Current Vocabulary Research Articles

An Experimental Study on the Effect of AIGC on High School Students’ English Words Memory

Vocabulary memorizing is the foundation of English learning, and improving students’ vocabulary memorizing efficiency occupies an essential place in English learning. However, the current vocabulary teaching activities are stereotyped in design and superficial in practice and fail to achieve the teaching goal of improving students’ vocabulary learning ability. With the development of AI, its function for learning is obvious. Therefore, based on AIGC, this study designs an experiment with 60 students from two parallel classes in grade one of a high school in Pingjiang County as the research object. The author adopts the literature method, investigation method, and experimental method. After referring to lots of related literature at home and abroad and conducting the investigation and analysis of the current situation of English vocabulary learning, the design principles and strategies for this experiment are put forward. At the end of the practice, the English vocabulary test and questionnaire survey were used as research tools to collect experimental data, and the SPSS27.0 software was used for statistics and analysis. The results show that AIGC can stimulate students’ interest in vocabulary memorizing, promote memorizing efficiency, and enhance the ability to use the vocabulary.

Exploring the Effects of Early Extramural English Exposure on the Vocabulary Size of University Students

Research has shown that current informal extramural (out-of-class) activities can be an important predictor of second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, but less is known about the relationship between language proficiency and activities earlier in life, which could have contributed to L2 acquisition. This exploratory study investigated Norwegian university students’ reported exposure to English through extramural activities at an early age and how this related to their current vocabulary size in L2 English. Participants (N = 40) completed an online survey comprising items from the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and questions about the earliest extramural activity they felt made an important contribution to their knowledge of L2 English and the age at which they engaged in this activity. Participants’ mean English vocabulary size, as measured by the VST, was 11,246 words, and regression analysis found that the age of reported earliest extramural exposure was a significant predictor for L2 vocabulary size but that the current age of participants was not a significant predictor of VST scores. The results suggest that investigating early exposure to extramural input could be an important avenue for future research.

An Analysis on the Use of TV Series- Friends as an Audiovisual Aid in English Vocabulary Teaching and Learning

Since Friends released in 1994, it has been the most welcomed TV series in the world. In this sitcom, characters lines are closed to peoples daily life, so it can be treated as an audiovisual aid in English vocabulary teaching and learning. Current vocabulary learning methods mainly focus on rote learning, which is inefficient for college students to comprehensively memorize and use words, thus, vocabulary learning should be combined with contexts, which can be provided by Friends. The paper will analyze lexical phenomena in lines of Friends on the basis of the context theory. It can be found that with the help of the contexts, offered by lines of the series, college students, to some extends, have access to changeable and complex meanings of words, as well as cultural connotations of culture-loaded words. Based on the limitations of this method, some humble suggestions will be offered. For teachers, it should be firstly considered that how to choose teaching materials. In the process of teaching, it may be advisable to assign a learning task in advance of playing the clips, and ask children to organize their notes with the plots of series after class. For self-learners, students should have self-discipline to focus on the English subtitles instead of the plots of series, and then remember to write down notes and memorize them again and again.

Thematic Analysis and its Interdisciplinary Interest:

The term “thematic analysis” abounds in research articles and appears in the titles of books, without the authors of these writings being primarily concerned with defining what thematic analysis is. Thematic analysis is present in the current vocabulary of several disciplines and is presented as a working method of choice in psychology, sociology, or linguistics, to name but a few. This article seeks to situate thematic analysis in the thinking of Holton Gerald, who introduced it into the philosophy of science as a rational approach that can account for scientific discovery and progress. The aim of this article is to see whether the attested interdisciplinary interest nature of thematic analysis argues in favour or against Holton’s claim of making it a credible and acceptable tool in philosophy of science.

The Neoliberal Face of the 'Local Turn' in Governance of Refugees in Turkey: Participatory Action Research in Karacabey, Bursa.

Based on the findings of participatory action research conducted in 2020 and 2021 in Karacabey, Bursa (Turkey), the article aims to offer a critical assessment of the current vocabulary that has become prevalent in Migration Studies such as 'local turn' and 'resilience'. In doing so, the article demonstrates the neoliberal logic of governance of migration and integration of migrants and refugees-a logic that is manifested by the Turkish central state in the form of delegating responsibilities to local actors without an attempt to financially strengthen them. Karacabey encounters various problems similar to many other rural and mountainous places in Europe such as depopulation, aging, emigration, deforestation, deinvestment, reduction of agricultural lands and production, and environmental problems. As the last decade has brought about massive migration of Syrians, the article mostly elaborates on their social, economic, and territorial impacts on Karacabey and Bursa-a region that has been historically exposed to various forms of migration, both international and domestic.

