The word "bed" looks like a bed: Orthographic iconicity in English.

The aim of this article is to redefine the phenomenon of borrowing on the basis of the Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian: to analyse the frequency and use of foreign words, to determine the proportion of new borrowings among foreign words, and to examine whether some of the foreign words may be treated as the instances of code switching or code mixing. The article attempts to make a distinction between new borrowings and other foreign words and discusses the phenomenon of code mixing in spoken language for the first time in Lithuanian; it also explains the terms of code switching and code mixing, which have not been discussed in Lithuanian linguistics. The results of the quantitative research have revealed that foreign words comprise only 0.33% of all words in spoken language. The largest proportion of these words is English words and phrases (93%), while lexemes or phrases from Russian, Latin, or Italian comprise only 7% of the words. The research has determined that new borrowings constitute 44% of all foreign words in the conversations under the present investigation, and code mixing has been employed in 56% of all instances. The research has demonstrated that code mixing is the most typical of spoken private speech, while the use of new borrowings is more frequent in more formal registers of spoken language, i.e. academic and media language.

Cochlear implantation (CI) has been successful in individuals with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) over the last few years. This study assessed the auditory and speech performance results of pediatrics with inner ear malformations (IEMs) following cochlear implantation at the Ahvaz cochlear implantation center and compared the outcomes of various malformations. All pediatrics with IEMs undergoing CI were included in the study. This retrospective study was performed on pediatrics with congenital IEMs who underwent cochlear implantation in Ahvaz cochlear implantation center between 2014 and 2019. The Category of Auditory Performance (CAP) and the Speech Intelligibility Rating (SIR) scores are two of the most frequently administered tests. The CAP with ranging from 0 (displays no awareness of environmental sounds) to 7 (can use the telephone with a familiar talker), was used to measure the speech perception performance of the implanted children. Furthermore, SIR consists of five performance categories ranging from "prerecognizable words in spoken language" to "connected speech is intelligible to all listeners". Finally, the study included 22 patients. The evaluation of the CT-Scan revealed three types of inner ear malformation: Incomplete Partition (IP)-I in 2 (9.1%), IP-II in 12 (54.5%), and common cavity in 8 (36.4%) individuals. The results were shown that the median CAP score preoperative was 0.5 (interquartile range (IQR): 0-2) and postoperative was 3.5 (IQR: 3-7). There were statistically significant differences in CAP scores between preoperative and second-year follow-up postoperative (p value = 0.036). The results were shown that the median SIR score preoperative was 1 (IQR: 1-5) and postoperative was 2 (IQR: 1-5). There were statistically significant differences in SIR scores between preoperative and second-year follow-up postoperative (p value = 0.001). Following a thorough preoperative screening, patients with specific IEMs can be candidates for CI and not a contraindication. There were statistically significant differences in CAP and SIR scores between preoperative and second-year follow-up postoperative in the common cavity and IP-II groups.

In second language acquisition, speech sounds, or phonemes, not present in a learner’s native language often pose an extra challenge for speech production. When hearing one of these unfamiliar phonemes, the learner either maps it to a similar native phoneme, perceives it as a completely foreign sound, or does not perceive it as speech at all. In the first case, the learner is unable to perceive a difference between the unfamiliar phoneme and the native phoneme to which it is mapped. This mapping difficulty potentially creates problems for the learner during word recognition. The present research investigated the extent to which English phonemes absent from the Mandarin phonological inventory impact processing of native Mandarin speakers in an auditory lexical decision task. Results of this research will expand the understanding of second language perception, especially within the context of auditory lexical decision tasks. A list of ten phonemes—/ɪ/, /æ/, /ʊ/, /ɛ/, /v/, /z/, /ʒ/, /ɵ/, /ð/, /ʤ/—present in the English phonological inventory but absent from that of Mandarin were identified as unfamiliar to native Mandarin speakers. Data from the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database, in which participants decided whether recorded utterances were English words or made-up words, were utilized. The effects of the proportion of unfamiliar phonemes, proportion of unfamiliar vowels, and proportion of unfamiliar consonants on reaction time, representative of processing difficulty, were then calculated using statistical techniques. It was found that the proportion of all unfamiliar phonemes in an utterance had no significant effect on the reaction time of the native Mandarin speakers. However, when the list of unfamiliar phonemes was divided into vowels and consonants, a greater proportion of unfamiliar vowels was noticed to increase reaction time, while a greater proportion of unfamiliar consonants was found to decrease reaction time. Further research in this area is required to determine a concrete explanation for these results. Interestingly, when the same analysis was performed on the data of native English speakers, similar results were observed. This may reflect a common language processing mechanism in second language learners and native speakers.

