinguals often are assessed in only one language, providing an inaccurate assessment of the child’s actual level of linguistic and cognitive development. A child assessed in only one language, typically that of the country in which he or she is being tested (i.e., English in the United States, often the second and less-proficient language), may be placed erroneously at a lower level of cognitive development than his or her true level. This placement can have adverse academic consequences, such as inappropriate lower-grade placement, being held back a year, enrollment in inappropriate remedial programs, and other placement decisions. (For more comprehensive discussions of first/second language knowledge and cognitive processing in bilingual children, see work by Cummins). Comparisons of children’s performance in the first and second language indicate that performance in one language, even the dominant language, is not an accurate reflection of the child’s level of development. Instead, assessment is most accurate with “best performance” measures that assess the highest level of development attained by a bilingual child across both languages. Therefore, whenever possible, “best performance” measures across the two languages should be the technique of choice during bilingual assessments. Most school districts and speech-language pathology clinics lack the bilingual staff and financial resources to test individuals in the dozens of native languages of their client populations. The result is both over-identification (the client does not have an impairment, but just needs more time to learn the language) and under-identification (the client is assessed only in English, and the assessor inaccurately concludes that the client’s difficulties are related to learning a new language) of bilinguals. This state of affairs can be improved only if changes are made both at the systemic level—by increasing funding for services to linguistically diverse populations—and at the individual level—by raising clinicians’ understanding of bilingualism and its consequences. With regard to the latter, clinicians should be aware of the most recent findings in four areas: lexical organization, word-learning, cognitive control, and neural organization. Lexical Organization In children learning a first language, a noticeable change takes place in the salience of various word-word relations during middle childhood. For example, a 6-year-old is quick to point out the thematic relationship between an iron and a shirt (“Because you can iron a shirt!”) but has difficulties attributing the relationship between planes and buses to their shared taxonomy. They might say that “Planes and buses both have fumes” instead of recognizing that both are vehicles. By 8 years of age, most children readily acknowledge both thematic and taxonomic relationships (Hashimoto, McGregor, & Graham, 2007). Children learning two languages simultaneously or sequentially must store and retrieve a larger number of words, because vocabularies are distributed across two linguistic systems. Does access to different semantic relations arise in the same timeline for these children? “chair,” a child may produce “table,” “sit,” and “legs”). The bilingual children produced a similar number of taxonomic associations (e.g., chair-table) to the prompts in their two languages and in comparison to monolingual English-speaking peers (who were matched on performance IQ). The similarities in overall performance suggest that the emergence of taxonomic relations is largely determined by general cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, we found subtle differences—the bilingual children more frequently responded taxonomically than the monolingual children when the first associations and associations to verbs (e.g., jump-walk) were compared. This subtle bilingual advantage is interesting given that the bilingual children had a significantly smaller English receptive vocabulary than the monolinguals. The bilingual children’s need to store and retrieve more words across two linguistic systems may have rendered taxonomic relations more salient. More recently, Sheng, Bedore, and Peña (2008) compared word associations generated by Spanish-English bilingual children in their first and second languages. These children were considered relatively balanced bilinguals based on their linguistic input and output. The children showed overall comparable performance in the two languages, but there also was a subtle Spanish advantage over English in generating taxonomic associations to adjectives and verbs. We hypothesize that features of the Spanish language, such as the use of salient derivational endings (e.g., -oso, -ado, -ivo) to mark the adjective class and the use of verbs in more salient positions in an utterance may have led to an earlier appreciation of taxonomic relations for Spanish adjectives and verbs. Sheng, Bedore, and Peña (2009) are extending this research to bilingual children who have language impairment. Monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment exhibit a significant deficit in the use of both taxonomic and thematic relations in comparison to typically developing peers (Sheng & McGregor, in press). Investigations of bilingual children with language impairment will provide insights regarding the interactions among bilingualism (an experiential factor), linguistic capacity (a learner-internal factor), and vocabulary organization. Word-learning Speech-language pathologists have long been aware that application of monolingual language norms to bilingual clients is inappropriate. What are the alternatives? One possibility is to use processing-based measures, such as word-learning, to index language ability in bilinguals (e.g., Peña, Iglesias, & Lidz, 2001) because these tasks reflect a child’s general ability to process linguistic information but do not rely on extant linguistic knowledge. Therefore, bilinguals with poor language knowledge due to low proficiency should perform just as well on word-learning tasks as monolinguals, and better than bilinguals who experience language deficits. However, little is known about the effects of bilingualism on word-learning. How exactly does bilingualism influence word-learning ability? Our recent research comparing bilingual and monolingual adults on their ability to learn new words