Complexity Of Syntactic Structure Research Articles

Predicting Depression Severity from Spontaneous Speech as Prompted by a Virtual Agent

IntroductionOne of the major challenges in clinical psychiatry remains the absence of well established objective measures of symptoms’ severity. Clinical insights are mainly provided through keen behavioral observation and subjective questionnaires and scales.ObjectivesThe aim of this paper is to predict depression severity through speech using the features extracted from the speech as provided by participants during a semi-structured dialogue with a virtual avatar.MethodsWe use data from a subset of the DAICWOZ dataset consisting in 142 dialogues between participants and a virtual avatar during which the avatar uses several prompts to maintain a conversation with the participant. The avatar uses prompts involving the topics of travel, dream jobs, and memorable experiences. From the speech generated from the dialogue, we extract participant utterances separated by prompt and extract features from the three sets of transcripts. We extract content features from the transcript and acoustic features from the excerpt corresponding to the speech from the participant for the prompt in question.We perform regression experiments on the PHQ8 items using the features extracted from each set of transcripts. Furthermore, we combine the features extracted from each set of transcripts and compute partial spearman correlations between them and the PHQ8 items using gender as a covariate.ResultsWith our best regression model we obtain an R2 of 0.1, explaining 10% of the variance in the PHQ total score. Additionally, we obtain a mean absolute error of 1.25, suggesting that the regressor can detect with more or less precision clinically meaningful differences in depression severity between participants. Partial correlations between the total score and the features show significant correlations between features dependent on the amount of speech generated by each participant, along with the complexity of syntactic structures used.ConclusionsAutomatic analysis of spontaneous speech could help with the detection and monitoring of signs of depression. By combining the use of this technology with timely intervention strategies for instance provided by a virtual agent it could contribute to timely prevention.Disclosure of InterestA. König: None Declared, M. Mina Employee of: ki:elements GmbH, S. Schäfer Employee of: ki:elements GmbH, N. Linz Shareolder of: ki:elements GmbH, Employee of: ki:elements GmbH, J. Tröger Shareolder of: ki:elements GmbH, Employee of: ki:elements GmbH

Legal linguistics challenges: legal language adaptation in the framework of the Russian Federation language policy

The article studies the problem of comprehensibility of the modern legal language of the Russian Federation from the point of view of an ordinary citizen. The authors define a concept of law from the linguistic level and summarize the existing theories concerning the problem of the legal language adaptation. Two legal and technical methods of addressing to federal executive bodies are discussed and compared. It is highlighted that imperfection of legal texts within a linguistic aspect is directly related to the uncertainty and vague designation of the federal executive and legislative bodies, the duality of definitions used and the excessive complexity of syntactic structures. Taking into account the experience of the Administrative Reform and the achieved results of the study, it is offered to work out a new direction of the Federal Language Policy for the development of legal culture, improve the law-making process and quality of laws. It is also proved that legal language should be adapted according needs and concerns of an ordinary citizen of the country in order to avoid legal illiteracy.

The peculiarities of teaching the language of learning to foreigners at the third level of higher education

The article highlights the peculiarities of teaching the language of learning to foreigners at the third level of higher education, which involves obtaining certain knowledge, skills, sufficient for conducting scientific research while taking a post graduate course. The communication needs and specificity of cognitive activity of graduate foreign students have been described. Teaching the language of foreign graduate students is based on the study of scientific speech, which serves the field of modern scientific activities and serves to convey objective information about the world around. The specificity of the scientific style of speech is determined by the peculiarities of the way of thinking under lying this functional style and the peculiarities of communication in the scientific sphere, the characteristics of which are objectivity, uniqueness, clarity, accuracy, logic, which can be the hallmarks of style at all its linguistic levels. Features of the scientific style of speech at the lexical and syntactic levels (deaganality, polyproposability, complexity of syntactic structures) have been considered. The genres of scientific speech (articles, dissertation, abstracts, abstract, annotations in written and oral speech speeh) and types of texts on the basis of which the training of the professional language of the specified contingent of students have been conducted. The place of abstract reading in the system of language teaching of post graduates have been considered. Abstract reading combines research and information activities and is the main type of reading while conducting scientific research, since it is directly implemented during the scholar's current state of the subject under study, the definition of a range of outstanding issues, and helps producing an informative message about the course of his own scientific work. The content for all education (report, participation in discussions) and written (writing informative and indicative abstracts, annotations, summaries, compilation of bibliographic description and list of literature) of speech at the third level of higher education have been described.

