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16504 papers
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and \nLinguistic Theories. \nEditors: Koenraad De Smedt, Jan Hajič and Sandra Kübler. \nNEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 1 (2007), 163-174. \n© 2007 The editors and contributors. \nPublished by \nNorthern European Association for Language \nTechnology (NEALT) \nhttp://omilia.uio.no/nealt. \nElectronically published at \nTartu University Library (Estonia) \nhttp://hdl.handle.net/10062/4476.
The authors examined the relationship of hostility with (a) affective ratings of pictures and (b) state affects evoked by task-induced stress in 95 healthy men and women 22-37 years of age. Pictures were from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; P. J. Lang, M. M. Bradley, & B. N. Cuthbert, 1999). Stressors included a startle task, mental arithmetic task, and choice-deadline reaction time task. The circumplex model of affect was used to structure the self-reported state affects. The authors found that hostility was associated with displeasure, high arousal, and low dominance ratings of IAPS pictures. Hostility was related to unpleasant affect and unactivated unpleasant affect during the experiment, and subscale paranoia was related to activated unpleasant affect. Findings suggest that participants scoring high on hostility are prone to negative emotional reactions.
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Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and \nLinguistic Theories. \nEditors: Koenraad De Smedt, Jan Hajič and Sandra Kübler. \nNEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 1 (2007), 1-6. \n© 2007 The editors and contributors. \nPublished by \nNorthern European Association for Language \nTechnology (NEALT) \nhttp://omilia.uio.no/nealt. \nElectronically published at \nTartu University Library (Estonia) \nhttp://hdl.handle.net/10062/4476.
We present the Modified French Treebank (MFT), a completely revamped French Treebank, derived from the Paris 7 Tree-bank (P7T), which is cleaner, more co-herent, has several transformed structures, and introduces new linguistic analyses. To determine the effect of these changes, we investigate how theMFT fares in statistical parsing. Probabilistic parsers trained on the MFT training set (currently 3800 trees) already perform better than their counter-parts trained on five times the P7T data (18,548 trees), providing an extreme ex-ample of the importance of data quality over quantity in statistical parsing. More-over, regression analysis on the learning curve of parsers trained on the MFT lead to the prediction that parsers trained on the full projected 18,548 tree MFT training set will far outscore their counterparts trained on the full P7T. These analyses also show how problematic data can lead to problem-atic conclusions–in particular, we find that lexicalisation in the probabilistic parsing of French is probably not as crucial as was once thought (Arun and Keller (2005)).
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and \nLinguistic Theories. \nEditors: Koenraad De Smedt, Jan Hajič and Sandra Kübler. \nNEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 1 (2007), 189-200. \n© 2007 The editors and contributors. \nPublished by \nNorthern European Association for Language \nTechnology (NEALT) \nhttp://omilia.uio.no/nealt. \nElectronically published at \nTartu University Library (Estonia) \nhttp://hdl.handle.net/10062/4476.
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The Referentiebestand Nederlands (RBN) is a lexical database for the Dutch language. Although its main objective is to function as a lexical resource for the production of bilingual dictionaries with Dutch as either source or target language, the RBN is designed as a multi-purpose lexical database. As such, the RBN is successfully used for the production of bilingual dictionaries as well as in the domain of language technology. Being a multi-purpose lexical database the RBN has a flexible structure and it contains more information about the entries than is strictly needed for the production of bilingual dictionaries. In this paper we describe the lexical information in the database and some of the principles and choices underlying its design. We will discuss some aspects of the macrostructure and we will elaborate on the microstructure by describing the lexical information about nouns and verbs. Special attention will be given to some of the characteristic properties of the RBN: the handling (of polysemy by using meaning shifts, the minute description of complementation patterns for verbs and the description of the many examples of combinations, like idioms and collocations.
This paper presents a method to automatically acquire wide-coverage, robust, probabilistic Lexical-Functional Grammar resources for Chinese from the Penn Chinese Treebank (CTB). Our starting point is the earlier, proofof- \nconcept work of (Burke et al., 2004) on automatic f-structure annotation, LFG grammar acquisition and parsing for Chinese using the CTB version 2 (CTB2). We substantially extend and improve on this earlier research as regards coverage, robustness, quality and fine-grainedness of the resulting LFG resources. We achieve this through (i) improved LFG analyses for a number of core Chinese phenomena; (ii) a new automatic f-structure annotation architecture which involves an intermediate dependency representation; (iii) scaling the approach from 4.1K trees in CTB2 to 18.8K trees in CTB version 5.1 (CTB5.1) and (iv) developing a novel treebank-based approach to recovering non-local dependencies (NLDs) for Chinese parser output. Against a new 200-sentence good standard of manually constructed f-structures, the method achieves 96.00% f-score for f-structures automatically generated for the original CTB trees and 80.01%for NLD-recovered f-structures generated for the trees output by Bikel’s parser.
Recent studies focussed on the question whether less-congurational languages like German are harder to parse than English, or whether the lower parsing scores are an \nartefact of treebank encoding schemes and data structures, as claimed by K¨ubler et al. (2006). This claim is based on the assumption that PARSEVAL metrics fully reflect parse quality across treebank encoding schemes. In this paper we present new experiments to test this claim. We use the \nPARSEVAL metric, the Leaf-Ancestor metric as well as a dependency-based evaluation, and present novel approaches measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output. We also provide extensive past-parsing crosstreebank conversion. The results of the experiments show that, contrary to K¨ubler et al. (2006), the question whether or not German is harder to parse than English remains undecided.
The linguistic quality of a parallel treebank depends crucially on the parallelism between the source and target language annotations. We propose a linguistic notion of translation units and a quantitative measure of parallelism for parallel dependency treebanks, and demonstrate how the proposed translation units and parallelism measure can be used to compute transfer rules, spot annotation errors, and compare different annotation schemes with respect to each other. The proposal is evaluated on the 100,000 word Copenhagen Danish-English Dependency Treebank.