consistently suggests that bilingual adults tested in their native language outperform monolingual adults on word-learning tasks. For example, Kaushanskaya and Marian (2009a) examined word-learning performance in monolingual speakers, English-Spanish bilinguals, and English-Mandarin bilinguals, and found that both bilingual groups outperformed the monolingual group. A related study (Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2009b) examined the effects of bilingualism on adults’ ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies during novel word-learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned novel words that overlapped with English orthographically, but diverged from English phonologically. Native-language orthographic information presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals, but not in bilinguals. These findings indicate that knowledge of two languages may shield bilinguals from native-language interference during novel word-learning. Current work (Kaushanskaya, Yoo, Van Hecke, & Mirsberger, 2009) suggests that monolinguals’ ability to learn new words depends on whether they learn new words silently or out loud. Conversely, bilinguals’ performance does not depend on any particular learning strategy, and they can acquire new words efficiently under any learning conditions. Our findings indicate that bilingualism facilitates word-learning performance in adults, although the precise mechanisms of this advantage remain unknown. Whether similar word-learning advantages can be observed in children is still under investigation. It appears that word-learning performance in bilingual children may be less contingent on latent vocabulary knowledge than in monolingual children (e.g., Kan & Kohnert, 2008; Wilkinson & Mazzitelli, 2003). However, studies that contrast word learning in simultaneous bilingual children (exposed to two languages from birth), sequential bilingual children, and monolingual children are necessary to identify the timeline and the mechanisms that underlie the development of the bilingual advantage for word learning. The finding that bilingualism facilitates word-learning performance has implications for the use of word-learning tasks to index language function in bilingual clients. If typically developing bilinguals perform at higher rates than typically developing monolinguals, then the expectations for bilingual clients with a suspected language difficulty may also need to be adjusted. Cognitive Control The consequences of bilingualism on cognition have implications for understanding the nature of linguistic-cognitive deficits. Linguistic and cognitive processes interact across the lifespan, with linguistic function tied to development of cognitive control throughout childhood and to its decline during aging (Comalli et al., 1962). For example, aging adults may have difficulty with language tasks that require inhibitory control, such as ignoring irrelevant language input when multiple speakers are present (Schrauf, 2008). Research suggests that the very processes that decline with normal aging also may be honed by lifelong bilingualism (Kavé et al., 2008). For example, aging bilinguals outperform monolingual peers at suppressing task-irrelevant information (Bialystok et al., 2004). Further, Bialystok, Craik, and Freedman (2007) showed that the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia may be delayed by up to four years in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. How does bilingual experience shape the cognitive system? In general, bilinguals face greater ambiguity during language processing because they consider similar-sounding words from two languages (instead of one) during comprehension and must choose between languages during production. For instance, a German-English bilingual who sees pictures of a bike and a leg while hearing “bike” & Marian, 2007). In our research, we aimed to identify a mechanism through which bilingual language processing may influence inhibitory control (Blumenfeld and Marian, in preparation). We measured the extent to which monolinguals and bilinguals activated similar-sounding words (e.g., “hamper” and “hammer”), and the extent to which they inhibited similar-sounding competitors as they identified the correct targets (e.g., a picture of a hammer). We found a correlation between how bilinguals (but not monolinguals) inhibited irrelevant words during comprehension and how well they performed on a non-linguistic task that required inhibition of irrelevant information. Bilinguals also showed higher accuracy rates on the non-linguistic inhibition task compared to monolingual peers. These findings suggest that a central inhibition mechanism may be recruited and altered by bilingual language processing. Identifying a link between language experience and cognitive processes is important because it may provide insights into how treatment can generalize from the cognitive into the linguistic domain and vice versa. Moreover, because inhibitory control deficits are thought to underlie (at least in part) a number of disorders, including attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and frontal lobe impairments, monolingual/bilingual differences in this domain may become clinically relevant, generating the need to create bilingual norms even on non-linguistic neuropsychological assessment tools. In general, monolingual/bilingual differences should be considered in populations with potentially weaker cognitive control, such as children or older adults. Aspects of cognitive development or aging may differ across monolingual and bilingual populations, with potential consequences for the nature and severity of cognitive/linguistic symptoms related to inhibitory control. Neural Organization Investigations into the neural manifestations of bilingualism have included functional comparisons of a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic domains and studies of cortical anatomy. The earliest studies of the cortical correlates of bilingualism used behavioral approaches to examine hemispheric dominance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, early- and late-acquired bilinguals, and high- and low-proficiency bilinguals. Hull and Vaid’s (2007) meta-analyses of the data reveal that early bilinguals were the only group that showed consistent bilateral