Word Boundaries Research Articles

Syntactic Configuration of Code-Switching between Indonesian and English: Another Perspective on Code-Switching Phenomena

Code-switching, an alternation or mixing one language with another, has been an unmarked phenomenon for a multilingual society. In Indonesia, this phenomenon nowadays lives and thrives among the people. This study discusses the syntactic configuration of code-switching between Indonesian and English in terms of switched segments, points, and changing types. The study is descriptive qualitative in nature. The data comprise 25 recording hours of natural speech produced by 119 Indonesians in 4 types of interaction: seminars, meetings, TV dialogues, and chitchats conducted in six metropolitan cities—Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Makassar. The sample drawn purposively comprises 550 switching discourses consisting of 666 switching corpora. It is found that nouns serving as subjects, predicators, objects of verbs, and prepositions to be the most dominant switched segments. A switch between Indonesian noun phrases and English noun phrases, Indonesian verbs or prepositions, and English objective noun phrases, Indonesian conjunctions, and English conjoined noun phrases or clauses is the most popular switched points, and intercausal switching including intraporal and interlexical switching is the most frequent switching type of code-switching between Indonesian and English. ANOVA Friedman’s test confirms that these patterns are the same among the four types of discourses, implying that such a syntactic configuration of Indonesia-English code-switching is universally applicable to any situation and type of interaction. In conclusion, the domination of nouns indicates that the syntactic configuration of Indonesian-English code-switching mainly occurs at minor constituents such as within a clause, phrase, and word boundaries. This demonstrates that code-switching between Indonesian and English is more likely to occur intrasentential rather than intersentential, which is the most popular anywhere in literature.

벅아이 코퍼스를 통해서 본 영어원어민들의 유무성 유형에 따른 단어경계파열음 발화 연구

In the currunt study investigates how the voicing types influence durations of homorganic word boundary stops. For this purpose, Buckeye speech corpus, which contains numerous spontaneous speech materials, were used. To measure the word boundary stops such as /p#p/, /b#p/, /p#b/, and /b#b/, stop closures of both word-final stops and those plus VOTs of word-initial stops were selected. The results were analyzed based on voicing types such as /voiceless#voiceless/, /voiced#voiceless/, /voiceless#voiced/, and /voiced#voiced/, and showed that word-boundary stops with word-initial voiceless stops were longer than those with word-initial voiced stops due to the VOT differences, and those with alveolar stops were shorter than those with bilabial and velar stops. In addition, the closure durations of the word-final stops were not statistically significant in the durations of word-boundary stops due to the fast rate of the spontaneous speech. (Dongguk University - Seoul)

The Beijing Sentence Corpus: A Chinese sentence corpus with eye movement data and predictability norms.

This report introduces the Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC). This is a Chinese sentence corpus of eye-tracking data with relatively clear word boundaries. In addition, we report predictability norms for each word in the corpus. Eye movement corpora are available in alphabetic scripts such as English, German, and French. However, there is no publicly available corpus for Chinese. Thus, to study predictive processes during reading in Chinese, it is necessary to establish such a corpus. Also, given the clear word boundaries in the sentences, BSC is especially useful to provide evidence relevant to the theoretical debate of saccade target selection in Chinese. With the large-scale predictability norms, we conducted new analyses based on 60 BSC readers, testing the influences of launch word and target word properties while controlling for visual and oculomotor constraints, as well as sentence and subject-level individual differences. We discuss implications for guidance of eye movements in Chinese reading.

High-Performance English–Chinese Machine Translation Based on GPU-Enabled Deep Neural Networks with Domain Corpus

The ability to automate machine translation has various applications in international commerce, medicine, travel, education, and text digitization. Due to the different grammar and lack of clear word boundaries in Chinese, it is challenging to conduct translation from word-based languages (e.g., English) to Chinese. This article has implemented a GPU-enabled deep learning machine translation system based on a domain-specific corpus. Our system takes English text as input and uses an encoder-decoder model with an attention mechanism based on Google’s Transformer to translate the text to Chinese output. The model was trained using a simple self-designed entropy loss function and an Adam optimizer on English–Chinese bilingual text sentences from the News area of the UM-Corpus. The parallel training process of our model can be performed on common laptops, desktops, and servers with one or more GPUs. At training time, we not only track loss over training epochs but also measure the quality of our model’s translations with the BLEU score. We also provide an easy-to-use web interface for users so as to manage corpus, training projects, and trained models. The experimental results show that we can achieve a maximum BLEU score of 29.2. We can further improve this score by tuning other hyperparameters. The GPU-enabled model training runs over 15x faster than on a multi-core CPU, which facilitates us having a shorter turn-around time. As a case study, we compare the performance of our model to that of Baidu’s, which shows that our model can compete with the industry-level translation system. We argue that our deep-learning-based translation system is particularly suitable for teaching purposes and small/medium-sized enterprises.