Long-term experience with a tonal language shapes pitch perception in specific ways, and consequently Chinese speakers may not process pitch in English words – e.g., “Rose?” spoken as a question versus “Rose” spoken as a statement – in the same way as native speakers of non-tonal languages do. If so, what are those pitch processing differences and how do they affect Chinese recognition of English words? We investigated these questions by administering a primed lexical-decision task in English to proficient Chinese–English bilinguals and two control groups, namely, Spanish–English and native English speakers. Prime-target pairs differed in one sound and/or in pitch. Results showed specific cross-language differences in pitch processing between the Chinese speakers and the control groups, confirming that experience with a tonal language shaped the perception of English words' intonation. Moreover, such experience helps to incorporate pitch into models of word-recognition for bilinguals of tonal and non-tonal languages.

How accentuation influences the processing of emotional words in spoken language: An ERP study

Word recognition is investigated along with semantic priming. While semantic priming has received attention among scholars investigating language processing in the last five decades, the literature lacks an investigation of semantic priming in word recognition among native and non-native German-speakers. To investigate the differences in how native speakers (L1) and non-native speakers (L2) of recognize words, and their corresponding speed, we designed two experiments consisting of two conditions; when the primes are associated with the target word, and when the primes are not related to the target word. For the semantic category, identical conditions were designed; when the primes are associated with the target word, and when they are not related to the target word. Reaction Time (RT) and accuracy were obtained during the experiments on both groups (L1 and L2). The experiment was controlled by the DMDX software package. The results indicate that there are no such differences among native speakers(L1) and non-native speakers of the German language unless in individual choices. There are similarities among first language speakers (L1) and second language speakers (L2) in both categoriesــــmorphology and semantics. The delay would occur when non-native speakers see a word in morphological and semantic priming.

While words are divided by blank spaces in print, there is no such obvious convention for separating words in spoken language. An experiment was conducted to ascertain the degree to which less obvious cues are available to signal boundaries between words. Native speakers of English who had no familiarity with Modern Greek listened to tape-recorded speech sequences in Greek into which a brief pause had been inserted. Their job was simply to indicate whether the pause had occurred within one word or between two words. A control group of Greeks exhibited nearly universal agreement. While American Ss responded correctly to just over half the Greek test items, as a group their responses were systematic. It was hypothesized that they were using implicit rules for segmenting English which do not apply to Greek. Suggestions were made as to the exact nature of these rules.

A Thesaurus of Modern Chinese 《现代汉语分类词典》(TMC) can guide learners in searching a word by its classification words. The classification of parts of speech in this thesaurus is one of the practical uses for Chinese learners to know the function of words. Difference on Chinese as foreign language which concern with words of spoken language and Chinese as native language which concern with words of written language is one of the difficulties for Indonesian Chinese learner in using TMC. Although TMC is a thesaurus for mother language learner, it is not only collecting words by frequency like reference books of Chinese as foreign language, but it can also be a fruitful “word bank”reference book for advanced learners because it emphasizes the Chinese semantic and cultural terms in collecting and classifying words. By using TMC, we can find the words that are related to things that native speakers use, the words that can reflect Chinese culture, society and habits with the classification of words.

Bonobos

Two studies were conducted to explore the connection between science texts features and students' ratings of the interest level of the texts. In both studies, students from the 8th-10th grade completed a knowledge test prior to reading, studied the texts, and rated the texts in terms of interest. In the first study, 124 students each worked with 48 popular scientific texts in biology. In the second study, 400 students worked with 40 texts from physics textbooks. The students indicated higher interest in texts with fewer abstract words and scientific terms, shorter sentences and words and a lower repeating rate for nouns. Frequent words in spoken language were related to lower interest in textbooks, but higher interest in popular scientific texts. This difference in the results may be attributed to the higher prior knowledge of textbooks (26%) compared to their knowledge of popular scientific texts (6%). Implications of the findings are discussed.

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The clinical management of differences of sex development (DSDs) aims to guarantee best practices in medical care while addressing concerns related to non-reversible surgeries. Rhetorical analysis was conducted to study the balance between science policy and patient advocacy related to DSD surgeries as depicted in medical education materials METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Unrestricted transcripts of two educational videos and text from all chapters of a handbook addressed to medical learners and faculty by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) were submitted to automated word cloud analysis (NVivo, QSR International®). Words with a weighted percentage > 0.19% from total words of a given source were defined as words of frequent use and were selected for further analysis after exclusion of words as conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, or conversational fillers. Words sharing noun, adjective and adverb forms were coded and weighed as a single word following the Oxford dictionary. Discrepancies on word selection, exclusion or coding were resolved between four raters. The rhetorical context of most frequent words was identified. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The word cloud analysis of the video resource intended for medical learners (n=104 words of frequent use) and the video intended for medical faculty (n= 94 words of frequent use) depicts a patient-centered approach (word people’) that is based on expert opinion (word [I] think’). The handbook (n= 998 words of frequent use) makes reiterated reference to patients’; lgbt’; gender’; health’; and caring’ while underscoring health concerns that are unrelated to genital variance (health’; caring’ and medical’). The noun surgery’ did not figure among the most frequent words in spoken language nor in written text even when summing its adjective and adverb forms. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Educational materials by the AAMC on DSDs accentuate patient-centered care within a medical humanism framework. However, the lack of discussion of DSD surgeries is an educational gap that should be addressed by key science policy and patient advocacy stakeholders.

