Sentence Completion Research Articles

A critical content analysis of writing materials covered in Indonesian high school English textbooks

Despite many studies addressing writing materials in English language learning textbooks in the Indonesian context, few reported the conformity of the English writing materials in senior high school textbooks intended for the 2013 curriculum to the genre of written language paradigm. The present study critically analyzed the existing writing materials covered in Indonesian senior high school textbooks. The data sources for this research were three English textbooks designed for three levels of senior high school students in Indonesia. The writing materials were selected from the textbooks as the representatives of the analysis objects. The data were analyzed following content analysis by integrating Brown (2004) as the conceptual framework. The results reveal that the writing materials are consistent with the framework. The books cover all text genres, including academic, professional, and personal writing. However, not all framework-informed sub-categories of texts are reflected in the writing materials of the examined textbooks. In addition, the evaluated textbooks emphasize student exposure to intensive writing tasks (grammatical transformation, short-answer sentence completion, and picture-cued tasks) and extensive writing tasks (paragraph construction, guided question and answer, and paraphrasing). These results highlight the need to align textbooks with the curriculum genre of the written language paradigm and to balance intensive and extensive writing tasks to prepare students for real-life writing situations.

Exploiting Language Models as a Source of Knowledge for Cognitive Agents

Large language models (LLMs) provide capabilities far beyond sentence completion, including question answering, summarization, and natural-language inference. While many of these capabilities have potential application to cognitive systems, our research is exploiting language models as a source of task knowledge for cognitive agents, that is, agents realized via a cognitive architecture. We identify challenges and opportunities for using language models as an external knowledge source for cognitive systems and possible ways to improve the effectiveness of knowledge extraction by integrating extraction with cognitive architecture capabilities, highlighting with examples from our recent work in this area.

Cerebellar-Induced Aphasia After Stroke: Evidence for the “Linguistic Cerebellum”

The cerebellum is traditionally known to subserve motor functions. However, for several decades, the concept of the “cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome” has evolved. Studies in healthy participants and patients have confirmed the cerebellar role in language. The exact involvement of the cerebellum regarding cerebellar aphasia remains uncertain. We included 43 cerebellar stroke patients who were tested at 3 months post-onset with the Boston Naming Test (BNT), the Token Test (TT), and the Diagnostic Instrument for Mild Aphasia (DIMA). Lesion side (left/right) and volume (cm3) were investigated. Patients significantly deviated on the following: BNT (p<0.001), TT (p<0.05), DIMA subtests: sentences repetition (p=0.001), semantic odd-picture-out (p<0.05), sentence completion (p<0.05) without an effect of lesion location (left/right) or volume (cm3) (p>0.05). Our clinical study confirms a non-lateralized cerebellar aphasia post-stroke, characterized by impairments in word retrieval, phonology, semantics, and syntax resembling cerebral-induced aphasia. The integral cerebellum appears to interact with eloquent cortico-subcortical language areas.

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

Studies on school-aged children have been infrequent in research on Spanish as a heritage language. The present study explored how dual-language immersion education, patterns of heritage language use, proficiency, and age shape child Spanish heritage speakers’ production and selection of differential object marking (DOM). A total of 57 English–Spanish bilingual children and 18 Spanish-dominant adults completed sentence completion and morphology selection tasks. Results revealed that the group of heritage speaker children that produced and selected the differential object marker most frequently was the seventh and eighth grade children (ages 12–14, the oldest in the study) who had completed a dual-language immersion program. Different factors accounted for variability in each task: bilingual education and proficiency affected the production of DOM, while age affected selection. Heritage speakers selected DOM more frequently than they produced this structure. These findings have implications for theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasizes that language experience and exposure account for differences between heritage speakers and argue for the dissociation of production from underlying syntactic knowledge. The data also argue that heritage speakers may possess a bilingual alignment for DOM, whereby underlying receptive knowledge is modulated by cumulative exposure, while production depends more on bilingual education and proficiency in Spanish.

Linguocultural Aspect of Hypotaxemes with Conditional Components in English and Uzbek Languages

In modern linguistics, there is a great interest in the analysis of linguistic and cultural material in the process of teaching languages, an anthropocentric paradigm is formed, and the language is considered not only within its communicative and cognitive function but as a kind of cultural code of individual linguistic and cultural communities. The purpose of this scientific article is to study the manifestation of linguistic and cultural worldviews and to study the linguistic and cultural aspects of hypotaxemes with conditional components in English and Uzbek languages. The study of the conceptual structure allows us to identify deeper and more significant properties of hypotaxemes with conditional components. The object of this scientific article is conditional sentences that express statements discussing known factors or hypothetical situations and their consequences. Complete conditional sentences contain a conditional clause (often referred to as the if-clause) and the consequence in non-related languages such as Uzbek and English.

