Sentence Completion Research Articles

South Korean immigrant workers in Germany: L2 German verb placement and sociolinguistic factors

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study explores the asymmetric placement of the finite verb in Korean L2 German speakers and examines the effect of sociolinguistic factors on the produced verb placement patterns. Design/methodology/approach: Fifty-eight participants performed a sentence completion task that elicited the preferred placement of the (finite) verb in matrix and subordinate clauses. In addition, language background interviews were conducted to better understand the sociolinguistic circumstances of the Korean immigrants. Data and analysis: The experimental data are analyzed using implicational scaling to identify patterns of verb placement. The effect of sociolinguistic factors was tested fitting an ordinal logistic regression model. Findings/conclusions: Contrary to the developmental stages of L2 German syntax found in previous research, the experimental results revealed that target-like subordinate clauses are produced more robustly than verb second (V2) constructions. It is argued that this result is better explained with difficulties producing subject-verb inversion, V2, than with facilitative L1 transfer effects from Korean, producing German subordinate clauses with V-final order. Concerning social factors, the type of occupation (coal miner or nurse) was most significant in predicting the preferred L2 verb placement pattern, followed by L2 education and age of immigration. Originality: This article adds to the understanding of L2 German syntax by revisiting previously identified stages of L2 German development with data that target the preferred verb placement in matrix and subordinate clauses from less-researched L1 Korean speakers. The intra-group distinction of Korean immigrants into coal miners and nurses further allows a differentiated look at the role of sociolinguistic factors. Significance/implications: This research is significant as it aims to draw a comprehensive picture of L2 German acquisition and usage in the context of labor migration, highlighting a less-studied group of immigrants.

Peningkatan Kemampuan Berbicara Melalui Media Gambar Seri pada Anak Kelompok B TK Kuncup Harapan Soborejo Pringsurat Temanggung Semester I Tahun Pelajaran 2017/2018

The Language is a very important communication tool in human life, because it serves as a tool to express thoughts and feelings to others. The problem faced by children in Group B of TK Kuncup Harapan Soborejo is that the children's speaking ability is still low. The purpose of this study was to determine the process of improvement and the magnitude of the increase in the speaking ability of the children of Group B Kindergarten Kuncup Harapan Soborejo Pringsurat in the first semester of the 2017/2018 academic year. The subjects of this study were 15 students in Group B of TK Kuncup Harapan Soborejo. The research was conducted in September 2017. Data collection methods used are observation, documentation and interviews. Based on the results of the research and discussion, it can be concluded that learning activities through serial picture media can improve the speaking ability of children in Group B Kindergarten Kuncup Harapan Soborejo Pringsurat Temanggung Semester I 2017/2018 Academic Year. This is evidenced by an increase in children's speaking ability at the time of pre-action by 13.3%, increasing to 33.3% in Cycle I, and reaching 86.7% in Cycle II. The success of learning improvement in improving children's speaking skills is indicated by the children being able to speak fluently, the children being able to ask and answering questions, and being able to speak in complete sentences (S-V-O/S-V-A).

Use of completion projective technique to understand consumer's perception upon a novelty cosmetic with olive oil

AbstractProjective techniques are a type of qualitative methodology that have rarely been applied to cosmetic products. In this study, 334 women completed an online survey aiming to explore their perception of an after‐shower oil with olive oil, applying three variants of the completion projective technique (story completion, sentence completion, and dialogue completion). Even though 36% of the assessors intended to buy and try the product, some aspects discouraged other consumers from buying it, such as the belief that the product will leave a greasy and sticky sensation on the skin (36.4%) and the intense disagreeable smell (28.7%) that it might have. The lack of knowledge of several consumers regarding the effects of olive oil on the skin was also evident. This study allowed us to define important aspects to be considered during the design of a new cosmetic containing olive oil. The information obtained might also be used to plan strategies of communication and position of the product in the market.Practical ApplicationsThe application of completion projective techniques to study consumers' perception of a novel cosmetic product allows us to obtain relevant information to be considered during the design of the new cosmetic, hence identifying more suitable marketing and communication strategies to promote the product to potential purchasers.

