Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
The main goal of this work is to determine whether a computer mouse can be used as a low-cost device for the acquisition of two-dimensional human movement velocity signals in the context of psychophysical studies and biomedical applications. A comprehensive overview of the related literature is presented, and the problem of characterizing mouse movement acquisition is analyzed and discussed. Then, the quality of velocity signals acquired with this kind of device is measured on horizontal oscillatory movements by comparing the mouse data to the signals acquired simultaneously by a video motion tracking system and a digitizing tablet. A synthesis of the information gathered in this work indicates that the computer mouse can be used for the reliable acquisition of biosignals in the context of human movement studies, particularly for many applications dealing with the velocity of the end effector of the upper limb. This paper concludes by discussing the possibilities and limitations of such use.
In this study we examine linguistic variation and its dependence on both social and geographic factors. We follow dialectometry in applying a quantitative methodology and focusing on dialect distances, and social dialectology in the choice of factors we examine in building a model to predict word pronunciation distances from the standard Dutch language to 424 Dutch dialects. We combine linear mixed-effects regression modeling with generalized additive modeling to predict the pronunciation distance of 559 words. Although geographical position is the dominant predictor, several other factors emerged as significant. The model predicts a greater distance from the standard for smaller communities, for communities with a higher average age, for nouns (as contrasted with verbs and adjectives), for more frequent words, and for words with relatively many vowels. The impact of the demographic variables, however, varied from word to word. For a majority of words, larger, richer and younger communities are moving towards the standard. For a smaller minority of words, larger, richer and younger communities emerge as driving a change away from the standard. Similarly, the strength of the effects of word frequency and word category varied geographically. The peripheral areas of the Netherlands showed a greater distance from the standard for nouns (as opposed to verbs and adjectives) as well as for high-frequency words, compared to the more central areas. Our findings indicate that changes in pronunciation have been spreading (in particular for low-frequency words) from the Hollandic center of economic power to the peripheral areas of the country, meeting resistance that is stronger wherever, for well-documented historical reasons, the political influence of Holland was reduced. Our results are also consistent with the theory of lexical diffusion, in that distances from the Hollandic norm vary systematically and predictably on a word by word basis.
In this paper, we analyze the behaviour of Singular Value Decomposition in a number of word similarity extraction tasks, namely acquisition of translation equivalents from comparable corpora. Special attention is paid to two different aspects: computational efficiency and extraction quality. The main objective of the paper is to describe several experiments comparing methods based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to other strategies. The results lead us to conclude that SVD makes the extraction less computationally efficient and much less precise than other more basic models for the task of extracting translation equivalents from comparable corpora.
Abstract Prior research on relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese has led to conflicting results regarding ease of processing subject-extracted RCs (SRCs) versus object-extracted RCs (ORCs) and has often used animacy configurations that are rare in corpora. Building on animacy patterns observed in a corpus, we used self-paced reading to explore how animacy influences real-time processing of Chinese RCs. Experiment 1 tested SRCs, and found marginal facilitation effects with animate heads (subjects) and inanimate objects. Experiment 2 tested ORCs and found significant facilitation effects with inanimate head (objects). Experiment 3 showed that when the subject is animate and the object inanimate, ORCs are as easy to process as SRCs, but when the subject is inanimate and the object is animate, SRCs are processed faster. Thus, the animacy of the head and the embedded noun must be taken into account when evaluating processing ease. Keywords: AnimacyRelative clause (RC)Mandarin ChineseProcessing Acknowledgments We would like to thank audiences at the 14th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), the 2008 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) and the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), where earlier versions of some of this research were presented. Preliminary analyses of some of the data reported here appeared in Wu, Kaiser, and Andersen (2010). The stimuli used in this research are a revised version of the stimuli used in Wu (2009). We thank Yanan Sheng for assistance in the stimulus revision and running of participants, Xiaomei Qiao, and Tangfeng Yang for assistance in carrying out norming studies, Mei Li for providing facilities in running Experiment 3 at Tongji University, and Rudolf Troike for help with finalising the translations of our Chinese stimuli. This research was partially supported by a project sponsored by the Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry, and by a grant from the Shanghai Municipal Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation (2010BYY003) to the first author. Notes 1As a reviewer pointed out, the relation between head animacy and RC-type is clear with object RCs (which tend to occur with inanimate heads), but less so with subject RCs. Indeed, in Mak et al.'s (2002, pp. 54–55) German corpus, the 144 subject-extracted RCs have inanimate heads almost as frequently as animate heads: 57% animate heads and 43% inanimate heads. Also, in Roland et al.'s (2007, p. 357) analysis of the English-language Brown corpus, 47% of 100 randomly-selected subject-extracted RCs have inanimate heads. However, existing corpus data from Chinese suggest that subject RCs' head animacy patterns (at least in Chinese) may vary depending on the grammatical role of the RC's head noun. For Chinese, Pu (2007, p. 45) and Wu (2009) found that (1) when SRCs modify sentential subjects, animate heads significantly outnumber inanimate heads, but (2) when SRCs modify sentential objects, there is no particular bias toward animate or inanimate heads. 2The term "experiencer" refers to a change of psychological state on a human participant caused by someone or something in the context of certain intransitive verbs (e.g., win, die); experience-theme verbs (e.g., love, discover, like); or causer-experiencer verbs (e.g., please, amuse, amaze, and annoy). 3Lin and Garnsey (Citation2010) manipulated animacy in their stimuli, but they also topicalised their RCs to a sentence-initial position and used null head nouns. Headless RCs and topicalisation in Mandarin normally occur only when supportive discourse contexts are given, but their stimuli were presented in isolation. Thus their stimuli had a marked structure, which may have complicated their results. 4One reviewer pointed out that the percentage of RCs where both nouns have the same animacy is 28% in Mak et al.'s (2002) Dutch corpus and 40% in their German corpus. However, viewed from another perspective, this means that the percentage of RCs with contrastive animacy configuration is 72% in Dutch and 60% in German, a pattern similar to Wu's (2009) corpus analysis. Furthermore, at least in Wu's (2009) analyses of Chinese Treebank Corpus, RCs with matched animacy (double-animates or double-inanimates) occurred significantly less frequently than RCs with nonmatched animacy (p'<.05). 5In Experiment 1, the log frequencies for the different verbs and for the embedded nouns were matched. The mean log frequencies for the verbs from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.14 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 3.32 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 0.1069, p=.9558. The mean log frequencies for the verbs from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.46 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 9.04 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si. These frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 78) = 0.6015, p=.616. The mean log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.07 for Oi-Sa and Oi-Si, 3.28 for Oa-Sa and Oa-Si. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 78) = 0.1726, p=.9146. The log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.38 for Oi-Sa and Oi-Si, 9.36 for Oa-Sa and Oa-Si. The frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 82) = 0.0087, p=.9989. Log frequencies for the head nouns were matched for the 2008 dictionary (means: 8.5 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 9.05 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si). According to this corpus, the frequencies of the different head nouns do not differ significantly, F(3, 72) = 1.7263, p=.1692. However, according to the SUBTLEX-CH corpus, the log frequencies for the head nouns are not matched [means: 4.32 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 2.88 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si; F(3, 74) = 4.8757, p=.0038]. As said, the frequency check reported above are based on an incomplete list of words that have their frequencies listed in either resource. 6At the sentence-initial RC-verb position (pos 1, e.g., raokai "bypass"), there was a marginal main effect of Head Animacy (t=1.84, p=.0663), and a marginal interaction between Head Animacy and Embedded-noun Animacy (t=−1.8, p=.073). However, given that this is the first word region, these weak effects are probably due to lexical differences. 7In Experiment 3, the log frequencies were matched for the verbs, but not for the embedded nouns and for the head nouns. The mean log frequencies of the verbs from SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.83 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads, 3.41 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 82) = 0.2254, p=.8785. The mean log frequencies of the verb from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.26 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 9.19 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. These frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 0.1274, p=.9436. The log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 2.86 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 4.03 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads. The differences in frequencies are marginally significant, F(3, 74) = 2.581, p=.062. The log mean frequencies of the embedded nouns from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.52 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 9.11 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads). These frequencies differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 2.833, p=.044. Reversely for the head nouns, their log frequencies for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads are more frequent than the log frequencies for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. However, because we used a Latin-square design such that the different nouns rotated through the different conditions, we do not think this affects our results.
In this article, we introduce a software package that applies a corpus-based algorithm to derive semantic representations of words. The algorithm relies on analyses of contextual information extracted from a text corpus—specifically, analyses of word co-occurrences in a large-scale electronic database of text. Here, a target word is represented as the combination of the average of all words preceding the target and all words following it in a text corpus. The semantic representation of the target words can be further processed by a self-organizing map (SOM; Kohonen, Self-organizing maps, 2001), an unsupervised neural network model that provides efficient data extraction and representation. Due to its topography-preserving features, the SOM projects the statistical structure of the context onto a 2-D space, such that words with similar meanings cluster together, forming groups that correspond to lexically meaningful categories. Such a representation system has its applications in a variety of contexts, including computational modeling of language acquisition and processing. In this report, we present specific examples from two languages (English and Chinese) to demonstrate how the method is applied to extract the semantic representations of words.
Text-analytic methods have become increasingly popular in cognitive science for understanding differences in semantic structure between documents. However, such methods have not been widely used in other disciplines. With the aim of disseminating these approaches, we introduce a text-analytic technique (Contrast Analysis of Semantic Similarity, CASS, www.casstools.org), based on the BEAGLE semantic space model (Jones & Mewhort, Psychological Review, 114, 1–37, 2007) and add new features to test between-corpora differences in semantic associations (e.g., the association between democrat and good, compared to democrat and bad). By analyzing television transcripts from cable news from a 12-month period, we reveal significant differences in political bias between television channels (liberal to conservative: MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews) and find expected differences between newscasters (Colmes, Hannity). Compared to existing measures of media bias, our measure has higher reliability. CASS can be used to investigate semantic structure when exploring any topic (e.g., self-esteem or stereotyping) that affords a large text-based database.
Statistical machine translation (SMT) is based on alignment models which learn from bilingual corpora the word correspondences between source and target language. These models are assumed to be capable of learning reorderings. However, the difference in word order between two languages is one of the most important sources of errors in SMT. In this paper, we show that SMT can take advantage of inductive learning in order to solve reordering problems. Given a word alignment, we identify those pairs of consecutive source blocks (sequences of words) whose translation is swapped, i.e. those blocks which, if swapped, generate a correct monotonic translation. Afterwards, we classify these pairs into groups, following recursively a co-occurrence block criterion, in order to infer reorderings. Inside the same group, we allow new internal combination in order to generalize the reorder to unseen pairs of blocks. Then, we identify the pairs of blocks in the source corpora (both training and test) which belong to the same group. We swap them and we use the modified source training corpora to realign and to build the final translation system. We have evaluated our reordering approach both in alignment and translation quality. In addition, we have used two state-of-the-art SMT systems: a Phrased-based and an Ngram-based. Experiments are reported on the EuroParl task, showing improvements almost over 1 point in the standard MT evaluation metrics (mWER and BLEU).
In this article, I undertake a qualitative analysis of third-person direct-object anaphoric reference in a corpus of Brazilian TV evening news programmes. A comparison of my results to previous studies (Bagno 2005, Duarte 1989, Schwenter and Silva 2003) reveals surprising findings in that figures for anaphoric pronouns (both clitics and tonic pronouns), as well as null objects, are extremely low. Instead, lexical NPs and passive constructions are used to establish anaphoric reference. While the use of lexical NPs to establish anaphoric reference has been analysed before, the use of passive constructions for this purpose has not been previously observed. I argue that the described pattern can be explained when taking into account the audiovisual quality of television combined with an audience design (Bell 1984) that aims to underline the seriousness of quality reporting.Neste artigo propomos uma analise qualitativa da referencia anaforica de objeto direto de terceira pessoa com base num corpus constituido...
Every language is a multiple system which includes different forms of linguistic reality. According to one of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) definitions it implies a language aimed at satisfying some professional needs. LSP is the result of communication needs of professionals using the language. Languages for Specific Purposes are codes different from the standard language, which have their rules. Some of the features of LSP include specific vocabulary and certain grammatical and lexical means. Everyday language cannot satisfy all the needs so loan words as well as loan translations are widely accepted. Medical language does not differ form other LSP as its vocabulary is based on certain principles. The aim of this paper is to analyze the standardization of medical terminology based on principles which will serve as a guideline for doctors and linguists in their common attempts to standardize medical language in order to avoid misunderstandings. The corpus is based on scientific, professional and popular articles and the analysis will show to which extent medical language is affected by the norms.
