Language Association Research Articles

Transitional Probabilities, Prediction and Backward Associations in Language

Le traitement de séquences de stimuli apparaît comme étant central dans la compréhension du langage. Au sein de séquences, l’apprentissage statistique permet de calculer des probabilités transitionnelles (PT). Une PT correspond à la probabilité de rencontrer successivement deux stimuli dans une séquence. Alors que les PT prospectives (PTP : probabilité de rencontrer B après A dans AB) ont été largement étudiées, les PT rétrospectives (PTR, probabilité de rencontrer A avant B) restent méconnues. De plus, les quelques études portant sur les PTR ne se sont basées que sur des mesures hors ligne, laissant ainsi de côté la question de leur utilisation dans le traitement séquentiel. Dans cet article, nous synthétisons l’évolution de divers concepts statistiques dans le traitement du langage, des cooccurrences dans l’amorçage sémantique jusqu’au PT, afin de mettre en évidence le manque d’études sur les PTR dans le contexte du traitement séquentiel.

Professional Empowerment Strategies of Nepali English language Teacher: A grand Narrative

This present paper aimed to explore professional empowering strategies of secondary English language teachers using a grand narrative inquiry method. For this study, interview was used to gather the grand narratives of four English language teachers. The critical events from their sharing were taken as authentic information and analyzed using transformative lens. The findings show that language teachers have become professionally more conscious, optimistic, updated, and transformative to accept the dynamic settings of English language teaching through building connection with language associations, social media messenger, workshop, seminar, and collaboration and sharing for empowering their skill. The findings also showed that the teachers respect the voices of the learners as the sources of imparting teaching learning skills and knowledge for professional enrichment.

Analysing lexical semantic changes in chinese educational texts by integrating machine learning methods

Analyzing Lexical Semantic Changes (LSC) in Educational Texts (ET) refers to examining how the meanings of words, terms, or phrases used in ET have evolved. It involves learning shifts in the semantic content, connotations, and language associations within educational resources such as textbooks, research articles, and instructional content. The analysis can reveal how educational models, pedagogical methods, and terminology have transformed in response to technological innovations, societal changes, and pedagogical developments. This analysis provides visions into the dynamic nature of educational discourse, helping researchers, educators, and policymakers understand how language has adapted to reflect changes in educational paradigms and the broader educational context. This research investigates the semantic analysis and classification performance within ET, employing the innovative Decision Tree + Feed Forward Neural Networks (DT + FFNNs) framework. This research shows the dynamic semantic relationships inherent in educational terminology by diverse semantic similarity measures and contextualized embeddings. It looks at how educational language changes to reflect changes in society, technology, and pedagogy. The study uses a DT + FFNN framework for semantic analysis and classification. The study uses several embeddings and semantic similarity metrics, and Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient (SCC) is employed to evaluate their effectiveness. This study highlights the DT + FFNN framework’s capacity to capture complex semantics in an educational setting and offers insights into the adaptive nature of educational discourse. SCC serves as a guiding metric, offering insights into the efficiency of several embeddings and measures. The findings show the pivotal role of fine-tuning in significantly enhancing the accuracy of DT + FFNNs across measures, revealing its remarkable potential in capturing semantics within an educational context.

Sound symbolism in Japanese names: Machine learning approaches to gender classification.

This study investigates the sound symbolic expressions of gender in Japanese names with machine learning algorithms. The main goal of this study is to explore how gender is expressed in the phonemes that make up Japanese names and whether systematic sound-meaning mappings, observed in Indo-European languages, extend to Japanese. In addition to this, this study compares the performance of machine learning algorithms. Random Forest and XGBoost algorithms are trained using the sounds of names and the typical gender of the referents as the dependent variable. Each algorithm is cross-validated using k-fold cross-validation (28 folds) and tested on samples not included in the training cycle. Both algorithms are shown to be reasonably accurate at classifying names into gender categories; however, the XGBoost model performs significantly better than the Random Forest algorithm. Feature importance scores reveal that certain sounds carry gender information. Namely, the voiced bilabial nasal /m/ and voiceless velar consonant /k/ were associated with femininity, and the high front vowel /i/ were associated with masculinity. The association observed for /i/ and /k/ stand contrary to typical patterns found in other languages, suggesting that Japanese is unique in the sound symbolic expression of gender. This study highlights the importance of considering cultural and linguistic nuances in sound symbolism research and underscores the advantage of XGBoost in capturing complex relationships within the data for improved classification accuracy. These findings contribute to the understanding of sound symbolism and gender associations in language.

