The level and forms of verbal creativity of microteaching student practitioners

Wheeldon and Monsell (this issue) found that production of a word in response to a definition had a large and long-lasting facilitatory effect on latency for later production of the same word to name a pictured object, and that this priming effect was not due to repeated production of the phonological word-form per se. This paper reports a further test of the locus of the effect. Welsh-English bilinguals named pictured objects in Welsh. Half the words were primed either by their earlier production in Welsh in response to Welsh definitions or by production of their equivalents in English in response to English definitions. Substantial facilitation resulted from prior production in the same language, none from prior production in the other language--provided that the equivalents differed in phonological form. Given that priming results neither from repeated activation of a meaning when different phonological forms are produced, nor from repetition of the same phonological form in response to different meanings, the priming effect must be localized in the connection between a word's meaning and its phonological form. We also put forward an account of bilingual lexicalization that accommodates this result together with some evidence indicating that production of words in one language is not wholly insulated from the "availability" of words in the other.

Bu çalışmada Arapça dil kurallarından kaynaklanan ihtilâfların meâllere ne ölçüde aktarıldığı Bayraktar Bayraklı ve Mustafa Öztürk meâli özelinde incelenmiştir. Çalışmada bu iki meâl; hakîkat-mecâz, çokanlamlılık, zamirin mercii, bazı bağlaç ve edatlar ile ilgili farklı değerlendirmeler, hazif/eksiltili cümle ve takdîm-te’hîr olmak üzere altı dil kuralı açısından üçer örnekle karşılaştırılmıştır. Sonuçta, anlamın özünde ciddi bir farklılığa sebep olmayan ihtilâfların meâle yansıtılmadığı ve dolayısıyla her iki meâlde de bu konuda isâbet sağlandığı saptanmıştır. Zira anlamın özüne etki etmeyen farklılıkların meâle yansıtılması, mealin kapsamı nazara alındığında hem imkân dışı hem de gereksizdir. Diğer taraftan mananın özünde ciddi farklara neden olan ihtilâfların kimi zaman meâle aktarıldığı kimi zaman ise aktarılmadığı tespit edilmiştir. Bu nedenle her iki meâlde de bu açıdan bazı eksikliklerin bulunduğu sonucuna varılmıştır. Çünkü tercih edilmeyen görüşlerin dipnot ya da açıklama bölümünde meâle yansıtılması önem arz etmektedir. Aksi halde âyetlerdeki anlam zenginliği meâle aktarılmadığı gibi tercih edilen anlamın kastedilmeyen anlam olma ihtimâli de mümkündür.

Shared or different: How linked are word production and comprehension?