dominance for language. Late bilinguals and monolinguals showed left-hemisphere dominance. Second-language proficiency was found to be less relevant than age of acquisition in influencing language lateralization. The authors proposed that a period of early monolingual development establishes left-hemispheric dominance that is then preserved irrespective of future bilingual experience. Interestingly, this decreased hemispheric dominance in early bilinguals also is observed for non-linguistic tasks. For example, Hausmann and colleagues (2004) used visual hemifield presentation to investigate face discrimination, a right-hemisphere-dominant task. Turkish-German bilinguals were more bilaterally dominant than both Turkish and German monolinguals. However, neuroimaging studies have failed to find consistent laterality differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers (e.g., Hernandez et al., 2001; Kim et al., 1997). When neural activations for single words are meta-analyzed on the basis of the lexical processes involved (semantic access, phonological code retrieval, or articulation), bilinguals and monolinguals activate similar neural regions for individual lexical processes (Indefrey, 2006; Indefrey & Levelt, 2004). What is different, though, is that specific perisylvian regions may differentially activate for individual languages of the bilingual speaker. The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has been shown to respond differentially to L1 and L2, either with different foci for L1 versus L2 or with greater volume of activation for L2 (Kim et al., 1997). This differential activation is found only for late bilinguals and for specific linguistic tasks. Marian and colleagues (2007), for example, found that the foci of LIFG activations differed across L1 and L2 for lexical and phonological processing, but not for orthographic processing. Others found L1 and L2 to activate the LIFG differentially for syntactic processing (Saur et al., 2009). The LIFG appears to make distinctions between L1 and L2 for linguistic processes for which it serves a unique role; further research is needed to elucidate these patterns. Moreover, bilingualism may have ramifications on cortical morphology: Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scans and an analysis procedure called voxel-based morphometry, Mechelli and colleagues (2004) found that individuals with higher proficiency in and/or earlier age of second-language acquisition had a higher gray matter density in the left inferior parietal cortex. What Clinicians Should Know Knowledge of bilingualism suggests the following linguistic, cognitive, and neurophysiological differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers: Linguistic differences Bilingual children develop an earlier understanding of taxonomic relationships than their monolingual peers (e.g., car and bus are vehicles). This understanding is not dependent on vocabulary size, but could be influenced by the structural features of the speaker’s language. Bilingual adults are better than monolingual adults at learning new words. Bilinguals use a variety of word-learning strategies with similar efficiency and are less susceptible to interference from conflicting orthographic information during word-learning. Linguistic input co-activates both languages in bilinguals; when bilinguals hear or read words in one language, partially overlapping linguistic structures in the other language also are activated. Cognitive differences Bilinguals may be able to inhibit irrelevant verbal and nonverbal information with greater ease than monolinguals. Inhibitory control ability is slower to decline with age in bilinguals than in monolinguals. The average age of dementia onset is later in bilinguals than in monolinguals. Bilingual children have been found to exhibit superior performance in divergent thinking, figure-ground discrimination, and other related meta-cognitive skills. Neural differences Bilateral processing of language (and other nonverbal tasks) is most likely to occur only in early bilinguals. Monolinguals and bilinguals use similar neural regions for language processing. However, late bilinguals are likely to activate the LIFG differentially for processes in which the LIFG plays a crucial role, such as phonological and syntactic processing. Bilinguals have greater gray matter density than monolinguals in certain left hemisphere regions. Did You Know? According to the 2000 U.S. Census, a language other than English was spoken in approximately 18% of all American households. According to the U.S. Census, the Hispanic population in 2007 was 45.5 million, a number expected to grow to 47.7 million by 2010 and 59.7 million in 2020. Approximately 7.5 million bilingual children were enrolled in U.S. schools in 2002. U.S. Census information on language use and the incidence of bilingualism (based on the 2000 Census) can be found on the U.S. Census Bureau Web site. ASHA and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimate that 10–15% of the U.S. population has a speech-language or hearing disorder. These estimates are higher among persons from socially and economically disadvantaged groups, including recent immigrants. 3.5% of ASHA have to be bilingual speech-language pathologists or 2009). can and about bilingualism on the Bilingual families can through groups such as Bilingual and in the Web site. A map of languages spoken across the U.S. can be found on the Web site. The of language and of these languages are about the National for Bilingual can be found on the Web site. 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Drawing on the g factor and information theory literatures, the relationship between the four subtests of the Culture-Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) and the entropy of the Ruiz Absolute Scale of Complexity Management (R-ASCM) was investigated. In results based on data collected from 186 university students, the entropy of the R-ASCM mostly loads the first principal component extracted from the CFIT subtests and shows a corresponding strong relationship with the item difficulty of the R-ASCM. Because entropy is a ratio scale of complexity— with a true zero and units called bits—these findings suggest that entropy is the right vehicle for measuring the information contained in nonverbal intelligence tests.