This paper reports about our efforts in creating a tri-lingual parallel treebank. The focal points are consistency checking and all aspects of sub-sentential alignment. We discuss the alignment guidelines, the importance of quality checks, and special alignment problems. Then we look at alignment algorithms and alignment visualization tools and we compare our own TreeAligner with other alignment tools. Our constituent structure treebanks contain just over 1,000 sentences and around 18,000 tokens in each language.
This paper presents recent extensions to Poliqarp, an open source tool for indexing and searching morphosyntactically annotated corpora, which turn it into a tool for indexing and searching certain kinds of treebanks, complementary to existing treebank search engines. In particular, the paper discusses the motivation for such a new tool, the extended query syntax of Poliqarp and implementation and efficiency issues.
In the domain of video content retrieval, we present an approach for selecting words and phrases from highly imperfect automatically generated transcripts. Extracted terms are ranked according to their descriptiveness and presented to the user in a multimedia browser interface. We use sense querying from the WordNet lexical database for our method of text selection and ranking. Evaluation of 679 video summarization tasks from 442 users shows that the method of ranking and emphasizing terms according to descriptiveness results in higher accuracy responses in less time compared to the baseline of no ranking.
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and \nLinguistic Theories. \nEditors: Koenraad De Smedt, Jan Hajič and Sandra Kübler. \nNEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 1 (2007), 85-96. \n© 2007 The editors and contributors. \nPublished by \nNorthern European Association for Language \nTechnology (NEALT) \nhttp://omilia.uio.no/nealt. \nElectronically published at \nTartu University Library (Estonia) \nhttp://hdl.handle.net/10062/4476.
Word-fragment completion is a frequently used test in implicit memory research. A database of 196 Spanish fragments was recently published (Dasí, Soler, & Ruiz, 2004) in which the fragments were described for indices, such as difficulty, familiarity, frequency, number of meanings, and so on (www.psychonomic.org/archive). In this work, a new index, thepriming index, is described for the same 196 fragments. This index is calculated for each fragment by subtracting the difficulty index (the proportion of correct completion when the fragment is not studied) from the proportion of correct completion when the fragment is studied, and it means the capacity of an item to be primed. In order to determine whether the new index performs well, we have replicated some important experimental effects, such as priming, frequency, and difficulty. We consider that this index can help researchers to better select stimuli for fragment-completion tasks.
The empirical investigation of human gesture stands at the center of multiple research disciplines, and various gesture annotation schemes exist, with varying degrees of precision and required annotation effort. We present a gesture annotation scheme for the specific purpose of automatically generating and animating character-specific hand/arm gestures, but with potential general value. We focus on how to capture temporal structure and locational information with relatively little annotation effort. The scheme is evaluated in terms of how accurately it captures the original gestures by re-creating those gestures on an animated character using the annotated data. This paper presents our scheme in detail and compares it to other approaches.
In this paper, we report on the role of the Urdu grammar in the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project (Butt, M., King, T. H., Niño, M.-E., & Segond, F. (1999). A grammar writer’s cookbook. CSLI Publications; Butt, M., Dyvik, H., King, T. H., Masuichi, H., & Rohrer, C. (2002). ‘The parallel grammar project’. In: Proceedings of COLING 2002, Workshop on grammar engineering and evaluation, pp. 1–7). The Urdu grammar was able to take advantage of standards in analyses set by the original grammars in order to speed development. However, novel constructions, such as correlatives and extensive complex predicates, resulted in expansions of the analysis feature space as well as extensions to the underlying parsing platform. These improvements are now available to all the project grammars.
In this paper I discuss some phenomena of lexical semantics using data from D.Dobrovol’skij’s approaches and the results of the analysis of the combinatorial profile of Russian звать. This word makes up the core of a lexical class ( вызвать, позвать, etc.) and I analyse their use in various contexts. The comparison of the combinatorial profiles of these words proves to be an efficient instrument for defining the combinatorial norms and helps in the lexicographic description of these words.
This article investigates the use of the lexical items belonging to the complementizer phrase of relative clauses (relative CP): overt complementizer that, null complementizer o, and relative pronoun which. The research purpose was to understand whether language learners are moving toward the target norm for nativeness, in terms of the selection of lexical items in the relative CP. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) Learners prefer the [？wh] relative CP, as L2 proficiency improves; and (2) learners prefer the [？wh] relative CP more for DO RCs than for SUB RCs. Data were elicited from Korean learners, teachers, and native speakers by way of a cross-sectional production method. A picture-description instrument was employed in which the participants were presented with sets of two pictures containing the same item. The statistical results show that learners, not teachers, show a closer correspondence to native speakers, in terms of the selection of lexical items in the relative CP, and it is teachers who seem to be moving away from the target norm for nativeness. Teachers’ feature preference is more deviated from native speakers’ than learners’ in the production of English relative CPs.