An Exploration of Start-Ups' Resilience to Crises using the Projective Research Technique – Sentence Completion

The study explores the impact of economic, health, climate, energy, and political crises on startups, highlighting the different ways entrepreneurs perceive and manage these complex challenges. The research, conducted through semi-structured online interviews using the projective technique of sentence completion, is based on a sample of 25 managers of startups founded between 2021 and 2022 in various fields. The results highlight that managers perceive crises as situations that accentuate vulnerability and risk, but also as opportunities for innovation and creativity.

Sentence Completion as a User Experience Research Method: Recommendations From an Experimental Study

Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate the use of the sentence completion technique (SCT) as a user experience (UX) research method. We conducted an online experiment (N = 400) to test the effect of sentence stem variations on sentence completion outcomes. Using a between-subjects design, half of the participants were exposed to impersonal sentence stems that did not include pronouns while the other half were exposed to stems formulated using first-person pronouns (PR). Additional hypotheses around stem formats (use of redundant stems, imaginative stems, two blanks stems, generic stems, stems prompting others’ perception) were tested using a within-subject design. The results do not support hypothesized differences between the pronoun and no pronoun condition. Findings however show that varying the format of the stem influences response behavior, as measured by variety, quantity and novelty of ideas, as well as the length of response. This study contributes to consolidating the use of SCT as a user research method and proposes actionable recommendations on how to create optimal sentence completion surveys in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Exploring Writing Self-Efficacy among Malaysian Tertiary English Learners

Despite being exposed to the language for more than ten years, writing is one of the key challenges for Malaysian English language learners. This is largely due to the influence of their first language and lack of confidence or appropriate platforms to use English effectively. This study examines whether writing self-efficacy influences writing performance across three dimensions: ideation, convention, and self-regulation. The Self-Efficacy for Writing Scale (SEWS) developed by Bruning et al. (2012) was employed to assess these dimensions in a sample of 448 participants from a local tertiary institution in Malaysia. A quantitative approach was used, with an 18-item questionnaire distributed to participants, and the data analysed using SPSS for descriptive analysis. The findings reveal that among the three dimensions of writing self-efficacy, writing convention had the highest average mean score of 3.75, followed by self-regulation at 3.35, and ideation at 3.34. These results suggest that, despite commonly being considered weak in English writing, the participants demonstrated higher confidence in their linguistic abilities, particularly in spelling and sentence completion. The study underscores the need for future research to explore the relationship between each dimension of writing self-efficacy and learners’ writing performance in greater depth. This could help identify more effective strategies to promote English writing skills among learners.

Tencent Text-Video Retrieval: Hierarchical Cross-Modal Interactions with Multi-Level Representations

Text-Video Retrieval plays an important role in multi-modal understanding and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most existing methods focus on constructing contrastive pairs between whole videos and complete caption sentences, while overlooking fine-grained cross-modal relationships, e.g., clip-phrase or frame-word. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Hierarchical Cross-Modal Interaction (HCMI), to explore multi-level cross-modal relationships among video-sentence, clip-phrase, and frame-word for text-video retrieval. Considering intrinsic semantic frame relations, HCMI performs self-attention to explore frame-level correlations and adaptively cluster correlated frames into clip-level and video-level representations. In this way, HCMI constructs multi-level video representations for frame-clip-video granularities to capture fine-grained video content, and multi-level text representations at word-phrase-sentence granularities for the text modality. With multi-level representations for video and text, hierarchical contrastive learning is designed to explore fine-grained cross-modal relationships, i.e., frame-word, clip-phrase, and video-sentence, which enables HCMI to achieve a comprehensive semantic comparison between video and text modalities. Further boosted by adaptive label denoising and marginal sample enhancement, HCMI achieves new state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks, e.g., Rank@1 of 55.0%, 58.2%, 29.7%, 52.1%, and 57.3% on MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, DiDemo, and ActivityNet, respectively.