Cross-language plagiarism detection deals with the automatic identification and extraction of plagiarism in a multilingual setting. In this setting, a suspicious document is given, and the task is to retrieve all sections from the document that originate from a large, multilingual document collection. Our contributions in this field are as follows: (1) a comprehensive retrieval process for cross-language plagiarism detection is introduced, highlighting the differences to monolingual plagiarism detection, (2) state-of-the-art solutions for two important subtasks are reviewed, (3) retrieval models for the assessment of cross-language similarity are surveyed, and, (4) the three models CL-CNG, CL-ESA and CL-ASA are compared. Our evaluation is of realistic scale: it relies on 120,000 test documents which are selected from the corpora JRC-Acquis and Wikipedia, so that for each test document highly similar documents are available in all of the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Polish. The models are employed in a series of ranking tasks, and more than 100 million similarities are computed with each model. The results of our evaluation indicate that CL-CNG, despite its simple approach, is the best choice to rank and compare texts across languages if they are syntactically related. CL-ESA almost matches the performance of CL-CNG, but on arbitrary pairs of languages. CL-ASA works best on “exact” translations but does not generalize well.
Nous presentons une architecture pour l’analyse syntaxique en deux etapes. Dans un premier temps un analyseur syntagmatique construit, pour chaque phrase, une liste d’analyses qui sont converties en arbres de dependances. Ces arbres sont ensuite reevalues par un reordonnanceur discriminant. Cette methode permet de prendre en compte des informations auxquelles l’analyseur n’a pas acces, en particulier des annotations fonctionnelles. Nous validons notre approche par une evaluation sur le corpus arbore de Paris 7. La seconde etape permet d’ameliorer significativement la qualite des analyses retournees, quelle que soit la metrique utilisee.
UFAL). Abstract. Annotated corpora such as treebanks are important for the development of parsers, language applications as well as understanding of the language itself. Only very few languages possess these scarce resources. In this paper, we describe our eort in syntactically annotating a small corpora (600 sentences) of Tamil language. Our annotation is similar to Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT 2.0) and consists of 2 levels or layers: (i) morphological layer (m-layer) and (ii) analytical layer (a-layer). For both the layers, we introduce annotation schemes i.e. positional tagging for m-layer and dependency relations (and how dependency structures should be drawn) for a-layers. Finally, we evaluate our corpora in the tagging and parsing task using well known taggers and parsers and discuss some general issues in annotation for Tamil language.
This paper examines the linguistic representation of male and female. Comparing German and English, this paper argues that, despite the grammatically gendered nature of German, both languages equally privilege the male element at the expense of the female. Referencing a variety of studies, this paper explores the use—in both languages—of the “generic he,” investigating how this custom is perceived by listeners; it examines marked terms, particularly the apparent need to mark female appearance in male-dominated professional spheres; it considers female visibility in language and the differing approaches taken by both English and German; and it explores feminine derivation and the semantic sexualization/degradation of the female form to male counterparts. Derivation from masculine norms as well as lexical and connotative gender are briefl y discussed. Finally, the paper looks at each language’s strategies for correction.
Pragmatic markers are an important part of the grammar of conversation and not simply markers of disfluency. They have a number of functions that help the speaker to organise the conversation and to express feelings and attitudes. Advanced EFL learners use frequent pragmatic markers such as well. However their use of well diverges from the native speaker norm. The present study uses data from the Swedish component of the LINDSEI corpus and its native speaker counterpart (LOCNEC) to examine similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers. The overall picture is that Swedish learners overuse well, although there are considerable individual differences. Thus learners use well above all as a fluency device to cope with speech management problems but underuse it for attitudinal purposes. Pragmatic markers cannot be taught in the same way as other lexical items but it is important to discuss how and where they are used.
Research in automatic text plagiarism detection focuses on algorithms that compare suspicious documents against a collection of reference documents. Recent approaches perform well in identifying copied or modified foreign sections, but they assume a closed world where a reference collection is given. This article investigates the question whether plagiarism can be detected by a computer program if no reference can be provided, e.g., if the foreign sections stem from a book that is not available in digital form. We call this problem class intrinsic plagiarism analysis; it is closely related to the problem of authorship verification. Our contributions are threefold. (1) We organize the algorithmic building blocks for intrinsic plagiarism analysis and authorship verification and survey the state of the art. (2) We show how the meta learning approach of Koppel and Schler, termed “unmasking”, can be employed to post-process unreliable stylometric analysis results. (3) We operationalize and evaluate an analysis chain that combines document chunking, style model computation, one-class classification, and meta learning.
This article focuses on tracheotomy, which is transformation of language, norms and speech. The article examines the philosophical problem of the transformation of language info speech, the latter is single unbroken wholeness. Norms are previously divided into d ialect and literal. Each of them is in turn d ivided into phonetic, lexical, orthographical, spelling, morphological, syntactic variety. For the disclosure of the issue there are different in terms of foreign and domestic linguistic differentiation with respect to language the language and speech rate. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the norm in-depth by the well-known Uzbek linguists.
Tant dans le domaine de la psychologie que dans celui du traitement automatique des langues, les normes portant sur des proprietes semantiques, comme le caractere concret ou abstrait, la polarite ou le caractere emotionnel, constituent des ressources importantes. La construction manuelle de ces normes, par l’intermediaire d’evaluateurs, est couteuse, d’ou l’interet de developper des methodes de construction ou d’extension automatique. Plusieurs methodes ont ete proposees, mais elles portent sur une seule dimension: la polarite. Nous proposons de voir dans quelle mesure l’une d’entre elles peut etre etendue a six autres normes, et ce pour le francais et l’espagnol. Les experimentations confirment l’efficacite de la technique non seulement pour etendre une norme, mais egalement pour mettre en evidence des mots pour lesquels les valeurs attribuees par les evaluateurs sont sujettes a caution.
The paper addresses the core problems of foreign students' communicative competence and justifies the «language culture» course as mean to build the required skills; the paper also proposes methodology of teaching those skills in the lexical norms study.
