Blend Words Research Articles

Optimality Theoretic Approach on the Tone Patterns of the Blended Words of South Kyungsang Korean

The purpose of the current study is to examine tonal interaction patterns of blended words in South Kyungsang(SK) Korean in the viewpoint of Optimality Theoretic(OT) approach. From previous research of SK Korean (loanword) compound tone patterns(Lee, 2011, 2013), we observed that the tonal interaction of SK compounds shows fundamental constraints such as the prohibition of long monotone, word initial L tone sequence, and two pitch falls in a prosodic domain. From the basis of the previous study on the tonal interactions of SK blended words(Lee, 2017), this paper investigates whether the OT constraints that were utilized in the tonal interaction analyses of SK compound words can be used in blended word analyses. The results of the present study indicate that the OT constraints of the SK tone system(Lee, 2009), e.g. no word initial L tone sequence, and the prohibition of long monotone (H) words, and of two accents (pitch falls) in a prosodic domain can be utilized in the OT analyses of the SK Korean blended words as well.

Tone Patterns of Blended Words in South Kyungsang Korean

Tone Patterns of Blended Words in South Kyungsang Korean

The Anglicisation of word formations: cross-linguistic blends in Spanish

Whereas the influence of English in form of Anglicisms has attracted considerable attention, little has been written on how English is interacting with autochthonous word-formation processes in modern languages. The present paper attempts to shed some light on a phenomenon that has been very recently attested in Spanish: the coinage of blend words involving overlap and combination of material from both English and the recipient language (in this case Spanish). I argue that thesead hocwords give us important insights into the state and status of English in what Kachru (1982) called the ‘Expanding Circle’.

Effects of Phonological Awareness Training on the Reading Performance of Children with Dyslexia in Primary Schools in Maiduguri Metropolis, Borno State, Nigeria

The study determined the effects of training in phonological awareness skills on the reading performance of children with dyslexia in primary schools in Maiduguri Metropolis. Two hypotheses, which sought to determine the significant effects of phonological awareness training on reading performance of children with dyslexia and the significant effect of sex on the intervention guided the study. The design of the study is quasi-experiment. A sample of 15 (8 boys and 7 girls) primary two pupils, purposefully selected in a private school, participated in the study. Phonological Awareness Skills Test (PAST), with Cronbach Alpha Coefficient reliability of 0.87, was used to give intervention on four phonological awareness skills - word identification, word deletion, word blending and word rhyming for 8 weeks, while a reading passage (Cloze test) was used to determine the reading levels of the participants before and after the intervention. Simple percentage and t-test were used to analyze the data at 0.05 level of significance. The results revealed that the training in phonological awareness skills significantly improved the reading performance of the children with dyslexia. However, there is no significant effect of sex on the intervention. Universities and colleges of education should give students specializing in English Language training in handling dyslexia to enable them indentify children with dyslexia in their classes and attend to their needs in their teaching in view of the move towards inclusive education.

An Investigation into the Processing of Lexicalized English Blend Words: Evidence from Lexical Decisions and Eye Movements During Reading.

New words enter the language through several word formation processes [see Simonini (Engl J 55:752-757, 1966)]. One such process, blending, occurs when two source words are combined to represent a new concept (e.g., SMOG, BRUNCH, BLOG, and INFOMERCIAL). While there have been examinations of the structure of blends [see Gries (Linguistics 42:639-667, 2004) and Lehrer (Am Speech 73:3-28, 1998)], relatively little attention has been given to how lexicalized blends are recognized and if this process differs from other types of words. In the present study, blend words were matched to non-blend control words on length, familiarity, and frequency. Two tasks were used to examine blend processing: lexical decision and sentence reading. The results demonstrated that blend words were processed differently than non-blend control words. However, the nature of the effect varied as a function of task demands. Blends were recognized slower than control words in the lexical decision task but received shorter fixation durations when embedded in sentences.

Why Do Word Blends with Near-Synonymous Composites Exist and Persist? The Case of Guesstimate, Chillax, Ginormous and Confuzzled

Abstract Despite their increasing use, little is known about the purpose of word blends, e.g. chillax, which have near-synonymous composite words (relax and chill). Potential explanations for their existence and persistence include: use in different sentence constructions, to provide unique meaning, and to create interest/identity. Th e current study used a vignette methodology with two-hundred and forty-one students to explore the relevance of such hypotheses for ‘guesstimate’, ‘chillax’, ‘ginormous’, and ‘confuzzled’. Our inconsistent results suggest that the semantics of the word blends may diff er from their composites in very subtle ways. However further work is needed to acknowledge and determine the impact of context upon the use and consequences of these word blends.