Смещение ракурса современного образования с формирования общеучебных компетенций на развитие функциональной грамотности определяется одной из тенденций в образовательной среде. Представляется возможным рассмотреть феномен лингвокреативности как один из параметров функциональной грамотности, поскольку коммуникативный, деятельностный и мыслительный компоненты этого феномена соотносятся с общеучебной компетенцией, направленной на развитие коммуникативных навыков и предполагающей умение решать жизненные задачи в различных сферах деятельности на основе прикладных знаний. Цель статьи – определение лексических, словообразовательных и грамматических средств реализации лингвокреативности в устной и письменной речи студентов-филологов и описание параметров явления лингвокреативности в аспекте функциональной грамотности будущих учителей русского языка. Исследование контекстов, содержащих средства актуализации лингвистической креативности, включает использование структурно-семантического анализа, контент-анализа, метода эксперимента с применением разработанной Т.А. Гридиной технологией диагностики вербальной креативности. Материалом исследования являются составленные студентами историко-филологического факультета Томского государственного педагогического университета контексты, содержащие окказиональную лексику; материалы онлайн-анкетирования; извлеченные приемом сплошной выборки контексты с окказионализмами из НКРЯ, романа Д. Рубиной «Бабий ветер» и серии романов Дж. Роулинг о Гарри Поттере, стихотворений М. Львова, А. Вознесенского, Е. Евтушенко. При проведении лингвистического эксперимента установлено, что составленные студентами контексты в условиях конкретного задания отличает стандартизированный характер, обусловленный наличием внешнего локуса контроля, заданностью модели для словопроизводства и сознательного использования приема языковой игры; экспрессивность; использование различных (узуальных и неузуальных) способов словообразования, среди которых продуктивными являются контаминация, гендиадис, субституция, суффиксация, сложение; создание неожиданных комбинаций языковых средств; наличие разных видов окказиональной лексики. Результаты проведенной диагностики вербальной креативности свидетельствуют о сформированности у участников эксперимента умений продуцировать авторский окказионализм по модели прототипа с учетом контекстуальной заданности. Отмечается высокий процент совпадения восстанавливаемых лексем с авторскими наряду с продуцированием собственных окказионализмов (27 %). Способность носителя языка использовать языковые средства в процессе речепорождения и текстовой деятельности при словотворчестве, задействуя при этом неузуальные способы словопроизводства, реализуя ассоциативный и деривационный потенциал единиц языка, дополняя семантику лексем новыми оттенками значения, является одним из показателей сформированности функциональной грамотности этого носителя, что соотносится с базисными принципами лингвокреативности. Критериями, свидетельствующими о достаточном уровне сформированности функциональной грамотности у студентов-филологов, проявляющейся в способности к вербальной креативности, являются развитый самоконтроль речи; высокий уровень развития языковой рефлексии; готовность и потребность использовать возможности языка с целью снизить предсказуемость текста и обогатить его содержательно; тенденция к переносу умения проявлять лингвокреативность в свободную речевую деятельность. The shift in the focus of modern education from the formation of general educational competencies to the development of functional literacy is determined by one of the trends in the educational sphere. It seems possible to consider the phenomenon of linguocreativity as one of the parameters of functional literacy, since the communicative, activity and thinking components of this phenomenon are related to the general educational competence aimed at developing communicative skills and implying the ability to solve life problems in various fields of activity based on applied knowledge. The aim of the article is to define lexical, word-formation and grammatical means of implementing linguistic creativity in the oral and written speech of philology students and description of the parameters of the phenomenon of linguistic creativity in the aspect of functional literacy of future teachers of the Russian language. The study of contexts containing means of actualization of linguistic creativity includes the use of structural-semantic analysis, content analysis, the experimental method using the technology of diagnostics of verbal creativity developed by T.A. Gridina. The material of the study is contexts containing occasional vocabulary compiled by students of the Faculty of History and Philology of TSPU; materials of an online questionnaire; contexts with occasionalisms extracted by the method of continuous sampling from the NKRYA, the novel by D. Rubina «Babiy Veter» and the series of novels by J. Rowling about Harry Potter, poems by M. Lvov, A. Voznesensky, E. Yevtushenko. During the linguistic experiment it was established that the contexts created by the students in the conditions of a specific task are distinguished by a standardized nature, due to the presence of an external locus of control, a given model for word production and the conscious use of the technique of language play; expressiveness; the use of various (usual and nonusual) methods of word formation, among which the productive ones are contamination, hendiadys, substitution, suffixation, addition; the creation of unexpected combinations of linguistic means; the presence of different types of occasional vocabulary. The results of the conducted diagnostics of verbal creativity indicate that the participants of the experiment have developed the ability to produce the author’s occasionalism according to the prototype model, taking into account the contextual predeterminedness. A high percentage of coincidence of the reconstructed lexemes with the author’s is noted along with the production of their own occasionalisms (27 %). The ability of a native speaker to use linguistic means in the process of speech production and textual activity in word creation, while using non-usual methods of word production, realizing the associative and derivational potential of language units, supplementing the semantics of lexemes with new shades of meaning, is one of the indicators of the formation of the functional literacy of this speaker, which is related to the basic principles of linguocreativity. The criteria indicating a sufficient level of development of functional literacy in philology students, manifested in the ability for verbal creativity, are developed self-control of speech; a high level of development of linguistic reflection; readiness and need to use the capabilities of language in order to reduce the predictability of the text and enrich it with content; a tendency to transfer the ability to demonstrate linguistic creativity to free speech activity.

Atypical associations to abstract words in Broca’s aphasia

Introduction. Revealing the psychologically real, individual meaning of the word as opposed to its dictionary meaning is the important task since such knowledge is crucial for effective communication. This is especially true for the words which denote key ideas and concepts of the culture. The word association experiment has been one of the most used methodologies to examine individual meaning of the word but it has been heavily criticized because of its subjectivity. In some of the recent works, data from language models and methods of vector semantics have been used to solve this problem. However, firstly, the very set of the features by which the meaning of the word is described is not uniform, which does not allow for a comparison of the results, and, secondly, some other types of data related to word production (i.e., behavioral data) are typically not taken into account. The aim of the present study is to reveal and systematically describe individual differences in the psychologically real meaning of the particular key words of the Russian culture using a new methodology which could be applied to any word association task. We propose to analyze data of different types (semantic features and keystroke dynamics markers) obtained during word association production to reveal individual differences in the word meaning. Materials and Methods. The material of the study is a newly developed dataset containing associative reactions to the keywords of Russian culture, anonymized data about the informants, as well as the reaction time while producing associations measured using a program that records keystrokes. The proposed research methodology includes both the existing approaches (automatic extraction of relations from texts based on data from language models and methods of vector semantics, i.e., “cultural cartography using word embeddings”) and a new list of features developed by the authors to describe individual differences in the meaning of a word based on the data from neurobiology about the meaning structure of word. A set of data analysis methods (linear mixed models, principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering on principal components) implemented in R packages is used to reveal individual differences in the word meaning in terms of the proposed list of features and association of the revealed differences with participants’ characteristics. Results. The cluster analysis showed the presence of two to three variants of psychologically real meanings for the 9 studied cue words which are listed among the key words of Russian culture. Systematic differences in the individual meanings of the words according to the proposed set of semantic features reflecting different aspects of semantic representations of word meaning in the human brain are described in detail, and a connection between specific features of the word meaning and the characteristics of the participants and markers of keyboard behavior are established for the first time. Discussion and Conclusion. The specific scientific results related to the individual differences in the psychologically real meanings of the words, as well as fully reproducible methodology proposed in this paper (the dataset and code of this study are available on GitHub) can be used in the practice of effective teaching of Russian as a foreign language, in the study of the changes in semantics of the key words of the culture based on text data, for designing effective political and advertising campaigns, etc. Among strands of the future research are the study into the effect of the different characteristics of the cue words on their semantic features and participants’ keystroke behavior, the broadening of the list of the proposed characteristics, the use of new language models and text corpora for the further development of an important theoretical and applied problem of revealing and describing the psychologically real word meaning.

