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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. This approach can be applied to all speakers interacting with people with communication disorders. References Anderson R. T. (2004). First language loss in Spanish-speaking children: Patterns of loss and implications for clinical practice.In Goldstein B. A. (Ed.), Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish-English speakers (pp. 187–212). Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Google Scholar Anderson R. T. (2001). Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition: Preliminary results.Bilingual Research Journal, 23, 389–408. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Ansaldo A. I., & Marcotte K. (2007). Language switching in the context of Spanish-English bilingual aphasia.In Centeno J. G., Anderson R. T., & Obler L. K., L. K. (Eds.), Communication disorders in Spanish speakers: Theoretical, research, and clinical aspects. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar Bhatia T. K., & Ritchie W. C. (1996). Bilingual language mixing, universal grammar, and second language acquisition.In Ritchie W. C. & Bhatia T. 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Journal Article Optimizing Procedures for the Making of Bilingual Dictionaries and the Concept of Linking Contrastive Lexical Databases Get access Godelieve Laureys Godelieve Laureys University of Gent (godelieve.laureys@Ugent.be) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 20, Issue 3, September 2007, Pages 295–311, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecm024 Published: 24 August 2007
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.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) is one of the most widely used tools for assessing implicit attitudes. To date, most IAT experiments have been run using Inquisit, a PC-based program. In the present article, we describe a method for conducting IAT experiments using PsyScope, a free, downloadable, Macintosh-based program (see Bonatti, n.d., for the OS X version; Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993, for the OS 9 version). In addition, we explain how data can be imported into SPSS for analysis. Preliminary results indicate that, in comparison with the PC version of the IAT, the Macintosh version provides similar sensitivity in measuring implicit self-esteem. Our PsyScope script and SPSS syntax may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
Hearing loss is a confounding variable that is rarely addressed in behavioral research despite its prevalence across the life span. Currently, the most common method of experimental control over hearing acuity is through self report of perceived impairment. We argue that this technique may lack sensitivity and that researchers should more commonly utilize standardized hearing screening procedures. Distinctive patterns of hearing loss are reviewed with attention to populations that commonly participate in behavioral research. We explain standard techniques for conducting pure tone hearing screening using a conventional portable audiometer and outline a procedure for how researchers can modify a conventional laptop computer for audiometric screening when a standard audiometer is unavailable. We offer a sample hearing screening program that researchers may use toward the development of their own protocol. This program is freely available for download at www psychonomic.org/archive.
This article examines the role orientations of new managers working in the Social Action field who are in an occupational transition phase. It extends and broadens the proactivity model developed in writings on organizational socialization. The latter is viewed as an interactive process which depends not only on the organization’s initiatives but also on the capacities of subjects to “clarify,” direct, develop their role and transform the norms of the organization (Morrison, 1993; Nicholson, 1984). Thus, socialization cannot be reduced to the mere result of pressure in the workplace. Our theoretical approach maintains that although role orientation is based on the subjects’ relations with task requirements and the rules and norms of the organization, it is influenced by the aims and commitments related to the socialization environments and activities of these individuals outside work.The qualitative empirical study presented here focuses on 15 new managers in the Social Action field (a social worker, special-education teachers, a socio-cultural group leader) who have, for 7 to 10 months, been performing managerial duties for the first time in their careers. These subjects underwent semi-structured interviews based on open-ended questions, a number of which dealt with role orientation. Operationally, the latter is characterized by the following indicators: value attached to duties, self-assignment of work objectives, operations related to activity completion or non completion, the aims of the action, time management of work activities, and relations with others inside and outside the workplace.The corpus established through a complete retranscription of the in-depth semi-structured interviews was processed in two ways: through a computerized lexical discourse analysis, using ALCESTE software, and through a standard theme-based content analysis. The results highlight inter-individual variabilities in the way the managerial role is performed. The lexical analysis using ALCESTE brought out four role orientation categories: (1) the role as positional construction (category 1); (2) the role involving hyperactivity (category 2); (3) the innovative role in serving the various Social Action population groups (category 3); (4) the innovative role in the territories (category 4).The theme-based discourse analysis helped to identify three main aims in the work activity. (1) Relations with the task: in a particularly discriminating way, activities and aims can be distinguished relating to either the environment outside the organization or the subject him/herself, as an actor in the organization. (2) Relations with others: these mainly involve relations between the managers and their superiors (experienced in the form of trust and cooperation or, on the contrary, in the form of dissatisfaction) and relations with the work team (from whom our subjects expect recognition or on whom they seek to exert their influence). (3) Relations with self and the time value of the action: these reveal contrasting positions regarding time management and the organization of work time and activities and non-work time and activities.The results obtained by correlating the data of both analyses show that in the occupational transition phase examined, the subjects engage in and perform their new managerial roles in the organization according to differentiated logics and orientations. The inter-individual variabilities observed in the implementation of these roles demonstrate that the latter are not simply driven by the rules and norms prescribed in the organization or solely by the subjects’ developmental aims within it. They are subject to subjective interpretation and meaning. The orientation the subjects give to their role during their occupational transition is also subordinated to their commitments to socialization environments and time outside work.