Effects of Spacing on Sentence Reading in Chinese

Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position. The eye movements of native readers of Chinese were recorded while they silently read original unspaced sentences and their experimentally manipulated counterparts for comprehension. We introduced two types of spaced sentences: one with spaces inserted at every probable word boundary (heavily spaced), and another with spaces placed only at highly probable word boundaries (lightly spaced). Linear mixed-effects regression models showed that heavily spaced sentences took identical time to read as unspaced ones despite the shortened fixation times on individual words (Experiment 1). On the other hand, reading times for lightly spaced sentences and words were shorter than those for unspaced ones (Experiment 2). Thus, spaces proved to be advantageous but only when introduced at highly probable word boundaries. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings.

The Phonetics and Phonology of Old Armenian <V>, <W>, and Prevocalic <OW>*

AbstractThe Old Armenian letters <v> and <w> occur in nearly complementary distribution, but a century of scholarship has failed to resolve whether they denote separate phonemes, allophones, or allographs. The relation of these sounds to the vowel /u/ and interpretation of prevocalic <ow> spellings are also debated. It is argued that Old Armenian had a single phoneme /u/ realized as [u] in syllabic positions, i.e. between consonants or between consonant and word boundary, and [w] or [v] next to a vowel. In initial position the nonsyllabic allophone was realized as [v], including before [ə] < pretonic *i, e.g. vasn [ˈvɑsən] ‘because of, with respect to’, vnas [vəˈnɑs] ‘harm, damage’, underyingly /uasn/, /uinas/. In word‐medial position the realization was [w] or perhaps [ʋ], which was written <v> after o and <w> after other vowels. After a consonant, <w> occurs in the oblique case forms of wo‐ and wo/ea‐stems, where it reflects dissimilation in the sequence *‐iyo‐ > *‐yo‐ > *‐wo‐; otherwise we find <ow> representing [əw], e.g. in lowanam [ləwɑˈnɑm] ‘wash’, gen. anowan [ɑnəˈwɑn] ‘name’, underlyingly /luanam/, /anuan/. The diphthongs aw, ew, iw, ov can therefore be interpreted as sequences of vowel + /u/, as in t‘iw /t‘iu/ ‘number’, gen. t‘owoy /t‘iuoy/.

Auditory Processing of Non-speech Stimuli by Children in Dual-Language Immersion Programs.

Perception of low-level auditory cues such as frequency modulation (FM) and rise time (RT) is crucial for development of phonemic representations, segmentation of word boundaries, and attunement to prosodic patterns in language. While learning an additional language, children may develop an increased sensitivity to these cues to extract relevant information from multiple types of linguistic input. Performance on these auditory processing tasks such as FM and RT by children learning another language is, however, unknown. Here we examine 92 English-speaking 7–8-year-olds in the U.S. and their performance in FM and RT perceptual tasks at the end of their second year in Cantonese or Spanish dual-language immersion compared to children in general English education programs. Results demonstrate that children in immersion programs have greater sensitivity to FM, but not RT, controlling for various factors. The immersion program students were also observed to have better phonological awareness performance. However, individual differences in FM sensitivity were not associated with phonological awareness, a pattern typically observed in monolinguals. These preliminary findings suggest a possible impact of formal language immersion on low-level auditory processing. Additional research is warranted to understand causal relationships and ultimate impact on language skills in multilinguals.

Second Language Learners’ Pauses Over Different Times Intervals in L2 Writing Essays: Evidence From a Keystroke Logging Program

Purpose. Several studies have been conducted to analyse students’ pauses during first language and/or second language writing to indicate the magnitude of the underlying cognitive processes learners have. Majority of studies have examined students’ pauses at a threshold 200ms. However, little is known about recording second language learners' pauses at different pauses’ times over different types of genres. The current investigation reports a case study of L2 learners’ cognitive processes by recording their pauses (<500ms, <1000ms, and <2000ms) during L2 writing in response to multiple genres prompts. 
 Design / methodology / approach. Twenty-five postgraduate students were asked to write three essays over three weeks, and their writing processes were recorded using a keystroke logging program (Inputlog, 7, Leijten & van Waes, 2013). Data was triangulated using a log file from the keystroke logging program, a process graph for writing behavior through different stages, and a visual video recording of their captured screens during writing behaviours. 
 Findings. Results found that the students paused over sentence and paragraph boundaries and their pauses between paragraphs were significantly higher in writing narrative essay than in their argumentative essays at pauses intervals <500 and <1000ms respectively, and in turn, their pauses between sentences in an argumentative essay were significantly higher than their pauses in a descriptive essay at <500, <1000 respectively. However, there were no significant differences across word boundaries over genre types. 
 Conclusions. The current study extends the previous literature in examining the underlying cognitive processes during L2 writing tasks as the trendy issue of psycholinguistics. Knowing the cognitive processes is crucial in diagnosing the students’ difficulties in writing L2 essays as advanced technology has the potential to explore intrusively the accurate cognitive processes learners involved during writing tasks.
 Originality / value. This paper is innovative in examining a state-of-the-art issue and has implications to the field of psycholinguistics.

