Complex Grammatical Structures Research Articles

СТРУКТУРА РАННИХ ПОСТИНСУЛЬТНЫХ КОГНИТИВНЫХ НАРУШЕНИЙ У ПАЦИЕНТОВ. С ПОРАЖЕНИЕМ ПРАВОГО И ЛЕВОГО ПОЛУШАРИЙ ГОЛОВНОГО МОЗГА: КОГОРТНОЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ

AIM. To identify the most informative indicators of functional-cognitive status, allowing for a differentiated approach to the diagnosis of cognitive impairment in patients with damage to the right and left hemispheres in the acute period of ischemic stroke. MATERIAL AND METHODS. 240 patients diagnosed with ischemic stroke in the carotid region were examined. Depending on the location, the patients were divided into two groups: Group 1 — 122 patients with damage to the left hemisphere of the brain;Group 2 — 118 patients with damage to the right hemisphere. The following scales were used to assess parameters of cognitivefunctional status: Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scale (MoCA), National Institutes of Health Scale (NIHSS), Barthel Index (BI), Questionnaire for Cognitive Decline in the Elderly (IQCODE), additional scales for assessing praxis, semantic aphasia, perceptual and executive function, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), MFI-20 and Apathy Scale (AES). The latency and amplitude of acoustic endogenous evoked potential, P300, was used as neurophysiological markers. Statistical analysis was performed using the SPSS 23 software package. RESULTS AND DISSCUSION. The main relevant indicators of cognitive dysfunction in both groups were declines in the areas of memory, perception and executive function, which prevailed in patients of the 1st group. The disorder of visual perception, understanding of complex grammatical structures, a predominance of decreased motivation and mental fatigue were identified in patients of the 1st group; impaired recognition of emotions and understanding of idioms, the presence of general fatigue and depression — in patients of the 2nd group. Statistically significant neurophysiological indicators were an increase in P300 latency in the frontal and central leads in patients of the 2nd group. CONCLUSION. The study identified relevant indicators of cognitive and psychoemotional status depending on the lateralization of the lesion in patients in the acute period of ischemic stroke. The P300 evoked potential method can be used to objectify cognitive dysfunction and evaluate the effectiveness of therapy for cognitive disorders. The results prove the feasibility of a comprehensive examination of cognitive deficits with the inclusion of additional scales and tests to assess perception, executive and mnestic functions, fatigue, affective and personality disorders. This will allow us to develop more effective individual rehabilitation programs aimed at restoring the cognitive and emotional resources of patients. KEYWORDS: ischemic stroke, cognitive function, affective disorders, fatigue, evoked potentials, Р300

The Comprehension of Grammatical Structures in a Pediatric Population with ASD and Epilepsy: A Comparative Study.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy represent a comorbidity that negatively influences the proper development of linguistic competencies, particularly in receptive language, in the pediatric population. This group displays impairments in the auditory comprehension of both simple and complex grammatical structures, significantly limiting their performance in language-related activities, hampering their integration into social contexts, and affecting their quality of life. The main objective of this study was to assess auditory comprehension of grammatical structures in individuals with ASD and epilepsy and compare the results among the three groups. A non-experimental cross-sectional study was designed, including a total of 170 participants aged between 7 and 9 years, divided into three groups: a group with ASD, a group with epilepsy, and a comorbid group with both ASD and epilepsy (ASDEP). The comprehension of grammatical structures was assessed using the CEG and CELF-5 instruments. Statistical analyses included MANOVA and ANOVA to compare scores between groups to verify associations between study variables. The results indicate that the group with ASD and epilepsy performed worse compared to the ASD and epilepsy-only groups, respectively. Additionally, a significant and directly proportional association was observed among all variables within the measures of grammatical structure comprehension. The neurological damage caused by epilepsy in the pediatric population with ASD leads to difficulties in understanding oral language. This level of functioning significantly limits the linguistic performance of these children, negatively impacting their quality of life and the development of core language skills.