Stakeholders' perception on the role of extensive livestock farming in the fight against climate change

Abstract Livestock farming is currently highly questioned and is considered by society to be one of the main precursors of climate change and innumerable environmental impacts. This social concern has marked a trend in public policies in Europe, promoting strategies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by controlling the carbon footprint of agri-food products. However, in certain regions, the perception of the main actors in the sector about the role that livestock farming plays in this fight against climate change and how new political trends point the way toward the sustainability of agrarian systems is still uncertain. In this study, the opinions of stakeholders of the agro-livestock sector on the role that extensive livestock farming plays in the current context of the fight against climate change and the demands for public policies to facilitate the adoption of mitigation practices were examined. A participatory research process through focus groups was used in this qualitative study. Specifically, five sessions were held at the beginning of 2022; the sessions were recorded, transcribed, and anonymized for further analysis. In these sessions, projective techniques were used, such as word association and sentence completion to understand stakeholders' perceptions of the role of extensive livestock farming in climate change. Brand mapping was conducted to determine the opinion on the profitability and GHG emissions of 10 livestock systems typical of the region and of eight quality labelling systems related to sustainability. Brainstorming was carried out to assess available practices for the adaptation of livestock farms and mitigation of climate change. Finally, there was an open debate regarding the demands for public aid for the implementation of mitigation practices. The word association technique identified concepts such as ‘Equilibrium’ in extensive livestock farming and concepts such as ‘Effects’, ‘Action’ and ‘Concern’ in climate change. For the term carbon footprint, the most mentioned concept was ‘ignorance’, and for common agricultural policy, the most mentioned term was ‘injustices’. The results of the brand mapping allowed us to determine the perception of the stakeholders regarding the profitability of the different extensive farm systems and on their GHG emissions, with the most extensive and traditional ones being perceived as the lowest emitters of gases but also the least profitable. For sustainable labels, stakeholders believed that labels contribute to profitability and lower GHG emissions. Strategies to adapt to climate change and reduce the impact of farms were focused on reforestation, grazing, and soil management, adjusting the livestock stocking rate and self-production of food on farms. The best mitigating practices proposed were the maintenance of the extensive livestock farming (4.69), improvement of accesses, livestock routes and roads (4.63), making and applying compost (4.50) and the simplified administrative procedures (5.00). In the prioritization of public aids, three categories were established based on the field of action: social/organizational measures (38 votes), economic measures (44 votes) and environmental measures (22 votes). The aid related to maintaining profitability and improving marketing, followed by aid to reduce bureaucracy and direct aid to extensive livestock farming, were identified as priorities. This study offers a detailed picture of how stakeholders in the agro-livestock sector see the role that extensive livestock farming plays in the fight against climate change. The best farm management practices and priority lines of public support that policy-makers can apply have been identified in this study and emanate directly from those who receive subsidies and make the decisions in their livestock farming to ensure their implementation more successful.

Corpus Microtext Analysis and English Teaching Model Innovation in Cloud Computing Background

Abstract The rapid development of cloud computing technology makes the English teaching corpus an excellent choice for innovative English teaching mode. This paper constructs a corpus of English teaching resources and English O2O teaching mode based on MOOC education platform, combines the probabilistic semantic analysis (PLSA) model with the potential semantic indexing to carry out microtext analysis of the English teaching corpus, and solves the PLSA model by using the expectation (EM) algorithm. For the English teaching corpus and English O2O teaching model constructed in this paper, a validation analysis was conducted in three aspects: micro text analysis, text lexical ability and teaching satisfaction. The results show that the PLSA model is able to obtain complete sentence expressions in the microtexture of the corpus when the weight coefficient of the lexical items is set to 0.3. The text vocabulary ability of students in English O2O teaching mode shows a significant difference level at 1% level, and the correlation coefficient of in-class to pre-class reaches 0.889. The English teaching corpus relying on MOOC platform and O2O teaching mode can effectively enhance students’ deep understanding of English sentences, improve students’ satisfaction with English teaching, and enhance students’ interest in learning English.

مشاكل القواعد في ترجمة مجموعة قصة قصيرة "أرنى الله" لتوفيق الحكيم في موضوع الحب

The problem in this research is the grammatical problem found in the translation of the short story collection of Arinillah by Taufik Hakim. This study aims to determine (1) the number of grammatical problems, (2) the types of grammatical problems, and to describe (3) the relationship between the translated text and the theory of grammatical problems found in Arinillah's short stories with the theme of love. Based on the data sources studied, the researcher found grammatical problems in the level of phrases and sentences found in four short story titles with the theme of love. The results of this study are tarkib washfi, tarkib idhafi, atahf mathuf, taukid, simple sentences, complete sentences, and complex sentences in a collection of short stories titled Taufik Hakim Arinillah. The short stories contain Taufik Hakim's philosophical thoughts which are good for the development of today's mindset

