Cross-language Studies Research Articles

Conceptualization of Pragmatic Language Through Proverbs: A Comparative Study of Arabic and English Proverbs

This study aims to analyze and compare several proverbs in Arabic and English from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective. Examining the similarities and differences of proverbs in different languages helps us appreciate the use of that language. Indeed, Arabic and English may constitute an excellent example of understanding the practical use of common proverbs and, more generally, the historical facets of these languages' background. In doing so, I identified twenty common sayings used in the two languages, Arabic and English, to investigate the parallelisms among them and observe their use in a particular cultural context. The study's originality focuses on the fact that until now, proverb cross-language studies on these languages from a metalinguistic point of view have not been examined.

Do Acoustic Characteristics of Dysarthria in People With Parkinson's Disease Differ Across Languages?

Cross-language studies suggest more similarities than differences in how dysarthria affects the speech of people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) who speak different languages. In this study, we aimed to identify the relative contribution of acoustic variables to distinguish PwPD from controls who spoke varieties of two Romance languages, French and Portuguese. This bi-national, cross-sectional, and case-controlled study included 129 PwPD and 124 healthy controls who spoke French or Portuguese. All participants underwent the same clinical examinations, voice/speech recordings, and self-assessment questionnaires. PwPD were evaluated off and on optimal medication. Inferential analyses included Disease (controls vs. PwPD) and Language (French vs. Portuguese) as factors, and random decision forest algorithms identified relevant acoustic variables able to distinguish participants: (a) by language (French vs. Portuguese) and (b) by clinical status (PwPD on and off medication vs. controls). French-speaking and Portuguese-speaking individuals were distinguished from each other with over 90% accuracy by five acoustic variables (the mean fundamental frequency and the shimmer of the sustained vowel /a/ production, the oral diadochokinesis performance index, the relative sound level pressure and the relative sound pressure level standard deviation of the text reading). A distinct set of parameters discriminated between controls and PwPD: for men, maximum phonation time and the oral diadochokinesis speech proportion were the most significant variables; for women, variables calculated from the oral diadochokinesis were the most discriminative. Acoustic variables related to phonation and voice quality distinguished between speakers of the two languages. Variables related to pneumophonic coordination and articulation rate were the more effective in distinguishing PwPD from controls. Thus, our research findings support that respiration and diadochokinesis tasks appear to be the most appropriate to pinpoint signs of dysarthria, which are largely homogeneous and language-universal. In contrast, identifying language-specific variables with the speech tasks and acoustic variables studied was less conclusive.

Cross-Language Perception of Lexical Tones by Nordic Learners of Mandarin Chinese

While existing cross-language studies on the perception of non-native tones primarily focus on naïve listeners, this study addresses an obvious gap by investigating learners from diverse language backgrounds. Specifically, it investigates Mandarin tone perception in two groups of learners from Nordic languages, Swedish (a pitch-accent language), and Danish (a non-tonal language), as well as in a group of native Chinese speakers. Analysis of their performance in tone identification task revealed a slight advantage for Swedish learners, implying the influence of their pitch accent background in learning Mandarin tones. However, both Swedish and Danish learners who excelled in the tone identification task exhibited similar perception of within-category tonal variations but differed from native Chinese speakers. Additionally, the study found that the presence of length contrast, a prosodic feature in the learners’ native languages, significantly influences their perception of Mandarin tones.

Visualizing emoji usage in geo-social media across time, space, and topic

Social media is ubiquitous in the modern world and its use is ever-increasing. Similarly, the use of emojis within social media posts continues to surge. Geo-social media produces massive amounts of spatial data that can provide insights into users' thoughts and reactions across time and space. This research used emojis as an alternative to text-based social media analysis in order to avoid the common obstacles of natural language processing such as spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, slang, and sarcasm. Because emojis offer a non-verbal means to express thoughts and emotions, they provide additional context in comparison to purely text-based analysis. This facilitates cross-language studies. In this study, the spatial and temporal usage of emojis were visualized in order to detect relevant topics of discussion within a Twitter dataset that is not thematically pre-filtered. The dataset consists of Twitter posts that were geotagged within Europe during the year 2020. This research leveraged cartographic visualization techniques to detect spatial-temporal changes in emoji usage and to investigate the correlation of emoji usage with significant topics. The spatial and temporal developments of these topics and their respective emojis were visualized as a series of choropleth maps and map matrices. This geovisualization technique allowed for individual emojis to be independently analyzed and for specific spatial or temporal trends to be further investigated. Emoji usage was found to be spatially and temporally heterogeneous, and trends in emoji usage were found to correlate with topics including the COVID-19 pandemic, several political movements, and leisure activities.