Acquiring pragmatics by Sandrine Zufferey (review)

Reviewed by: Acquiring pragmatics by Sandrine Zufferey Elly Ifantidou Acquiring pragmatics. By Sandrine Zufferey. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 202. ISBN 9780415746441. $49.95. Zufferey’s book is organized in five parts that cover pragmatics from its theoretical foundations to its mutual influence with language acquisition (Part 1), social skills (Part 2), and cognitive competencies required in acquiring pragmatic skills (Part 3). Pragmatic development in a second language and autism are examined, too (Part 4). Ten chapters, two under each part, discuss topics such as speech acts, the role of social relations and cultural norms in children’s pragmatic development, metaphor, irony, scalar implicatures, referring expressions, and connectives. Z focuses on cognitive underpinnings on par with social interaction skills; she sidesteps early communicative abilities observed in conversational turn-taking and preschoolers’ situated activities (see Slobin et al. 1996, Matthews 2014). Nevertheless, the book accomplishes the much-awaited unification of the major trends in the pragmatic development of children, that is, the social and the cognitive. Ch. 1 traces popular topics within pragmatic theory back to their origins, namely speech-act theory and H. Paul Grice. This chapter can be a useful review for students who have had semantics and pragmatics courses and are familiar with the standardization hypothesis, nonliteral language in the Gricean framework, and generalized, particularized, and conventional implicatures. It is surprising that the introductory chapter to developmental pragmatics circumvents research on modality, spatial and evidential concepts (see Papafragou 1998, Matsui & Fitneva 2009, Quinn, Doran, & Papafragou 2011, Johanson & Papafragou 2014), and metaphor (see Vosniadou 1989, Pouscoulous 2011, 2014) by drawing on textbooks instead. Other areas where further qualifications are perhaps needed are Herbert Clark’s principle of contrast, intention reading, and cultural learning that have been used to discuss the role of theory of mind (ToM) abilities (e.g. joint [End Page 228] attention, gaze direction, intentional behavior) and social interaction in word learning. Part 1 concludes with an overview of explicit and implicit measures used to assess children’s production and comprehension. Ch. 3 is on the acquisition of speech acts. Emphasis is on effects of age and order of acquisition, direct vs. indirect speech acts, and the use of conventional linguistic forms to convey indirect speech acts. Z introduces evidence on requests and promises, which argues that awareness of conventional rules (in the form of felicity conditions) and level of implicitness do not explain children’s early ability to produce and understand direct and indirect requests. Instead, the data suggest that complexity of syntactic structures and of inferences that are required to retrieve the intended meaning can explain why young children understand indirect requests that tap into their developing ToM abilities better than indirect requests that rely on world knowledge they have not yet acquired. Ch. 4 offers a comprehensive review of pragmatic competencies tapping into social behavior and cognitive growth. Z illustrates three- to four-year-old children’s ability to adapt tone of voice, to shift from direct to indirect speech acts, and to add politeness markers depending on the social status of addressees and the context of conversation. She stresses the role of multiparty peer interaction in situations of conflict where discourse markers are used to mark power relations. In this process, children are exposed to culturally specific routines that forge pragmatic competencies on par with universal linguistic and cognitive traits (e.g. in acquiring requests, discourse markers, arguments in conflicts). On socialization practices, I would have preferred some discussion of current research on young children’s conversational skills as these become manifest in turn-taking (see Cassillas & Frank 2012, Casillas 2014a,b) and on early social traits in infants as these become manifest in faithful imitation (Hilbrink et al. 2013). This would have been very relevant given Amy Kyratzis’s (2007) work on peer group interactions. Returning to the issue of ToM abilities in Ch. 5, Z contrasts evidence from four-year-olds’ success in false-belief tests, earlier success in linguistic tasks, and eye-gaze infant studies. Children are capable of inferential communication required to process metaphors, resolve ambiguity, and understand hints at the age of two and a half years and long before they pass explicit versions of the false-belief task...