The traditional cultural euphemism of the Han nationality has profound ideological roots. China has always advocated Confucianism, which has led to the implicit expression of Chinese people’s emotions. There are almost no obvious emotional words in spoken language, which poses a challenge to Chinese sentiment analysis. It is very interesting to exploit a corpus that does not contain emotional words, but instead uses detailed description in text to determine the category of the emotional expressed. In this study, we propose a corpus for Chinese implicit sentiment analysis. To do this, we have crawled millions of microblogs. After data cleaning and processing, we obtained the corpus. Based on this corpus, we introduced conventional models and neural networks for implicit sentiment analysis, and achieve promising results. A comparative experiment with a well-known corpus showed the importance of implicit emotions to emotional classification. This not only shows the usefulness of the proposed corpus for implicit sentiment analysis research, but also provides a baseline for further research on this topic.

Objective: This study is the second of a two-part investigation on lexical effects on bilinguals’ performance on a clinical English word recognition test. Focus is on word-frequency effects using counts provided by four corpora. Design: Frequency of occurrence was obtained for 200 NU-6 words from the Hoosier mental lexicon (HML) and three contemporary corpora, American National Corpora, Hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), and SUBTLEXUS. Correlation analysis was performed between word frequency and error rate. Study sample: Ten monolinguals and 30 bilinguals participated. Bilinguals were further grouped according to their age of English acquisition and length of schooling/working in English. Results: Word frequency significantly affected word recognition in bilinguals who acquired English late and had limited schooling/working in English. When making errors, bilinguals tended to replace the target word with a word of a higher frequency. Overall, the newer corpora outperformed the HML in predicting error rate. Conclusions: Frequency counts provided by contemporary corpora predict bilinguals’ recognition of English monosyllabic words. Word frequency also helps explain top replacement words for misrecognized targets. Word-frequency effects are especially prominent for bilinguals foreign born and educated.

Visual word recognition is crucial for improving reading skills in second language learners (L2Ls). It is unclear whether L2Ls who are native speakers of languages that use alphabetic scripts can recognize Chinese characters at an early stage of visual processing and if their visual specialization can reach a level of word recognition comparable to that of native Chinese speakers. This study aims to uncover the visual specialization mechanism of Chinese L2Ls. A delayed-color matching task was carried out with participants who were Chinese first language speakers (L1Ss) and advanced Chinese L2Ls with Indonesian as their first language. The results of the event-related potentials (ERPs) indicated that L2Ls exhibited significant visual specialization with a predominant distribution of the left-lateralized N170, along with some activation in the right hemisphere. These findings suggest that the early processing stage of Chinese characters by advanced L2Ls is similar to that of adult native speakers, although it is still influenced by their first language and its writing system.

Keystroke Dynamics can be used as an unobtrusive method to enhance password authentication, by checking the typing rhythm of the user. Fixed passwords will give an attacker the possibility to try to learn to mimic the typing behaviour of a victim. In this paper we will investigate the performance of a keystroke dynamic (KD) system when the users have to type given (English) words. Under the assumption that it is easy to type words in your native language and difficult in a foreign language will we also test the performance of such a challenge-based KD system when the challenges are not common English words, but words in the native language of the user. We collected data from participants with 6 different native language backgrounds and had them type random 8-12 character words in each of the 6 languages. The participants also typed random English words and random French words. English was assumed to be a language familiar to all participants, while French was not a native language to any participant and most likely most participants were not fluent in French. Analysis showed that using language dependent words gave a better performance of the challenge-based KD compared to an all English challenge-based system. When using words in a native language, then the performance of the participants with their mother-tongue equal to that native language had a similar performance compared to the all English challenge-based system, but the non-native speakers had an FMR that was significantly lower than the native language speakers. We found that native Telugu speakers had an FMR of less than 1% when writing Spanish or Slovak words. We also found that duration features were best to recognize genuine users, but latency features performed best to recognize non-native impostor users.