Both classroom instruction and lexical database development stand to benefit from applied research on sign language, which takes into consideration American Sign Language rules, pedagogical issues, and teacher characteristics. In this study of technical science signs, teachers' experience with signing and, especially, knowledge of content, were found to be essential for the identification of signs appropriate for instruction. The results of this study also indicate a need for a systematic approach to examine both sign selection and its impact on learning by deaf students. Recommendations are made for the development of lexical databases and areas of research for optimizing the use of sign language in instruction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
782 SEER, 85, 4, OCTOBER 2007 television is largely Prague-based may have a more profound bearing on the use of language than has generally been appreciated. Not surprisingly, this study has many of the strengths and some of the weaknesses of a typical doctoral thesis. It offers a comprehensive summary and evaluation of existing research and provides very useful cross-references. It also highlights the complexity of language usage in a linguistic settingwhere stylisticallyand functionally divergent forms coexist, and where theprestigious 'standard' variant is not the spoken norm. Most importantly, it offers new statistical information to add to the existing body of data on morphological, phonological and lexical variation, and to substantiate claims that language choice always depends to a significant extent on the purpose of the dialogue and the formality of the situation.However, minor problems with editing and proof-reading detract from the overall quality of thework. Furthermore, the selection of television broadcasts inevitably contains a degree of subjectivity and is not indicative of the speech of the population as a whole. Finally, itwould appear that a lack of space may have prevented the author from developing some of hermore interesting ideas, such as the notion thatwomen may be treated differendy tomen in the television studio, and that this may be reflected in theiruse of language. In summary, despite some shortcomings, this is an original and stimulating study,which is of relevance to all scholars of language variation and change, and presents considerable scope for further research. School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences Tom Dickins Universityof Wolverhampton Pushkin, Alexander. 'TheGypsies' and Other NarrativePoems. Translated, with an introduction and notes, by Antony Wood. Engravings by Simon Brett. Angel Books, London, 2006. xl + 116pp. Notes.?14.95. Anyone who has ever attempted to translate nineteenth-century Russian verse into English should make a point of turning to the Afterword of Antony Wood's new book. Subtided 'Pushkin's Voice inEnglish', it is a pithy credo from one of the UK's leading translators of verse. One statement in particular should be writ large above any translator's desk: 'the rise of translation theory in recent decades has not been accompanied by the emergence of any sub stantial body of translation of Pushkin's verse that has impressed as verse in English' (p. 114). Wood makes clear how he intends to remedy thisdeficiency. To begin with he is uncontroversial. He will eschew alternating masculine and feminine rhymes as being too difficult to achieve inRussian. He will have recourse to half-rhymes, since rhymes are far easier to find in an inflected language than in an uninflected language. His other points, however, are more contentious. He is clearly no enthusiast for translations which reproduce exactly themetre and rhyme scheme of the original, considering that their effect 'tends to be self-conscious, self-satisfied,unengaged and disembodied' (p. in). Nor does he think that the number of lines of the original should necessarily be maintained. reviews 783 The Afterword is one of the items added toWood's earlier work 'The Bridegroom', with 'Count Nulin} and 'TheTale of the Golden CockereT,published by Angel Books in 2002 and reviewed in this journal (vol. 82, July 2004, no. 3). These three poems are reproduced here with slight amendments, one of which, fromThe Bridegroom,isparticularly felicitous.Whereas in 2002 we find in the tenth stanza of the poem 'and then a jet/Over Natasha's head', the revised translation reads 'then splash a/Dash of iton Natasha. The new book is some twice the length of the earlier book. The new translations are Pushkin's first 'problem' poema,The Gypsiesand the skazka,The Tale of the Dead Princess and theSevenChampions.True to his credo,Wood does not attempt to replicate Pushkin's iambic tetrameter throughout his transla tion of The Gypsies. His favoured departure from this involves removing the initial unstressed syllable and turning the line into trochaic tetrameter. There are numerous examples of the type 'Life resounds on every side' (p. 3 ). In addition there are variants of this variant, all scrupulously noted in the Afterword. These departures from Pushkin's metre are clearly no oversight and Wood shows considerable expertise in producing...
This paper deals with a multimodal annotation scheme dedicated to the study of gestures in interpersonal communication, with particular regard to the role played by multimodal expressions for feedback, turn management and sequencing. The scheme has been developed under the framework of the MUMIN network and tested on the analysis of multimodal behaviour in short video clips in Swedish, Finnish and Danish. The preliminary results obtained in these studies show that the reliability of the categories defined in the scheme is acceptable, and that the scheme as a whole constitutes a versatile analysis tool for the study of multimodal communication behaviour.
Collaborative and content-based filtering are the recommendation techniques most widely adopted to date. Traditional collaborative approaches compute a similarity value between the current user and each other user by taking into account their rating style, that is the set of ratings given on the same items. Based on the ratings of the most similar users, commonly referred to as neighbors, collaborative algorithms compute recommendations for the current user. The problem with this approach is that the similarity value is only computable if users have common rated items. The main contribution of this work is a possible solution to overcome this limitation. We propose a new content-collaborative hybrid recommender which computes similarities between users relying on their content-based profiles, in which user preferences are stored, instead of comparing their rating styles. In more detail, user profiles are clustered to discover current user neighbors. Content-based user profiles play a key role in the proposed hybrid recommender. Traditional keyword-based approaches to user profiling are unable to capture the semantics of user interests. A distinctive feature of our work is the integration of linguistic knowledge in the process of learning semantic user profiles representing user interests in a more effective way, compared to classical keyword-based profiles, due to a sense-based indexing. Semantic profiles are obtained by integrating machine learning algorithms for text categorization, namely a naïve Bayes approach and a relevance feedback method, with a word sense disambiguation strategy based exclusively on the lexical knowledge stored in the WordNet lexical database. Experiments carried out on a content-based extension of the EachMovie dataset show an improvement of the accuracy of sense-based profiles with respect to keyword-based ones, when coping with the task of classifying movies as interesting (or not) for the current user. An experimental session has been also performed in order to evaluate the proposed hybrid recommender system. The results highlight the improvement in the predictive accuracy of collaborative recommendations obtained by selecting like-minded users according to user profiles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper presents a scheme for ranking of spelling error corrections for Urdu. Conventionally spell-checking techniques do not provide any explicit ranking mechanism. Ranking is either implicit in the correction algorithm or corrections are not ranked at all. The research presented in this paper shows that for Urdu, phonetic similarity between the corrections and the erroneous word can serve as a useful parameter for ranking the corrections. This combined with a new technique Shapex that uses visual similarity of characters for ranking gives an improvement of 23% in the accuracy of the one-best match compared to the result obtained when the ranking is done on the basis of word frequencies only.