A Case Study of Sandplay Therapy for a Mother with Insecure Attachment and the Impact on Family Members

The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in a mother's attachment and emotional control resulting from Sandplay Therapy in cases of insecure adult attachment. Additionally, the study aimed to examine the changes in family perception and attachment to the mother's changes. One mother with a high insecure adult attachment score and her family were selected as subjects for this study. Attachment scales, emotional control scales, sentence completion tests (SCTs), and interviews were conducted before and after the therapy to study the subjects' changes in attachment and emotional control, as well as the changes perceived by family members. The mother then underwent 12 sessions of Sandplay Therapy. The results showed that: After Sandplay therapy, the mother's attachment and emotional control demonstrated positive changes. The mother's changes through Sandplay Therapy contributed to the improvement of the family's positive perception and attachment level. The Sandplay box underwent a process of individualization, leading to self-realization. In conclusion, Sandplay Therapy helps stabilize the attachment and emotion of insecure attachment mothers, and the changes in mothers have a positive impact on the perception and attachment of family members. A follow-up study, it is necessary to expand the number of study subjects by attachment type.

An Analysis of Formal Language Style in The American President Movie

Language style serves as a supplementary instrument for individuals to partake in dialogue, drawing upon their speaking proficiency to align with the context and subject matter of the discourse. Using Martin Joss’s theory (1967), this research aims to find out the characteristics of formal language style that occur in the utterances in the American President movie. Descriptive qualitative method was used as the research design to analyze the characteristics of formal language style in the American President movie. The results of this research found 195 data which are presented in three points. The respectful tone (11), polite tone (21), avoid contraction of level grammar (22), avoid run-on sentence of level grammar (7), efficient words of level grammar (8), complete sentence of level grammar (113), and formal modal of level grammar (13). This means that the complete sentence of level grammar is prominently proved to be used in communication withing formal language style used in American President movie. based in the result of the research, it is fruitful to suggest the students of English Department to do further analysis about the five language styles used in other resources like movies, novels, or article that contain about the politics.

Code-Switching Analysis in EFL Classroom Interaction: A Sociolinguistic Study

This research aims to analyze the types and the functions of code-switchingin EFL Classroom Interaction by teacher and students. The type of this research is descriptive using a qualitative approach. The instruments which are used are observation, interview, and documentation. The observation is conducted 3 times while interview was done to English teacher and some students to know the use of code switching in EFL classroom. The result shows that code switching is mostly used especially in explaining material to students based on Poplack theory. Three types of code switching which was used by the teacher: tag switching occurred 5 times in 3 meetings, intrasentential code-switching occored 33 times in 3 meetings, and interrsentential code-switching occurred 22 times in 3 meetings. Meanwhile, Based on Sert, there are the three functions of teachers’ code-switching accomplished. They were topic switch occurred 37 times in 3 meetings, affective function occurred 16 times in 3 meeting), and repetitive function occurred 16 times in 3 meetings. Besides, there are two functions of students’ code-switching accomplished. These functions are equivalence appeared 3 times in 3 meetings and reiteration appeared 1 time in three meetings. In conclusion, the type of code switching that is most often done by teachers is intersential switching, which occurs in one sentence, when the speaker says a complete sentence in one language into another language. Meanwhile, the code switching function that is most often used by teachers is topic switch, namely the teacher does code switching when explaining material to students, while the code switching function that is most often used by students is equivalence, namely repeating to avoid mistakes.

EXPLORING THE PHENOMENON OF BOREDOM IN THE CONTEXT OF LEISURE AMONG OLDER ADULTS

Abstract Boredom is a concept that seems at odds with leisure, yet research on this topic indicates these constructs are often connected. Leisure boredom has been studied primarily among adolescents (Donati et al., 2019; Weybright et al., 2015). However, boredom is prevalent among older adults. Social isolation and loneliness often intertwine with boredom, and research suggests that prolonged boredom can negatively affect health and well-being (An et al, 2022; Goldberg et al., 2011). Yet, there is a dearth of research on this topic and existing literature typically examines adults’ functional status and disengagement or selective investment in leisure activities (Kleiber et al., 2008) rather than examining boredom more broadly. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the concept of boredom holistically in the context of leisure among community-dwelling older adults. The study used a multi-method approach utilizing focus groups and projective techniques of sentence completions and drawings. Forty-two older adults were recruited from senior centers and senior communities located in four western US cities. Thematic analysis with a six-step process outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006) was employed to analyze the data. Boredom was described as a personal state (e.g., negative self-perception, low energy and sensation/arousal, lacking motivation) and as activity-related emotions derived from unsatisfied/disengaged leisure participation. Participants also highlighted how life events and circumstances shaped their identity and contributed to boredom. Findings offered meaningful insights into how participants defined boredom, articulated causes of boredom, and strategies they use to alleviate boredom.