The purpose of the paper is twofold: firstly, it analyses the most frequent problems in the translation of legal texts encountered by the university-level students of translation doing the course “The translation of legal texts” and, secondly, it describes the solutions applied. A fundamental difficulty in the translation of legal texts concerns the highly technical subject matter itself. There are important differences between legal systems, each of which has specific norms, as is reflected especially at the lexical level, in the terminology used. Different text genres (for example, legislation, contracts, indictments, legal textbooks, etc.) require different translation approaches and strategies. For students of translation, a particular problem may also be the high level of abstractness of legislative texts, which are among the most complex legal texts. The paper also discusses difficulties which students have with homonyms, synonyms and collocations in the translation of legal texts.
In the present article, functions written in the freeware R are presented that calculate several measures from traditional signal detection theory for each individual in a sample, along with summary statistics for the sample. Bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals are also produced. Arguments are made for using an alternative approach—multilevel generalized linear models—and a function is presented for it. These functions are part of the R package sdtalt, which is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network. Recent data from memory recognition studies are used to illustrate these functions.
Abstract Language is an important means through which power relations are created and negotiated. In addition to everyday choices speakers make about their own language use, variations in ways of talking are related to local theories of power, status, identity, self, ethnicity, class, and gender. Grammatical and lexical choices, choices in forms of address and reference, turn‐taking, narratives of cause and effect, genre, and stylistic performance, as well as the organization of space for talk and participation, embodied behaviors, and silence are used as elements in the distribution of power. Power and language are connected through the marking of certain encounters and contexts as requiring particular types of language use, the privileging of certain types of language, who may or may not speak in certain settings, which contexts are appropriate for which types of speech and which for silence, what types of talk are appropriate to persons of different statuses and roles, norms for requesting and giving information, and practices for alternating between speakers. Pragmatic uses of language are an important tool for constructing social difference and distinctions between individuals in terms of efficacy and power.
This article presents the current state of a work in progress, whose objective is to better understand the effects of factors that significantly influence the performance of latent semantic analysis (LSA). A difficult task, which consisted of answering (French) biology multiple choice questions, was used to test the semantic properties of the truncated singular space and to study the relative influence of the main parameters. A dedicated software was designed to fine-tune the LSA semantic space for the multiple choice questions task. With optimal parameters, the performances of our simple model were quite surprisingly equal or superior to those of seventh- and eighthgrade students. This indicates that semantic spaces were quite good despite their low dimensions and the small sizes of the training data sets. In addition, we present an original entropy global weighting of the answers’ terms for each of the multiple choice questions, which was necessary to achieve the model’s success.