Investigating Applied Linguistic Implications of Hausa as an L1 in PSCs: A Case Study of Four Selected Primary Schools in Kano Municipal Local Government Area

The Hausa language is not only a tool for communication but also a medium for creative writing, rhetorical expressions and language art mastery by schooled children. This research aims to investigate primary pupils’ competence in the Integrated Language Core (ILC). The ILC helps pupils to develop sound communicative skills if seriously handled. In addition, the research in question is to investigate a more comprehensive language art usage and a more complex grammatical structure regarding children's language development in the classroom with Hausa as their first language (L1). Being an “action research”, the methodology used in this study involved field research whereby four selected primary schools – as our case study – were visited; also, participants’ observation and questionnaires were administered to have a fact-finding report of Hausa-teaching-learning inadequacy. Using qual-quan analysis, the result of the study discovered certain problems that hinder children’s ability to the appropriate language development. It is also reported that the poor conditions of both teachers and pupils coupled with the poor facilities encountered and at the same time lack of interest towards the subject as a whole are the factors responsible for the setback in both teaching and learning of Hausa language. It is worth noting that the rationale behind conducting this research work is to recommend ways of ameliorating or improving the teaching and learning of the Hausa language especially in primary school classes (PSCs) as an L1.

Exploring Students' Difficulties in TOEFL Listening

The purpose of this study was to determine the difficulties that students face when listening to TOEFL Preparation Tests at the English Study Program, FKIP UKI TORAJA. The participants in this study consisted of 12 students from the 8th semester of the English Department at FKIP UKI Toraja. The research employed a descriptive qualitative method and collected data through interviews. The data was then analyzed using three main stages: data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusions. After analyzing and discussing the findings, it can be concluded that 8th semester English Department students at UKI Toraja encounter various difficulties when listening to TOEFL Preparation tests, which can be categorized into three main areas. Each category presents different challenges. Regarding the comprehension of listening materials, students face difficulties with complex grammatical structures, understanding every word in spoken discourse, interpreting the meaning of lengthy spoken texts, and encountering unfamiliar vocabulary. Additionally, students encounter difficulties related to listening itself, including anxiety, deducing the meaning of unknown words, lack of concentration, unclear pronunciation, difficulty with retention, losing focus, and listening without transcripts. Furthermore, students also face obstacles related to the physical setting, such as poor quality cassettes or discs, inadequate equipment, and background noise.

Investigating the Causes of Poor Listening Comprehension among ESL Undergraduate Students

The current study investigates the causes of poor listening comprehension among ESL undergraduate students of majoring in English at Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University, Shaheed Benazirabad (SBBU, SBA). Meeting the research objectives, the data were collected using a quantitative research method. The sample (n=204) was selected randomly, and a closed-ended questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaire was based on four categories:(a) Problems related to listening text, (b) Problems related to the listener, (c) Problems related to the speaker, and (d) Problems related to the physical setting. The data were analysed through SPSS software. The study came out with these findings namely noise as a barrier, unfamiliar words, unfamiliar topics, long listening texts, lack of prior knowledge, lack of interest, complex grammatical structures, slang expressions, hesitation, pauses, the spoken text contains jargon, variety of accents, speech rate, pronunciation, and physical setting. Considering the above findings, the study suggested effective remedies to overcome poor listening comprehension issues.

Leveraging contextual representations with BiLSTM-based regressor for lexical complexity prediction

Lexical complexity prediction (LCP) determines the complexity level of words or phrases in a sentence. LCP has a significant impact on the enhancement of language translations, readability assessment, and text generation. However, the domain-specific technical word, the complex grammatical structure, the polysemy problem, the inter-word relationship, and dependencies make it challenging to determine the complexity of words or phrases. In this paper, we propose an integrated transformer regressor model named ITRM-LCP to estimate the lexical complexity of words and phrases where diverse contextual features are extracted from various transformer models. The transformer models are fine-tuned using the text-pair data. Then, a bidirectional LSTM-based regressor module is plugged on top of each transformer to learn the long-term dependencies and estimate the complexity scores. The predicted scores of each module are then aggregated to determine the final complexity score. We assess our proposed model using two benchmark datasets from shared tasks. Experimental findings demonstrate that our ITRM-LCP model obtains 10.2% and 8.2% improvement on the news and Wikipedia corpus of the CWI-2018 dataset, compared to the top-performing systems (DAT, CAMB, and TMU). Additionally, our ITRM-LCP model surpasses state-of-the-art LCP systems (DeepBlueAI, JUST-BLUE) by 1.5% and 1.34% for single and multi-word LCP tasks defined in the SemEval LCP-2021 task.