Why do Moroccan English Foreign Language learners experience more Peace of Mind (外语平和心态) than Chinese EFL learners and how does it affect their performance?

The current study considers the effects of the Chinese low arousal emotion Foreign Language Peace of Mind (FLPOM) and the medium-to-high arousal emotion of Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) on the performance of 400 Chinese and 502 Moroccan English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The database consists of two merged datasets collected with the same instruments from learners with comparable profiles for English. The data on Chinese EFL learners was collected and used in Zhou et al. (Applied Linguistics Review, 2023a) while the data on Moroccan EFL learners was used in Dewaele and Meftah (Journal of the European Second Language Association, 2023); Dewaele et al. (Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2023a). The comparison revealed that all students reported higher levels of FLE than FLPOM. Moroccan students scored significantly higher on FLPOM and FLE than their Chinese peers. They also had significantly higher scores on the FLE Personal dimension. Finally, FLPOM was more strongly associated with performance than FLE among the Moroccan EFL learners, confirming the pattern in Zhou et al. (Applied Linguistics Review, 2023a). FLPOM did explain slightly more variance in the performance of Chinese EFL learners. Pedagogical implications are presented.

ASSOCIATION OF UNITS REPRESENTING COLOR IN THE UZBEKI LANGUAGE

In linguistics, color-expressing words are crucial for making objects appear colorful in the mind. A person retains knowledge about items and the color they seem to him in his memory. Later, when exposed to an external stimulus, this information is associatively recreated in his memory. Language association is the phenomenon in question. We spoke about color correlations in Uzbek language in this article.

Borderland's theory in indigenous ethnic community archiving

The main purpose of this article is to bring to the fore the nexus between what borderlands theory stands for and the mushrooming of community archives in these areas as a form of counter-archiving and documenting the ‘other’. Zimbabwe's borderlands are uniquely inhabited by the marginalised ethnic indigenous groups of people. This prevalent borderland phenomenon has seen the growth of community archives which border on archival activism. Therefore, this article, through literature review interrogates further this borderland phenomenon by giving an overview picture of the nexus between community archives and Zimbabwe's borderlands. One of the findings reveals that these community archives which come in different formats such as archives, museums, trusts, oral history groups and language associations seem to be a counter move by the marginalised to tell their stories which are side-lined by those in power. It is now almost axiomatic to conclude that the stories of those in borderlands are scarcely documented in the mainstream heritage institutions in Zimbabwe. Also, one of the leitmotifs which runs through the article is how the concepts of Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) are used by community archives in borderlands to further their objectives.

Voices of Three Junior Scholars: A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?”

Voices of Three Junior Scholars: A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?”

Prototypical associations in the production of words in English as a foreign language by L2 learners

Abstract This ongoing study attempts to explore the role semantic prototypes play in response to the production of words of a semantic category by two groups of learners differing in age and language level. Our main objectives point to i) the identification of the number of words produced in English regarding semantic prototypes by the groups of informants; ii) the analysis and comparison of the similarities and the differences of the prototypical associations provided by learners of different ages and different language levels; iii) the evidence of the universality of prototypes through the convergences and/ or divergences collected in the sample. The data collection instruments considered for this ongoing study are a background questionnaire and a productive semantic categorization task. Findings yielded that (i) there is evidence of prototype responses, and they are exclusively associated with the basic level of categorization; (ii) children retrieved fewer prototypical and non-prototypical words than adolescents in a lexical availability test; (iii) convergences and divergences are shown in the words retrieved by the two groups differing in age and language level. This study aims to evolve the dynamics of prototypical associations in language, and their linguistic, social, and cultural implications in communication when learning a foreign language.

Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents

Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents

Image Difference Captioning with Pre-training and Contrastive Learning

The Image Difference Captioning (IDC) task aims to describe the visual differences between two similar images with natural language. The major challenges of this task lie in two aspects: 1) fine-grained visual differences that require learning stronger vision and language association and 2) high-cost of manual annotations that leads to limited supervised data. To address these challenges, we propose a new modeling framework following the pre-training-finetuning paradigm. Specifically, we design three self-supervised tasks and contrastive learning strategies to align visual differences and text descriptions at a fine-grained level. Moreover, we propose a data expansion strategy to utilize extra cross-task supervision information, such as data for fine-grained image classification, to alleviate the limitation of available supervised IDC data. Extensive experiments on two IDC benchmark datasets, CLEVR-Change and Birds-to-Words, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling framework. The codes and models will be released at https://github.com/yaolinli/IDC.