Sequences of high tones across word boundaries in Tswana

The article analyses violations of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) above the word level in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language, by investigating the realization of adjacent lexical high tones across word boundaries. The results show that across word boundaries downstep (i.e. a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones) only takes place within a phonological phrase. A phonological phrase break blocks downstep, even when the necessary tonal configuration is met. A phrase-based account is adopted in order to account for the occurrence of downstep. Our study confirms a pattern previously reported for the closely related language Southern Sotho and provides controlled, empirical data from Tswana, based on read speech of twelve speakers which has been analysed auditorily by two annotators as well as acoustically.

Statistical word learning in Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder.

A growing body of work shows that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) perform poorly on statistical word learning (SWL) tasks, consistent with the predictions of the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis that predicts that procedural memory is impaired in DLD. To date, however, SWL performance has not been compared across linguistically heterogeneous populations of children with DLD. To compare SWL performance in a group of age, sex and non-verbal IQ-matched Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children with and without DLD. Two cohorts of children: (1) 35 Catalan-Spanish-speaking children with DLD (Mage = 8;7 years) and 35 age/sex-matched typical developing (TD) children (Mage = 8;9 years), and (2) 24 English-speaking children with DLD (Mage = 9;1 years) and 19 age/sex matched TD controls (Mage = 8;9 years) completed the tone version of a SWL task from Evans etal. (2009). Children listened to a tone language in which transitional probabilities within tone words were higher than those between words. For both Catalan-Spanish and English cohorts, overall performance for the children with DLD was poorer than that of the TD controls regardless of the child's native language. Item analysis revealed that children with DLD had difficulty tracking statistical information and using transitional probability to discover tone word boundaries within the input. For both the Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children, SWL accounted for a significant amount of unique variance in Receptive and Expressive vocabulary. Likelihood ratio analysis revealed that for both Catalan-Spanish and English cohorts, children having performance ≤ 45% on the SWL task had an extremely high degree of likelihood of having DLD. The analysis also revealed that for the Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children, scores of ≥ 75% and ≥ 70%, respectively, were highly likelihood to be children with normal language abilities. The findings add to a pattern suggesting that SWL is a mechanism that children rely on to acquire vocabulary. The results also suggest that SWL deficits, in particular when combined with other measures, may be a reliable diagnostic indicator for children with DLD regardless of the child's native language, and whether or not the child is bilingual or monolingual. What is already known on the subject Although there is some disagreement, a small but growing body of work suggests that deficits in procedural memory, as measured either by motor sequencing (Serial Reaction Time-SRT) or SWL tasks, may be part of the deficit profile of children with DLD. To date, studies have not examined SWL across linguistically heterogeneous populations of children with DLD to determine if it is a unique clinical marker of the disorder. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The results show that children with DLD, regardless of their native language, or whether the child is bi- or monolingual, have difficulties on SWL tasks, and that these deficits are linked to severity of the language disorder. Taken together, these results indicate that procedural memory deficits may be a core feature of DLD. This suggests that statistical-learning tasks using tone stimuli can also advance our understanding of statistical-learning abilities in children with DLD more globally. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The current study shows that statistical-learning tasks using tone stimuli can be used in conjunction with standardized assessment measures to differentiate children with DLD from children with typical language ability.

Can Word-Word Space Facilitate L2 Chinese Reading: Evidence From the Two Empirical Studies by Advanced L2 Learners of Mandarin Chinese

The purpose of this article aims to analyze the effect of word-word space in written Chinese to advanced non-native speakers when they read and process Mandarin texts. The participants have performed one online reaction time experiment and another one offline pencil-paper test. The results indicate that the structure of word segmentation in written Chinese texts have play an effective role in sentences’ semantic processing, and the length and difficulty of sentences stimuli have also displayed significant function for their Chinese sentences processing. However, the results of offline test show that the combinational amount of segmental words have not affected the texts materials processed by advanced L2 participants. These results suggest that word boundary can facilitate L2 learners of Mandarin Chinese in processing text during their reading. Apart from theoretical implications, this article also proposes a new pedagogical approach to teaching text segmentation in Chinese, which can be useful in instructing Chinese as a second or foreign language.

