Different Types Of Words Research Articles

Have media texts become more humorous?

As a research topic, humour has drawn much attention from multiple disciplines including linguistics. Based on Engelthaler & Hills’ (2018) humour scale, this study developed a measure named Humour Index (HMI) to quantify the degree of humour of texts. This measure was applied to examine the diachronic changes in the degree of humour of American newspapers and magazines across a time span of 118 years (1900-2017) with the use of texts from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Besides, the study also discussed the contributions of different types of words to the degree of humour in the two genres. The results show significant uptrends in the degree of humour of both newspapers and magazines in the examined period. Moreover, derogatory and offensive words are found to be less frequently used than other categories of words in both genres. This study provides both theoretical and methodological implications for humour studies and claims or hypotheses of previous research, such as infotainment and linguistic positivity bias.

The impact of lexical and phonological distance on reading acquisition: The diglossic context of Arabic

BackgroundArabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co‐existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA).The study investigated the impact of lexical–phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are different types of words) on reading accuracy and fluency across grade levels.MethodsThe participants were 180 native Arabic‐speaking children first and second graders. Participants were asked to read three‐word lists comprising words of three different lexical distance from spoken Arabic (identical, cognates and unique) and three text selections representing similar lexical distance (mostly identical, mostly cognates and mostly unique).ResultsThe findings showed a main effect of the word and text lexical distance fluency and accuracy reading scores. There was also a main effect of grade level on both scores. In addition, a significant interaction between the word and type words text lexical distance and grade level was found. The results revealed a more significant gap between the identical and the other two lexical distance categories (cognates and unique) in the second grade than in the first grade. Similarly, a more significant disparity was observed between the mostly identical type words and mostly cognate type word texts compared to unique type word texts in the second grade than in the first grade.ConclusionsThe results highlight the importance of StA knowledge and the centrality of diglossia lexical–phonological distance categories in reading, especially the contribution of reading StA words to text reading. The higher performance levels when reading identical compared to unique and cognate words and texts are discussed in light of the theoretical approaches to diglossic lexical–phonological distance. The results point to the centrality of diglossia lexical–phonological distance categories in reading.

A new insight into linguistic pattern analysis based on multilayer hypergraphs for the automatic extraction of text summaries

Forensic linguistics and stylometry have in the exploration of linguistic patterns one of their fundamental tools. Mathematical structures such as complex multilayer networks and hypergraphs provide remarkable resources to represent and analyze texts. In this paper, we present a model that includes some specific mesoscopic relations between the different types of words in a corpus (lexical words, verbs, linking words, other words) according to the sentences or paragraphs in which they appear. This model is supported by various mathematical structures such as partial multiline graphs, multilayer hypergraphs, and their derivative graphs. The methodology proposed from this new point of view is of singular help to find meaningful sentences from any text to set up an automatic summary of the text and, eventually, to determine its linguistic level.

Factors of cognitive complexity of test questions in psychophysiological studies

The paper presents the results of a study of the functional state evaluations of the brain during auditory perception. The subjects listened 60 questions with different linguistic characteristics, taken from polygraph database templates, and answered to them. This characteristics: is the number of different types of words, the percentage of words from different parts of speech, the number of negations, the presence of forms of personal pronouns and their place in the question, the number of letters, the percentage of vowels, the position of intonational stress. As psychological characteristics that affect the functional state of the brain, the following were measured: verbal intelligence according to the R.Amthauer’s test, personal and situational anxiety according to the Spielberger — Khanin test. To measure the functional state of the brain, a 19-channel EEG was recorded in the 10–20% system. The functional state of the brain was assessed by calculating the fractal dimension of the EEG using the method. The sample consisted of students and employees of a number of educational institutions in St Petersburg, 9 men and 8 women aged 19 to 59 years. An analysis of the experimental data made it possible to confirm the hypothesis about the influence of the measured questionnaire characteristics, the linguistic characteristics of the questions, and the psychological characteristics of the subjects on the fractal dimension of the EEG. EEG analysis in various leads revealed two EEG “complexity” factors related to the frontal and occipital areas of the brain. A regression model was obtained for assessing the cognitive complexity of a particular test question, which is reflected in the complexity of the EEG curve of the subject perceiving this question. The resulting model allows you to select questions for psychophysiological examination that have the required level of cognitive complexity. The results of the work testify to the importance of such an indicator as the fractal dimension of the EEG for studying the functional state of the brain and its dependence both on the personal and biological characteristics of a person, and on the emotional state and complexity of the information received by the analyzers.