Paths and opportunities: geolinguistic methods in dialectology

The dimensional approach to language is a feature of contemporary linguistic re- search, in which the three main dimensions of language functioning – spatial, tempo- ral, and human – are brought together as an integral whole. Geolinguistics as a specific method of work and approach to analysis, approaches the temporal and social aspects from the spatial point of view. This method has made a major contribution to the ex- ploration of the spatiality of linguistic phenomena and the closely related regularities. The basic material is a collection of dialectal or multilingual words, represented by maps, arranged in atlases, which depict the distribution of sounds, shapes, words, and meanings. The origin of geolinguistics can be dated to the last quarter of the 19th century, and its development to the 20th century: in addition to classical dialectology and diachronic linguistics, the new grammar school also played a major role in the creation of this method. Over time, its use in the study of regional variants within languages has in- creasingly extended to cross-language studies as well. Nowadays, the method of pro- ducing language atlases has become much more sophisticated: they reflect both the semantic changes in linguistics that are periodically renewed, and the basic data rep- resentation procedures brought about by modern technological developments.

Music perception and speech intelligibility in noise performance by Italian-speaking cochlear implant users

ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to investigate the performance correlations between music perception and speech intelligibility in noise by Italian-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users.Materials and methodsTwenty postlingually deafened adults with unilateral CIs (mean age 65 years, range 46–92 years) were tested with a music quality questionnaire using three passages of music from Classical Music, Jazz, and Soul. Speech recognition in noise was assessed using two newly developed adaptive tests in Italian: The Sentence Test with Adaptive Randomized Roving levels (STARR) and Matrix tests.ResultsMedian quality ratings for Classical, Jazz and Soul music were 63%, 58% and 58%, respectively. Median SRTs for the STARR and Matrix tests were 14.3 dB and 7.6 dB, respectively. STARR performance was significantly correlated with Classical music ratings (rs = − 0.49, p = 0.029), whereas Matrix performance was significantly correlated with both Classical (rs = − 0.48, p = 0.031) and Jazz music ratings (rs = − 0.56, p = 0.011).ConclusionSpeech with competitive noise and music are naturally present in everyday listening environments. Recent speech perception tests based on an adaptive paradigm and sentence materials in relation with music quality measures might be representative of everyday performance in CI users. The present data contribute to cross-language studies and suggest that improving music perception in CI users may yield everyday benefit in speech perception in noise and may hence enhance the quality of listening for CI users.

Effects of phonotactic legality on gestural coordination in consonant clusters: An electromagnetic articulography study

Cross-language studies of speech production have shown that English speakers can produce phonotactically illegal onset fricative-nasal clusters (e.g., /fn/) with high accuracy based on acoustic analyses. However, it remains unclear whether the articulatory gestures affiliated with the fricative-nasal segments are produced with comparable gestural timing to native onset clusters (e.g., /sm/, /fl/). We here used electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to investigate whether the production of non-native /fn/ onset clusters exhibits a comparable amount of consonant-vowel gestural overlap to native onset clusters (i.e., /sm/ and /fl/) in nonwords. Previous articulatory investigations have demonstrated that native English onset clusters exhibit an increase in gestural overlap between the vowel-adjacent consonant and the vowel (e.g., SMAGDEEP) when compared to the corresponding singleton (MAGDEEP). We controlled for the vocal tract configuration (e.g., jaw position) by comparing each onset cluster to heterosyllabic sequences consisting of the same consonant sequences (e.g., /sm/ vs /s#m/). While the data collection is still ongoing, the preliminary results (n = 3) suggest that when the complexity of the onset increased, vowel-adjacent consonantal gestures showed greater temporal overlap with vocalic gestures for phonotactically legal sequences (SMAGDEEP versus MAGDEEP) but not illegal sequences (FNAGDEEP versus NAGDEEP).

Multilingual Research: Reflections on Translating Qualitative Data

Abstract The objective of this article is to examine translation dilemmas in cross-cultural qualitative research projects. In particular, I reflect on my experiences of conducting cross-language qualitative research and I examine how the translation techniques I have employed over the years shape the collection and interpretation of non-English to English qualitative data. Centred on the question ‘What aspects of participants’ representation are lost or foreclosed in this act, process and outcome of translating and how can this be mitigated?’, I discuss how the following coalesce to inform how this complex and multidimensional question is addressed: (i) the competencies, processes and outcomes of translating, (ii) the importance of situating data in its social context and (iii) how this shapes the representation of data. As well, this article discusses the implication of cross-cultural and cross-language studies on social work and presents three lessons learned from my experiences.