Petőfi Sándor néhány verséről diákszemmel

Some of Sándor Petőfi's poems from a student's point of view: Mosaics from the research of students' analyses of art Curricula come, curricula go, and they bring in their wake outdated, then updated, or even new textbooks from time to time, in the name of reforms or a modern perspective. Meanwhile, the quiet, or more intense debate swings back and forth, again and again between the work-centered or reception-centered literature teaching approaches. This paper contributes to this discourse while shedding light on the intersection of what can be called a pair of opposing concepts at the center of the debate, when the degrees of understanding a work of literature and the student's confrontation with poetical works as lyrical subjects become the organizing principle in the world of a literature class. This professional-pedagogical reflection is supported by a presentation of facts, data, and correlations of the analytical work of twenty 7th grade students from Kelebia in southern Hungary, in order to assist the teaching and learning of literature as a subject. Keywords: content-centered versus reception-centered literature teaching, poetic text, historical and aesthetic views of literature, author/creator attitude, use of literary and art theoretical concepts, technical terminology, technical vocabulary, paragraph, complete sentence, sentence unit, structure and style analysis

Immobilized: (In)congruent collateral consequences and racialized driver's license restrictions

For Americans convicted of crimes, collateral consequences impose barriers extending long past the completion of official sentences. The present study develops a novel distinction between congruent and incongruent collateral consequences. Congruent consequence laws impose barriers that are closely linked to their triggering offenses, while incongruent measures impose barriers that are only loosely connected to triggering offenses—or are disconnected entirely. Focusing specifically on the impactful consequence of restricting legal driving privileges, this article examines how the determinants of these policies vary according to the degree of congruity between triggering offense and collateral consequence. Using novel data on driver's license restriction laws, we find that the Black composition of state felony record populations is positively associated with the extensiveness of license restrictions for nondriving safety offenses. Conversely, we do not find a statistically significant relationship between states’ felony record racial composition and their volume of license restrictions for driving safety offenses. These findings reveal a major divergence in pathways leading to congruent and incongruent collateral consequence statutes at the state level. The results are further notable given driving's central role in the US socioeconomic system.

Sentence completion in progressive supranuclear palsy following transcranial direct current stimulation

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is an atypical Parkinsonian disorder which results in deterioration of motor and cognitive skills, including language disorders such as impaired word retrieval. While there is evidence of successful use of tDCS to improve word fluency in PSP, little is known about the effectiveness of brain stimulation for word retrieval in sentence context. Therefore, we investigated whether tDCS reduces sentence completion time in PSP patients. In this sham-controlled, triple-blinded crossover study, anodal tDCS (atDCS) was applied over the left Broca’s area at 2 mA for 20 min (n = 23). In contrast to patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA), also an atypical Parkinsonian disorder, and healthy elderlies, sentence completion improved in PSP patients when tDCS was applied. The improvement in word fluency reported in previous studies using other electrode positions was not replicated. By using atDCS of the left Broca’s area, we were able to demonstrate a difference between the two movement disorders. The obtained insight could be helpful to improve language therapy of these disorders.

The structure correspondence hypothesis predicts how word and sentence in language correlate with term and principle in mathematics.

The association between language and mathematics is an important debated topic. Here, we proposed a structure correspondence hypothesis to explain under what conditions language and mathematics are closely related. According to the hypothesis, there would be an association when they have equivalent structure. One hundred and fifty high school students were recruited to finish mathematical and language tests at the element level (i.e., geometric term processing and word analogy) and at the low-dimensional combination level (i.e., geometric principle processing and sentence completion) as well as the tests to measure cognitive covariates (general intelligence and spatial processing). After controlling for age, gender and cognitive covariates, geometric term processing and word analogy were closely correlated, and geometric principle processing and sentence completion were significantly correlated. No other correlations were found. The results support the structure correspondence hypothesis and provide a new perspective of structure of language and verbalized mathematics for the relation between language and mathematics.