As an extension of decades of syntactic theorizing, treebanks have inherited a small set of phrasal categories, which abstract over the environments that the categories can occur in. Extending ideas from Johnson (1998), we explore encoding information from the local tree context in each category. We then discuss two clustering techniques which preserve the distributionally relevant category distinction, forming linguistically relevant generalizations and improving PCFG parsing performance. 1
You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Jul 2007Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Aspects of Communication: Research-Praxis Relationships José G. Centeno, Raquel T. Anderson, M. Adelaida Restrepo, Peggy F. Jacobson, Jackie Guendouzi, Nicole Müller, Ana Inés Ansaldo and Karine Marcotte José G. Centeno Google Scholar More articles by this author, Raquel T. Anderson Google Scholar More articles by this author, M. Adelaida Restrepo Google Scholar More articles by this author, Peggy F. Jacobson Google Scholar More articles by this author, Jackie Guendouzi Google Scholar More articles by this author, Nicole Müller Google Scholar More articles by this author, Ana Inés Ansaldo Google Scholar More articles by this author and Karine Marcotte Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR2.12092007.12 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Effective communication requires the integration of multiple factors, including linguistic, cultural, cognitive, and neurological variables. Ethnography and sociolinguistics may enhance our understanding of how those factors interact. Ethnography is the systematic, qualitative study of culture, including the cultural bases of linguistic skills and communicative contexts (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1995). Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, focuses on how language use is shaped by individual and societal forces (Coulmas, 1997). As examples, ethnographic research may examine discourse and vocabulary trends in a specific cultural group; sociolinguistic studies may focus on language input differences in bilingual development or age-related speech variation (Ball, 2005). Although the separation between ethnography and sociolinguistics is not always clear (Salzmann, 1993), the application of ethnographic and sociolinguistic principles to speech-language pathology research and practice is critical. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic descriptions point to key relationships in the inextricable links among culture, language, communication, and cognition. Language development, communication acts, and concomitant thought processes are affected by the cultural world in which we live (Centeno, 2007b). Ethnographic and sociolinguistic analysis expands our understanding of an individual’s communication history, language profile, and psycholinguistic processing (Ball, 2005; Centeno, 2007b), and has particular significance in our increasingly diverse clinical caseloads. Based on monolingual and bilingual speakers, current research and theory illustrate how approaches grounded in the ethnographic and sociolinguistic realities of language and communication can enrich experimental methodology, theory-building, and evidence-based practices in speech-language pathology. Child Language Analysis The analysis of spontaneous language samples is a critical tool for SLPs involved in research and pediatric practice. Knowledge of the cultural and sociolinguistic contexts in which children acquire and use language enhances the productive elicitation and accurate analysis of children’s language skills. This knowledge includes topics, conversational formats, and tasks that maximize language productivity, as well as analysis techniques that consider acquisitional variables. Language samples from Latino children in the United States can serve as an illustration. Latino children constitute the nation’s largest minority population receiving speech-language services in pediatric settings (e.g., Roseberry-McKibbin et al., 2005). These children also represent diverse social, cultural, educational, and linguistic backgrounds, which translate into considerable variability in cultural norms, literacy experiences, discourse styles, Spanish dialects, and levels of bilingualism (McCabe & Bliss, 2003; Zentella, 2005). To stimulate productivity in the collection of language samples, clinicians need to acknowledge language socialization practices consistent with a child’s developmental background. For example, the discourse of Mexican-American families frequently focuses on the family. Storytelling as entertainment also is common in Mexican-American homes (McCabe & Bliss, 2003); consequently, family-related topics in storytelling may lead to greater expressive output when used with Mexican-American children. Similarly, elicitation of appropriate language requires suitable techniques. Although there is limited research on language elicitation methods used with Latino children, some studies have pointed to effective strategies. For example, Latino children can be successful story retellers from preschool age, particularly when they have training or models (Fiestas & Peña, 2004; Gutiérrez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994; Restrepo, 1998). Story retelling can be more fruitful than spontaneous story production in eliciting language in both preschool and school-age Latino children (Castilla & Restrepo, 2004). In fact, story retelling combined with parent reports provide the best identification of Spanish-speaking children with language disorders (Restrepo, 1998; Restrepo et al., 2005). The accurate examination and diagnostic assessment of language samples must be grounded in the sociolinguistic contexts affecting language input during acquisition. Sound language analysis can help SLPs understand children’s developmental linguistic changes in monolingual and bilingual contexts and assess post-intervention linguistic outcomes. For example, sensitive measures of language growth in preschool Mexican-American Spanish-speaking children can include Spanish mean length of utterance (MLU) in words and subordination index (number of dependent clauses per sentence) obtained from story retellings. Further, preschool Spanish-speaking children receiving bilingual intervention have shown significant productivity in these two measures within the same school year as compared with children in English-only language interventions (Castilla & Restrepo, 2004). Language analysis also can detect cross-linguistic effects or grammatical changes caused by the unequal use of languages in bilingual environments. It is critical to differentiate between linguistic limitations caused by a disorder from linguistic features related to language use in bilingual communication. For example, Spanish sentence length—prior to the acquisition of English as a second language—can predict growth in English grammar in preschool children who speak Spanish (Castilla & Restrepo, 2004). In situations of language loss (attrition), the complexity of certain linguistic elements—such as verbs in Spanish—may weaken as children develop proficiency in English and use Spanish less frequently (Anderson, 2001, 2004). Additionally, language-disordered Spanish-English children in educational programs may demonstrate different attrition patterns in Spanish, their first language (L1). When examining the grammatical profiles of two bilingual Spanish-English children with language impairment, Restrepo (2003) found different patterns of L1 (Spanish) loss; one child exhibited growth in MLU while his utterances increased in errors. The other child demonstrated a decrease in MLU and a decrease in errors per utterance. Linking ethnographic and sociolinguistic factors to language sampling facilitates appropriate methodology and diagnostic interpretations of children’s grammatical development. Given the variability in acquisitional scenarios across sociocultural contexts, much research in language sampling in specific groups of monolingual and bilingual children is required before generalizations can be made. Typical Discourse Routines Sociolinguistic descriptions of language use provide plausible theoretical grounds to interpret psycholinguistic processing in speakers with expressive restrictions, as exemplified