Reliability and validity of the CTOPP Elision and Blending Words subtests for struggling adult readers

Almost half of American adults struggle with reading but there is a dearth of reading-related assessments for these adults. In turn, researchers and practitioners use assessments designed for children with these adults. This study examined the psychometric and descriptive attributes of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) Elision and Blending Words subtests with struggling adult readers. The sample included 207 native English speaking adults reading between the third- and fifth-grade levels. Analyses included comparisons of struggling adult readers to the CTOPP norm group. Results revealed lower overall performance and reliability and validity for struggling adult readers compared to the norm group. In addition, analyses included comparisons of performance, reliability, and validity within the group of struggling adult readers by age. The older adults had lower overall performance as well as more questionable reliability and validity. This study raises concern about administering and interpreting Elision and Blending Words subtests with struggling adult readers.

A study of English blends: From structure to meaning and back again

This article presents an approach to the resolution of the much discussed problem of morphological classification of blend words and their distinction from such neighbouring morphological categories as clipping compounds. The research focuses on novel coinages and takes a data-driven approach to study the interaction between the form and the meaning of blends/clipping compounds. A multifactorial analysis of formal and semantic properties of these words is undertaken, as a result of which phonological and structural differences between blends and clipping compounds are explained using formal and semantic factors.

Performance of School Age Reading Disabled Students on the Phonological Awareness Subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP)

This study examined the performance of reading disabled children on the two Phonological Awareness Subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP). Participants performed significantly different on these two subtests with a poorer performance on the Elision subtest than Blending Words. In addition, the two subtests were not correlated for this group. Results suggest that, for reading disabled children, interpretation of the composite score may not be as useful as considering the individual subtests scores.

The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology-Orthography Interface

AbstractIn English, blending is a highly predictable and productive naming process. However, no systematic morphological template for blends has yet been proposed. Using data from Internet fandom pairing names (FPNs), I describe the phonological and orthographic constraints that shape blended words, such as preference for complex onsets, maintenance of stress placement, and phonological and orthographic overlap. Outputs are compared with lexical neighbors to evaluate their phonotactic acceptability and orthographic transparency. This model of blending describes the interaction of many layers of representation, and also shows the effect of the Internet as a text-based speech community participating in linguistic decision-making.

Slovenly Language and Freedom of Speech at US Colleges

The present article analyses communicative features of US students, their usage of slovenly language and blend words. The data for the research was obtained at American University, Washington College of Law (AU WCL) students, Washington D.C., USA. The aim of the research was also to discuss the process of creating new words and their usage in a specific situation and by specific community members. The paper studies historic, legal and educational background of using slovenly language by students and how the concept of ‘Freedom of Speech’ has changed over the century. The case study revealed unique picture of student life as it’s really lived today. It describes students’ contribution in the research with their findings, adding DC specific slang in educational, legal and criminal context. From the research findings it can be concluded that despite judicial intervention slovenly language is used without limit by everyone and has thus gone global. Even a court intervention won’t stop the teen spirit from saying something ‘illegal’ or unacceptable. In the process of the permanent change of the language many such units lose their original meaning and function but nevertheless, such coinages are very popular among different users of the language.

Investigating sentence processing and language segmentation in explaining children's performance on a sentence‐span task