An investigation into the relationship between the type of self-repair and structural complexity of utterances

This study is concerned with the investigation of the relationship between the type of self-repair and the structural complexity of utterances in which they appear, focusing mainly on syntactic self-repairs. The subjects of the study were 48 students of East Asian backgrounds, learning English as a second language in Australia. Specifically, this study has sought to establish a relationship between the occurrence of syntactic repairs and the complexity of syntactic structures L2 speakers use. The findings suggest that the occurrence of repairs in general (that is, without relating specific categories of repair to structural complexity) does not appear to be related to the syntactic complexity of the structures in which they occur. However, the scrutiny of the position of syntactic self-repairs is indicative of a relationship between the frequency of syntactic self-repairs and the complexity of the syntactic structures, suggesting that for those who learn English as their second language, the complexity of syntactic structures must be one, if not the,contributing factor leading to the occurrence of syntactic repairs. For other kinds of repairs, including phonological, morphological/lexical, appropriacy and information-structuring repairs, the occurrence of repairs is unrelated to syntactic complexity. Keywords: Structural Complexity; Self-repairs; Second language learning; Class room presentation.

Verbal working memory and its relationship to sentence‐level reading and listening comprehension in persons with aphasia

Background: Working memory (WM) has gained recent attention as a cognitive construct that may account for language comprehension deficits in persons with aphasia (PWA) (Caspari, Parkinson, LaPointe, & Katz, 1998; Martin, Kohen, & Kalinyak‐Fliszar, 2008; Wright, Downey, Gravier, Love, & Shapiro, 2007). However, few studies have investigated individual differences in performance on sentence comprehension tasks as a function of WM capacity in PWA when WM demands are manipulated. Aims: The purposes of the current study were: (1) to examine the relationships among verbal WM, sentence comprehension, and severity of impairment in PWA and (2) to investigate the differential performance of high versus low verbal WM groups on sentence comprehension tasks in which task demands were manipulated by the length of the sentence stimuli, complexity of syntactic structure, and by presentation method which varied the time over which the linguistic material was available for computation. Methods & Procedures: A total of 20 PWA were divided into high and low WM groups based on a listening version of a WM sentence span task. Each participant completed a listening version (CRTT) and three reading versions (CRTT‐R) of the Computerised Revised Token Test as the sentence comprehension tasks. Outcomes & Results: The WM task significantly predicted performance on the CRTT conditions in which information was only temporarily available, thereby imposing greater WM demands on sentence comprehension. The verbal WM task was significantly correlated with aphasia severity and a principal components analysis revealed that the WM task, overall aphasia severity, and overall reading impairment level loaded on a single factor with 76% of shared variance. The low WM group's performance was significantly lower than the high WM group on the CRTT subtests with syntactically more complex structures and on the CRTT conditions with temporally restricted presentation methods. Conclusions: This verbal WM task was significantly and moderately correlated with the overall severity of aphasia as well as with both listening and reading sentence comprehension. The WM group differences emerged only in sentence comprehension tasks with greater WM demands. These results are consistent with the notion that WM effects are most evident when WM capacity is sufficiently taxed by the task demands (e.g., Caplan & Waters, 1999; Just & Carpenter, 1992).

Involvement of cognitive control in sentence comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

This study investigates the reanalysis processes as a consequence of conflict between incompatible sentential representations in sentence comprehension. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, we examined the situation in which the sentential representation built upon world knowledge (i.e., the plausibility heuristic) conflicts with the one built upon syntactic rules (i.e., the syntactic analysis). We found that sentence processing is constrained both by the complexity of syntactic structure and by the reader's cognitive control ability. For readers with higher control abilities, as measured by the Stroop task, a sustained positivity was observed between 350 and 850 ms when conflicts occurred in complex (i.e., passive) sentences, whereas an anterior negativity was observed between 300 and 600 ms when conflicts occurred in simple (i.e., active) sentences. For readers with lower control abilities, however, brain potentials were not affected by the complexity of syntactic structure, with a sustained positivity obtained between 350 and 750 ms for conflicts occurring in both active and passive sentences. These results suggest that the mechanisms of cognitive control are involved in the reanalysis processes to resolve conflict between incompatible sentential representations. The sustained positivity is possibly associated with detection and resolution of representational conflict, while the anterior negativity is associated with suppression of inappropriate representation or response tendency.