The production of adjectives in narratives by individuals with primary progressive aphasia

Adjectives (e.g., hungry) are an important part of language, but have been little studied in individuals with impaired language. Adjectives are used in two different ways in English: attributively, to modify a noun (the hungry dog); or predicatively, after a verb (the dog is hungry). Attributive adjectives have a more complex grammatical structure than predicative adjectives, and may therefore be particularly prone to disruption in individuals with grammatical impairments. We investigated adjective production in three subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA: agrammatic, semantic, logopenic), as well as in agrammatic stroke aphasia and a group of healthy control participants. Participants produced narratives based on picture books, and we coded every adjective they produced for its syntactic structure. Compared to healthy controls, the two agrammatic groups, but not the other two patient groups, produced significantly fewer attributive adjectives per sentence. All four patient groups were similar to controls for their rate of predicative adjective production. In addition, we found a significant correlation in the agrammatic PPA participants between their rate of producing attributive adjectives and impaired production of sentences with complex syntactic structure (subject cleft sentences like It was the boy that chased the girl); no such correlation was found for predicative adjectives. Irrespective of structure, we examined the lexical characteristics of the adjectives that were produced, including length, frequency, semantic diversity and neighborhood density. Overall, the lexical characteristics of the produced adjectives were largely consistent with the language profile of each group. In sum, the results suggest that attributive adjectives present a particular challenge for individuals with agrammatic language production, and add a new dimension to the description of agrammatism. Our results further suggest that attributive adjectives may be a fruitful target for improved treatment and recovery of agrammatic language.

The Development and Teaching Application of Japanese Peripheral Language Phenomenon Based on Big Data Corpus

Since the introduction of the concept of big data corpus into language analysis, many scholars have conducted research on Japanese big data corpus, especially the subject, from different language views and perspectives, and have drawn many valuable conclusions. However, due to scholars' different theories and different thinking modes, their understanding of the Japanese big data corpus is still quite different. The seminar teaching method, as a teaching mode for the cultivation of innovative talents in Japanese peripheral languages, has distinctive features such as interactivity, democracy, motivation, and extension. It has been widely used in postgraduate and undergraduate courses at home and abroad and applied to A wide range of disciplines. Especially in Japan, each university has Seminar courses. Because of its strong practicality, it is conducive to cultivating students' independent learning ability, organization and coordination ability, and communication ability, so whether it can be applied and promoted in the teaching of Japanese peripheral languages, this research is carried out. Although experts have always been committed to the innovation of Japanese teaching, the advancement of teaching materials, and the continuous innovation of design, they also need the teaching practice and experimentation of front-line teachers. After years of practice in basic Japanese teaching by generations of teachers, we still encounter this problem: students cannot use the language fluently, they can only memorize words, grammar, and the usage of some fixed terms by rote; Some students with strong writing ability are not strong in conversation and expression. According to these problems in teaching, the author found that students could not use language well, probably because they did not have the awareness and desire to communicate. Sometimes the single teaching method and the boring teaching content make students uninterested in learning Japanese, and the large number of pseudonyms, Chinese characters, and complex grammatical structures make students dazzled. The experimental results show that the new teaching method proposed by the experimental model is suitable for the learning of Japanese peripheral languages, which improves the student's learning and thinking ability, which proves that the optimized NN-SLVM model is good.