Reviews1 43 Merriam-Webster'sAdvanced Learner's English Dictionary. 2008. Springfield: Merriam-Webster. Pp. 2016. JL b 1IiC world of dictionaries for advanced learners of English has long been dominated by two British publishers: Oxford University Press, which published the first modern learner's dictionary, die learner's Dictionary of Current F.nglkh (now the Oxford Advanced learner's Dictionary, or OAlJ)), in 1948; and Longman, which entered the market with die Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (IJ)OCF) in 1 978. Both publishers have followed dieir flagship products with dictionaries for intermediate and basic learners, with picture dictionaries, and with electronic products. In 1981, Longman published an American version of its intermediate-level dictionary as the Ixmgman Dictionary ofAmerican English, and for more than a decade this dictionary was about all diat was available to learners who preferred American English—die huge market of students living and working in die United States, as well as learners outside die US (particularly in Japan and many countries in die Americas). American dictionary publishers did not specialize in dictionaries for learners and were relative latecomers in spotting die market potential in ESL products. When diey did decide to enter die fray in die 1990s, diey badly miscalculated. Some, such as Merriam-Webster and Webster's New World, created "basic" dictionaries by adapting an existing data set; others, such as Heinle, Random House, and NTC, opted for single-audior works. These books showed little or no evidence diat dieir compilers were aware ofwhat by dien was more dian forty years' wordi of research and innovation in die production of learner's dictionaries—of die importance of using a controlled defining vocabulary, of showing pronunciations in the International Phonetic Alphabet, ofshowing grammatical patterns, of examining corpora oflearners' essays to aid in die writing ofusage notes, ofusing corpora to determine die relative frequency ofwords, patterns, and expressions so as to aid in making inclusion decisions. In die meantime, bodi Cambridge University Press and Longman produced new corpus-based editions of intermediate-level American dictionaries, and Longman published the lemgman Advanced American Dictionary, essentially an Americanized version of the Ixmgman Dictionary ofContemporary Englkh. With the exception of die Newbury House dictionaries published by Heinle, which have had some success, the home-grown American products have not presented a real challenge to the dominance of the American English learner's dictionary market by British publishers. A decade ago, die publishers at Merriam-Webster saw, quite righüy, that there was room for a strong American contender, and set out to produce one. The resulting dictionary, Merriam-Webster's Advanced learner's F.nglkh Dictionary (MWAlJJ)), largely avoids the clear weaknesses of its predecessors, and represents a solid, well-edited, and authoritative resource. In reviewing the text, I will make reference to its chiefcompetitors, the Dictionaries: journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 30 (2009), 143-150 144Reviews Macmillan F'.nglkh Dictionaryfor Advanced Learners ofAmerican F.nglkh (MFD) and the Longman Advanced American Dictionary (IAAl)). Headwords and the Organization of Entries The number ofdiscrete lexical items—"100,000 words and phrases"—that are defined in MWAIFJ) is comparable to that of its competitors. Most learner's dictionaries list each part ofspeech as a separate homograph; MWAUDAso gives separate homographs for etymologically distinct words, e.g., calf the baby cow and the calf of your leg. It includes some British English terms and expressions, much as British dictionaries include some American ones. But sometimes the choice of inclusion is odd, and I suspect this may be because while the MerriamWebster citation resources are voluminous, a citation bank does not have the characteristics of a corpus that make it possible for a lexicographer tojudge centrality and frequency when considering whether to include a given term. Thus MWAIFJ) has an entry for cloud-cuckoo-land while the British edition of MFJ) does not include the American equivalent, la-la land; yet MWAIJD fails to provide an entry for earlier, even though this comparative form is frequent and its use should be illustrated for learners. MWIAFJ) gives the pronunciation of headwords in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is now the undisputed norm for a learner's dictionary. Unfortunately, stress patterns are not shown...
The thesis studies the translation process for the laws of Finland as they are translated from Finnish into Swedish. The focus is on revision practices, norms and workplace procedures. The translation process studied covers three institutions and four revisions. In three separate studies the translation process is analyzed from the perspective of the translations, the institutions and the actors. The general theoretical framework is Descriptive Translation Studies. For the analysis of revisions made in versions of the Swedish translation of Finnish laws, a model is developed covering five grammatical categories (textual revisions, syntactic revisions, lexical revisions, morphological revisions and content revisions) and four norms (legal adequacy, correct translation, correct language and readability). A separate questionnaire-based study was carried out with translators and revisers at the three institutions. \n\nThe results show that the number of revisions does not decrease during the translation process, and no division of labour can be seen at the different stages. This is somewhat surprising if the revision process is regarded as one of quality control. Instead, all revisers make revisions on every level of the text. Further, the revisions do not necessarily imply errors in the translations but are often the result of revisers following different norms for legal translation. \n\nThe informal structure of the institutions and its impact on communication, visibility and workplace practices was studied from the perspective of organization theory. The results show weaknesses in the communicative situation, which affect the co-operation both between institutions and individuals. Individual attitudes towards norms and their relative authority also vary, in the sense that revisers largely prioritize legal adequacy whereas translators give linguistic norms a higher value. Further, multi-professional teamwork in the institutions studied shows a kind of teamwork based on individuals and institutions doing specific tasks with only little contact with others. This shows that the established definitions of teamwork, with people co-working in close contact with each other, cannot directly be applied to the workplace procedures in the translation process studied. Three new concepts are introduced: flerstegsrevidering (multi-stage revision), revideringskedja (revision chain) and normsyn (norm attitude). \n\nThe study seeks to make a contribution to our knowledge of legal translation, translation processes, institutional translation, revision practices and translation norms for legal translation. \n\n Keywords: legal translation, translation of laws, institutional translation, revision, revision practices, norms, teamwork, organizational informal structure, translation process, translation sociology, multilingual.