Environment Context Variability and Incidental Word Learning: A Virtual Reality Study.

Previous research has shown that changes in the scenarios in which something is learned and recalled, respectively, may result in a subpar performance in memory recollection. The current study aimed to evaluate how changes in the visuo-perceptual environmental learning context impact incidental vocabulary learning. To this end, a highly immersive virtual reality setting was created, and participants were required to read eight distinct stories visually presented to them. A novel word was delivered twice in every paragraph and embedded in each story. Stories could be displayed either in a high variability condition, where each paragraph was shown in a new environment context (four different classrooms) or in a low variability condition, where each paragraph was shown in the same context. The findings obtained across four assessment tasks (free recall, recognition, picture matching, and sentence completion) demonstrated that significant visuo-perceptual variability did not bring about any disadvantages in word learning. Thus, perceptual information from a physically diverse environment could provide a variety of instructional and educational beneficial possibilities in the absence of a learning disadvantage.

It’s all about the sentential construction

Abstract Cross-linguistically, very few complete sentences, as opposed to a myriad of phrases, lexicalize to become words. I here offer an account for this skewed distribution, along the lines of Construction Grammar, by analyzing a set of mono-clausal sentences in Hebrew which have indeed become – or are on the verge of becoming – words. I adopt the distinction between categorical and thetic propositions, and show that only the latter can evolve into words. A thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition, much like a verb-phrase, enables a tight semantic bonding between its components to form an ‘interpretatively cohesive’ unit, which may lead to semantic change. An evaluative thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition is comment-like, hence ‘semantically-incomplete’, and in need of a topic from prior discourse to predicate on, which may lead to a change in grammatical status. All verb-phrases meet these two criteria but only few sentences do, hence, I argue, the skewed distribution of sources from which new words evolve.

Investigating sentence processing and working memory in patients with mild Alzheimer and elderly people.

Linguistic disorders are one of the common problems in Alzheimer's disease, which in recent years has been considered as one of the key parameters in the diagnosis of Alzheimer (AD). Given that changes in sentence processing and working memory and the relationship between these two activities may be a diagnostic parameter in the early and preclinical stages of AD, the present study examines the comprehension and production of sentences and working memory in AD patients and healthy aged people. Twenty-five people with mild Alzheimer's and 25 healthy elderly people participated in the study. In this study, we used the digit span to evaluate working memory. Syntactic priming and sentence completion tasks in canonical and non-canonical conditions were used for evaluating sentence production. We administered sentence picture matching and cross-modal naming tasks to assess sentence comprehension. The results of the present study revealed that healthy elderly people and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease have a significant difference in comprehension of relative clause sentences (P <0.05). There was no significant difference between the two groups in comprehension of simple active, simple active with noun phrase and passive sentences (P> 0.05). They had a significant difference in auditory and visual reaction time (P <0.05). Also there was a significant difference between the two groups in syntactic priming and sentence completion tasks. However, in non-canonical condition of sentence completion, the difference between the two groups was not significant (P> 0.05). The results of the present study showed that the mean scores related to comprehension, production and working memory in people with mild Alzheimer's were lower than healthy aged people, which indicate sentence processing problems at this level of the disease. People with Alzheimer have difficulty comprehending and producing complex syntactic structures and have poorer performance in tasks that required more memory demands. It seems that the processing problems of these people are due to both working memory and language problems, which are not separate from each other and both are involved in.