An Attentional Blink Research on Different Types of Words in Male with Substance Use Disorder

An Attentional Blink Research on Different Types of Words in Male with Substance Use Disorder

Even in predictable orthographies: Surface dyslexia in Turkish

ABSTRACT Purpose We report here, for the first time, on developmental surface dyslexia in Turkish, a very transparent orthography. surface dyslexia is a deficit in the lexical route, which forces the reader to read words via the sublexical route, leading to regularization errors. Methods To detect surface dyslexia, we used reading aloud of loanwords with irregular conversion of vowel length or consonant allophone, and analysed regularization errors. We also tested the properties of this dyslexia using lexical decision on pseudohomophones, repetition and reading of nonwords, and analyses of reading of different types of words. The children with surface dyslexia were identified out of 175 9–10-year-olds who were tested using a reading aloud screening task and tasks that were designed to detect sublexical (rather than lexical) reading of existing words. Results We identified 45 fourth-graders with surface dyslexia. Reading speed was less sensitive to surface dyslexia than regularization errors, as only one-third of the children we diagnosed with surface dyslexia according to their reading errors also showed slower reading than controls. A task of lexical decision of pseudohomophones indicated that 31 of the participants had impairment in the orthographic input lexicon, whereas for 14 others the orthographic input lexicon was intact and the deficit is probably at a later stage in the lexical route – the phonological output lexicon or the connection between the lexica. Nonword reading was intact for the majority of surface dyslexia participants (35 of the 45). None of the surface dyslexia participants showed phonological deficits. Conclusions Surface dyslexia can be identified even in transparent orthographies once the relevant stimuli and error analyses are used.

Penthemimeral Elision in Tragic Trimeters

Abstract This paper provides a statistical survey of the incidence of elision at the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic trimeters of Greek tragedy. It updates and builds on the work of Descroix (1931) by considering the rates of elision of different types of words: lexicals, nonlexical polysyllables, and nonlexical monosyllables. While all tragedians elide less at the caesura than throughout the line, in Aeschylus the rate of this reduction is far greater for lexicals and polysyllabic nonlexicals than it is for monosyllabic nonlexicals. On this evidence, and the evidence of interlinear elision, it is tentatively suggested that lexicals and nonlexical polysyllables should together be considered as the more constrained elisions. When the rates of constrained elision are examined, the difference between Aeschylus and later Euripides is revealed to be twice that obtained when bulk figures are used. This difference is attributed to a combination of Euripides’ adoption of more fluent phrasing towards the end of his career and the tragedians’ different approaches to compositional constraints.

Feelings of Contrast at Test Reduce False Memory in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott Paradigm.

False memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm are explained in terms of the interplay between error-inflating and error-editing (e.g., monitoring) mechanisms. In this study, we focused on disqualifying monitoring, a decision process that helps to reject false memories through the recollection of collateral information (i.e., recall-to-reject strategies). Participants engage in recall-to-reject strategies using one or two metacognitive processes: (1) applying the logic of mutual exclusivity or (2) experiencing feelings of contrast between studied items and unstudied lures. We aimed to provide, for the first time in the DRM literature, evidence favorable to the existence of a recall-to-reject strategy based on the experience of feelings of contrast. One hundred and forty participants studied six-word DRM lists (e.g., spy, hell, fist, fight, abduction, mortal), simultaneously associated with three critical lures (e.g., WAR, BAD, FEAR). Lists differed in their ease to identify their critical lures (extremely low-BAS lists vs. high-BAS lists). At recognition test, participants saw either one or the three critical lures of the lists. Participants in the three-critical-lure condition were expected to increase their monitoring, as they would experience stronger feelings of contrast than the participants in the one-critical-lure condition. Results supported our hypothesis, showing lower false recognition in the three-critical-lure condition than in the one-critical-lure condition. Critically, in the three-critical-lure condition, participants reduced even more false memory when they could also resort to another monitoring strategy (i.e., identify-to-reject). These findings suggest that, in the DRM context, disqualifying monitoring could be guided by experiencing feelings of contrast between different types of words.