Grammatical complexity: Insights from English for academic purposes teachers

While grammatical complexity has received much attention in the past decades, little research has yet sought the insights of second language (L2) writing teachers who are on the front line of educating academic writers. Given that teachers’ understanding of the representation of complex grammatical structures may impact their students’ development of academic literacy, this study explored L2 teachers’ perception of grammatical complexity. Twenty English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers (N = 20) in a Chinese university evaluated a set of five texts including varying grammatical characteristics. Using their ratings and notes as stimuli, we conducted a consecutive stimulated recall with each teacher to elicit their rationales for judging the texts on grammatical complexity. The findings indicated that, in evaluating grammatical complexity, EAP teachers not only considered lexico-grammatical features, but also deliberated over the propositional complexity, coherence, and formality. Also, while cognizant of the importance of features associated with phrasal complexity, EAP teachers seemed to have overestimated the significance of subordination and underestimated the role of non-finite dependent structures in academic prose. Implications were discussed in terms of teacher training and further theorizing grammatical complexity.

Роль художественных приемов абсурда и нонсенса в формировании структурно-семантической организации текста (на материале поэмы Л. Кэрролла «Охота на Снарка»)

The aim of the study is to rethink the structural and semantic organization of the English writer Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” by contrasting the phenomena of nonsense and absurdity. The article presents an analysis of original passages from the poem based on the identification and justification of the relationship between the complex grammatical and syntactic structure of the text and its lexical units. The scientific novelty lies in the consideration of the phenomena of nonsense and absurdity as artistic devices, as well as in the description of their ability to complement each other in the process of meaning generation. As a result, it is proved that each of these techniques in its own way affects the structural and semantic organization of the poem text expanding its interpretative potential.

The Effects of Deductive and Inductive Grammar Instructions in Communicative Teaching

A quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of inductive and deductive types of instruction in the acquisition of a complex grammatical structure, the passive voice. The participants were two groups (n = 34) of second-year Japanese students from a vocational school who had three treatment lessons designed for each group embedded into the course curriculum. The quantitative and qualitative data were gathered to seek possible connections between students’ preferences and learning gains. Using a pretest and posttest design, we compared the results of recognition and production tests for inductive and deductive instruction groups. Both types of instructions were found beneficial for learners and yielded a significant effect between the production part of the pre- and post-tests, however, the inductive group significantly outperformed the deductive group on the recognition test. The qualitative data indicated students’ preferences toward deductive instruction, as it is traditional and well-known in Japan. The results of the study suggest using the inductive type of instruction with simpler grammar and deductive instruction with more complex grammatical structures. The authors advocate the importance of practicing both types of instructions. The study also shows the benefits of using CLT for teaching English in Japan. 

Unraveling Students’ Strategies in Overcoming the Listening Comprehension Problems

Understanding the listening comprehension strategy plays important role for students successfull to upgrade their listening test and TOEFL score as well. This aims to investigate deeply the students’ strategies in overcoming listening comprehension problems. The descriptive qualitative method is applied toward the third semester students of English Education study program Muhammadiyah University of Bengkulu. This research took 51 students who have taken listening courseworks (listening 1 and 3). Data collection technique were conducted by giving questionnaires in the light of Rebbica’s theory (1993); direct and indirect strategies. The results of study showed there were some problems faced by the third semester students in conducting listening comprehension test, such as unfimiliar words, complex grammatical structure, lack of concentration, pronunciation, obscure form of speech, long answer question, and accents. Whilst, most of students used cognitive strategy in overcoming their problem in listening comprehension. To sump up, students must to learn some listening strategies as an effort to anticipate their problems when conduct listening comprehension test.

Individual Differences in Language Learning: A Complex Systems Theory Perspective. Carol Griffiths & Adem Soruç (2020). Palgrave Macmillan, 220 pages, ISBN 978-3-030-52900-0 (eBook).

Individual differences are attached considerable importance in almost all components of the linguistic system, including the acquisition and processing of properties of speech, complex grammatical structures, and discourse (Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018). For this reason, research on individual differences has excellent potential to contribute significantly to the debates in the language sciences. Considering each individual as a unique language learner, exploring individual differences can provide language teachers with lots of opportunities concerning material adaptation, adopting appropriate strategies, adjusting their teaching style, and giving feedback in the language learning and teaching process. More specifically, there is a complex relationship among learner variables such as first language literacy, self-efficacy, gender, attainment, and so on (Courtney, Graham, Tonkyn & Marinis, 2017). Individual Differences in Language Learning: A Complex Systems Theory Perspective attempts to decipher this complex system adopting an evidence-based perspective in each significant individual difference presented in different sections. One of the strengths of the book is that each section has been designed in a reader-friendly manner with eye-opener prompt questions at the very beginning and at the end, follow-up tasks, and a list for further reading which serves as a guide for researchers.