Evaluation of quantitative parameters in the English language. The article touches upon different lexical and grammatical means of expression of quantitative parameters in the modern English language and means of representation of evaluative concepts 'much' and 'little'. Specific features of the processes of evaluative conceptualization and evaluative categorization are under study, as well as the notion of quantitative standard/norm as the reflection of collective shared knowledge.
A recent proposal (Pollock 1989) within the framework of Government and Binding (GB) grammatical theory has been that the members of INFL Agreement and Tense should be given full constituent status as maximal projections in their own right. This idea has been applied to the syntax of Modern Irish in order both to test the universality of the expanded INFL proposal and to investigate what new perspectives it might have to offer on some remaining problems of Irish syntax. The results are presented in the following paper along with discussions of the direction they suggest for further research. INTRODUCTION Using data from mostly English and French, J.Y. Pollock argues in a recent proposal (1989) that if the usual members of INFL, Agreement and Tense, are included in the syntax as full maximal projections, many of the phenomena surrounding auxiliaries, negation, and verb movement can receive straightforward explanations. The proposal seems readily adaptable for other SVO languages which are generally accepted as showing evidence of verb movement, notably the so-called Verb Second (V2) languages. In order to test the universality of the expanded-INFL proposal, an expandedINFL syntax has been applied to the model VSO language Modern Irish. The result has been a quite promising new syntactic structure for Irish which seems to confirm the universality of expanded-INFL. While it is fully compatible with existing analyses for Irish word order in which V S O is derived from SVO, the new expanded syntax is equally adaptable to an account deriving VSO from SOV. Such an account is suggested by the Irish infinitive clause, which is built around the verbal noun (VN), and which regularly shows surface SOV order. The new syntax provides an attractive solution for the placement of preverbal particles (interrogative, relative, negative, and copula), which are the only elements regularly allowed to precede the verb in Irish. It also suggests some interesting perspectives for the analysis of copula constructions, an area which remains an open question in Irish syntax. 58 SHEILA DOOLEY COLLBERG Expanded-INFL syntax I would like to begin by defining exactly what is meant here by an expanded-INFL syntax. This is my own terminology for the kind of structure proposed in Pollock 1989. It is probably easiest to see what is new about this structure if we compare it to earlier models of universal syntax. Through the years, the 'basic' syntactic tree structure assumed within the G B theoretical framework has steadily grown more complex and abstract. The first tree structure (a) above shows a pre Barriers (Chomsky 1986) type of syntax with really the bare essentials. The S portion of the tree is the area which undergoes the most change. In the second tree (b), after Barriers, we have a new level of constituent structure introduced: INFL (inflection). It corresponds roughly to the S level of the previous structure. We also see that there is an abstract element Agr (Agreement) which is assumed to be generated in INFL. The whole tree shows consistent 2-level expansion of X-bar syntax for each phrasal projection. The last tree above (c) is an example of the expanded-INFL syntax: The IP of (b) has grown into two fully expanded phrasal projections in their own right: AgrP and TP (Tense). This of course gives us a lot more 'room' in the syntax to propose analyses for grammatical phenomena involving the abstract (or AN EXPANDED-INFL SYNTAX FOR MODERN IRISH 59 overt) elements Agr and Tense, namely things like the behavior of auxiliaries, subject-verb inversion, negation, quantifiers, and verb movement. As Pollock demonstrates, this kind of structure can be used to explain many of the word order details of the SVO languages French and English — details which otherwise seem unexplainable except by recourse to ad hoc stipulations. B A S I C I R I S H S Y N T A C T I C S T R U C T U R E Can the kind of structure pictured in (lc) say anything new to us about Irish? Can we implement such a structure at all for a V S O language like Irish? The answer depends in part upon how one decides to analyze the surface V S O order of Irish. There are two possible analyses, both represented in the existing literature. V S O is base-generated Stenson 1981 and Chung 1983 are two studies which represent the view that the V S O order in Irish is base-generated. This implies that the syntactic structure is a flat, one-level tree with all constituent phrases placed as sisters to the initial verb and no verb movement involved. It accurately represents the observed surface word order of Irish and is thus descriptively adequate, but it offers little explanation for the verb-initial order. Chung