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.
This paper addresses the question of how to obtain consistent semantic annotation on the basis of a set of noisy texts. Many potential real-world applications of semantic computing are faced with the need to handle texts which are not well-edited, and for which a resource-intensive treebanking effort is not feasible. Student-produced short answers contain many grammatical and lexical errors, making consistent annotation a challenge. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that semantic role annotation can be done in a consistent and useful manner even under these constraints.
This paper investigates new design options for the feature space of a dependency parser. We focus on one of the simplest and most efficient architectures, based on a deterministic shift-reduce algorithm, trained with the perceptron. By adopting second-order feature maps, the primal form of the perceptron produces models with comparable accuracy to more complex architectures, with no need for approximations. Further gains in accuracy are obtained by designing features for parsing extracted from semantic annotations generated by a tagger. We provide experimental evaluations on the Penn Treebank.
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.
In this chapter I argue for a key premise in the argument I will present (in chapter 4) for anti-individualism regarding the individuation of speech content, linguistic meaning, and (ultimately) the attitudes. The premise itself asserts the existence of public linguistic norms. As developed in the argument to follow, such norms are normative in that they provide standards for the correct usage and interpretation of lexical items (that is, they provide the semantic standards of these items); and such norms are public, first, in that they derive from the shared, public language that is common property to all members of a speech community, and second, in that participants in speech exchanges – speakers and hearers alike – are positively but defeasibly presumed to be answerable to these norms on each particular speech exchange. In this chapter I will be pursuing the idea that the practice whereby knowledge is spread through a speaker's use of language itself depends on the existence of semantic standards provided by the shared public language. Or rather: such standards are required if this practice is to be, as we take it to be, a pervasive and efficient way to spread very specific pieces of knowledge, under conditions in which speaker and hearer may know nothing about one another's speech and interpretative dispositions beyond what is manifested in the brief speech exchange itself.
This paper reports on experiments in frame-semantic annotation of a parallel treebank. Selected English and Swedish sentences that contained verbs of motion and communication were annotated independently by two annotators. We found that they assigned the same frame to corresponding sentences in 52% of the cases. This leads us to the conclusion that parallel treebanks can save considerable effort when building semantically annotated resources.
In morphologically rich languages, should morphological and syntactic disambiguation be treated sequentially or as a single problem? We describe several efficient, probabilisticallyinterpretable ways to apply joint inference to morphological and syntactic disambiguation using lattice parsing. Joint inference is shown to compare favorably to pipeline parsing methods across a variety of component models. State-of-the-art performance on Hebrew Treebank parsing is demonstrated using the new method. The benefits of joint inference are modest with the current component models, but appear to increase as components themselves improve. 1
We argue in favor of the the use of labeled directed graph to represent various types of linguistic structures, and illustrate how this allows one to view NLP tasks as graph transformations. We present a general method for learning such transformations from an annotated corpus and describe experiments with two applications of the method: identification of non-local depenencies (using Penn Treebank data) and semantic role labeling (using Proposition
Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference \nof Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. \nEditors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. \nUniversity of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. \nISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) \nISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) \npp. 152-159.