L2 Proficiency Effects on the Use of Verb Bias Information

This study investigated whether L2 proficiency affected how L2 learners used verb bias information in their written production. Two groups of high proficiency and low proficiency L2 learners participated in a sentence completion task with direct object (DO) bias verbs, equi (EQ) bias verbs and sentential complement (SC) bias verbs. The results showed a significant difference between the two L2 learner groups in the percentage of DO and SC sentence completions preferred for each verb type. The low proficiency group used more DO structures and fewer SC structures for all three types of verbs compared to the high proficiency group. However, despite the low proficiency group’s preference for the DO sentence structure, significant correlations between the verb bias strength index of each verb and number of DO/SC sentence completions were found for both the low and high proficiency groups. These results suggest that while low proficiency L2 learners generally prefer to use the structurally more minimal DO structure as opposed to the SC structure, they are sensitive to verb bias properties and are able to use this information in their written production.

Inlediğini Anlama Becerisini Değerlendirme Görev Biçimleri: Yabancı Dil Olarak Türkçe Öğretimi Ders Kitapları ve Öğretim Elemanlarının Seçimleri Üzerine Karşılaştırmalı Bir İnceleme

The aim of the study is to examine the frequency and distribution of the task formats in the evaluation of listening comprehension skills in the Turkish language teaching textbooks for foreigners. This study also aims to compare these findings with the practices preferred in the exams by the instructors teaching Turkish as a foreign language. In the study, sequential exploratory design was applied by using document analysis and descriptive method. Three widely used textbooks and 36 instructors as the participants have formed the scope of the study. The findings indicate that the most frequently preferred task formats in the books are gap-filling and dichotomous item. As a result of the z-test, a significant difference between the textbooks in terms of the ratios of short-answer question, multiple-choice item, matching, and dichotomous item task formats has been found. Dichotomous item, gap-filling, sentence completion, short answer questions, information transfer, multiple choice and matching have been the most preferred task formats by the instructors in the exams. As a result of Kruskal Wallis test, no significant difference was found between the participants in terms of preferring the evaluation task formats according to the variables of graduation degree, last graduated department, and professional experience.

Do smart speaker skills support diverse audiences?

Smart speakers with voice assistants like Google Home or Amazon Alexa are increasingly popular and essential in our daily lives due to their convenience of issuing voice commands. Ensuring that these voice assistants are equitable to different population subgroups is crucial. In this paper, we present the first framework, AudioAcc, to help evaluate the performance of various accents. AudioAcc takes in videos from YouTube and generates composite commands. We further propose a new metric called Consistency of Results (COR) that developers can use to avoid the incorrect translation of the produced results by rewriting the skill to improve the Word Error Rate (WER) performance. We evaluate AudioAcc on complete sentences extracted from YouTube videos. The result reveals that our composite sentences generated by AudioAcc are close to the complete sentences. Our evaluation of diverse audiences shows that first, speech from native speakers, particularly Americans, exhibits the best WER performance by 9.5% in comparison to speech from other native and nonnative speakers. Second, speech from American professional speakers has significantly more fairness and the best WER performance by 8.3% in comparison to speech from German professional speakers and German and American amateur speakers. Moreover, we show that using the COR metric could help developers to rewrite the skill to improve the WER accuracy, which we used to improve the accuracy of the Russian accent.

Optional Plural Agreement in Heritage Turkish Speakers’ Verb Form Choices

Abstract Turkish 3rd person plural subjects are frequently used with verbs that are unmarked for number, with plural suffix omission influenced by semantic and word-order related constraints. Previous findings from judgment tasks indicate that monolingual and heritage Turkish speakers differ in the way they are affected by these constraints. This study builds and expands upon previous research by investigating the role of word order in more detail, and by examining whether the constraint weightings obtained from Uygun and Felser’s (2021) acceptability judgment data are able to predict speakers’ verb form choices in a timed sentence completion task. Besides confirming that word-order related constraints are information-structural in nature, our results show that heritage speakers over-produce plural-marked verbs in comparison to monolingual speakers, indicating between-group differences in constraint ranking. We interpret this as reflecting a tendency among Turkish heritage speakers to regularize the agreement system, which is not necessarily observed in metalinguistic judgment tasks.