Computer application of a syntactic density measure

complexity of syntactic structures in different levels of graded reading materials and in the oral and written language of children at different levels of development. Research in language education and in language development can be facilitated by using the computer to analyze and measure syntactic density (also called syntactic complexity or syntactic maturity by some researchers). This paper explains one computerized program for measuring this quality of language. One of the characteristics of language development in children is that with increasing maturity and language development, they use increasingly more complex structures. Although language acquisition is most rapid in the preschool period, research has shown (Hunt, 1965, 1970; Loban, 1963, 1970; O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris, 1967) that students of elementary and secondary school ages continue to develop their abilities to manipulate language by employing increasing numbers of complex syntactic structures. Much of the recent research in syntactic development (Hunt, 1970; Loban, 1970; Golub and Frederick, 1971) has been aimed at discovering, describing, and specifying those characteristics of syntax that distinguish degrees of complexity of syntax. Through a series of studies of children's oral and written discourse, Golub (1974) has developed a Syntactic Density instrument to tabulate the occurrences of specific linguistic structures that correlate with teachers' judgments of writing samples. In an early stage of the study, sixty-three linguistic variables were listed, from which multivariate analysis isolated the ten that most highly correlated with teachers' high ratings, and canonical correlation assigned a relative weight to each variable according to the degree of its contribution to "syntactic density." When the variables are counted and weighted, the products are added and the total is divided by the number of T-units in the sample to arrive at a single syntactic density score, which is printed out on a Tabulation Sheet. (A T-unit is a main clause with all of its subordinate clauses.) The variables included in Golub's formula reflect structures that have been identified in linguistic theory as being complex structures. Measures of mean main clause length and mean subordinate clause length are combined with measures of these other types of complexities. Golub's formula not only incorporates the measures of T-unit length and subordinate clause length that Hunt and others have found useful, but also reflects complex verb expansions, use of some advanced structures of time, and reductions or embeddings that take the form of prepositional phrases. A PL/l program has been written by Kidder to apply the formula to samples of natural language. Encoding Conventions for Data. Text to be analyzed by the computer program must be prepared in blank-delimited form in columns 1 to 72. This means that each word and syntactic punctuation mark must be preceded and followed by at least one blank. Lexical punctuation, as in hyphenated words or in abbreviations, is not by blanks separated from its associated character string. Multiple blanks are ignored. Quotation marks surrounding conversation may be omitted. At the end of each paragraph, the final mark of punctuation must be doubled. To separate samples, three dollar signs ($$$) must appear at the end of each in columns 1 to 3.

Pause Detection Thresholds in a Stop-Phoneme Environment

The minimum silent interval duration necessary to be perceived as an intrasentenee pause was investigated. The stimuli consisted of five recorded sentences within which the words “lost” and “contact” were manipulated so that their syntactic relation to one another varied in complexity from sentence to sentence. Thirty subjects, working individually, adjusted the silent interval duration between the words “lost” and “contact” to that point at which they just perceived a pause. Results indicated that complexity of syntactic structure had no effect on the obtained pause detection thresholds. Presence or absence of a plosive burst terminating the word “lost” did, however, have an effect on pause-detection thresholds. Presence of the plosive burst frequently resulted in negative pause durations, that is, the point at which the subject indicated he just detected a pause was in reality an overlap of the words “lost” and “contact.” Negative thresholds were not observed when the plosive burst was absent, thus indicating that the silent interval preceding the plosive burst may well have been perceived as part of the interword pause interval. [Supported by NIH Grant.]