One of the aims of every linguistic theory is to provide an exact and systematic description of the meaning of any sentence. The notion of "valence" is widely used in West- and East-European linguistics (Tesnière, Helbig/Schenkel, Apresjan, Mel'cuk, etc.) in order to account for the connection between syntactic structures and word meanings. So, in John saw the children it is due to the inherent valences of SEE that John is under-stood as 'seeing' and the children as 'seen': the referents of these two sentence elements carry specific meaning aspects of the verb. They only function in this way if they meet the formal characteristics set by the verb. In this paper I furnish a definition of "valence" and a corresponding discovery procedure. This procedure yields an explicit set of valences of any particular word. Valences are considered aspects of the meaning of a (set of) word(s) X, carried by the referent of a (set of) word(s) Y; as a corrolary, the meaning of this Y cannot be completely understood without taking into account the functioning of its referent as the carrier of the valence meaning. The discovery procedure does not assign a specific valence meaning to a verb if the functioning of the corresponding sentence element can be (completely) accounted for on the grounds of its own form. To illustrate this point, a valence labelled "price" which is claimed by Apresjan for the Russian verb ARENDOVAT' (='to lease'), would be rejected by the procedure because the corresponding sentence element has a form and a meaning which are not in function of its being dependent to ARENDOVAT', but would have the same form and meaning in other contexts. An analysis of the syntax and semantics of the Dutch verb WACHTEN (='to wait') illustrates the procedure. A short contrastive analysis of Russian and Dutch 'wait' shows some interesting differences in their comparable valences and in the syntactic peculiarities of adjuncts to these verbs.

Sentence comprehension depends on the understanding of both the individual words and their hierarcical relations with other words. So far, researchers have studied sentence processing by using different methods. In this study, sentence comprehension of school-aged children without developmental language disorder were investigated by using eye tracking measure. The data collection tool consists of ten sets of sentences in four different meaning conditions such as literal sense, figurative sense, polysemous sense and technical sense. In each condition the same target word, area of interest, were identified, which make a total of 40 target sentences. In this study, ‘the first fixation duration’, ‘total fixation duration’ and ‘total visit duration’ are used as the metrics of eye tracking data to analyze the processing of different types of Turkish sentences. The results revealed that in TVD and TFD parameters there was significant difference among all 4 categories of meanings. Furthermore, there was significant difference in TVD and TFD parameter among literal and polysemous meaning categories and figurative and polysemous meaning categories. On the contrary there was no significant difference among literal and figurative, literal and technical and figurative and technical meaning categories. The results of this study indicate that different meanings of the same word can cause different processing difficulties. The processing of polysemous meaning takes longer time than processing of literal, figurative and technical meaning. The children have difficulty in making connection between the literal meaning and polysemous meaning. Educators should improve children’s cognitive abilities and help them to create the connection between the literal and polysemous sense. The results suggest that salient meaning is more activated than the less frequent meaning. The results of the study are in consistence with Giora’s Graded Salience Hypothesis revealing that salient meaning is activated faster than the nonsalient meaning.

Language learning and brain reorganization in a 3.5-year-old child with left perinatal stroke revealed using structural and functional connectivity

Abstract: Weber did not publish works on the sociology of music during his lifetime, yet he recognized that a specific rationalism influenced even this most intrinsic human experience. This article uses formal and substantive rationality to explore how Weber linked the final harmonious chord structure’s emotional content ( Gefühlsinhalten ) to modern capitalist society in the West. The late Renaissance saw a demand for expressive music, integrating new melodic elements within a framework emphasizing vertical harmonic consonance. This reflects the Western tendency to rationalize music’s emotional content, intertwined with ascetic rationalism’s ethical orientation. While Weber did not empirically analyze music’s connection to individual meaning extensively, his insights provide a lens to examine musical forms’ aesthetic features and cultural significance from a comparative civilizational perspective.