We measured perceived depth from the optic flow (a) when showing a stationary physical or virtual object to observers who moved their head at a normal or slower speed, and (b) when simulating the same optic flow on a computer and presenting it to stationary observers. Our results show that perceived surface slant is systematically distorted, for both the active and the passive viewing of physical or virtual surfaces. These distortions are modulated by head translation speed, with perceived slant increasing directly with the local velocity gradient of the optic flow. This empirical result allows us to determine the relative merits of two alternative approaches aimed at explaining perceived surface slant in active vision: an ''inverse optics'' model that takes head motion information into account, and a probabilistic model that ignores extra-retinal signals. We compare these two approaches within the framework of the Bayesian theory. The ''inverse optics'' Bayesian model produces veridi)
Despite tremendous advances in artificial language synthesis, no machine has so far succeeded in deceiving a human. Most research focused on analyzing the behavior of "good" machine. We here choose an opposite strategy, by analyzing the behavior of "bad" humans, i.e., humans perceived as machine. The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence features humans and artificial agents trying to convince judges on their humanness via computer-mediated communication. Using this setting as a model, we investigated here whether the linguistic behavior of human subjects perceived as non-human would enable us to identify some of the core parameters involved in the judgment of an agents' humanness. We analyzed descriptive and semantic aspects of dialogues in which subjects succeeded or failed to convince judges of their humanness. Using cognitive and emotional dimensions in a global behavioral characterization, we demonstrate important differences in the patterns of behavioral expressiveness of the)
It has been shown that the human genome contains extensive copy number variations (CNVs). Investigating the medical and evolutionary impacts of CNVs requires the knowledge of locations, sizes and frequency distribution of them within and between populations. However, CNV study of Chinese minorities, which harbor the majority of genetic diversity of Chinese populations, has been underrepresented considering the same efforts in other populations. Here we constructed, to our knowledge, a first CNV map in seven Chinese populations representing the major linguistic groups in China with 1,440 CNV regions identified using Affymetrix SNP 6.0 Array. Considerable differences in distributions of CNV regions between populations and substantial population structures were observed. We showed that ∼35% of CNV regions identified in minority ethnic groups are not shared by Han Chinese population, indicating that the contribution of the minorities to genetic architecture of Chinese population could not)
The paper addresses the core problems at building the communication competencies of foreign student and justifies the language culture course as mean to build the required skills, the paper also proposes methodology of teaching those skills in the lexical norms study.
Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for understanding the relative roles of proficiency and order of acquisition in determining how the brain represents language. In a previous study, we combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of word processing in a group of Spanish- English bilinguals who were more proficient in their native language. We found that from the earliest stages of lexical processing, words in the second language evoke greater activity in bilateral posterior visual regions, while activity to the native language is largely confined to classical left hemisphere fronto-temporal areas. In the present study, we sought to examine whether these effects relate to language proficiency or order of language acquisition by testing Spanish-English bilingual subjects who had become dominant in their second language. Additionally, we wanted to determine whether activity in bilateral visual regions was relat)
State of the art Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems require large sense-tagged corpora along with lexical databases to reach satisfactory results. The number of English language resources for developed WSD increased in the past years, while most other languages are still under-resourced. The situation is no different for Dutch. In order to overcome this data bottleneck, the DutchSemCor project will deliver a Dutch corpus that is sense-tagged with senses from the Cornetto lexical database. Part of this \ncorpus (circa 300K examples) is manually tagged. The remainder is automatically tagged using different WSD systems and validated by human annotators. The project uses existing corpora compiled in other projects; these are extended with Internet \nexamples for word senses that are less frequent and do not (sufficiently) appear in the corpora. We report on the status of the project and the evaluations of the WSD systems with the current training data.
In today’s digital multilingual world, language technology is crucial for providing access to information and opportunities for economic development. With approximately two thousand different languages, Africa is a multilingual continent par excellence, presenting acute challenges for those seeking to promote and use African languages in the areas of business development, education and relief aid. In recent times a number of researchers and institutions, both from Africa and elsewhere, have come forward to share the common goal of developing capabilities in language technology for African languages. In 2009 and 2010, the first two workshops on African Language Technology were organized (De Pauw et al. 2009, 2010a) as a forum to bring together a wide range of researchers working in this domain.
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a statistical technique for representing word meaning that has been widely used for making semantic similarity judgments between words, sentences, and documents. In order to perform an LSA analysis, an LSA space is created in a two-stage procedure, involving the construction of a word frequency matrix and the dimensionality reduction of that matrix through singular value decomposition (SVD). This article presents LANSE, an SVD algorithm specifically designed for LSA, which allows extremely large matrices to be processed using off-the-shelf computer hardware.
Background The importance and protective nature of children's early communication capacities, from birth to preschool years, in relation to later academic and social functioning is well established in the literature. Studies have shown links between early language competence (from birth to preschool) and later language, literacy, behavioural and social outcomes 1-3 as well as language, literacy and numeracy being shown to serve as key protective factors for positive life outcomes.4 The term ‘communication’ includes speech (the physical production of sounds), language (understanding and expression of spoken and written language, from sounds to words to sentences, to discourse), pragmatics (the social use of language in interactions), fluency (the smooth rhythm and pattern of talking) and voice (the production of sound through the vocal cords). 5, 6 Prelinguistic and early language development are the areas of communication that are of primary interest in this systematic review because they are the predominant aspects of communication that studies measure, when investigating the impact of parent responsiveness on children's communication development. Prelinguistic communication skills are the foundation skills that facilitate infants' communication competence.7-10 The prelinguistic period is typically from 0-12 months and skills include early vocal behaviours such as cooing and babbling,5 symbolic and functional play,(cited in 7) attention,11, 12 gestures such as facial expression,13 eye contact, turn taking, copying9 and phonetic (speech) perception.10 Language development encompasses the sub-components of sound and sound patterns (phonological development), words (lexical development), sentences and grammar (syntactic and morphological development) and the development of communicative competence, incorporating pragmatic skills (language use in a social context).5 Communication development starts from the prelinguistic period and is influenced by environmental factors including parental (particularly maternal) responsiveness and directiveness. Responsiveness refers to adults' ‘prompt, contingent, and appropriate’ (cited in 14 pp64) responses to a child's behaviours. This definition underpins the various aspects or descriptions of responsiveness that have been researched in relation to children's communicative development, for example: maternal encouragement,15 supportive parenting, 16 interpersonal timing, 17 and maternal behavioural and verbal responsiveness.14 Masur and colleagues14 also discuss the importance of considering directiveness (as well as responsiveness) when investigating the impact of parent speech and behaviour on children's communication development. Directiveness is described as being ‘characterised by attempts to command and control children's behaviour or attention’ 14(pp64) and may be supportive or intrusive in nature. Research has shown predictive relationships between parental responsiveness and directiveness and children's language development.14,16,18,19 Enhancing parent responsiveness to children's early communication can have positive effects on child development, social development, self esteem, the attachment relationship between parent and child literacy outcomes. 