Children with poor language abilities tend to perform poorly on verbal working memory tasks. This result has been interpreted as evidence that limitations in working memory capacity may interfere with the development of a mature linguistic system. However, it is possible that language abilities, such as the efficiency of sentence processing and the ability to segment language, directly influence performance on common working memory tasks. This study investigated the possible roles of sentence-processing efficiency and the ability to segment language in children's performance on a verbal working memory task. Participants were 37 children (aged 6;2-13;7) with varying oral language and reading abilities. Children completed a sentence-span task to assess working memory: the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT). In the CLPT, children determine the truth value of sentences while maintaining sentence final words in memory. Sentence-processing efficiency was evaluated by measuring response latencies to CLPT sentence veracity judgments outside the context of the CLPT. The Elision and Blending Words subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing were used to measure the ability to segment and combine units of language. Children's ability to segment words into smaller units (Elision) was a significant predictor of word recall on the CLPT, which is commonly assumed to reflect working memory capacity. Sentence processing latency did not reach significance as a unique predictor. Individual differences on the sentence-span task are partly explained by the ability to segment language into smaller units. Future studies should further consider the metalinguistic and metacognitive demands of tasks used to measure working memory. If metalinguistic abilities directly impact performance on working memory tasks, the utility of working memory theories in explaining individual differences in language abilities is reduced. Inferences that link 'working memory capacity' to language ability become circular. One clinical implication of such a result would be that appropriate intervention strategies may not involve focusing on working memory capacity, but rather on building language skills, including metalinguistic knowledge, which in turn should directly improve children's processing capacities.

A randomised efficacy study of Web‐based synthetic and analytic programmes among disadvantaged urban Kindergarten children

This study explores whether two computer‐based literacy interventions – a ‘synthetic phonics’ and an ‘analytic phonics’ approach produce qualitatively distinct effects on the early phonological abilities and reading skills of disadvantaged urban Kindergarten (Reception) children. Participants (n=53) were assigned by random allocation to one of the two interventions. Each intervention was generally delivered three times per week for 13 weeks as part of a reading centre approach in Kindergarten classrooms with small groups of children. In the synthetic programme children showed, as predicted, significant (p<.05) improvement in CV and VC word blending and the articulation of final consonants. The children in the analytic phonics programme showed, as predicted, significant (p<.05) improvements in articulating shared rimes in words. These results suggest that synthetic and analytic programmes have qualitatively different effects on children's phonological development. These phonological differences are not however immediately reflected in any qualitative differences in the way children undertook word reading or nonword decoding.

The Efficacy of Fast ForWord Language Intervention in School-Age Children With Language Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Trial

A randomized controlled trial was conducted to compare the language and auditory processing outcomes of children assigned to receive the Fast ForWord Language intervention (FFW-L) with the outcomes of children assigned to nonspecific or specific language intervention comparison treatments that did not contain modified speech. Two hundred sixteen children between the ages of 6 and 9 years with language impairments were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: (a) Fast ForWord Language (FFW-L), (b) academic enrichment (AE), (c) computer-assisted language intervention (CALI), or (d) individualized language intervention (ILI) provided by a speech-language pathologist. All children received 1 hr and 40 min of treatment, 5 days per week, for 6 weeks. Language and auditory processing measures were administered to the children by blinded examiners before treatment, immediately after treatment, 3 months after treatment, and 6 months after treatment. The children in all 4 conditions improved significantly on a global language test and a test of backward masking. Children with poor backward masking scores who were randomized to the FFW-L condition did not present greater improvement on the language measures than children with poor backward masking scores who were randomized to the other 3 conditions. Effect sizes, analyses of standard error of measurement, and normalization percentages supported the clinical significance of the improvements on the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999). There was a treatment effect for the Blending Words subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (R. K. Wagner, J. K. Torgesen, & C. A. Rashotte, 1999). Participants in the FFW-L and CALI conditions earned higher phonological awareness scores than children in the ILI and AE conditions at the 6-month follow-up testing. Fast ForWord Language, the intervention that provided modified speech to address a hypothesized underlying auditory processing deficit, was not more effective at improving general language skills or temporal processing skills than a nonspecific comparison treatment (AE) or specific language intervention comparison treatments (CALI and ILI) that did not contain modified speech stimuli. These findings call into question the temporal processing hypothesis of language impairment and the hypothesized benefits of using acoustically modified speech to improve language skills. The finding that children in the 3 treatment conditions and the active comparison condition made clinically relevant gains on measures of language and temporal auditory processing informs our understanding of the variety of intervention activities that can facilitate development.

Phonemic Carryover Perseveration: Word Blends

This article will outline and describe the aphasic disorder of recurrent perseveration and will demonstrate how it interacts with the retrieval and production of spoken words in the language of fluent aphasic patients who have sustained damage to the left (dominant) posterior temporoparietal lobe. We will concentrate on the various kinds of sublexical segmental perseverations (the so-called phonemic carryovers of Santo Pietro and Rigrodsky) that most often play a role in the generation of word blendings. We will show how perseverative blends allow the clinician to better understand the dynamics of word and syllable production in fluent aphasia by scrutinizing the "onset/rime" and "onset/superrime" constituents of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, respectively. We will demonstrate to the speech language pathologist the importance of the trochee stress pattern and the possibility that its metrical template may constitute a structural unit that can be perseverated.