Design of Semantic Matching Model of Folk Music in Occupational Therapy Based on Audio Emotion Analysis.

The main semantic symbol systems for people to express their emotions include natural language and music. The analysis and establishment of semantic association between language and music is helpful to provide more accurate retrieval and recommendation services for text and music. Existing researches mainly focus on the surface symbolic features and association of natural language and music, which limits the performance and interpretability of applications based on semantic association of natural language and music. Emotion is the main meaning of music expression, and the semantic range of text expression includes emotion. In this paper, the semantic features of music are extracted from audio features, and the semantic matching model of audio emotion analysis is constructed to analyze ethnic music audio emotion through feature extraction ability of deep structure. The model is based on the framework of emotional semantic matching technology and realizes the emotional semantic matching of music fragments and words through semantic emotional recognition algorithm. Multiple experiments show that when W = 0.65, the recognition rate of multichannel fusion model is 88.42%, and the model can reasonably realize audio emotion analysis. When the spatial dimension of music data changes, the classification accuracy reaches the highest when the spatial dimension is 25. Analysing the semantic association of audio promotes the application of folk music in occupational therapy.

Hospitalized Children With Limited English Proficiency: The Strive to Improve Analgesia.

Hospitalized Children With Limited English Proficiency: The Strive to Improve Analgesia.

Soft and hard skills identification: insights from IT job advertisements in the CIS region.

Labor market transformations significantly affect the sphere of information technologies (IT) introducing new instruments, architectures, and frameworks. Employers operate with new knowledge domains which demand specific competencies from workers including combinations of both technical (“hard”) and non-technical (“soft”) skills. The educational system is now required to provide the alumni with up-to-date skill sets covering the latest labor market trends. However, there is a big concern about the self-adaptation of educational programs for meeting the companies’ needs. Accordingly, frequent changes in job position requirements call for the tool for in-time categorization of vacancies and skills extraction. This study aims to show the demand for skills in the IT sphere in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region and discover the mapping between required skill sets and job occupations. The proposed methodology for skills identification uses natural language processing, hierarchical clustering, and association mining techniques. The results reveal explicit information about the combinations of “soft” and “hard” skills required for different professional groups. These findings provide valuable insights for supporting educational organizations, human resource (HR) specialists, and state labor authorities in the renewal of existing knowledge about skill sets for IT professionals. In addition, the provided methodology for labor market monitoring has a high potential to ensure effective matching of employees.

Researching language at street level: In memory of Vivian Cook and review of The Language of the English Street Sign

Vivian Cook passed away on 10 December 2021, aged 81 years. Our last conversation was in October and he was very much looking forward to the proof of his latest book The Language of the English Street Sign. We had talked about the book over quite a long time and he showed me various versions of different chapters. As a multicompetent linguist and language educator, Vivian worked on many aspects of language and linguistics. His book, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, introduced it to generations of aspiring linguists and remains one of the most accessible texts on the topic. He was keen to make connections between formal linguistics and applied linguistics through studies of language teaching and learning, as this 1985 article ‘Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and second language learning’ in this journal demonstrated. He was a father figure in second language acquisition, having established the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA) in 1989 and written many of the classics in the field. From the very beginning of his career, Vivian had a passion for language as used in everyday life. His earlier English language teaching texts included Realistic English in the 1970s and the ‘English for Life’ series in the 1980s. His books, Accommodating Broccoli in the Cemetary and It’s All in a Word (All in a Word for the US edition), made him a global media personality. From the 1990s, Vivian developed a keen interest in writing systems research, which was an extension to his earlier work on spelling. He complained both privately and publicly that modern linguists and philologists, especially those working with European languages, paid little attention to writing systems. He himself wrote a book The English Writing System, edited volumes on second language writing systems and launched a journal, Writing Systems Research, with Bene Bassetti.

Cognitive-communication disorder following right hemisphere damage: Narrative production.

Cognitive-communication disorder (CCD) results from the association of language and cognition impairment that may follow right hemisphere (RH) damage and impair the quality of life of affected persons. We studied a set of 1,625 narratives produced by a cohort of 125 individuals (50 with a single right vascular lesion in the MCA territory and 75 cognitively healthy controls) using a task of picture-based discourse production. Discourse production was analyzed in its macro-and microlinguistic aspects to characterize better the linguistic mechanisms underlying RH patients' performance. The RH group produced more words and elocutions than controls, with a lower rate of informational content and a higher percentage of global coherence errors (all p-values <0.0001). Individuals with RH lesions showed formal lexical and syntactic aspects of discourse mostly preserved. Alterations in the macrostructure of discourse prevailed over microstructural alterations in our sample, according to most literature studies. The group of individuals with RH lesions produced narratives containing more words and utterances, with a lesser degree of lexical information and more global coherence errors.