This study proposes a new approach in the sentence tokenization process. Sentence tokenization, which is known so far, is the process of breaking sentences based on spaces as separators. Space-based sentence tokenization only generates single word tokens. In sentences consisting of five words, tokenization will produce five tokens, one word each. Each word is a token. This process ignores the loss of the original meaning of the separated words. Our proposed tokenization framework can generate one-word tokens and multi-word tokens at the same time. The process is carried out by extracting the sentence structure to obtain sentence elements. Each sentence element is a token. There are five sentence elements that is Subject, Predicate, Object, Complement and Adverbs. We extract sentence structures using deep learning methods, where models are built by training the datasets that have been prepared before. The training results are quite good with an F1 score of 0.7 and it is still possible to improve. Sentence similarity is the topic for measuring the performance of one-word tokens compared to multi-word tokens. In this case the multiword token has better accuracy. This framework was created using the Indonesian language but can also use other languages with dataset adjustments.

Creativity related cortex activity in the remote associates task

Sex differences in electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of creativity were studied using verbal and figural divergent tasks to be performed in accordance with the instructions to “give any solution” or “give an original solution.” The common effect was a greater activity of the right hemisphere, which did not depend on the sex, task type, or instructions for performance of the tasks. The α2 and β2 rhythms were the main EEG frequency correlates of creative thinking; the degree and sign of their reactivity depended on the aforementioned factors. Although the creative abilities in men and women were similar under test conditions, the EEG correlates of both figural and verbal tasks were sex-dependent. A high reactivity of the α2 rhythm was more marked during verbal creative thinking in women; and that of the β2 rhythm, during figural creative thinking in men. The instruction-related improvement of the critical selection of solutions was to a greater extent reflected by changes in the cortical activity, more pronounced in the frontal cortex in the women. Thus, the same creative productivity in men and women was mediated by different strategies of performance of both figural and verbal tasks, and the sex-related differences in these strategies remained even when the motivation for creativity was changed.

Pavlenko argues that contemporary models of the bilingual lexicon (e.g., Kroll & De Groot, 1997) confuse word meanings and concepts. A new approach to concepts in bilingual memory is advocated in which meanings and concepts have separate representations. ‘‘The evidence for a distinction between word meanings and concepts comes from the study of aphasia: it has been demonstrated that global and paroxysmal aphasics exhibit a complete loss of language (lack of production and comprehension) in the presence of self-regulated and communicative behavior, based on wellcontrolled non-linguistic conceptual representations’’. For example, the patients may be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog but producing or understanding the words ‘‘cat’’ and ‘‘dog’’ is impossible. According to Pavlenko, such findings suggest that word meanings and concepts have separate representations in the brain (cf. Paradis, 1997). In this commentary, I argue that the assumption of separate representations for meanings and concepts is not required by the aphasia data ‐ in fact, the standard account of global aphasia and anomia does not make this distinction (e.g., Caplan, 1992). Furthermore, the findings on bilingual performance do not require the separation either. Instead, a single, conceptual level suffices and provides an even better account of the available evidence. I lay out my arguments using the WEAVER++ model of word production (Roelofs, 1992, 1993; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999a) but they hold for most ‘‘one-level’’ models in the literature. WEAVER++ is a model for monolingual word production in which conceptual representations also code word meanings. So, if Pavlenko is right, the model should have great difficulty accounting for the patient data and it should be hard to extend the model to bilingual production. In the model, a distinction is made between conceptual preparation, lemma retrieval, and word-form encoding. During conceptual preparation, a speaker decides on the conceptual information to be verbally expressed, called the ‘‘message’’ concepts. In lemma retrieval, a message concept is used to retrieve a lemma from memory, which is a representation of the syntactic properties of a word, crucial for its use in sentences. For example, an English verb lemma specifies the word’s syntactic class and what kind of complements the word takes. A verb lemma also contains morphosyntactic slots for the specification of tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. The slots are given values using information from the message or are set by agreement. So, it is certainly not the case that a one-level model ‘‘narrows the scope of investigation to lexicalized concepts only, making it impossible to entertain any other kind, such as grammaticized concepts (encoded morphosyntactically)’’ as claimed by Pavlenko. A noun lemma specifies the syntactic class, has a number slot (for count nouns), and, for languages like Dutch, French, and German, specifies the grammatical gender. Lemma retrieval makes these properties available for syntactic encoding processes. In word-form encoding, the lemma information and the morphosyntactic slot values are used to retrieve the appropriate form properties from memory in order to construct an articulatory program. Information about words is represented in a network

Spontaneous speech in patients with gliomas in eloquent areas: Evaluation until 1 year after surgery