MLR, I02.3, 2007 849 them to a traditional published form as was done inEngler's critical edition. This gives readers amuch more immediate sense of connection with Saussure's thought, as well as providing some inkling ofwhat it is like towork with theoriginal manuscript materials. The textproper ends on page 240, with 87 pages given over to the bibliography of secondary literatureon Saussure since I970. It isa very fulland useful listingcovering awide range ofworks coming from linguists and literarycritics, and while some omis sions are inevitable, nothing can detract from the fact that this volume marks a true watershed in thedevelopment of Saussurean studies in theEnglish-speaking world. UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH JOHN E. JOSEPH La Langue, lestyle,lesens: etudesoffertes aAnne-Marie Garagnon. By CLAIRE BADIOU MONFERRAN, FRiED1ERIC CALAS, JULIEN PIAT, and CHRISTELLE REGGIANI. Paris: L'Improviste. 2005. 383pp. E28. ISBN978-2-913764-27-9. The titleof thevolume, a collection of articles inhonour ofAnne-Marie Garagnon, indicates the threemain themes explored. There are fourmain sections which reflect the interestsboth of the dedicatee and of her colleagues and formerpupils. The first section, entitled 'La langue entre histoire et systeme', isparticularly rich and inter esting. It examines what the editors call 'l'heritage conceptuel etmethodologique du xxe siecle' (p. 7), opening up interesting questions in the history of French linguis tic thought and of the French language, and in linguistic theory and ideologies of language. The second part, 'Faits de langue et faitsde style', includes articles which discuss and analyse particular lexical and semantic features of the French language from the Renaissance to the present day. The third part, 'Effets de style et effets de discours', offers insights into current trends in stylistic analysis, which inFrance is particularly marked by theories of 'enonciation'. Notable in the final part, en titled 'Stylistique et hermeneutique des formes', are the articles byGeorges Molinie and Thomas Clerc, which aim to present the epistemological basis ofAnne-Marie Garagnon's stylistic approach; other contributors explore certain stylisticmotifs in literary texts ranging fromLa Princesse de Cleves to Proust. It is impossible in the space of a review to do justice to all the articles and I propose to focus on a num ber of papers which seem to reflectwell the overall quality of the volume. Gilles Siouffi's excellent article, for example, reviews the notion of 'langue classique' and considers how a stylistic and grammatical analysis of its features can enable us better tounderstand it.He challenges the paradoxical notion of classical French as at once forming the norm forcontemporary French and being considered as 'radicalement autre' (p. i). A number of contributions treat the analysis of proper names fromdif ferentperspectives. Delphine Denis provides an interesting discussion of the status of the proper name in the seventeenth century. She shows how in this period there gradually emerges a theoryof proper nouns 'plus ou moins rapprochee du nom com mun' (p. 33). She notes how thegrammars and volumes ofobservations on theFrench language elaborate an opposition between common and proper nouns, but, with the possible exception of thePort-Royal logic,never discuss thecomplex nature ofproper nouns or the nature of theirmeaning. Adopting a stylistic approach, Van Dung Le Flanchec uses an analysis ofMaurice Sceve's 'Mon Orphee' toquestion modern ana lyses of proper names in terms of antonomasia, which should in her view rather be considered a stylisticquestion. Adopting a similar stylistic approach, Claire Badiou Monferran looks at different types of anaphora in a corpus of seventeenth-century nouvelles galantes; once again she sees the repeated use of anaphoric demonstrative pronouns as being a stylistic traitrather than an inherent feature of theFrench of the 85o Reviews period. Notable among the articleswhich adopt an approach associated with theories of 'enonciation' is the article by Frederic Calas. Starting froman analysis of an extract from Marivaux's Yournaux and fromLesage's Gil Blas de Santillane, he demonstrates thatepanorthosis isnot simply a rhetorical figurebut also gives thediscourse an ironic effect,therebycriticizing 'l'hypocrisiemondaine' (p. 247). In short, thevolume offers insights into a wide range of perspectives which are currently being applied to the study of French language and literature.What theyperhaps all have in common is the desire to reflecton 'legeste hermeneutique' (p. i). UNIVERSITY...