by verb use. Monolingual Spanish-speaking children, for example, oscillate between the present and the past in choice of dominant verb tense until age 5; the present appears to stabilize as the most frequently used tense in the spoken narratives of older children and adults (Sebastián & Slobin, 1994). Similarly, discourse analysis of Spanish conversational adult narratives revealed that—despite the frequent alternated use of the present, past, and imperfect tenses—the past-present alternation emerged as the most prominent tense shift (Silva-Corvalán, 1983). In speakers with compromised expressive resources, the early emergence and frequent use of simple verb forms in speech may combine to maximize access and production of such verbs. Such speakers include monolingual children with expressive delays, bilingual speakers experiencing L1 loss, and aphasic speakers with limited syntactic production in their oral expressions. Spanish-speaking adults and children with typical development and language impairment may use similar verb tenses in their narratives (Jacobson, 2006). Both groups tend to use the past (Yo caminé, “I walked”), imperfect (Yo caminaba, “I used to walk”), and present (Yo camino, “I walk”) tenses more frequently than any other verb tenses in story retelling tasks. Similarly, bilingual Spanish-English children and adults experiencing L1 (Spanish) loss show a greater use of simple verb tenses in their spoken discourse—the present, the present progressive (Yo estoy caminando, “I am walking”), and the past tense (Anderson, 2001; 2004; Silva-Corvalán, 1991). Also, monolingual Spanish-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia who experience agrammatism (impoverished syntax in their utterances) favor the present tense in their spontaneous discourse, and both the present and the past tenses in sentence repetition tasks (Centeno, 2007a; Centeno & Obler, 2001). This evidence supports a socio-cognitive approach to interpret verb use in speakers with expressive restrictions or disorders (Centeno, 2007a; Silva-Corvalán, 1991). Verb tenses acquired early by children and used frequently in unimpaired conversation (e.g., past and present) may have certain features—being so common as to be automatic, for instance—that enhance resistance to loss and errors. In addition, these tenses with their simple inflectional endings may be easier to process than more morphologically complex tenses (e.g., conditional: Yo caminaría, “I would walk”; present perfect: Yo he caminado, “I have walked”) (Centeno, 2007a; Centeno & Obler, 2001). To understand linguistic restrictions in speakers with expressive deficits, our analysis may be strengthened by considering the frequency of use in daily conversation and the linguistic complexity of expressive elements favored by speakers. Language Switching and Mixing Sociolinguistic description of bilingual discourse suggests the frequent use of code-switching and code-mixing (Bhatia & Ritchie, 1996). The former involves language switches occurring at sentence boundaries (e.g., I’m hungry pero no quiero comer, I’m hungry but I don’t want to eat); the latter includes language switches taking place within clause or sentence boundaries (e.g., Ella está very happy, She is very happy). Though the distinction between switching and mixing is controversial, both expressive devices constitute a trademark of proficient bilinguals (Bhatia & Ritchie, 1996). Effective control of language switching (LS) and language mixing (LM) is a requirement for bilinguals, especially for pragmatically appropriate language selection in monolingual and bilingual discourse. Brain damage may impair control mechanisms and lead to pathological LS and LM. Different approaches have been proposed to account for normal and pathological language switching. Among them, the lesion approach examines the impact of brain damage on LS, whereas the cognitive approach describes LS in terms of cognitive operations or processing requirements. More recently, the neurocognitive approach emphasizes how processing devices map onto neuroanatomical sites (Green, 1986, 2005). A neurocognitive model of control in bilingual language switching can be useful in analyzing and treating pathological switching in bilingual patients with aphasia. This model suggests that control of the bilingual language system, including language switching, may be affected when brain damage impairs the necessary cognitive operations. Ansaldo and Marcotte (2007) relied on this concept to plan treatment for a Spanish-English individual with aphasia.. The patient used switching as a strategy to overcome anomia (word retrieval problems) but did not have voluntary control over his LM and LS, even with monolingual partners. The patient, however, could translate better than he could name specific items. According to the neurocognitive model, the patient’s involuntary impairment in LM and LS affected the lexical level (i.e., anomia) and the L1-L2 control level (i.e., involuntary mixing and switching). The word-retrieval deficit, combined with possible problems in the mechanisms that control inhibition, resulted in switching from one language to the other. Translation and switching were integrated into a treatment program based on a neurocognitive strategy that would enhance voluntary switching. Translation was a useful compensatory technique for treatment because translational abilities are less impaired than other linguistic skills in bilinguals with aphasia (Paradis, 2004), as the patient exhibited. Switching aimed to increase control by systematically manipulating the impaired use of this behavior. Prior to treatment, the patient was tested in noun and verb naming, repetition, and translation of the same items from Spanish to English, and vice versa. A “Switch Back through Translation” (SBT) approach integrated translation and switching into treatment. SBT transformed pathological LS and LM into translation by cueing the patient to provide the closest equivalent of a noun or a verb in the other language whenever he erred on language selection. The increased awareness and control in switching improved his communication abilities, as the patient gradually learned to translate independently and shifted to the appropriate language. It also facilitated his word-finding abilities. A theory-based neurocognitive intervention that connects cognitive operations and discourse features may be useful in cases of impaired switching in bilinguals with aphasia. This strategy targets impaired neurocognitive factors (i.e., attention and control) while simultaneously relying on translation to address the impaired use of discourse features in bilinguals (i.e., LM and LS) to optimize communication. Ethnography and Dementia The tradition of ethnographic research focuses on describing a culture’s patterns of behavior, norms, and beliefs, among other characteristics, from the perspective of its members (Hymes, 1972a, b; 1974). Ethnographers observe and record patterns of social and communicative behaviors in relation to a specific situation or a specific stimulus. The ethnography of communication (EC) provides a systematic investigation of patterns in language use in interaction. It also provides a descriptive, analytical framework for the communication context and for the participants, their social roles and their impact on the interaction. A central tenet of this approach is that communication is an act that reveals a speech community’s attitudes and beliefs (Guendouzi & Müller, 2006). The clinical benefits of EC can be used in treatment of individuals with communication disorders, as shown in the interactions with patients with dementia. Beliefs about dementia may affect the way in which a society reacts to and cares for—or doesn’t care for—individuals with dementia. These beliefs then give rise to a culture of stereotypes that include negative views of aging. When we interact with people who have dementia, we may bring cultural expectations (e.g., the belief that all people with dementia are aggressive) to the interaction. Such cultural expectations may frame the way people, including clinicians and relatives, approach the person with dementia and influence how they communicate with that person. Indeed, it may be that our beliefs about dementia inadvertently cause us to interact in ways that are less than