L1 versus L2 writing processes: What insight can we obtain from a keystroke logging program?

Writing in a language different from one’s mother tongue is a daunting task. The same challenge may apply to languages that have diglossic features whose spoken form differs from the written form. This article investigates Arab students’ writing behaviors (fluency, pauses, and revision) in response to an argumentative composition in their L1 (first language: Arabic) and L2 (second language: English), given that understanding their complexities in writing processes would help instructors to rectify language writing-related problems. Guided by Kellogg’s model, this article attempts to investigate the cognitive processes underlying these writing behaviors as aided by a keystroke logging program (Inputlog 7.0). It also examined if writing behaviors would be correlated to the writing quality of their produced final texts. Data were collected from log files of the Inputlog generated upon the students’ writing processes, screened video recordings, and a stimulated recall interview. Results indicated that compared with L2 writing in character production, L1 writing processes were highly significant, less significant in pauses over word boundaries, and highly significant in time on the task factor. Concerning revision behavior, no significant differences were found in time spent on deletion and insertion, whereas a significant difference was found in R-burst for L2 writing. As regards quality of text, many pauses and minimal production of words tend to be negative indicators for writing quality output. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are highlighted.

Can Word Segmentation and Length of Text Affect L2 Reading? Evidence From Advanced L2 Learners of Chinese and the Three Reading Models

The purpose of this article is to examine whether the word segmentation and the length of text will promote Chinese as a second language reading, and what the appropriate reading models are best for L2 learners when they processing Chinese language reading tasks. According to the experiment test, the results indicated that the main effects of word segmentation and length of text were not significantly different, and the interaction effect of the two factors was not significant in statistics too for advanced proficiency L2 learners of Chinese. This article concludes by using the approach of word boundary and choosing the useful reading models for teaching Chinese reading in classrooms are the valuable approaches for teachers when they combine other effective ways in L2 education.

A boundary-based tokenization technique for extractive text summarization

The need to extract and manage vital information contained in copious volumes of text documents has given birth to several automatic text summarization (ATS) approaches. ATS has found application in academic research, medical health records analysis, content creation and search engine optimization, finance and media. This study presents a boundary-based tokenization method for extractive text summarization. The proposed method performs word tokenization by defining word boundaries in place of specific delimiters. An extractive summarization algorithm was further developed based on the proposed boundary-based tokenization method, as well as word length consideration to control redundancy in summary output. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach enhanced word tokenization by enhancing the selection of appropriate keywords from text document to be used for summarization.

An exploration into Penultimate and Final Lengthening in Tswana (Southern Bantu)

This study investigates the segmental lengthening patterns resulting from prosodic boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The aim is to shed light on the interaction between Penultimate Lengthening and Final Lengthening, providing the first quantitative investigation of these phenomena in Tswana. We conducted a production experiment that applies a widely tested design to elicit production data of two different phrasal structures in coordinated noun phrases. The results suggest that Penultimate Lengthening and Final Lengthening constitute independent mechanisms, which both apply in Tswana. Penultimate Lengthening occurs before prosodic phrase boundaries as well as before word boundaries, yet at differing degrees. Before phrase boundaries, it involves a strong lengthening effect on the vowel of the penultimate syllable. Before word boundaries, the amount of lengthening is smaller. Final lengthening operates on the final syllable before a phrase boundary, involving a larger amount on the final vowel than on the preceding consonant. This pattern is in line with the pattern observed in other languages. The amount of lengthening on the final vowel is comparable to the amount on the penultimate vowel. Given that a large increase of lengthening on the penultimate syllable has not been observed in connection with Final Lengthening, we assume that Penultimate Lengthening constitutes a language-specific mechanism that applies independently. Final Lengthening, on the other hand, might be a universal phenomenon. The perceptual salience of Penultimate Lengthening, which has been widely reported in the literature for Bantu languages, might have to do with the dynamics within the lengthening domains, namely that the lengthening in penultimate position is abrupt and relatively stronger than in final position when compared to the preceding syllable.

Boosting the input: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to low-frequency phonotactic patterns in novel wordforms.