20-23 Hence, parents, as the primary caregivers, are in a powerful position to influence their child's communication development, and subsequent academic and social success, through the way they respond to their children from birth. The importance of this systematic review This systematic review aims to support and direct evidenced based practice and health promotion in speech pathology and related fields that work with parents and infants or children. To the reviewer's awareness, no systematic reviews on the relationship between parent responsiveness and children's communication development have been developed to date. Systematic reviews can play a role in the education of health professionals and lay people.24 A systematic review on the relationship between parental responsiveness and children's communication development could support health professionals and policy makers in easily accessing synthesised information on this topic. Prevalence data on speech-language difficulties in 2 to 4 ½ year olds has been reported as 5-8%. (cited in 25 & 26) Whilst this percentage is not categorized into causal factors, it is plausible, based on the research on parental responsiveness, that a proportion of these children have speech-language difficulties due to a reduced level of parental responsiveness in their early learning environment. Despite the established evidence regarding the importance of maternal responsiveness on children's early communication development, which in turn, influences later life outcomes, it is the reviewer's opinion that this information is not widely promoted in the general community to serve as a preventative measure. Using Gordon's operational classification of disease prevention, a universal or selective preventative measure would include public education as ‘an essential aspect of the strategy for optimal public health practice’. 27 (pp108) According to Gordon a universal preventative measure is desirable for everybody in the general population (i.e. all parents of infants or expectant parents), while a selective preventative measure is aimed at subgroups of the population who are considered to have characteristics that place them ‘at risk’ (i.e. parents who are at risk of being less responsive to their infants). This systematic review could encourage the focus of universal or selective health promotion and policy development on educating society about the benefits and importance of parent responsiveness in relation to child development outcomes. Health promotion and early parent education on the parent's role in children's early communication development could potentially reduce the number of preschool and school-age children with speech-language difficulties, hence reducing the economic, social and individual costs of this issue. This comprehensive systematic review will incorporate both quantitative and textual components. A preliminary search of the literature has found that studies on parental responsiveness and children's communication development are quantitative by nature. The textual component of this review will set the context of current thinking and action in society in relation to the quantitative component. The textual component is important because it will investigate whether the research is being put into action, or at least has a profile in society. The textual component may help to clarify the direction, if any that government needs to take regarding public education on this topic. A qualitative component of this systematic review is not included because a preliminary search did not identify any qualitative papers, and a qualitative approach is not required to answer the research question presented. Review question/objective The quantitative objective of this review is to determine the best available evidence on the relationship between parents' responsiveness to children's prelinguistic and early communication and their subsequent communication development. More specifically, the questions are: What are the attributes of parental responsiveness? That is: To delimit the attributes of parents' verbal and behavioural responsiveness and directiveness that influences children's preverbal and early communicative development. Do some attributes of parent responsiveness have more consequence to children's early communication development than others? Is the amount or frequency of parent responsiveness important? That is: Do varying levels of parent responsiveness impact differently on children's communication development? Are there parental factors (e.g. education level) within the well population that predict or influence responsiveness quality and quantity? If so, what are they? The textual objective is to identify the current social context within Australia, regarding the topic of parental responsiveness and children's communication development. More specifically, the questions are: Does current government policy on child development reflect the research evidence identified in the quantitative component of this systematic review? What is society's current awareness and standing (perception) on this topic, as identified through policy, expert and public opinion? Are there preventative universal or selective health promotion measures in place relating to the review question? If the answer to question 3 is ‘yes’, then what are they? Inclusion criteria Types of participants The quantitative component of this review will consider studies that include parents as the primary independent variable and children as the secondary, dependent variable. More specifically, the review will include studies with: 1. Parents Because a main goal of this review is to support public education for universal or selective health promotion, parents who are identified as falling within the well or at risk, but not clinically significant population will be included. Well parents refer to the general public who are not affected by current suffering. 27At risk parents may include parents whose social circumstances place them at risk of being less responsive to their children. For example, parents of low education or intellectual capacity, or of certain age. At risk parents will be included in this review because they have characteristics that place them in a position for selective preventive health promotion 27 and could provide insight into the outcomes of varying levels of parent responsiveness to children. The term clinically significant refers to parents who have clinical diagnoses that impact on their capacity to respond to their children. For example, hearing impairment, and mental illnesses such as psychoses, schizophrenia, clinical or post-natal depression. These parents are excluded from the review because they present compounding factors that are beyond the scope of this review. 2. Children Children who's language level is preverbal (i.e. prelinguistic period) up to production of early phrases (E.g.: two-word utterances) will be included in this systematic review. Based on child development norms, these ages would typically include 0 - 3 year olds, however, studies that have older cohorts will also be included, providing the earlier years are also represented within the study. Children who are typically developing, or defined as a ‘late talker’ or as having a specific speech/language issue will be included in this systematic review because these studies may reveal important information about parent responsiveness as a causal or influencing factor. Studies may or may not have control groups. Studies will not be considered for this review when children are identified as having any primary co-morbid condition such as syndromes, global developmental delays or disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder, or hearing issue including hearing impairment and cochlear implant because this introduces too many confounding factors. Studies on bilingual children will not be included for the same reason. Consideration will be made as whether to include children who spend care time with a carer other than their primary parent/caregiver, for example, childcare. The amount of time spent in the care of persons/institutions other than their parents is important to consider because the review is examining the relationship between the parent's impact on the child through their responsiveness attributes and levels. It is beyond the scope of the review to consider the language development of children independent of their parent's responsiveness. The reviewer will examine the literature to determine the cut off point for time spent in childcare. Where this is not clear, the reviewer will contact the authors of the studies