Transfer Learning in wastewater treatment plants control: Measuring the transfer suitability

The industrial sector is nowadays experiencing a digital transformation motivated by the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Concepts such as data-driven models, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and Transfer Learning (TL) are part of the current vocabulary in the industrial management and control topics. For that reason, in this paper the application of TL techniques is proposed to derive new ANN-based control structures from pre-existing ones. Notice that if an ANN-based controller is transferred into a new industrial environment, its appropriate behaviour must be ensured, and what it is more important, this must be known a priori. Nevertheless, TL techniques do not always ensure this. That is why the Transfer Suitability Metric (TSM) is proposed here. Determining the similarity among environments, this metric tells if the controller can be transferred, transferred with certain limitations, or if it cannot be transferred at all. Here, the metric is applied over a Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP). The objective is to derive the control structure of one control loop, let us say the Dissolved Oxygen (DO), and then transfer it into another basic control loop in a WWTP, the Nitrate–nitrogen (NO), and vice-versa. Results show that with the help of the TSM, an improvement around a 68.54% and 80.53% in the Integrated Absolute Error (IAE) and the Integrated Squared Error (ISE) is obtained in the NO management, respectively. Moreover, a simplification and speed-up of the controller design process is achieved.

TRANSFORMATION OF LEXICAL UNITS IN THE INTERNET SPACE (BY THE MATERIAL OF THE SOCIAL NETWORK «VKONTAKTE»)

This article analyzes the current vocabulary for the Internet space, in particular, social networks. The origin of the selected words is investigated and the semantic content of the lexemes selected for analysis is interpreted. The role of neologems, slang from the point of view of their functioning in the text, their role and meaning is also indicated.

Academic achievements and brain volume development in children and adolescents.

Children are expected to acquire both basic and numeric skills. Achievement of higher levels of reading, writing, arithmetic, and vocabulary are favorable and desirable. The relationship between each literacy skill and neural development has been investigated; however, association between brain development and the 4 literacy skills has not been examined. This longitudinal, structural, neuroimaging study explored the contribution of higher academic achievement in reading, writing, arithmetic, and vocabulary to neural development. The brain volumes of children and adolescents aged 9-16years were measured in the first test. Approximately 2.6years later, the brain volumes and 4 academic achievement scores of 77 participants were measured in the second test. Changes in the gray matter volume in the left fusiform gyrus were associated with vocabulary scores, whereas those in the left striatum were associated with arithmetic scores. The reading and writing scores showed no statistically significant relationship with changes in brain volume. The current vocabulary score correlated with current gray matter volume, while brain volumes in the first test showed no association with any achievement scores. These results suggest that academic achievement may modulate brain plasticity in various ways.

COVID-19 target Sphere in English-language media text (based on The Economist magazine)

The subject of the study is a conceptual metaphor in the English-language media text. The current vocabulary associated with coronavirus infection is taken as an analysis. The cognitive paradigm of language research is based on the general methodological principle of cognitive linguistics: to draw conclusions about the structures of consciousness from the facts of language. The article examines certain images in relation to the description of COVID-19 in the modern English-language media text. Special attention is paid to the selection of ontological, orientation and structural metaphors, where the target sphere is SARS COV-2. Metaphorical expressions are analyzed, which are recognized as an important tool for the study of the conceptual sphere of a person. The main conclusions of the study are the fact that the COVID in the English text is considered as an ENTITY, an ANIMAL and the SEA. Highlighting the conceptual metaphors COVID-19 IS A SUBSTANCE, COVID-19 IS AN ANIMAL, COVID-19 IS A SEA, we came to the conclusion that the British consider coronavirus infection as something tangible, dangerous and endless.Different metaphors highlight different sides of the same phenomenon, and the speaker/writer always chooses between them, guided by current communicative goals. Each metaphor inevitably emphasizes, or highlights, some aspects of a particular concept, and obscures others.

Test smells 20 years later: detectability, validity, and reliability

Test smells aim to capture design issues in test code that reduces its maintainability. These have been extensively studied and generally found quite prevalent in both human-written and automatically generated test-cases. However, most evidence of prevalence is based on specific static detection rules. Although those are based on the original, conceptual definitions of the various test smells, recent empirical studies indicate that developers perceive warnings raised by detection tools as overly strict and non-representative of the maintainability and quality of test suites. This leads us to re-assess test smell detection tools’ detection accuracy and investigate the prevalence and detectability of test smells more broadly. Specifically, we construct a hand-annotated dataset spanning hundreds of test suites both written by developers and generated by two test generation tools (EvoSuite and JTExpert) and performed a multi-stage, cross-validated manual analysis to identify the presence of six types of test smells in these. We then use this manual labeling to benchmark the performance and external validity of two test smell detection tools—one widely used in prior work and one recently introduced with the express goal to match developer perceptions of test smells. Our results primarily show that the current vocabulary of test smells is highly mismatched to real concerns: multiple smells were ubiquitous on developer-written tests but virtually never correlated with semantic or maintainability flaws; machine-generated tests actually often scored better, but in reality, suffered from a host of problems not well-captured by current test smells. Current test smell detection strategies poorly characterized the issues in these automatically generated test suites; in particular, the older tool’s detection strategies misclassified over 70% of test smells, both missing real instances (false negatives) and marking many smell-free tests as smelly (false positives). We identify common patterns in these tests that can be used to improve the tools, refine and update the definition of certain test smells, and highlight as of yet uncharacterized issues. Our findings suggest the need for (i) more appropriate metrics to match development practice, (ii) more accurate detection strategies to be evaluated primarily in industrial contexts.