Sounds of Healthy Aging: Assessing Everyday Cognitive Activity From Real-Life Audio Data

The healthy aging model of the World Health Organization (2015) highlights the value of assessing and monitoring everyday activities in understanding health in old age. This symposium includes four studies that used the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a portable recording device that periodically collects sound snippets in everyday life, to assess various real-life cognitive activities in the context of healthy aging. The four studies collected over 100,000 sound snippets (30-seconds long) over a few days from young and older adults in the US and Switzerland. Participants’ speech in the sound snippets were transcribed and coded for different cognitive activity information. Specifically, Haas and Kliegel have investigated the “prospective memory paradox” by examining the commonality and differences in utterances about retrospective and prospective memory failure in young and older adults’ everyday conversations. Demiray and colleagues investigated the relation between autobiographical memory functions and conversation types in young and older adults in relation to well-being. Luo and colleagues have identified the compensatory function of real-world contexts in cognitive aging: Their study showed that older adults benefited from talking with their spouse in producing complex grammatical structures. Finally, Polsinelli and colleagues found robust associations between language markers (e.g., prepositions, more numbers) and executive functions, highlighting the potential use of spontaneous speech in predicting cognitive status in healthy older adults. Finally, Prof. Matthew Grilli will serve as a discussant and provide an integrative discussion of the papers, informed by his extensive work on clinical and cognitive neuroscience of memory in relation to real-life contexts.

A two-level deep learning approach for emotion recognition in Arabic news headlines

ABSTRACT Going online has created more opportunities for newspapers to present breaking news in a timely manner. Concentrating in spreading more bad news increases the feeling of danger and depression in the society. Some authors believe on tendency of some media to be focused on sharing the bad events in life rather than the good ones because of the impact and the attraction over the audience is more significant. Sentiment analysis work has not been recognized, proposed, or documented on Arabic news because of the challenges that Arabic raises as a language including the different Arabs' dialects and its complex grammatical structure. With the emerging flow of news that cause a global panic and anxiety worldwide, this study focuses on the serious need to identify what effective role could machine learning classifiers have in the early detection process of the psychology impact on the readers by the daily news headlines. In this work, a dataset of news headlines were gathered from top popular online Arabic news sites and were annotated to seven emotional categories: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. A convolutional neural network-based two-level approach was proposed for sentiment classification. The performance of the proposed approach was compared to six machine learning classifiers (zeroR, k-nearest neighbor, decision trees, naïve Bayes, random forest and Support vector machine) and showed better accuracy, precision, and recall.

Exploring English Language Students’ Difficulties in Listening Comprehension

Listening skill is one of the four major skills of language that most language learners desire to get mastery in order to communicate effectively in different contexts. It is one of the most challenging skills for many students. The main aim of this study, therefore, was to explore English language students’ listening comprehension difficulties. I employed a survey research design as a research method. Randomly selected sixty male and sixty female students studying English at three community schools of Rupandehi district, Nepal took part in this study as research respondents. They all were from secondary level. A closed ended questionnaire with 24 items on students' listening problem was administered to elicit the data from the respondents. The results of questionnaire indicated that content of the listening text (e.g., unfamiliar words, idiom, feeling fatigue while listening to the long text) was the major source of listening difficulties for the students. The second source of difficulty was related to the listener that included lack of concentration with long listening text and existence of noise in the place. The third difficulty included linguistic features such as complex grammatical structures, pronunciation and problems in distinguishing the word boundaries. And the last source of listening problem was concerned with speaker’s speed of speech and different accents. The findings also raise awareness of both teachers and students regarding the listening comprehension problems.