Going South and zooming into what also matters in language, gender and sexuality

This essay contributes to the ‘Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research’ on the theme of ‘Place’ by joining other colleagues under two threads: ‘going South’ and ‘going micro’. Under ‘going South’, I speak from my trajectory and place as a Brazilian scholar to highlight the geopolitical importance of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) and the journal Gender and Language, not just for the intellectual and scientific development of studies on language, gender and sexuality but also for research produced in nonhegemonic centres. In defending that we ‘go micro’ – i.e. that we zoom in our methodological lenses to social interactions in everyday life – I argue for the relevance of interactional studies to the investigation of language, gender and sexuality in action. I illustrate how microanalytical methodological lenses have guided my research, some of the findings they have helped me disclose and some of the applications they have helped me foster.

Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Language and gender in North Africa

This essay investigates and contextualises the emergence and evolution of the discipline of ‘Language and Gender’ in North Africa in an attempt to remedy the underrepresentation of this region in scholarship. I ground this essay in my experiences with Language and Gender in Morocco and the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), both of which were central in shaping my academic journey. The pre- and post-Uprisings periods surrounding what is often discussed as the ‘Arab Spring’ in the early 2010s carried serious consequences for the emergence of Language and Gender as a discipline. These moments and my involvement in them were deeply impacted by specific historical, sociopolitical and intellectual dimensions, most saliently the women’s movement and the discipline of linguistics. My essay draws on these experiences to advocate for the importance of decolonising the international language and gender canon with North African perspectives that move beyond English and the Global North.

1362. Adding Insult to Injury: Association of Stigmatizing Language and Suboptimal Outcomes in People Who Inject Drugs

Abstract Background The National Academy of Medicine has identified stigma surrounding substance use disorders (SUDs) and infectious diseases (ID) as a key barrier to integration of opioid use disorder (OUD) and ID services. Prior literature on stigmatizing language in OUD clinical care focuses on surveys and theoretical scenarios rather than real-world data. As part of a larger study of patients admitted for infectious complications of injection drug use (CHOICE), we sought to determine how inpatient physicians describe persons with OUD, as well as associations of this language with outcomes along the OUD continuum of care. Methods CHOICE is a retrospective review of adults hospitalized with an infectious complication of OUD and IDU at four academic medical centers. Included patients were hospitalized between 1/1/2018-12/31/2018, had ICD9/10 diagnosis codes consistent with OUD and acute bacterial/fungal infection, and chart review verification of active infection associated with OUD. Data was abstracted regarding demographics, inpatient interventions, transitions of care, and outcomes 1 year after admission. Potentially stigmatizing language was identified based on the discharge summary. “Abuse” and “misuse” were considered potentially stigmatizing; “use disorder” was considered best practice. Associations of language and outcomes were analyzed via logistic generalized estimating equations. Results A total of 287 subjects met inclusion criteria; 119 (42%) were female and the median age was 40 years (IQR: 32 – 52). The most common terms used to describe OUD were “abuse” (190, 66%) and “IVDU” (119, 42%). “Use disorder” was noted in only 72 (25%) charts. In a regression analysis, any mention of “use disorder” was associated with not leaving against medical advice (OR 2.48, 95% CI 1.24 – 4.95), a plan for ongoing OUD treatment (OR 5.17, 95% CI 2.05-13.0), and addiction-specific follow up (OR 2.94, 95% CI 2.34-3.68). Conclusion In this multicenter retrospective study, inpatient physicians commonly referred to patients with OUD using stigmatizing language. When NIH-preferred language was used this was associated with improved outcomes along the OUD continuum of care, possibly reflecting increased awareness of best practices for treating patients with OUD. Disclosures Ellen Eaton, MD , Gilead (Grant/Research Support) Ellen Eaton, MD , Gilead (Individual(s) Involved: Self): Research Grant or Support Greer A. Burkholder, MD, MSPH, Eli Lilly (Grant/Research Support) Sarah Kattakuzhy, MD, Gilead Sciences (Scientific Research Study Investigator, Research Grant or Support) Elana S. Rosenthal, MD, Gilead Sciences (Research Grant or Support)Merck (Research Grant or Support)