for this specific information. The textual component of this review will consider discourse and opinion reported or published by government agencies, experts, the public and media, about the systematic review question, that is of direct relevance or interest to Australia. Types of intervention(s) The quantitative component of the review will consider any studies that evaluate parent verbal and behavioural responsiveness and directiveness to their children's preverbal and or early linguistic communication. Studies may investigate parent responsiveness and or directiveness in the context of a home or clinical/education environment. The reviewer will take the environment (e.g. home, laboratory, community settings) in which studies gather their data into consideration throughout the review process. The textual component of this review will consider published and unpublished papers that describe society's and government's current attitudes and opinions regarding the topic of parental responsiveness to infant and early communication. Types of outcomes The quantitative component of this review will consider studies that include outcome measures of child prelinguistic and early language development. This includes, but is not limited to, measures of language milestones such as comprehension of first words, speech sound perception, babbling, first word production, first 50 words and first 2-word utterance. The process of the systematic review may reveal other important prelinguistic or early language outcomes, which may be considered for inclusion depending on the validity, reliability and standardisation of the tools used to obtain the data. The preferred type of assessment tools used to retrieve data about child language outcomes will be standardised language/communication assessments. However, parent reports and non-standardised assessments will also be considered for inclusion. The textual component of this review will consider discourse and opinion about the topic of parental responsiveness and children's communication development, as reported in textual or policy papers. The outcome will be the main themes and concepts identified through expert and society opinions, and government policy, in relation to the review question. Types of studies The quantitative component of the review will consider analytical epidemiological study designs including prospective and retrospective cohort studies, case control studies and analytical cross sectional studies for inclusion. Randomised control trials of parent responsiveness are not ethically possible, therefore will not be included in this review. Case series studies have not been identified in preliminary search of the topic, therefore will not be included in this review. The textual component will consider expert opinion, discussion papers, position papers, government policies and reports, conference papers, theses and dissertations, and other text relating to child development/health promotion/early education within the context and parameters of the review question. Discourse must be written in English and be of western culture. Discourse from Australia is of primary interest. Discourse from other countries that constitute western society (i.e.: the Americas, New Zealand and Western Europe)28 will only be included where it has been shown to be of interest to Australia. For example, an Australian expert has commented on a paper from another Western country. Search strategy The search strategy aims to find both published and unpublished studies. A three-step search strategy will be utilised for each component of this review. An initial limited search of PubMed and CINAHL will be undertaken followed by analysis of the text words contained in the title and abstract, and of the index terms used to describe article. A second search using all identified keywords and index terms will then be undertaken across all included databases. Where necessary, terms and indexing language will be adjusted to search the other databases listed. This process will be done in close consultation with the Research Librarian for Mental Health, Psychiatry, Psychology, University of Adelaide. Thirdly, the reference list of all identified reports and articles will be searched for additional studies. Studies published in English will be considered for inclusion in this review. As there are no other identified systematic reviews on this topic, any quantitative studies within an unlimited timeframe will be considered for inclusion in this review, in order to increase the breadth of the results and so not to miss any pertinent earlier studies. To keep textual information of current opinion and policy relevant and up to date, the timeframe will be the past 10 years (2002 - 2012). The databases to be searched include: PubMed PsycINFO CINAHL Embase Scopus Web of Science Mednar Proquest Dissertations and Theses Index to Theses Australian Digital Theses Program The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLDT) Keywords and concepts to be used for the initial search of PubMed and CINAHL will include:Table: No Caption available.The search for textual information will also include relevant websites in the English language, related to child development, literacy, parent-infant attachment, government policy on early childhood development and education, and media releases relating to the review question. An initial search to identify a comprehensive list of relevant websites for grey literature will be done through the Google search engine using initial key words seen above and additional keywords including: Government policy Early childhood Parent education Parent training Infant mental health Expert opinion(s) Individual countries (eg Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America, United Kingdom) Examples of potential grey literature sites include: Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Council of Australian Governments The Hanen Centre. Speech and Language Development for Children Assessment of methodological quality Quantitative papers selected for retrieval will be assessed by two independent reviewers for methodological validity prior to inclusion in the review using standardised critical appraisal instruments from the Joanna Briggs Institute Meta Analysis of Statistics Assessment and Review Instrument (JBI-MAStARI) (Appendix I). Textual papers selected for retrieval will be assessed by two independent reviewers for authenticity prior to inclusion in the review using standardised critical appraisal instruments from the Joanna Briggs Institute Narrative, Opinion and Text Assessment and Review Instrument (JBI-NOTARI) (Appendix I). Any disagreements that arise between the reviewers will be resolved through discussion, or with a third reviewer. Data collection Quantitative data will be extracted from papers included in the review using the standardised data extraction tool from JBI-MAStARI (Appendix II). Textual data will be extracted from papers included in the review using the standardised data extraction tool from JBI-NOTARI (Appendix II). The data extracted will include specific details about the interventions, populations, study methods and outcomes of significance to the review question and specific objectives. Data synthesis Quantitative papers will, where possible, be pooled in statistical meta-analysis using JBI-MAStARI. All results will be subject to double data entry. Effect sizes expressed as relative risk for cohort studies and odds ratio for case control studies (for categorical data) and weighted mean differences (for continuous data) and their 95% confidence intervals will be calculated for analysis. A Random effects model will be used and heterogeneity will be assessed statistically using the standard Chi-square. Where statistical pooling is not possible the findings will be presented in narrative form including tables and figures to aid in data presentation where appropriate. Textual papers will, where possible be pooled using JBI-NOTARI. This will involve the aggregation or synthesis of conclusions to generate a set of statements that represent that aggregation, through assembling and categorising these conclusions on the basis of similarity in meaning. These categories are then subjected to a meta-synthesis in order to produce a single comprehensive set of synthesised findings that can be used as a basis for evidence-based practice. Where textual pooling is not possible the conclusions will be presented in narrative form. Conflicts of interest The primary reviewer is not aware of any conflicts of interest at the time of submitting the systematic review protocol. Acknowledgements The primary reviewer would like to acknowledge the support of the secondary reviewer, Matthew Kowald; her principal supervisor, Dr Aye Aye Gyi from the Joanna Briggs Institute, University of Adelaide; her associate supervisor, Dr Debbie James from Research and Evaluation Unit, Children, Youth and Women's Health Service, and Maureen Bell, Research Librarian for Mental Health, Psychiatry, Psychology, University of Adelaide. As this systematic review forms partial submission for the award of Masters of Clinical Sciences degree, a secondary reviewer will be used for critical appraisal only.