attempts to give a possible theoretical defense of the flat structure by appealing to the observation that VSO languages seem to lack the subject-object asymmetries with regard to extraction properties that one usually finds in S V O languages. However, this is not quite correct. The subject NP in Irish is much more closely tied to the verb than the object NP. While nothing can ever intervene between the subject and the verb, there are times when the object is in fact forced to move away from its canonical position. This occurs when the object is pronomimal. It must, appear in absolute final position in its clause, and it apparently reaches this position by means of some sort of a rule of Pronoun Postposing (Chung & McCloskey 1987). These facts suggest that the relationship of the subject and object NP to the verb is not simply one of equal sisterhood. The S V O Analysis If the VSO order of Irish is not base-generated, then it must arise through some sort of derivational process from a different underlying word order. This view is implicitly supported in an article devoted to establishing the 60 SHEILA DOOLEY COLLBERG existence of a V P in Irish (McCloskey 1983). The existence of a V P entails at least two hierarchical levels of sentence structure, with the verb originating in a V O or OV constituent and obligatorily fronted to some other position. Sproat 1985 builds on the work of McCloskey to develop a full SVO Analysis for Welsh, arguing that the same analysis may be applied to Irish. The underlying structure for the two languages is argued to be SVO, and the obligatory fronting of the finite verb is made to follow from the requirements of case theory. Sproat maintains that while INFL in SVO or SOV languages may assign nominative case either to the left or the right, INFL in VSO languages is restricted to assigning case rightward. The verb lexicalizing INFL is thus forced to appear to the left of the subject NP in order to assign nominative case successfully. Sproat's SVO Analysis is a step in the right direction in that it gives a theoretically attractive explanation for the obligatory fronting of the verb, but it is incomplete in that Sproat does not specify any landing site for the conjoined verb and INFL. Without going into any more detail, it may be said that the arguments for the SVO Analysis are quite attractive, and the general consensus among Celtic syntacticians seems to be that Irish is SVO underlyingly. In general, a derivational account like this for verb-initial languages is pretty much the norm now, as can be seen in recent works of a typological, nature such as Koopman & Sportiche 1988. EXPANDED-INFL FOR IRISH Obviously, it should be possible to adapt the Pollock type of syntax for Irish if we accept that Irish VSO order is derived from SVO. So let us assume that for the moment. Then, of course, there are plenty of language-specific details to work out, and the following sections contain suggestions for handling these. My proposal for the full syntactic structure of Irish is given in (2) and wil l be referred to throughout the ensuing discussion. Principles and parameters according to Pollock Given in (3) is a very brief summary of the most important points that Pollock argues for in his article. These can be reduced to a pair of universal principles (I and II) and a set of parameters (III) which vary from language to language. AN EXPANDED-INFL SYNTAX FOR MODERN IRISH 61
Colloquial speech as any other sublanguage is subject to its own norm. Specificity of colloquial norm lies in its implicit character. Colloquial lexical units, which are normative for colloquial speech, are marked by minimal degree of stylistic degradation. In the process of unofficial communication the choice of linguistic units is subconsciously made within certain normative criteria. It is realized in case of violation of colloquial norm.
We suggest a simple procedure for the extraction of Wikipedia sub-domains, propose a plain-text (human and machine readable) corpus exchange format, reflect on the interactions of Wikipedia markup and linguistic analysis, and report initial experimental results in parsing and treebanking a domainspecific sub-set of Wikipedia content.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands We present a coding system combined with an annotation tool for the analysis of gestural behavior. The NEUROGES coding system consists of three modules that progress from gesture kinetics to gesture function. Grounded on empirical neuropsychological and psychological studies, the theoretical assumption behind NEUROGES is that its main kinetic and functional movement categories are differentially associated with specific cognitive, emotional, and interactive functions. ELAN is a free, multimodal annotation tool for digital audio and video media. It supports multileveled transcription and complies with such standards as XML and Unicode. ELAN allows gesture categories to be stored with associated vocabularies that are reusable by means of template files. The combination of the NEUROGES coding system and the annotation tool ELAN creates an effective tool for empirical research on gestural behavior.