Some Issues of Translation of Idioms from English into Russian

The relevance of the research is determined by the importance of intercultural and cross-language studies in order to identify similarities and differences in language systems. The aim of this study is to consider different translations of idioms from English into Russian comparing different time translations of the D.K. Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) with the English original novel. Materials of the article can find application in the development of lectures and practical lessons on general and comparative linguistics, country studies, special courses in translation theory and intercultural communication theory. The research materials may be used in the practice of the improving the techniques and methods of translation from English into Russian.

Interdisciplinary approach to cross-language and cross-cultural communication studies

The present paper touches upon topical issues connected with the necessity of using interdisciplinary approach to cross-language and cross-cultural communication studies. Modern world is based on communication which presupposes the process of sharing meaning through verbal and non-verbal behaviour. It’s a matter that requires very serious and complex handling especially in the time of globalization. Explanation of the terms denoting language, culture, cross-language and cross-cultural communication, their interrelations and peculiarities of usage in all spheres of human activities is given in the paper. Special attention is paid to the communication types and their peculiarities. Our cultural understanding of the world and everything in it ultimately affects our communication style, and nowadays we face hybrid, changing and conflicting cultures, where we are expected to become pluricultural individuals. Effective communication with people of different cultures and languages is especially challenging. If people recognize and understand differing world views, they will 10 certainly adopt a positive and open-minded attitude towards cross-cultural differences. By accepting people, their differences and acknowledging that we do not know everything will make us open up to people and their differences resulting in using contextual information for better understanding. Seeking feedback and taking risks to open up channels of communication and being responsible for our feelings as well as actions, will go a long way in ensuring that miscommunication is mitigated. Therefore, to avoid miscommunication, much effort and willingness on the part of people representing different cultural and educational background is needed. Understanding of these aspects of cultures will help better coexist and cooperate despite all difficulties, conflict situations as well as negative attitudes. In this respect of primary importance is to apply interdisciplinary approach to cross- language and cross-cultural communication studies in order to work out effective communicative strategies to be put into practice.

MulTed: A multilingual aligned and tagged parallel corpus

Recently, more data-driven approaches are demanding multilingual parallel resources primarily in the cross-language studies. To meet these demands, building multilingual parallel corpora are becoming the focus of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) scientific groups. Unlike monolingual corpora, the number of available multilingual parallel corpora is limited. In this paper, the MulTed, a corpus of subtitles extracted from TEDx talks is introduced. It is multilingual, Part of Speech (PoS) tagged, and bilingually sentence-aligned with English as a pivot language. This corpus is designed for many NLP applications, where the sentence-alignment, the PoS tagging, and the size of corpora are influential such as statistical machine translation, language recognition, and bilingual dictionary generation. Currently, the corpus has subtitles that cover 1100 talks available in over 100 languages. The subtitles are classified based on a variety of topics such as Business, Education, and Sport. Regarding the PoS tagging, the Treetagger, a language-independent PoS tagger, is used; then, to make the PoS tagging maximally useful, a mapping process to a universal common tagset is performed. Finally, we believe that making the MulTed corpus available for a public use can be a significant contribution to the literature of NLP and corpus linguistics, especially for under-resourced languages.

THE CONCEPTOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF LINGUAGE AND CULTURE STUDIES

Laid down in the present paper is a reanalysis of the principles of the language and culture approach to the study of idioms. While studying phraseology of different languages along these lines the most urgent problem is considered to be a “decoding” of cultural information on the basis of a conceptual analysis. The theoretical framework involves a study and a description of the interaction between language and culture, language and ethnos, language and national mentality and presupposes an insight into of the structure and specific features of concepts as mental entities. Also of benefit to the approach seems its prospective application in cross-language studies. Phraseological units are considered in close connection with cognitive and mental structures of thinking and symbolic stereotypes as well as mythological, ethical, religious and ritual concepts. Certain scholars regard a concept as a basic unit of mentality emphasizing that it is a pure sense, a primary sense, a primary image, a constant, an archetype. Other researchers consider a concept to be a unit of collective consciousness which has a linguistic expression and ethnocultural marking. In linguistics there exists a narrow and broad understanding of this concept. The former characterizes the concept as the most significant cultural and meaningful category of a person’s inner world, while the latter focuses on the layer of axiological connotations in the meaning of the word, i.e. any verbalized sense which is denoted by an ethnic specificity. In most schools of linguistics the single out essential features of the concept overlap: a) unrealism (a concept is a structure of consciousness); b) heterogeneity of concepts (the world, the knowledge of which is structured in this mental formation, is exceedingly diverse); c) ability of being transmitted into different fields (arts, religion, law, language, science); d) specificity that is conditioned by the belonging of a concept-carrier to several social groups; e) heterogeneous structure with the discreteness of several layers, distinctions, aspects, etc. in the structure of a concept. These characteristics of a concept determine its interdisciplinary status. Keywords: conceptual analysis, culture and language studies, decoding of cultural information.