Measuring talkativeness is of interest to several areas of research. However, there are few brief, validated measures available. We examined test-retest reliability, inter-relationships and convergent/divergent validity for five brief measures of verbal productivity. Nineteen men and 32 women participated in four sessions, completing five speech tasks that varied in demand, purpose of speech and sociability. Several potential metrics (word count, duration and rate) were examined. All tasks except a novel Unprompted Speech task demonstrated good word count test-retest reliability (interclass correlation coefficients from .71 to .85). Factor analysis revealed low-demand, non-functional tasks formed one factor (“Voluntary Talkativeness”), while higher demand tasks formed a second factor (“Speech Ability”). This finding and examination of relationships with IQ, personality and gender indicate “Voluntary Talkativeness” is not wholly accounted for by verbal ability, and is only weakly related to self-reported personality. Recommendations for the measurement of “Voluntary Talkativeness” are made.
We analyze and extend a recently proposed model of linguistic diffusion in social networks, to analytically derive time to convergence, and to account for the innovation phase of lexical dynamics in networks. Our new model, the degree-biased voter model with innovation, shows that the probability of existence of a norm is inversely related to innovation probability. When the innovation rate in the population is low, variants that become norms are due to a peripheral member with high probability. As the innovation rate increases, the fraction of time that the norm is a peripheral-introduced variant and the total time for which a norm exists at all in the population decrease. These results align with historical observations of rapid increase and generalization of slang words, technical terms, and new common expressions at times of cultural change in some languages.
Exogenous neurotrophin delivery to the deaf cochlea can prevent deafness-induced auditory neuron degeneration, however, we have previously reported that these survival effects are rapidly lost if the treatment stops. In addition, there are concerns that current experimental techniques are not safe enough to be used clinically. Therefore, for such treatments to be clinically transferable, methods of neurotrophin treatment that are safe, biocompatible and can support long-term auditory neuron survival are necessary. Cell transplantation and gene transfer, combined with encapsulation technologies, have the potential to address these issues. This study investigated the survival-promoting effects of encapsulated BDNF over-expressing Schwann cells on auditory neurons in the deaf guinea pig. In comparison to control (empty) capsules, there was significantly greater auditory neuron survival following the cell-based BDNF treatment. Concurrent use of a cochlear implant is expected to result in )
Autori istrauju otvorena pitanja leksikoga normiranja u hrvatskoj maritimolokoj leksikografiji.S jedne strane,
Plagiarism has always been a concern in many sectors, particularly in education. With the sharp rise in the number of electronic resources available online, an increasing number of plagiarism cases has been observed in recent years. As the amount of source materials is vast, the use of plagiarism detection tools has become the norm to aid the investigation of possible plagiarism cases. This paper describes an approach to improve plagiarism detection by incorporating a lexical generalisation technique. The goal is to identify plagiarised texts even if they are paraphrased using different words. Experiments performed on a subset of the PAN‟10 corpus show that the matching approach involving lexical generalisation yields promising results, as compared to standard n-gram matching strategies. 1
1 IntroductionThis paper deals with contrastive analysis of computer terms in Slovenian and Serbian language. Problematic aspects of computer jargon in two similar and related languages are considered in context of cultural and linguistic differences noticed during translation from Slovenian to Serbian. The analytic framework is grounded in concrete translator's challenges of some lexical issues in translation process. As George Steiner claims that ordinary language, literally at every moment, mutates in many forms: words enter as old words lapse. Grammatical conventions are changed under pressure of idiomatic use or by cultural ordinance. (Steiner 1998:19)When we are translating a text into another language we are confronted with cultural differences and, for translator, translating professional texts represents a big challenge. He has to be a mediator from professional idiom in one language to professional idiom in other languages. In era of rapidly changing computer technology, spreading new ways of global communication and developing of social networks, we are surrounded by computers and we use some of computer terms in our everyday lives. But, different cultures have different language politics and they relate differently to translating of terms taken from English as modern-day global language. As has been stated, all speech communities have experienced need to modernize and keep abreast of developments in science, technology, etc. (Winford 2007:37), and the spread of English loanwords into many languages across globe may fill gaps in lexicon (Winford 2007:38), but this massive lexical borrowing caused by innovation in field of computer science and technology may be regulated. Lexical borrowing is determined by norms, network structures and language ideology of community: Loyalty to one's native language and pride in its autonomy may encourage resistance to any foreign incursions (Winford 2007:41).Lexical borrowing into lexicon can have consequences on phonology, morphology or on lexicon itself. New lexical fields in recipient language may be created by using computeresse (Winford 2007:58).We attend to show correlation between language politic and accepting of English IT terms. There are two opposite attitudes about this kind of lexical borrowing in professional language: a) usage of Anglicisms is recommended because of globalisation; they provide understanding between experts from different countries; English terms in computer jargon have same purpose as Latin terms in field of medicine and natural science at all; b) translation, or at least adaptation, of these terms is necessary, they become a part of lexical system of recipient language and its standardisation is strongly recommended. We will show which of these attitudes is more common among users of computer jargon.2 Material and methodsThe research is carried out on basis of data excerpted during translation of graduate work Odnos studentov do zasebnosti na spletni skupnosti Facebook and term paper Etika in internet: oglasevanje na internetu, both published on Internet page of Faculty of Economy, University of Ljubljana, and supplemented by examples collected from internet dictionaries of computer terms (http://www.islovar.org, http://sverapoj.nedohodnik.net/gloss/, http://www.mikroknjiga.rs/pub/rmk/index.php). Islovar is project of Linguistic Section of Slovenian Society INFORMATIKA, established in year 2000, with purpose of increasing concern for professional language, equalizing IT terms and recruiting experts and common people for its modelling, through free interactive use and interactive development of dictionary. This internet dictionary has a large repertoire of computer terms and number of entries is constantly growing. …
The objective of this study was to analyze and describe the aspects that connote the representation of the influenza A in a sample of children and adolescents of elementary an high school of the metropolitan area of Mexico, through a drawing and questionnaire item.386 subjects participated (X age= 11.72; D.S 2) 180 men and 206 women. The methodology adopted was predominantly qualitative. The analysis of the drawings were made by two independent investigators (98% agree).The analysis of responses was carried out with the ALCESTE program (Reinet 1986). We found 4 universe lexical called: Illness serious /attitude of the NO; Illness dangerous-mortal/proactive recommendation; specific infection and treatment. The Influenza perception is evidenced as a social and human experience, involving the person and his environment, and reflects the cultural knowledge, values and norms of their group.