An emotion-eliciting version of the Hayling Sentence Completion Test

ABSTRACT Introduction Executive functions comprise a suite of higher-order cognitive processes, which interact with other processes, such as emotion, to drive goal-directed behavior. The Hayling Sentence Completion Test is a widely used standard neuropsychological tool to measure executive functions, namely verbal initiation and suppression. The current studies aimed to establish and validate an emotion-eliciting version of the Hayling Sentence Completion Test, in order to examine the executive processes of initiation and suppression in an emotional context. Study 1 aimed to provide a quantitative evaluation of the emotional content of the Emotional Hayling Test. Study 2 investigated the differences between the Standard and Emotional Hayling Tests, and explored how performance relates to specific emotional properties of the sentences within the Emotional Hayling. Methods Study 1 included N = 100 participants, who were asked to rate each Emotional Hayling Sentence stem in terms of valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (intensity: low-high). Study 2 included N = 204 participants who completed the Emotional Hayling Test, along with other neuropsychological measures of cognitive and affective functioning. Results As designed, the sentence stimuli in the Emotional Hayling were rated as significantly higher in absolute emotional valence and arousal, compared to the Standard Hayling (Study 1). Overall, initiation and suppression on the Emotional Hayling were significantly poorer than on the Standard Hayling (Study 2). Finally, within the Emotional Hayling, participants made more suppression errors in response to negative sentences compared to positive sentences, and this effect was present in younger but not older adults. Conclusions Reduced performance on the Emotional Hayling Test, particularly in response to negative sentences, is consistent with the emotional content placing increased demands on the executive function system. We present the Emotional Hayling Test as a promising clinical tool, with the potential to capture disruptions in emotional processing.

A resource-rational model of human processing of recursive linguistic structure

A major goal of psycholinguistic theory is to account for the cognitive constraints limiting the speed and ease of language comprehension and production. Wide-ranging evidence demonstrates a key role for linguistic expectations: A word's predictability, as measured by the information-theoretic quantity of surprisal, is a major determinant of processing difficulty. But surprisal, under standard theories, fails to predict the difficulty profile of an important class of linguistic patterns: the nested hierarchical structures made possible by recursion in human language. These nested structures are better accounted for by psycholinguistic theories of constrained working memory capacity. However, progress on theory unifying expectation-based and memory-based accounts has been limited. Here we present a unified theory of a rational trade-off between precision of memory representations with ease of prediction, a scaled-up computational implementation using contemporary machine learning methods, and experimental evidence in support of the theory's distinctive predictions. We show that the theory makes nuanced and distinctive predictions for difficulty patterns in nested recursive structures predicted by neither expectation-based nor memory-based theories alone. These predictions are confirmed 1) in two language comprehension experiments in English, and 2) in sentence completions in English, Spanish, and German. More generally, our framework offers computationally explicit theory and methods for understanding how memory constraints and prediction interact in human language comprehension and production.

“Are You …”: An Examination of Incomplete Question Stems in Self-administered Surveys

Questionnaire designers are encouraged to write questions as complete sentences. In self-administered surveys, incomplete question stems may reduce visual clutter but may also increase burden when respondents need to scan the response options to fully complete the question. We experimentally examine the effects of three categories of incomplete question stems (incomplete conversational, incomplete ordinal, and incomplete nominal questions) versus complete question stems on 53 items in a probability web-mail survey. We examine item nonresponse, response time, selection of the first and last response options, and response distributions. We find that incomplete question stems take slightly longer to answer and slightly reduce the selection of the last response option but have no effect on item nonresponse rates or selection of the first response option. We conclude that questionnaire designers should follow current best practices to write complete questions, but deviations from complete questions will likely have limited effects.