The name-picture verification task is widely used in spoken production studies to control for nonlexical differences between picture sets. In this task a word is presented first and followed, after a pause, by a picture. Participants must then make a speeded decision on whether both word and picture refer to the same object. Using regression analyses, we systematically explored the characteristics of this task by assessing the independent contribution of a series of factors that have been found relevant for picture naming in previous studies. We found that, for "match" responses, both visual and conceptual factors played a role, but lexical variables were not significant contributors. No clear pattern emerged from the analysis of "no-match" responses. We interpret these results as validating the use of "match" latencies as control variables in studies or spoken production using picture naming. Norms for match and no-match responses for 396 line drawings taken from Cycowicz, Friedman, Rothstein, and Snodgrass (1997) can be downloaded at: http://language.psy.bris.ac.uk/name-picture_verification.html.
Grammar extraction in deep formalisms has received remarkable attention in recent years. We recognise its value, but try to create a more precision-oriented grammar, by hand-crafting a core grammar, and learning lexical types and lexical items from a treebank. The study we performed focused on German, and we used the Tiger treebank as our resource. A completely hand-written grammar in the framework of HPSG forms the inspiration for our core grammar, and is also our frame of reference for evaluation.
We introduce a new type of lexical structure called lexical system, an interoperable model that can feed both monolingual and multilingual language resources. We begin with a formal characterization of lexical systems as simple directed graphs, solely made up of nodes corresponding to lexical entities and links. To illustrate our approach, we present data borrowed from a lexical system that has been generated from the French DiCo database. We later explain how the compilation of the original dictionary-like database into a net-like one has been made possible. Finally, we discuss the potential of the proposed lexical structure for designing multilingual lexical resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of Language Resources & Evaluation is the property of Springer Nature 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 )
An impressive amount of work was devoted over the past few decades to collocation extraction. The state of the art shows that there is a sustained interest in the morphosyntactic preprocessing of texts in order to better identify candidate expressions; however, the treatment performed is, in most cases, limited (lemmatization, POS-tagging, or shallow parsing). This article presents a collocation extraction system based on the full parsing of source corpora, which supports four languages: English, French, Spanish, and Italian. The performance of the system is compared against that of the standard mobile-window method. The evaluation experiment investigates several levels of the significance lists, uses a fine-grained annotation schema, and covers all the languages supported. Consistent results were obtained for these languages: parsing, even if imperfect, leads to a significant improvement in the quality of results, in terms of collocational precision (between 16.4 and 29.7%, depending on the language; 20.1% overall), MWE precision (between 19.9 and 35.8%; 26.1% overall), and grammatical precision (between 47.3 and 67.4%; 55.6% overall). This positive result bears a high importance, especially in the perspective of the subsequent integration of extraction results in other NLP applications.
This paper discusses two new procedures for extracting verb valences from raw texts, with an application to the Polish language. The first novel technique, the EM selection algorithm, performs unsupervised disambiguation of valence frame forests, obtained by applying a non-probabilistic deep grammar parser and some post-processing to the text. The second new idea concerns filtering of incorrect frames detected in the parsed text and is motivated by an observation that verbs which take similar arguments tend to have similar frames. This phenomenon is described in terms of newly introduced co-occurrence matrices. Using co-occurrence matrices, we split filtering into two steps. The list of valid arguments is first determined for each verb, whereas the pattern according to which the arguments are combined into frames is computed in the following stage. Our best extracted dictionary reaches an F-score of 45%, compared to an F-score of 39% for the standard frame-based BHT filtering.
In this paper, we address the problem of document re-ranking in information retrieval, which is usually conducted after initial retrieval to improve rankings of relevant documents. To deal with this problem, we propose a method which automatically constructs a term resource specific to the document collection and then applies the resource to document re-ranking. The term resource includes a list of terms extracted from the documents as well as their weighting and correlations computed after initial retrieval. The term weighting based on local and global distribution ensures the re-ranking not sensitive to different choices of pseudo relevance, while the term correlation helps avoid any bias to certain specific concept embedded in queries. Experiments with NTCIR3 data show that the approach can not only improve performance of initial retrieval, but also make significant contribution to standard query expansion.