Recasts versus clarification requests: The relevance of linguistic target, proficiency, and communicative ability

Abstract This paper compares the effects of recasts and clarification requests as two implicit types of corrective feedback (CF) on learning two linguistic structures denoting past aspectual distinction in French, the passé composé and the imparfait. The participants in this classroom-based study are 52 high-school learners of French FL at a pre-intermediate level of proficiency (level B1 of CEFR). A distinctive feature of this study is the use of focused, context constrained communicative tasks in both treatment and tests. The paper specifically highlights the advantages of feedback using recasts for the acquisition of morpho-syntactically complex grammatical structures such as is the French passé composé. The study points to the participants’ communicative ability as an essential aspect of language proficiency, which seems to be crucial to bringing about the benefits of recasts. Oral communicative skill in a foreign language classroom is seen as a prerequisite for an appropriate interpretation and recognition of the corrective nature of recasts.

Cross-Morpheme Generalization Using a Complexity Approach in School-Age Children.

Purpose This single-case study examines a complexity approach to target selection in grammatical intervention in three children with varying levels of mastery of tense and agreement. Specifically, we examine whether targeting a complex tense and agreement grammatical structure (auxiliary BE in questions) leads to generalization to other less complex and related tense and agreement markers (auxiliary BE in declaratives, copula BE, third-person singular -s, and past tense -ed). Method Three children (all boys; aged 5;5-9;7 [years;months]) with deficits in morphosyntax were enrolled in a treatment program targeting a complex grammatical structure (auxiliary BE in questions) following collection of multiple baselines. Children's performance on the complex structure and related tense and agreement markers were tracked before, during, and after the intervention across three different tasks. Results Results show that, despite its grammatical complexity, the target was elicited in all three children with incomplete mastery of the tense and agreement system. Furthermore, all children demonstrated generalization to expressive language by increasing their mean length of utterance by approximately one morpheme during spontaneous language production following intervention. All children demonstrated individual patterns of generalization to other tense and agreement structures not targeted during intervention. Conclusions These functional changes observed following intervention set the stage for future controlled studies to establish a stronger cause-effect relation. Taken together, this study contributes to an emerging body of work showing that complex grammatical targets may be used in intervention earlier than previously thought.

Comparison of Expressive Spoken Language Skills in Children With Cochlear Implants and Children With Typical Hearing.

When children start formal education, they are expected to be able to express complex thoughts. However, in order to do so, they need to be able to use both complex grammatical structures and a variety of words. One group that is at risk of having a delay in terms of their expressive language ability is children with cochlear implants (CI). In this study, we evaluated whether children with CI perform comparably to children with typical hearing (TH) on a standard expressive spoken grammar and a standard expressive spoken vocabulary task when the groups were matched on non-verbal intelligence and working memory capacity. It was found that the children with CI in this study performed more poorly on a standard expressive spoken vocabulary task but not on a standard expressive spoken grammar task when compared to the children with TH. Differences in terms of expressive spoken vocabulary do not seem to be explained by differences in cognitive ability. In addition, the variation in terms of expressive spoken language ability was larger in the children with CI compared to the children with TH. This might be explained by additional confounding factors, like the time of language deprivation or by a greater influence of cognitive differences for the acquisition of spoken language for children with CI.

L2 learners’ acquisition of simple vs. complex linguistic features across explicit vs. implicit instructional approaches: The mediating role of beliefs

A large number of studies have explored grammar instruction through implicit and explicit instructional conditions. The general conclusion drawn from these studies points to the superiority of explicit instruction; however, the claim has been attenuated by a number of reservations raised regarding its generalizability across types of grammatical structures and learners of different characteristics. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the comparative effectiveness of these two types of instructional conditions in acquiring explicit and implicit knowledge of complex and simple linguistic features by participants holding different epistemic beliefs. The results demonstrated a relative advantage for explicit instruction. However, the results also showed that the effectiveness of explicit/implicit instructional conditions varied for the participants. Additionally, the findings provided evidence against the assumption that complex structures are best learned through implicit instructional conditions and simple structures are best taught explicitly. The hypothesis that learners with more sophisticated epistemic beliefs outperform those with more naive epistemic beliefs in learning complex grammatical structures was not borne out by the analyses. Conclusions and suggestions for further research are provided.