Arabic Language Learning with Communicative Method and Factors Affecting Student's Speaking Ability

Research on communicative methods for acquiring and teaching a second language has been extensively explored. Still, the research is more dominant on the acquisition and teaching of English only. This study aims to describe learning Arabic by using communicative methods and the factors that influence the Arabic speaking ability of students in the superior class of Darussakinah Batu Bersurat Islamic Boarding School. The method used is the descriptive qualitative method. The results of this study indicate that the use of communicative methods in learning Arabic increases students’ speaking skills, and students actively speak Arabic in the learning process. Other factors that affect students’ speaking ability are the language environment, continuous daily vocabulary, and good mastery of Arabic Grammar (nahwu and shorof grammar). Mastery of Arabic grammar is beneficial for students in reconstructing memorized vocabularies into complete sentences, thus creating a sense of confidence in speaking.

Foreign Language Processing of English Regular and Irregular Past Tense Verbs by Arabic-Speaking EFL Children

Purpose. This paper examines whether irregular past verbs are acquired earlier than regular past verbs by Arabic-speaking EFL children.&#x0D; Methods and procedure. Ninety fifth graders were tested using pictures representing 20 regular and 20 irregular past tense verbs through a sentence completion task. An introspective session was conducted with 70 children following the administration of the tests in order to determine the areas of difficulty. &#x0D; Results. The results mainly revealed that there is a statistically significant difference between regular and irregular verbs in favour of regular verbs. This suggests that the children learn regular forms prior to irregular ones contradicting the Natural Order Hypothesis and providing credence to the two Interlanguage strategies, namely, the L2 Overgeneralization of Alternative L2 Category Strategy and L1 Transfer Strategy. The children’s failure to produce the irregular form of the verb can be ascribed to the default system that they rely on, which is the computation system rather than the storage system. Thus, Arabic-speaking EFL children apply regular inflection of -ed whenever their memory fails to produce an irregular verb form.&#x0D; Conclusions. This study has demonstrated that Arabic-speaking EFL children do not follow the same sequence of acquisition as that exhibited by first language learners in acquiring the regular and irregular simple past forms. These learners acquire the regular past tense forms prior to the irregular ones contradicting the Natural Order Hypothesis. Due to the lack of irregularities in their first language, these learners apply the regular inflection rule to novel or unfamiliar verbs without sometimes considering the possibility of an existent irregular form that needs to be retrieved from memory. This also provides credence to two Interlanguage strategies, namely, the L2 Overgeneralization of Alternative L2 Category Strategy and L1 Transfer Strategy. More studies that investigate the sequence of acquisition of other types of morphemes by Arabic-speaking EFL children are needed to explore the effect of L1 and other factors such as the learning situation on the acquisition of English morphemes.

Reader Response: Intravenous Immunoglobulin Therapy in Patients With Painful Idiopathic Small-Fiber Neuropathy.

<h3>BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:</h3> Functional MR imaging is widely used for preoperative language assessment in candidates for resective neurosurgery. Language mapping paradigms that are adaptive to participant performance have the potential to engage the language network more robustly and consistently, resulting in more accurate functional maps. The aim of the current study was to compare two adaptive paradigms with the recommended language mapping paradigms that constitute the current standard of care. <h3>MATERIALS AND METHODS:</h3> Seventy-three patients undergoing fMRI for language lateralization and/or localization completed an adaptive semantic matching paradigm, an adaptive phonological judgment paradigm, and two standard paradigms: sentence completion and word generation. The paradigms were compared in terms of the degree to which they yielded lateralized language maps and the extent of activation in frontal, temporal, and parietal language regions. <h3>RESULTS:</h3> The adaptive semantic paradigm resulted in the most strongly lateralized activation maps, the greatest extent of frontal and temporal activations, and the greatest proportion of overall satisfactory language maps. The adaptive phonological paradigm identified anterior inferior parietal phonological encoding regions in most patients, unlike any of the other paradigms. <h3>CONCLUSIONS:</h3> The adaptive language mapping paradigms investigated have several psychometric advantages compared with currently recommended paradigms. Adoption of these paradigms could increase the likelihood of obtaining satisfactory language maps in each individual patient.