optimal for treatment. Acknowledging ethnographic and sociolinguistic factors broadens our interpretation of language development/impairment and psycholinguistic processing in young and adult speakers, and our understanding of practitioner/relative-client interactions. As these examples have shown, important relationships exist between ethnographic factors (e.g., language practices in Hispanic individuals) and sociolinguistic dimensions (e.g., discourse patterns); both areas have relevance to linguistic profiles (e.g., language delay, language attrition, and aphasia) and processing domains (i.e., linguistic and cognitive operations). Although the use of ethnography and sociolinguistics is not new in speech-language pathology (e.g., Simmons-Mackie & Damico, 1999; Washington & Craig, 1994; Westby, 1994), an increased application of interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to the study of communication disorders is needed (e.g., Centeno et al., 2007; Code, 2001; Silliman, 2007). Ethnographic and sociolinguistic analysis provides valuable insights into the complex interactions of culture, language, communication, and cognition. Understanding how these factors relate to research in our discipline can strengthen the development of sound experimental methodology, ecologically valid theoretical accounts, and realistic evidence-based practices. Given our increasingly diverse clinical caseloads, such strategies are imperative. This article is based on a presentation by the authors at the 2006 ASHA Convention. Ethnography of Communication: A Person-Centered Approach Ethnography of communication relies on systematic person-centered descriptions of patterns of linguistic form, pragmatic usage, and social function. Consider a visit by a graduate student to a nursing home to collect data for a project on dementia. Hymes (1972a, b) summarized the major ethnographic factors involved in analyzing a speech situation through the use of the anagram SPEAKING. Setting: The resident’s room in the nursing home Participants: A person with dementia and a graduate student in speech-language pathology Ends (goals): These are difficult to ascertain in the case of the person with dementia. However, the graduate student has both overt goals (e.g., to learn about the resident’s life, and to spend time visiting with him/her) and covert goals (e.g., to collect data in order to study and treat dementia) Acts sequence: The types of communication used (e.g., a question-answer format) Key: Whether the interaction is informal or formal Instrumentality: The mode of communication (e.g., conversation or sign language) Norms: Polite conversation Genre: Possibly a friendly chat or “small talk” An ethnographic approach allows the clinician to consider the communicative behaviors the patient or client manifests based upon his or her communication status and the situational and environmental factors that influence the interaction. 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“The History of Error”:Hardy's Critics and the Self Unseen Jill Richards (bio) For one thing, many fine poems that have lyric moments are not entirely lyrical; many largely narrative poems are not entirely narrative; many personal reflections or meditations in verse hover across the frontiers of lyricism. ———Thomas Hardy, in the "Preface" to Select Poems of William Barnes1 Recalling a Gothic arch straying hazardously over its bounds, or the abrupt blankness of a wall where pattern anticipates a window, Hardy believed his poetry to reveal architectural moments of "cunning irregularity."2 For Hardy, the "unforeseen" arises as poetic conventions yield to the jarring peculiarities of the words themselves. Hardy's language radically displaces the speaking "I," so that past and present subjects are distinct and often contradictory rather than continuous with the speech that renders them. Playing upon the Victorian convention of a speaker in a location, Hardy eschews topographical coherence to redefine the poetic "I" as a subject misplaced in time, continually looking backward yet unseeing in the present moment. These lyric voices are not of the Victorian tradition from which they arise, nor do they anticipate a strictly modernist destruction of selfhood. Hardy's subjects are not fractured in a traditional sense, but are rather a response to the aberrances of their language. Distortion in poetic voice echoes the gaps of narrative sequence and idiom that so often appear in the poems. It is then neither language nor narrative voice that lends us a grammar of Hardy's poetry, but the way these structures stray out of their bounds, unfolding against one another. Yet Hardy's language has often gained the criticism that it hovers across poetic norms through ignorance and clumsiness not "cunning irregularity." The critical reception of Hardy's poetry has attracted notice for such rancor, one stemming from a misguided elitism that spurred even Lytton Strachey to uncharacteristically sour remarks.3 From the outset, F. R. Leavis found Hardy's unconventional language to be full of "gauche unshrinking mismarriages" of words, of the "prosaic banal, the stilted literary, the colloquial" jumbled together in a seemingly random process.4 What Leavis called a "style out of stylelessnesss" had been less vehemently articulated by William Archer as a [End Page 117] lack of "local and historical perspective in language, seeing all the words in the dictionary on one plane, so to speak, and regarding them all as equally available."5 For the earliest reviewers, Hardy's poetry was to be valued in spite of its language: the best poems were those that managed to shrug off such a handicap, so that a select canon of works might emerge unscathed from their marred diction and syntax. More recently, critics have found themselves praising Hardy's language for the awkwardness that was once condemned. Such purposeful moments of gracelessness are read as "authentic," and thus closer to the speech of a rural working-class, one that sits opposed to a purely literary language.6 In the end, Archer and Leavis seem closer to the truth after all, albeit inadvertently. Hardy's language acts on many different literary and historical planes indeed; it includes classes of language whose interactions are far too systematic to be simply "authentic." Ralph Elliott charts these linguistic features in Thomas Hardy's English (1984) proving Hardy's lexical irregularities to fall into patterns with specific literary purpose.7 Elaborating on the findings of Elliott in a more theoretical bent, Dennis Taylor's Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philosophy turns against critical tradition to show how Hardy's language is contextualized by its past and future, so that "awkwardness reflects those points where language is changing and where language is seeking new possibilities of precision" (p. 378). This is not double language—a pairing of learned and local, scholarly and sincere. Instead, it is one that works on historical levels, extending to use dialect falling in and out of usage, words old and new, familiar and coined. Thus, what Leavis calls the "mismarriage" of words keeps language from settling in a crystallized moment in history. This interaction is at once reaching out towards a past, acknowledging a philological history, and then acting...
Vernacularisation et traduction des textes pragmatiques en Afrique — La traduction des textes comportant des lacunes d'ordre grammatical, lexical, stylistique ou idiomatique présente habituellement des difficultés particulières, lesquelles sont amplifiées lorsqu'elles sont attribuables à la vernacularisation d'une langue étrangère. Dans les sociétés postcoloniales, l'absence ou la non-disponibilité des études linguistiques sur la plupart des langues locales rend ardue l'analyse des interférences entre ces dernières et les langues officielles étrangères. Cette situation, ajoutée à la grande diversité ethnolinguistique ambiante, ne facilite pas l'interprétation des textes produits par les personnes semi-lettrées. Le traducteur de ces textes se présente davantage comme un rédacteur qui, à partir de l'idée globale qui se dégage de l'original, conçoit et produit un texte répondant aux normes de la langue cible. L'évaluation d'un tel travail ne peut se faire qu'en comparant la finalité des deux textes.