Predicting the Structure of a Lexical Environment from Properties of Verbal Working Memory

We analyzed a Japanese lexical database to investigate the structure of the lexical environment based on the hypothesis that the lexical environment is optimized for the functioning of verbal working memory. Our prediction was that, as a consequence of the cultural transmission of language, low-imageable meanings tend to be represented by frequent phonological patterns in the current vocabulary rather than infrequent phonological patterns. This prediction was based on two findings of previous laboratory studies on verbal working memory. (1) The quality of phonological (phonemic and accent) representations in verbal working memory depends on phonological regularity knowledge; therefore, short-term phonological representations are less robust for words with infrequent phonological patterns. (2) Phonological representations are underpinned by contributions from semantic knowledge; therefore, phonological representations of highly imageable words are more robust than those for low-imageable words. Our database analyses show that nouns with less imageable meanings tend to be associated with more frequent phonological patterns in Japanese vocabulary. This lexical structure can maintain the quality of phonological representations in verbal working memory through contributions of semantic and phonological regularity knowledge. Larger semantic contributions compensate for the less robust phonological representations of infrequent phonological forms. The quality of phonological representations is preserved by phonological regularity knowledge when larger semantic contributions are not expected.

System Construction of Mind Map in English Vocabulary Teaching Based on Machine Learning Algorithm

Mind map is an effective graphical thinking tool for expressing divergent thinking. It is a simple, yet effective and efficient, practical thinking tool. This paper aims to use machine learning algorithms to build a mind map system and apply it to English vocabulary teaching. This paper first introduces the classification of machine learning algorithms and then briefly expounds the overview of the mind map construction system. Finally, this paper integrates the mind map constructed by machine learning algorithms into English vocabulary teaching practice and compares it with the traditional teaching mode. The experimental results show that the accuracy rate of students’ vocabulary review and test under the vision of the English vocabulary teaching mode of the mind map constructed by the machine learning algorithm has reached 85%, which verifies the effectiveness of the method. Popularizing it in the current English vocabulary teaching can improve students’ interest and effect in learning vocabulary and has certain operability.

L’outillage en quartz spécialisé utilisé en percussion lancée en contexte discoïde à Pointe pseudo-Levallois : l’exemple de Champs de Bossuet

The quartz component of the Champs de Bossuet (CdB) industry has been the subject of technological and techno-functional analyses focused on the ergonomic characterization of percussive tools related to their morphologies, their dimensions and masses but especially on their Active Percussion Zone (APZ) (morphology, extent, location). After assessing the position held by the percussive tools in the quartz component, they will be described on the basis of a subdivision into two large families correlated to their function and mode of operation: sharp percussion tools and blunt percussion tools (Viallet et al. 2022). Among this last group, constituting the panoply of percutors (of sensu lato size), ergonomic specificities could be highlighted in a correlation with a specialization of the lithic flint production mode for which they were used: discoid debitage with pseudo-Levallois point and its ramifications (Bourguignon et al. 2000; Lenoble et al. 2000 ; Bourguignon & Turq 2003). Each of the characteristics (weights, size and morphology) and their grouping by categories will be described and quantified and their function evaluated. Finally, we will propose, for classes of hammerstones with very specific size and ergonomic characteristics, a terminology derived from the current technical vocabulary describing the «striking tools» and in particular hammers for purposes of differentiation in the rich panoply of percussive tools and comparisons in other archaeological records.

The Productivity of Lexemes of English Origin

The dynamism of a language is sustained by the flexible and receptive character at the lexico-semantic level. An important contribution to the development and enrichment of the current vocabulary is made not only by the lexemes of English origin (Anglicisms), but also by the derivatives produced from them. Integrated in the Romanian linguistic system, the newly created elements become authentic structural and functional units. In the present study, the author selected and analyzed a series of English words with extended circulation in the specialized languages and their lexical family, which they constitute/ complete in the meantime with units formed on Romanian territory. Most of the examined terms are recorded in the recent lexicographical works, but there are also words that circulate only in the mass media, in various fields of public activity and in the colloquial style, demonstrating the linguistic creativity and inventiveness of the users.