Differential contributions of inferior frontal gyrus subregions to sentence processing guided by intonation.

Auditory sentence comprehension involves processing content (semantics), grammar (syntax), and intonation (prosody). The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is involved in sentence comprehension guided by these different cues, with neuroimaging studies preferentially locating syntactic and semantic processing in separate IFG subregions. However, this regional specialisation has not been confirmed with a neurostimulation method. Consequently, the causal role of such a specialisation remains unclear. This study probed the role of the posterior IFG (pIFG) for syntactic processing and the anterior IFG (aIFG) for semantic processing with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in a task that required the interpretation of the sentence's prosodic realisation. Healthy participants performed a sentence completion task with syntactic and semantic decisions, while receiving 10Hz rTMS over either left aIFG, pIFG, or vertex (control). Initial behavioural analyses showed an inhibitory effect on accuracy without task-specificity. However, electric field simulations revealed differential effects for both subregions. In the aIFG, stronger stimulation led to slower semantic processing, with no effect of pIFG stimulation. In contrast, we found a facilitatory effect on syntactic processing in both aIFG and pIFG, where higher stimulation strength was related to faster responses. Our results provide first evidence for the functional relevance of left aIFG in semantic processing guided by intonation. The stimulation effect on syntactic responses emphasises the importance of the IFG for syntax processing, without supporting the hypothesis of a pIFG-specific involvement. Together, the results support the notion of functionally specialised IFG subregions for diverse but fundamental cues for language processing.

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Does Sex Matter? High Semantic Autobiographical Retrieval in Women and Men With Alzheimer's Disease.

The decline of autobiographical memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is mainly characterized by overgenerality. While there is a large body of research on autobiographical overgenerality in AD, this research has mainly assessed retrieval with a dichotomy between specific vs. general retrieval. To go beyond this dichotomy, we assessed several degrees of autobiographical specificity in patients with AD, namely, we assessed specific vs. categoric vs. extended vs. semantic retrieval. We also assessed sex differences regarding these degrees of autobiographical specificity. We invited patients with mild AD and control participants to complete sentences (e. g., "When I think back to/of…") with autobiographical memories. Memories were categorized into specific, categoric, extended, or semantic memories. Results demonstrated more semantic than specific, categoric or extended memories in men and women with AD. In control participants, analysis demonstrated more specific than categoric, extended, and semantic memories in men and women. Also, no significant differences were observed between women and men with AD, or between control women and men, regarding specific, categoric, extended, and semantic memoires. This study offers not only a nuanced analysis of autobiographical specificity in patients with mild AD, but also an original analysis regarding this specificity by sex.

Adaptive Language Mapping Paradigms for Presurgical Language Mapping.

Functional MR imaging is widely used for preoperative language assessment in candidates for resective neurosurgery. Language mapping paradigms that are adaptive to participant performance have the potential to engage the language network more robustly and consistently, resulting in more accurate functional maps. The aim of the current study was to compare two adaptive paradigms with the recommended language mapping paradigms that constitute the current standard of care. Seventy-three patients undergoing fMRI for language lateralization and/or localization completed an adaptive semantic matching paradigm, an adaptive phonological judgment paradigm, and two standard paradigms: sentence completion and word generation. The paradigms were compared in terms of the degree to which they yielded lateralized language maps and the extent of activation in frontal, temporal, and parietal language regions. The adaptive semantic paradigm resulted in the most strongly lateralized activation maps, the greatest extent of frontal and temporal activations, and the greatest proportion of overall satisfactory language maps. The adaptive phonological paradigm identified anterior inferior parietal phonological encoding regions in most patients, unlike any of the other paradigms. The adaptive language mapping paradigms investigated have several psychometric advantages compared with currently recommended paradigms. Adoption of these paradigms could increase the likelihood of obtaining satisfactory language maps in each individual patient.