A method of data collection is presented that unites the efficiency of mass testing with the ease of instant electronic data collection that is typical of computer-based experiments run on individual participants. A wireless response system (WRS), originally designed as a teaching tool, is used to replicate three classic and robust effects from the memory literature (effects of false memory, levels of processing, and word frequency). It is shown that for these types of experimental designs, data can be collected more efficiently (in both time and effort) with the WRS method than through traditional mass- and individual-testing methods alone. The advantages and limitations of WRSs for use in mass electronic data collection are discussed.
We present a simple history-based model for sentence generation from LFG f-structures, which improves on the accuracy of previous models by breaking down PCFG independence assumptions so that more f-structure conditioning context is used in the prediction of grammar rule expansions. In addition, we present work on experiments with named entities and other multi-word units, \nshowing a statistically significant improvement of generation accuracy. Tested on section 23 of the PennWall Street Journal Treebank, the techniques described in this paper improve BLEU scores from 66.52 to 68.82, and coverage from 98.18% to 99.96%.
We modified the traditional (verbal) digit span task for administration via computer and the Internet. This online version collects data on the floor and ceiling of a subject’s span capacity, rather than generating a rough estimate of capacity based on a 50% success rate, as the traditional version does. We compared the two versions within adult subjects in two cohorts: college-age normal readers and college-age reading-disabled readers. To explore the reliability of the online version as a research tool, we employed the Bland-Altman approach to examine agreement between instruments. The online version yielded spans similar to those yielded by the traditional version, tending toward smaller values at the high end and larger values at the low end of span sizes, in the typical readers. It differentiated between the better and poorer readers reliably, and to the same extent as does the verbal version. The online version of the digit span task is comparable to the traditional version in assessing verbal span capacity; the code with which to implement the task is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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), 19-30. \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.
This article is about analysis of data obtained in repeated measures designs in psycholinguistics and related disciplines with items (words) nested within treatment (5 type of words). Statistics tested in a series of computer simulations are:F 1,F 2,F 1 &F 2,F′, minF′, plus two decision procedures, the one suggested by Forster and Dickinson (1976) and one suggested by the authors of this article. The most common test statistic,F 1 &F 2, turns out to be wrong, but all alternative statistics suggested in the literature have problems too. The two decision procedures perform much better, especially the new one, because it systematically takes into account the subject by treatment interaction and the degree of word variability.
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.
The aim of this paper is to investigate whether a treebank grammar can be used to automatically classify and annotate German phrases contained in a MT lexicon. Phrases from the lexicon appear in their citation form and may differ structurally from the phrase tokens found in the corpus. We describe the grammar extraction process for a formalism called Tree-Generating Binary Grammar and evaluate the performance of subsets of the obtained grammar on a set of four types of lexical phrases.
The article deals with the lexical changes that occurred in the Belarusian language within the 1930s. Books many times printed in the 1930s were the source of the study. Let alone that a certain stability in the lexicon of the Belarusian standard language was achieved by the end of the 1920s, one can observe a landslide of many norms previously used in editions of 1933 and later on. These changes happened against the background of the party-state activities in the field of the corpus planning of Belarusian (the “Results of the Discussion on Linguistics” resolution of the bureau of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Communist Party of 1930, the “About changes and simplification of the Belarusian orthography” resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic of 1933, language cultivation campaign etc.). Changes mostly concerned Polonisms and words identical to Polish, as well as unique neologisms and colloquial Belarusian words. Mainly Russianisms and words with Russian cognates replaced them.
In this paper we will describe VIT (Venice Italian Treebank), created at the University of Venice. We will focus on the syntactic-semantic features and on the quantitative analysis of the data of our treebank comparing them to other treebanks. In general, we will try to substantiate the claim that treebanking grammars or parsers is dramatically dependent on the chosen treebank; and eventually this process seems to be dependent either from substantial factors such as the adopted linguistic framework for structural description or, ultimately, the described language.