Can you hear what I feel? A validated prosodic set of angry, happy, and neutral Italian pseudowords.

This contribution aims to establish a set of validated vocal Italian pseudowords that convey three emotional tones (angry, happy, and neutral) for prosodic emotionalprocessing research. We elaborated the materials by following a series of specific steps. First, we tested the valence of a set of written pseudowords generated by specific software. Two Italian actors (male and female) then recorded the resulting subset of linguistically legal and neutral pseudowords in three emotional tones. Finally, on the basis of the results of independent ratings of emotional intensity, we selected a set of 30 audio stimuli expressed in each of the three different emotions. Acoustic analyses indicated that the prosodic indexes of fundamental frequency, vocal intensity, and speech rate anchored individual perceptions of the emotions expressed. Finally, the acoustic profile of the set of emotional stimuli confirmed previous findings. The happy tone stimuli showed high f0 values, high intensity, high pitch variability, and a faster speech rate. The angry tone stimuli were also characterized by high f0 and intensity, but by relatively smaller pitch variability and a lower speech rate. This last profile echoes the description of "cold anger." This new set of prosodic emotion stimuli will constitute a useful resource for future research that requires emotional prosody materials. It could be used both for Italian and for cross-language studies.

Timing of translation in cross-language qualitative research.

Although there is increased understanding of language barriers in cross-language studies, the point at which language transformation processes are applied in research is inconsistently reported, or treated as a minor issue. Differences in translation timeframes raise methodological issues related to the material to be translated, as well as for the process of data analysis and interpretation. In this article we address methodological issues related to the timing of translation from Portuguese to English in two international cross-language collaborative research studies involving researchers from Brazil, Canada, and the United States. One study entailed late-phase translation of a research report, whereas the other study involved early phase translation of interview data. The timing of translation in interaction with the object of translation should be considered, in addition to the language, cultural, subject matter, and methodological competencies of research team members.

Neural correlates reveal sub-lexical orthography and phonology during reading aloud: a review.

The sub-lexical conversion of graphemes-to-phonemes (GPC) during reading has been investigated extensively with behavioral measures, as well as event-related potentials (ERPs). Most research utilizes silent reading (e.g., lexical decision task) for which phonological activation is not a necessity. However, recent research employed reading aloud to capture sub-lexical GPC. The masked priming paradigm avoids strategic processing and is therefore well suitable for capturing sub-lexical processing instead of lexical effects. By employing ERPs, the on-line time course of sub-lexical GPC can be observed before the overt response. ERPs have revealed that besides phonological activation, as revealed by behavioral studies, there is also early orthographic activation. This review describes studies in one’s native language, in one’s second language, and in a cross-language situation. We discuss the implications the ERP results have on different (computational) models. First, the ERP results show that computational models should assume an early locus of the GPC. Second, cross-language studies reveal that the phonological representations from both languages of a bilingual become activated automatically and the phonology belonging to the context is selected rapidly. Therefore, it is important to extend the scope of computational models of reading (aloud) to multiple lexicons.

Asymmetries in vowel perception: Do they arise from focalization, perceptual magnets, or both?

While directional asymmetries are ubiquitous in cross-language studies of vowel perception, their underlying mechanisms have not been established. One hypothesis is that listeners display a universal perceptual bias favoring vowels with greater formant frequency convergence, or focalization (Polka and Bohn, 2011). A second, but not mutually exclusive, hypothesis is that listeners are biased toward prototypical vowel exemplars in their native language (Kuhl, 1993). In a test of these hypotheses, English listeners discriminated synthesized English /u/ and French /u/ vowels presented in pairs. While the French /u/ tokens exhibit greater formant convergence (between F1 and F2), English listeners have previously been shown to rate the English /u/ tokens as “better” instances of the category (Molnar, 2010). Preliminary results demonstrate that the degree of focalization affects vowel discrimination. When discriminating vowel changes presented in the direction going from the more focal (French) to less focal (English) /u/ vowels, English listeners' reaction times were slower, relative to the same changes presented in the reverse direction. These results suggest that listeners treat the more focal vowels as perceptual reference points. Additional data collection with French listeners is ongoing. The implications of these findings for theories of vowel perception will be discussed.