Tools of the Trade

Modesty garments and barriers are some of the tools used by intimacy professionals in scenes of physical intimacy. This equipment is, in my opinion, still the unspoken hero that helps me do my job, that gives performers a better sense of protection and a tool that supports and enhances consent based practices.
 In the following paper, I will look at modesty garments and barriers I currently use in my practice. I will chart my own journey, discuss the development of INTIMASK, give examples of current vocabulary I use, and share a checklist. Get ready, this paper is long and I take full responsibility for that.
 Writings about modesty garments and barriers are extremely scarce in books, academic research and many articles discuss them on a superficial level. And so it was difficult for me to edit sections and cut corners from the information I felt was needed. [...] This paper is written with some progression that makes sense to me and yet, I do think each section can also stand on its own. So please journey through it at your own pace and choosing.

Contextual meanings of political vocabulary

Political vocabulary is one of the most relevant subjects of study of modern linguistics, constantly updated, it serves as an indicator of the state of the political sphere of society and the political consciousness of a person. The article is devoted to lexemes that have firmly entered the current political vocabulary of our time: democracy, liberal, patriotism, patriot, nationalism, nationalist, opposition, president. Based on the analysis of modern explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, as well as the dictionary of political terms, it is concluded that terminological, special vocabulary in the modern political language is often used in an unusual meaning. In the article, using the method of contextual analysis, the evaluative connotative element of the meaning of the indicated lexemes is investigated. It is concluded that lexemes acquire a positive or negative evaluative value, first of all, depending on the context, the actual terminological meaning is leveled when used. The revealed meanings are non-systemic, accordingly, they are not fixed in dictionaries, while they are obvious to the carrier and are frequent. This indicates the specific nature of the modern political language, which is influenced by the modern journalistic style. The research results can be used to analyze controversial cases of the use of political vocabulary.

The Importance of Dialect Awareness among Learners

The Dictionary of Standard Slovenian Language (SSKJ 2014) uses seven types of labels (qualifiers). The present article focuses on the style-genre label nar. (dialectal), further specified as vzhodno (eastern). There are 414 entries so labelled in the SSKJ2. This survey will focus on verbs only (98), labelled as dialectal eastern in the SSKJ2, comparing them to those found in Rajh’s material for his dialectal dictionary of Prlekija dialect Gúčati po antùjoško (2010), as well as in The Slovenian Orthography (Slovenski pravopis – SP 2001). The aim is to point out the importance of incorporating the current dialectal vocabulary into the normative manuals, as well as the importance of their labelling being a great help for teachers, language editors, translators, etc.

Использование синонимов в словарных дефинициях неологизмов (на материале немецкого языка)

The study aims to describe the possibilities of using synonyms in dictionary definitions of neologisms. The article analyses the material from the German dictionary “Unsere Wörter des Jahrzehnts 2000-2010” / “Our Words of the 2000-2010 Decade”. Scientific novelty of the study lies in considering the lexicographic recording of the current vocabulary, which entered the German language permanently in the first decade of the XXI century and was included in the Duden dictionary in the second decade. As a result, the researcher has identified the use of the lexical units in dictionary definitions that are synonymous with an entry word or, which is most often the case, its components. It has been shown that the pairs consisting of German words and the pairs in which one of the words is borrowed can both function as synonyms.

Two-year-olds at elevated risk for ASD can learn novel words from their parents.

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and word learning ability using a paradigm in which parents teach their child words. Results revealed that both groups learned novel words, even though parents indicated that infants at elevated risk of ASD knew fewer words. This suggests that these early compromised vocabularies cannot be solely linked to difficulties in word formations.

Vocabulary recommendation approach for forced migrants using informal language learning tools

Learning a new language is a major challenge faced by many forced migrants. Current vocabulary learning curricula are not adapted to the migrants’ needs, which makes the learning process even more challenging. Today, the widespread use of smartphones among forced migrants provides us with new opportunities to collect and recommend the vocabulary they need. In this work, we propose a demographic- and content-based vocabulary recommendation approach that considers the migrant’s status, migration stage, and vocabulary themes. Based on our approach, the vocabulary recommended to a forced migrant belongs to the same theme as the vocabulary that other forced migrants in the same migration stage chose to learn. The approach was evaluated with 37 Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Germany that used SCROLL, an informal language learning tool, to learn their target language. We compared the learning achievement and motivation of the participants when they learned the recommended vocabulary and the standard textbook vocabulary. Our results showed that the proposed vocabulary recommendation approach resulted in higher learning achievement for refugees in Germany and higher motivation levels for refugees in Germany and Lebanon. Tailored vocabulary recommendation approaches showed potential to improve the language learning experience of forced migrants and warrant further study.