This paper presents a new approach to part-of-speech (POS) tagging in which the basic unit being tagged is a contiguous sequence of words rather than a single word. We run experiments on two different tagsets: the UPENN treebank and a treebank annotated with more ambiguous tags that have a semantic component. We show that the phrase-based system alone is a respectable tagger that exceeds the performance of the ME tagger on the ambiguous tagset. Moreover, when a log-linear model is built using features from both phrase-and word-based techniques, the tagging accuracy improved on both of our data sets yielding the highest reported performance to date on the more ambiguous tagset.
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.
Speech-to-speech translation technology has difficulties processing elements of spontaneity in conversation. We propose a discourse marker attribute in speech corpora to help overcome some of these problems. There have already been some attempts to annotate discourse markers in speech corpora. However, as there is no consistency on what expressions count as discourse markers, we have to reconsider how to set a framework for annotating, and, in order to better understand what we gain by introducing a discourse marker category, we have to analyse their characteristics and functions in discourse. This is especially important for languages such as Slovenian where no or little research on the topic of discourse markers has been carried out. The aims of this paper are to present a scheme for annotating discourse markers based on the analysis of a corpus of telephone conversations in the tourism domain in the Slovenian language, and to give some additional arguments based on the characteristics and functions of discourse markers that confirm their special status in conversation.
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.
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 is a study of German compound nouns, used metaphorically to refer to three life style manifestations characteristic of postmodern society: consumption, health and fitness orientation, and the pursuit of pleasure. The lexical items are classified according to the source domains of the respective metaphors, thus demonstrating the variety of perspectives that come into play and providing an insight into the ways people think as well as their attitudes and values with respect to the phenomena focussed on in the study. Common to all lexemes is an element of excess, which suggests that the phenomena in question are regarded as violations of societal norms.
Description of several hybrid disambiguation methods combining the strength of hand-written disambiguation rules and statistical taggers. Three different statistical (HMM, Maximum-Entropy and Averaged Perceptron)taggers are used in a tagging experiment using Prague Dependency Treebank. The results of the hybrid systems are better than any other method tried for Czech tagging so far.
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.
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.
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.
While heavy lexical borrowing can pose a problem to any approach to linguistic prehistory, it has often been regarded as an especially difficult problem for lexicostatistics, especially in such areas as Australia, where some believe that extensive borrowing is the norm. The present paper applies lexicostatistics to what is arguably the most massive case of borrowing known for Australia, namely between the Jingulu and Mudburra languages of the Northern Territory, and finds that it actually leads to what is generally considered the correct genetic classification of these languages. This result is then shown to depend on certain relationships among the lexicostatistical percentages that may not always obtain in other cases of heavy borrowing.
This study employs corpus-based and computer-aided methodology to investigate Polish advanced learners' use of the past progressive in L2 English. The analysis is performed within the framework of the Aspect Hypothesis and it is based on narrative and descriptive essays (the total of 35,319 tokens) drawn from the PELCRA learner corpus. The learner data is contrasted with two sections of the FLOB corpus comprising native speakers' texts of a comparable genre. The results have demonstrated that, although Polish advanced learners on the whole can dissociate the use of tense-aspect morphology from its prototypical combinations with the lexical aspect and their use of the past progressive across the situation types reflects the native patterns, they tend to overuse past progressive forms in comparison to the native norm. This tendency can be explained by L1 influence, but it is also reinforced by writing instruction, which fails to sensitise students to the stylistic effects of employing preterite versus past progressive forms to describe the background situation in a narrative.
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)
“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...
This paper seeks to shed light on the diachronic evolution of collocations by examining structures formed in Modern Spanish with dar “give” plus state nouns (e.g. dar miedo “frighten”, literally, “give fear”). Using the Corpus del español, I offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteen representative dar miedo -type collocations from the 1200s to the 1900s. The results show that although the basic properties of dar miedo -type structures have remained remarkably stable over the centuries, during the Middle Ages the verb hacer “make” was used here almost as often as dar — a competition apparently inherited from Latin. While different nouns show different patterns of loss of hacer, echoing the lexical diffusion of certain grammatical changes, the 1500s saw a very sharp decline in “make” cases across the board, leading to its complete disappearance from this context by the 1800s. The loss of hacer led to a radical simplification of the collocational properties of state nouns in Spanish vis-à-vis Latin and other Modern Romance varieties. This process resulted both from language-internal factors mostly related to the lexical semantics of dar and hacer and from three key sociolinguistic processes in 16th-century Spanish: koineization, change of norm and increased standardization.