This paper deals with the ways in which minority students in the Danish public school system bring mono-lingually based norms into their poly-lingual peer group interaction. In sequential micro-analyses of interaction we show how the students use the voice of an authority in their reproduction and negotiation of linguistic norms. We base our analyses on the Bakhtinian concept of double-voicing, the Goffmanian concept of keying and Tholander's concept of subteaching. We discuss in detail the relation between the local practices of the students and the linguistic norms expressed in broader society, for instance in newspaper editorials and government papers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. \n \tOverall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. \n \tOverall, 58% of the content words, 39% of the basic vocabulary, and 50% of the subject pronouns in the Salcedo corpus were derived from Spanish. When compared to Muysken’s description of highlander Quichua in the 1970’s, Spanish loanwords have more than doubled in each category. The overall level of Spanish loanwords in Salcedo Quichua has grown to a level between highlander Quichua in the 1970’s and Media Lengua. Similar to Spanish’s lexical influence in Media Lengua, the increase of Spanish borrowings in today’s rural Quichua can be seen in non-basic and basic vocabularies as well as the subject pronoun system. Significantly, most of the growth has occurred through forms of adlexification i.e., doublets, well-established borrowings, and cultural borrowings, suggesting that ‘ordinary’ lexical borrowing is also capable of producing Media Lengua-type sentences. \n \tI approach the second objective by investigating two separate phenomena related to structural convergence. The first examines the complex verbal constructions that have developed in Quichua through Spanish loan translations while the second describes the type of Quichua particles that are attached to Spanish lexemes while speaking Spanish. The calquing of the complex verbal constructions from Spanish were employed when speaking standard Quichua. Since this standard form is typically used by language purists, I argue that their use of calques is a strategy of exploiting the full range of expression from Spanish without incorporating any of the Spanish lexemes which would give the appearance of ‘contamination’. The use of Quichua particles in local varieties of Spanish is a defining characteristic of Quichuacized Spanish, spoken most frequently by women and young children in the community. Although the use of Quichua particles was probably not the main catalyst engendering Media Lengua, I argue that its contribution as a source language to other ‘mixed’ varieties, such as Media Lengua, needs to be accounted for in descriptions of BML genesis. Contrary to Muysken’s representation of relatively ‘unmixed’ Spanish and Quichua as the two source languages of Media Lengua, I propose that local varieties of Spanish might have already been ‘mixed’ to a large degree before Media Lengua was created. \n \tThe third objective attempts to draw a relationship between particular social variables and the use of Spanish loanwords. Whisker Boxplots and ANOVAs were used to determine which social group, if any, have been introducing new Spanish borrowings into the bilingual communities in Salcedo. Specifically, I controlled for age, education, native language, urban migration, and gender. The results indicate that none of the groups in each of the five social variables indicate higher or lower loanword use. The implication of these results are twofold: (a) when lexical borrowing occurs, it is immediately adopted as the community-wide norm and spoken by members from different backgrounds and generations, or (b) this level of Spanish borrowing (58%) is not a recent phenomenon. \n \tThe fourth and final objective draws on my ethnographic research that addresses the attitudes of syncretic language use. I observed that Quichuacized Spanish and Hispanicized Quichua are highly stigmatized varieties spoken by the country’s most marginalized populations and families, yet within the community, syncretic ways of speaking are in fact the norm. It was shown that there exists a range of different linguistic definitions for ‘Chaupi Lengua’ and other syncretic language practices as well as many contrasting connotations, most of which were negative. One theme that emerged from the interviews was that speaking syncretic varieties of Quichua weakened the consultant’s claim to an indigenous identity. \n \tThe linguistic and social data presented in this dissertation supports an alternative view to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis, one that has the advantage of operating with well-precedented linguistic processes and which is actually observable in the present-day Salcedo area. The results from the study on lexical borrowing are significant because they demonstrate how a dynamic bilingual speech community has gradually diversified their Quichua lexicon under intense pressure to shift toward Spanish. They also show that Hispanicized Quichua (Quichua with heavy lexical borrowing) clearly arose from adlexification and prolonged lexical borrowing, and is one of at least six identifiable speech styles found in Salcedo. These results challenge particular interpretations of language contact outcomes, such as, ones that depict sources languages as discrete and ‘unmixed.’ The bilingual continuum presented in this thesis shows on the one hand, the range of speech styles that are accessible to different speakers, and on the other hand, the overlapping, syncretic features that are shared among the different registers and language varieties. It was observed that syncretic speech styles in Salcedo are employed by different consultants in varied interactional contexts, and in turn, produce different evaluations by other fellow community members. \n \tIn the current dissertation, I challenge the claim that relexification and Media Lengua-type sentences develop in isolation and without the influence of other bilingual phenomena. Based on Muysken's Media Lengua example sentences and the speech styles from the Salcedo corpus, I argue that Media Lengua may have arisen as an institutionalized variant of the highly mixed "middle ground" within the range of the Salcedo bilingual continuum discussed above. Such syncretic forms of Spanish and Quichua strongly resemble Media Lengua sentences in Muysken’s research, and therefore demonstrate how its development could have occurred through several different language contact processes and not only through relexification.
In contrast to quantity processing, up to date, the nature of ordinality has received little attention from researchers despite the fact that both quantity and ordinality are embodied in numerical information. Here we ask if there are two separate core systems that lie at the foundations of numerical cognition: (1) the traditionally and well accepted numerical magnitude system but also (2) core system for representing ordinal information. We report two novel experiments of ordinal processing that explored the relation between ordinal and numerical information processing in typically developing adults and adults with developmental dyscalculia (DD). Participants made "ordered" or "non-ordered" judgments about 3 groups of dots (non-symbolic numerical stimuli; in Experiment 1) and 3 numbers (symbolic task: Experiment 2). In contrast to previous findings and arguments about quantity deficit in DD participants, when quantity and ordinality are dissociated (as in the current tasks), DD parti)
Reviews the book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution by Dennis Baron (2009). This book addresses the impact of digital technologies on reading and writing practices by contextualizing these developments within the communication technologies that have preceded them. Though computers are often blamed for a perceived deterioration of culture and language, Baron notes that scorn and mistrust of communication technologies is not a new phenomenon; in fact, writing, the printing press, and the telegraph were all greeted at first with skepticism. And despite the pervasive anxiety that 'internet speech' is resulting in the destruction of grammar and spelling, Baron observes that online communities enforce their own linguistic norms. Rather than a linguistic free-for-all, Baron argues, 'spelling counts' in virtual spaces just as it does offline. In sum, Baron accounts for both the benefits and pitfalls of the digital revolution and analyzes it as merely another set of technological innovations, usefully situating them within a history of writing technologies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)