To learn their first words, infants must attend to a variety of cues that signal word boundaries. One such cue infants might use is the language-specific phonotactics to track legal combinations and positions of segments within a word. Studies have demonstrated that, when tested across statistically high and low phonotactics, infants repeatedly reject the low-frequency wordforms. We explore whether the capacity to access low-frequency phonotactic combinations is available at 9months when pre-exposed to wordforms containing statistically low combinations of segments. Using a modified head-turn procedure, one group of infants was presented with nonwords with low-frequency complex onsets (dr-), and another group was presented with zero-frequency onset nonwords (dl-). Following pre-exposure and familiarization, infants were then tested on their ability to segment nonwords that contained either the low- or the zero-frequency onsets. Only infants in the low-frequency condition were successful at the task, suggesting some experience with these onsets supports segmentation.

Hybrid Chinese text classification model based on pretraining model

In order to solve the problems of fuzzy boundary of Chinese words, polysemy of one word and the inability of traditional models to reflect the importance of each word in the text, a hybrid text classification model based on Ernie CNN and bilstm attention (mecba) is proposed. Firstly, Ernie model is used to generate the corresponding word vector, which can retain rich semantic information and enhance the semantic representation of words. Then, the word vector is input into CNN to extract local information, and the context feature is extracted by bilstm attention, and the output of the two is spliced; Finally, softmax classifier is used for classification. The experimental results show that the model is better than CNN, bilstm and other classification models, and can effectively improve the performance of Chinese text classification.

A Low-Area and Low-Power Comma Detection and Word Alignment Circuits for JESD204B/C Controller

In an 8B/10B mode giga-bit-per-second serial data transactions, the de-serialized data is sent to a comma detection and word alignment (CDWA) module to identify the word boundaries, which is a prerequisite in the high-speed transceivers such as PCIe, USB and JESD204B/C. In order to ensure that the comma code (/K/-code) can be correctly detected. Ten 10-bit comma detector cells are adopted in a typical CDWA module, which require a complex circuitry and an enormous power consumption. To overcome these limitations, a low-area and low-power CDWA circuit for JESD204B/C transceiver chip in 8B/10B mode has been proposed in this paper. The bit width of the detector cells can be truncated from 10 to 6 under the condition, that CDWA module can detect a complete comma code correctly. On one hand, the proposed CDWA module is verified with a FPGA development platform with the reduction of the hardware resources and power consumption to 31.72% and 20.11% respectively as compared to the typical structure available. On the other hand, a 10-Gbps transceiver chip with the proposed CDWA module is fabricated with a 55-nm CMOS process and the word alignment function of the proposed module is proved by the measurement results. The area of this transceiver chip including $2\times $ transmitting links and $2\times $ receiving links is 2.89 mm2, and the power consumption is 467.8 mW, under a maximum data transmission rate of 10 Gbps.

Prosodization of prepositional clitics and prosodic words in Brazilian Portuguese: Investigation of phonetic cues

In this paper, syllable duration (Vowel-to-Vowel unit) and F0 variation are analyzed as cues to distinguish the prosodization of prepositional clitic-host sequence from a syllable within a prosodic word in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). A production task was created to assess 1) whether the syllable production time helps to identify a clitic boundary and a word boundary and 2) whether the F0 configuration aligned to a clitic syllable differs from the F0 configuration aligned to a syllable in a word boundary. The results show that: 1) the syllable duration measurement supports the hypothesis that there is no distinction between prepositional clitics and a syllable which is part of a prosodic word (PW); 2) the pitch range of tonal events associated to the syllable that bears the PW boundary differs from that associated to the syllables that bear a clitic-host sequence boundary. Based on these results we argued that the prepositional clitics are prosodized as a syllable adjoined to its host. This interpretation leads us to suggest that the relevant domain for prepositional clitic prosodization is between PW and PPh (Phonological Phrase) in BP.

Manipulating Interword and Interletter Spacing in Cursive Script: An Eye Movements Investigation of Reading Persian.

Persian is an Indo-Iranian language that features a derivation of Arabic cursive script, where most letters within words are connectable to adjacent letters with ligatures. Two experiments are reported where the properties of Persian script were utilized to investigate the effects of reducing interword spacing and increasing the interletter distance (ligature) within a word. Experiment 1 revealed that decreasing interword spacing while extending interletter ligature by the same amount was detrimental to reading speed. Experiment 2 largely replicated these findings. The experiments show that providing the readers with inaccurate word boundary information is detrimental to reading rate. This was achieved by reducing the interword space that follows letters that do not connect to the next letter in Experiment 1, and replacing the interword space with ligature that connected the words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, readers were able to comprehend the text read, despite the considerable costs to reading rates in the experimental conditions.