Language deviation is a linguistic device of purposeful violation of language norms,which serves not only as the necessity but also as the inevitability of language development.There are various forms of language deviation,including phonological deviation,lexical deviation,grammatical deviation,semantic deviation,graphological deviation,deviation of register and figurative deviation.It is the reflection of variety of language and its social nature.Language deviation does bring richer cultural connotation to every language.
Highly frequent and highly polysemous verbs, such as give, take, and make, pose a challenge to automatic lexical acquisition methods. These verbs widely participate in multiword predicates (such as light verb constructions, or LVCs), in which they contribute a broad range of figurative meanings that must be recognized. Here we focus on two properties that are key to the computational treatment of LVCs. First, we consider the degree of figurativeness of the semantic contribution of such a verb to the various LVCs it participates in. Second, we explore the patterns of acceptability of LVCs, and their productivity over semantically related combinations. To assess these properties, we develop statistical measures of figurativeness and acceptability that draw on linguistic properties of LVCs. We demonstrate that these corpus-based measures correlate well with human judgments of the relevant property. We also use the acceptability measure to estimate the degree to which a semantic class of nouns can productively form LVCs with a given verb. The linguistically-motivated measures outperform a standard measure for capturing the strength of collocation of these multiword expressions.
This article reports a calibration procedure that enables researchers to track movements of the eye while allowing relatively unrestricted head and/or body movement. The eye—head calibration algorithm calculates fixation point based on eye-position data acquired by a head-mounted eyetracker and corresponding head-position data acquired by a 3-D motion-tracking system. In a single experiment, we show that this procedure provides robust eye-position estimates while allowing free head movement. Although several companies offer ready-made systems for this purpose, there is no literature available that makes it possible for researchers to explore the details of the calibration procedures used by these systems. By making such details available, we hope to facilitate the development of cost-effective, nonproprietary eyetracking solutions.
Computer games potentially offer a useful research tool for psychology but there has been little use made of them in assessing cognitive abilities. Two studies assessing the viability of a computer game-like test of cognitive processing speed are described. In Experiment 1, a computerized coding task that uses a mouse response method (McPherson & Burns, 2005) was the basis for a simple computer game-like test. In Experiment 2, dynamic game-like elements were added. Validity was assessed within a factor analytic framework using standardized abilities tests as marker tests. We conclude that computer game-like tests of processing speed may provide an alternative or supplementary tool for research and assessment. There is clearly potential to develop game-like tests for other cognitive abilities.
This article presents the first technology ever for online registration and interactive and automatic analysis of finger movements during tactile reading (Braille and tactile pictures). Interactive software has been developed for registration (with two cameras and a microphone), MPEG-2 video compression and storage on disk or DVD as well as an interactive analysis program to aid human analysis. An automatic finger-tracking system has been implemented which also semiautomatically tracks the reading aloud speech on the syllable level. This set of tools opens the way for large scale studies of blind people reading Braille or tactile images. It has been tested in a pilot project involving congenitally blind subjects reading texts and pictures.
Though dialect recession in small, historically insular communities has now been the focus of a number of variation studies, there are few studies that scrutinize this process in real time. Ocracoke Island, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, presents an ideal situation for this study as tourists and new residents continue to flood the island that is still called home by 300 to 400 ancestral islanders among its 700 to 800 permanent residents. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted on the island by the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP) in the early 1990s, almost 15 years ago, and since that time the NCLLP's presence on the island has remained constant. In recent years (2005-present), a follow-up study to that conducted in 1993-1995 has been launched in order to assess how quickly the language of Ocracoke really is receding, and what, if any, effects the NCLLP's presence has had on the dialect. \n\nThis thesis examines both qualitative and quantitative data collected from almost 70 interviews. In an analysis of discourse between Ocracoke middle schoolers, certain ideologies about Ocracoke in-group identity are discovered as well as struggles in maintaining the image of "color-blindness" in conversations about the recent Hispanic presence on the island. Additionally, two morphosyntactic and one phonological feature typical of the Brogue dialect are analyzed. Past tense remorphologization of the negative forms of be, as in I weren't or she weren't, and the use of the static locative to in place of prepositional lexical items such as at, as in he's to the dock, are both common morphosyntactic features found along the Outer Banks and especially in Ocracoke (Schilling-Estes & Wolfram 1994; Wolfram, Hazen, & Schilling-Estes 1999; Vadnais 2006). Also, the relative backing of the nucleus of the glide ⁄ai⁄ in relation to ⁄⁄ production, creating such productions as hoi toid, is a salient and commonly referenced variation of this particular region (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1995; Craig 1994).\n\nWhile all three of these features are decreasing in relative usage, the distribution among different age and social groups leads to the usage differentiations analyzed in this thesis. Local groups, including the "Poker Game Network" (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997; Wolfram, Hazen, & Schilling-Estes 1999) and the "Pelican Network" (identified in this thesis) help to clarify the definition of a "traditional" Ocracoke male. However, participating in such networks may not singularly correlate with the preservation of traditional island norms. Certain families and individuals seem to be the inspiration for the vision most islanders consider a true O'cocker, as they're called.
In this paper, we describe the application of a bidirectional dependency parser trained on the Turin University Treebank.
When multidimensional scaling solutions are used to study semantic concepts, the dimensionality of the optimal configuration has to be determined. Several strategies have been proposed to choose the appropriate dimensionality. In the present paper, the traditional dimensionality choice criteria were evaluated and compared to a method based on the prediction of an external criterion. Two studies were conducted in which typicality of an exemplar within a semantic concept was predicted from its distance to the concept centroid. In contrast to the low-dimensional solutions selected by the traditional methods, predictions of an external criterion improved with additional dimensions up till dimensionalities that were much higher than what is common in the literature. This suggests that traditional methods underestimate the richness of semantic concepts as revealed in spatial representations derived from similarity measures.