Experimental Evidence for Serial Models of Lexical Access: A Judgment Task

The hypothesis that the lemma and lexeme levels of lexical access are in a feed-forward serial relation is supported. Subjects judge the degree of semantic relatedness of pairs of words. Stimuli are all functionally synonymous; they are pairs of words implicated in natural word blends. Half the stimuli are phonologically related and the other half are not. In one experiment the pairs are presented in a sentential context and in the other no context is provided. In both the experiments the phonologically unrelated pairs are judged closer in meaning than the phonologically related pairs. This is interpreted as support for serial models of lexical access.

Components in Early Second Language Reading and Spelling

The purpose of this study was to uncover any differences in the early reading and spelling processes of children learning to read in a first language (L1) and children learning to read in a second language (L2). The reading and spelling development of native Dutch-speaking children and minority children in the first two grades of elementary school were compared. The children were given a number of tasks to test their vocabulary knowledge and the efficiency of their word decoding (including grapheme knowledge and word blending), word spelling (including cipher knowledge and phonemic segmentation), and reading comprehension processes. Analyses of variance were used to test for differences between the L1 and L2 learners. LISREL analyses were used to explore the components underlying the reading and spelling processes in the 2 groups of children. The results showed that the minority children kept up with the native Dutch-speaking children on word blending and word decoding tasks. On word spelling and reading comprehension, however, the minority children were found to be less efficient than their monolingual Dutch peers. The structural models for word decoding and word spelling were highly comparable for the 2 groups. For reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge was found to have more of an impact on the L2 learners than on the L1 learners. This finding suggests that children learning to read in an L2 should be helped to build their lexical knowledge and that reading instruction should be matched to this knowledge.

Convergence of a spreading activation neural network with application of simulating aphasic naming errors in Finnish language

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by brain damage. Difficulties in word processing called anomia constitute the most common type of errors in aphasia. Naming errors are characteristic of aphasia and can be used to investigate the disorder. In this context, naming refers to a psycholinguistic test where the subject is asked to utter the names of target objects presented to him or her in the form of simple pictures. In the case of aphasia the subject may name objects presented or concepts incorrectly by word blends (e.g. semantic error to say “right” for “left”) or even forming nonwords (words without sensible meaning). Previously [5,6,8,10,11], we have constructed a simulation technique with a spreading activation algorithm to model the mental word processing of an aphasic by employing a succession of four neural networks with semantic, phonological, syllabic and phonemic processing functions, respectively. Treating words and their component parts as textual units, naming errors are generated in the system by spreading activation in the networks. In this paper we study the convergence properties of the algorithms which are used for spreading activation in these networks. Convergence shows which component parts dominate other parts in the networks employed. It can be reasonable also in the psycholinguistic sense, at least concerning the so-called perseveration in which some word or sound is repeated being unable to form a correct word. To enable to predict and control the behaviour of the model the convergence property is useful to understand.

Word Blends as Sublexical Substitutions

AbstractThe standard structural approach to word blends, such asnoise1/sound2→nound, has been to assume they involve a splicing together of the two words, where part of word2is used to complete part of word1. The splice position has then been used as the source of mental lexicon generalizations. On the basis of 166 naturally occurring word blends, this article argues for a different approach—a “substitution” approach. The approach allows a comparison of the properties that word blends share with sublexical exchanges, anticipations, perseverations and substitutions; in addition, it accounts for the convergence of these properties. The substitution analysis allows a principled distinction between target and intruder; it predicts metrical structure output, and possible and impossible errors; moreover, the substitution analysis simplifies and constrains language production models.

Lemmas and Lexemes: The Evidence from Blends

An analysis of 166 word blends provides support for the claim that word frequency effects are located at the phonological level of lexical access. The traditional structural approach to blends has been to view them as involving a sequence of two words where word2 completes an incomplete word1, as in yes/right→yight. The proposal here is that blends are better viewed as homologous to sublexical substitutions. Among other advantages, this approach allows one to distinguish a target word from an intruder. Only those targets which are phonologically related to their intruders are subject to a word frequency effect; others are not.