This article examines the corpus of multinationals’ codes of conduct on CSR issues which has been collated by the ILO. Through lexical software analysis we identify three main points of reference in CSR codes of conduct: respect for ILO norms, discussion of the company’s relationship to society, and reinforcement of its internal discipline and organisation. Surprisingly, the issue of corporate responsibility itself constitutes a small part of the text of the codes. Their main targets are employees, who are charged with a dual task: to ensure the implementation of the principles stated in the codes, and to protect the assets of the company. In a reflexive dimension, codes of conduct help us to understand the key characteristics of the companies which made them.
In this paper, we describe the application of a bidirectional dependency parser trained on the Turin University Treebank.
07–484 Aceto, Michael (East Carolina U, USA; acetom@ecu.edu ), Statian Creole English: An English-derived language emerges in the Dutch Antilles. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 411–435. 07–485 Anchimbe, Eric A. (U Munich, Germany), World Englishes and the American tongue. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 3–9. 07–486 Bartha, Csilla & Anna Borbély (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary; bartha@nytud.hu ), Dimensions of linguistic otherness: Prospects of minority language maintenance in Hungary. Language Policy (Springer) 5.3 (2006), 337–365. 07–487 Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan (North-West U, Potchefstroom, South Africa; basascvr@puk.ac.za ), Integrativeness: Untenable for world Englishes learners? World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 437–450. 07–488 Gooskens, Charlotte (U Groningen, The Netherlands; c.s.gooskens@rug.nl ) & Renée van Bezooijen, Mutual comprehensibility of written Afrikaans and Dutch: Symmetrical or asymmetrical? Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press) 21.4 (2006), 543–557. 07–489 Gooskens, Charlotte & Wilbert Heeringa (U Groningen, The Netherlands; c.s.gooskens@rug.nl ), The relative contribution of pronunciational, lexical, and prosodic differences to the perceived distances between Norwegian dialects. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press) 21.4 (2006), 477–492. 07–490 Guilherme, Manuela (U De Coimbra, Portgual), English as a Global language and education for cosmopolitan citizenship. Language and International Communication (Multilingual Matters) 7.1 (2007), 72–90. 07–491 Koscielecki, Marek (The Open U, Hongk Kong, China). Japanized English, its context and socio-historical background. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 25–31. 07–492 Meilin, Chen (Three Gorges University, China) & Hu Xiaoqiong, Towards the acceptability of China English at home and abroad. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 44–52. 07–493 Mesthrie, Rajend (U Cape Town, South Africa; raj@humanities.uct.ac.za ), World Englishes and the multilingual history of English. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 381–390. 07–494 Poole, Brian (Ministry of Manpower, Muscat, the Sultanate of Oman), Some effects of Indian English on the language as it is used in Oman. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 21–24. 07–495 Robinson, Ian (U Calabria, Italy), Genre and loans: English words in an Italian newspaper. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 9–20. 07–496 Ross, Kathryn (U Oxford, UK; kathryn.ross@trinity.ox.ac.uk ), Status of women in highly literate societies: The case of Kerala and Finland. Literacy (Blackwell) 40.3 (2006), 171–178. 07–497 Sala, Bonaventure M. (Cameroon), Does Cameroonian English have grammatical norms? English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 59–64. 07–498 Wei-Yu Chen, Cheryl (National Taiwan Normal U, Taiwan; wychen66@hotmail.com ), The mixing of English in magazine advertisements in Taiwan. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 467–478. 07–499 Wong, Jock (National U Singapore, Singapore; jockonn@hotmail.com ), Contextualizing aunty in Singaporean English. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 451–466. 07–500 Xiaoxia, Cui (Yunnan U, China), An understanding of ‘China English’ and the learning and use of the English language in China. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 40–43. 07–501 Young, Ming Yee Carissa (Macao U Science & Technology, Macau; myyoung@must.edu.mo ), Macao students' attitudes toward English: A post-1999 survey. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 479–490.