The present paper discusses the process of linguistic borrowing and adaptation of foreign words to the rules of Croatian. The process is analysed on the examples of borrowings from English. Earlier studies of this process and linguistic changes in general are critically analysed within the context of the theory of radial categories and concepts of encyclopedic knowledge (whose methodological apparatus provides a detailed description of the course and logic of linguistic borrowing). A new model for the analysis of linguistic borrowing is proposed. This model, on the one hand, integrates the results of earlier studies of this phenomenon and presents them in the light of their mutual interdependence, and on the other hand, offers an integral insight into the nature and course of linguistic borrowing. Earlier attempts studied only individual aspects of linguistic borrowing and did not provide a complete insight into the whole process. On the basis of the proposed model some general conclusions about the nature of two basic approaches to interrelations of lexic and norm (puristic and functional), as well as some principles of lexical normativity can be made, if we abandon somewhat paradoxical notion of lexical norm due to the direct interdependence of linguistic borrowing and extralinguistic reality.
The range of lexical means expressing general positive evaluation significantly changed in the XVII-XVIII centuries. This was mainly conditioned by a shift in the correlation between the lexical units representing general positive evaluation and the norm: generalized positive marking was attributed to slight deviations from the norm and primarily to exceeding the norm (difference from the similar, exclusivity).
OBJECTIVE: The current literature highlights the research and clinical applications of parental report in investigating the status of language skills in young children. Since language acquisition norms for Maltese have not yet been established, this study attempts to obtain preliminary indications of developmental trends in early lexical development by adapting an established parent-completed vocabulary checklist for use with Maltese children. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The concurrent validity of this bilingual adaptation was examined relative to picture naming abilities and spontaneous vocabulary use in a cross-sectional cohort of 10 children aged between 12 and 30 months who were primarily exposed to Maltese. RESULTS: The results indicate a high and significant correlation between lexical production abilities as reported by parents completing the checklist and as measured through confrontation naming and conversational language use. Reported vocabulary measures indicate a steady increase in lexical production with age, with a sharp increment evident beyond the age of 24 months. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that the preliminary version of the vocabulary checklist has potential for gauging early lexical growth and point towards the need for further research on a larger scale.
PURPOSE: This study examined the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on the early lexical performance of African American children. METHOD: Thirty African American toddlers (30 to 40 months old) from low-SES (n = 15) and middle-SES (n = 15) backgrounds participated in the study. Their lexical-semantic performance was examined on 2 norm-referenced standardized tests of vocabulary, a measure of lexical diversity (number of different words) derived from language samples, and a fast mapping task that examined novel word learning. RESULTS: Toddlers from low-SES homes performed significantly poorer than those from middle-SES homes on standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary tests and on the number of different words used in spontaneous speech. No significant SES group differences were observed in their ability to learn novel word meanings on a fast mapping task. CONCLUSION: The influence of socioeconomic background on African American children's lexical semantic tasks varies with the type of measure used.
This work is about multimodal and expressive synthesis on virtual agents, based on the analysis of actions performed by human users. As input we consider the image sequence of the recorded human behavior. Computer vision and image processing techniques are incorporated in order to detect cues needed for expressivity features extraction. The multimodality of the approach lies in the fact that both facial and gestural aspects of the user’s behavior are analyzed and processed. The mimicry consists of perception, interpretation, planning and animation of the expressions shown by the human, resulting not in an exact duplicate rather than an expressive model of the user’s original behavior.
This paper tests three factors that have been held to be responsible for the variable stress behavior of noun-noun constructs in English: argument structure, semantics, and analogy. In a large-scale investigation of some 4500 compounds extracted from the CELEX lexical database (Baayen et al. 1995), we show that traditional claims about noun-noun stress cannot be upheld. Argument structure plays a role only with synthetic compounds ending in the agentive suffix - er. The semantic categories and relations assumed in the literature to trigger rightward stress do not show the expected effects. As an alternative to the rule-based approaches, the data were modeled computationally and probabilistically using a memory-based analogical algorithm (TiMBL 5.1) and logistic regression, respectively. It turns out that probabilistic models and the analogical algorithm are more successful in predicting stress assignment correctly than any of the rules proposed in the literature. Furthermore, the results of the analogical modeling suggest that the left and right constituent are the most important factor in compound stress assignment. This is in line with recent findings on the semi-regular behavior of compounds in other languages.
We describe our contribution to the SemEval task on Frame-Semantic Structure Extraction. Unlike most previous systems described in literature, ours is based on dependency syntax. We also describe a fully automatic method to add words to the FrameNet lexical database, which gives an improvement in the recall of frame detection.
An alternative to the view that during evolution the human brain became specialized to preferentially attend to threat-related stimuli is to assume that all classes of stimuli that have high biological significance are prioritized by the attention system. Newborns are highly biologically relevant stimuli for members of a species, as their survival is important for reproductive success. The authors examined whether the Kindchenschema (baby schema) as described by Lorenz (1943) captures attention in the dot probe task. The results confirm attentional capture by photos of human infants presented to the left visual field, suggesting right hemisphere advantage. The magnitude of the attentional modulation was highly correlated with subjective arousal ratings of the photos. The findings show that biologically significant positive stimuli are prioritized by the attention system.
Visual stimuli are judged for their emotional significance based on two fundamental dimensions, valence and arousal, and may lead to changes in neural and body functions like attention, affect, memory and heart rate. Alterations in behaviour and mood have been encountered in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) undergoing functional neurosurgery, suggesting that electrical high-frequency stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) may interfere with emotional information processing. Here, we use the opportunity to directly record neuronal activity from the STN macroelectrodes in patients with PD during presentation of emotionally laden and neutral pictures taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to further elucidate the role of the STN in emotional processing. We found a significant event-related desynchronization of STN alpha activity with pleasant stimuli that correlated with the individual valence rating of the pictures. Our findings suggest involvement of the human STN in valence-related emotional information processing that can potentially be altered during high-frequency stimulation of the STN in PD leading to behavioural complications.