Translation in cross-language international business research: Beyond equivalence

In this paper, we problematise the way translation has been treated in international business (IB) research. We start by conducting an interpretive content analysis of both qualitative and quantitative cross-language studies published in four core IB journals over the course of a decade. Our analysis shows the dominance of a technicist view of translation associated with the equivalence paradigm. In contrast, we advocate a shift to a more contextualised approach informed by theoretical developments in translation studies. More specifically, we focus on two theoretical perspectives – skopos theory and cultural politics – which offer related but distinct approaches to rethinking equivalence. We conclude by advocating that the translation process be reframed as a process of intercultural interaction, rather than a lexical transfer of meaning. This reconceptualisation would, we argue, open up what is currently a “black box” in most IB studies. The contextualised approach that we offer has the potential not just to enrich the findings of studies, but also provide insights that are of multidisciplinary relevance.

From “Faithfulness, Expressiveness, and Elegance” to “Creative Treason” —A Brief Analysis of Variations in Cross- Languages in Pa Chin’s Cold Nights

The phenomenon of variation is common in texts of different literatures and cultures. For the development of Comparative Literature in China, in order to break through the linguistic barriers between Eastern and Western civilizations, the Chinese Professor Cao Shunqing develops the Variation Theory of Comparative Literature in 2005. The Variation Theory of Comparative Literature is a valuable integration of all contemporary disciplines. It ranges from transnational variation studies, cross-language variation studies, cross-cultural variation studies, cross-civilization variation studies, to the images of “otherness” studies, etc. The paper is trying to analyze Pa Chin’s novel Cold Nights of bilingual format in Chinese and English from the perspective of creative treason in cross-language variation studies from three aspects: domestication and foreignization translating method of translator’s individualized translation; mistranslation and omissions; abridged translation compilation and adaptation. Based on the original translation principle as “Faithfulness, Expressiveness, and Elegance”, the paper tries to search for the variations in cross-languages in the literary translation and its deep hidden causes from the aspects of language, culture, history, and local custom in Pa Chin’s Cold Nights.

The Factor Structure of Polish Personality–Descriptive Adjectives: An Alternative Psycho–lexical Study

The results of the Polish psycho–lexical study have been included in nearly all comparisons aimed at finding dimensions common to various cultures and languages. Because of the ambiguity concerning the interpretation of some factors and because of a number of methodological shortcomings, it was decided that another lexical study of the Polish language should be carried out. The alternative study was based on more extensive lexical material and involved a sample covering the full age range. The analyses used 547 personality–descriptive adjectives and self–ratings from 624 respondents aged from 16 to 80 years (mean age = 38.0 years). In a six–factor solution, the obtained structure was typical for many languages: Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Honesty and Intellect. The result of factor analysis depended on neither the type of factoring nor the type of rotation applied. The results of the study were discussed in relation to cross–language studies and to previous studies of the structure of Polish personality–descriptive lexicon. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Lateralization of semantic processing is shaped by exposure to specific mother tongues: The case of insight problem solving by bilingual and monolingual native Hebrew speakers

Solving insight problems is a complex task found to involve coarse semantic processing in the right hemisphere when tested in English. In Hebrew, the left hemisphere (LH) may be more active in this task, due to the inter-hemispheric interaction between semantic, phonological and orthographic processing. In two Hebrew insight problems experiments, we revealed a performance advantage in the LH, in contrast to the patterns previously observed in English. A third experiment, conducted in English with early Hebrew–English bilinguals, confirmed that the LH advantage found with Hebrew speakers does not depend on specific task requirements in Hebrew. We suggest that Hebrew speakers show redundancy between the hemispheres in coarse semantic processing in handling frequent lexical ambiguities stemming from the orthographic structure in Hebrew. We further suggest that inter-hemispheric interactions between linguistic and non-linguistic processes may determine the hemisphere in which coarse coding will take place. These findings highlight the possible effect of exposure to a specific mother tongue on the lateralization of processes in the brain, and carries possible theoretical and methodological implications for cross-language studies.