A Well‐Rounded Diet: Fueling Children’s Vocabulary Development

AbstractTexts are an often ‐ignored element in studies of interactive read‐alouds in early childhood settings. In this article, Ithe author addresses this research gap by examining 60 preschool books for the vocabulary affordances they provide for young children. There were five types of books in the study: narrative, informational, interactive, alphabet, and counting. Surprisingly, in the study, I found that different types of preschool books have the same number of new words but offer children different types of words that are important for their vocabulary development. Throughout the article, the authorI provides readers with examples of these different types of words and offers suggestions for practitioners to maximize preschool children’s word learning by selecting a variety of books for interactive read‐alouds.

Revisiting Mednick’s (1962) Theory of Creativity with a Composite Measure of Creativity: The Effect of Stimulus Type on Word Association Production

AbstractS.A. Mednick (1962) proposed a theory of creativity suggesting that highly creative individuals can produce more word associations to a stimulus than less creative individuals. Numerous studies have supported this theory using the Remote Associates Test (RAT) as the measure of creativity. Additionally, some studies have suggested that high‐frequency words elicit more word associations overall than low‐frequency words, and concrete words elicit more associations overall than abstract words. The current study further investigated Mednick’s theory by (a) creating controlled lists of stimuli that can better uncover how word type (abstract versus concrete) and word frequency (high versus low) affect the number of word associations produced to a stimulus, (b) including several creativity tasks besides the RAT, and (c) examining the role of other factors in creative thinking, including intelligence and verbal fluency. Participants first completed a word association task with four different types of words (i.e., high‐frequency concrete, low‐frequency concrete, high‐frequency abstract, and low‐frequency abstract), and then completed a variety of tasks, including several creativity tasks. Participants were categorized as highly creative or less creative based on a composite measure of the creativity tasks. Highly creative individuals produced more associations overall, supporting Mednick’s theory. Furthermore, high‐frequency stimuli resulted in higher overall associative responses compared to low‐frequency stimuli, but contrary to previous research, no differences emerged for concrete versus abstract stimuli. There was also no difference in intelligence scores between the two creativity groups, and only a marginally significant difference in verbal fluency scores.

Evaluation of Vector Transformations for Russian Word2Vec and FastText Embeddings

Authors of Word2Vec claimed that their technology could solve the word analogy problem using the vector transformation in the introduced vector space. However, the practice demonstrates that it is not always true. In this paper, we investigate several Word2Vec and FastText model trained for the Russian language and find out reasons of such inconsistency. We found out that different types of words are demonstrating different behavior in the semantic space. FastText vectors are tending to find phonological analogies, while Word2Vec vectors are better in finding relations in geographical proper names. However, we found out that just four out of fifteen selected domains are demonstrating accuracy more that 0.8. We also draw a conclusion that in a common case, the task of word analogies could not be solved using a random word pair taken from two investigated categories. Our experiments have demonstrated that in some cases the length of the vectors could differ more than twice. Calculation of an average vector leads to a better solution here since it closer to more vectors.

Multimodal metaphor detection based on distinguishing concreteness

Metaphors are a common linguistic phenomenon, and metaphor identification plays an essential role in metaphor processing. Most existing metaphor computing techniques use only texts to gain features, but we acquire additional knowledge from other modalities. At present, the multimodal model in the metaphor field is in the exploratory stage, and the few multimodal models available are still relatively crude. We propose a multimodal metaphor detection method according to the idea that different types of words are suitable for different modality calculations. First, our proposed framework uses a fine-grained concreteness calculation method based on part of speech to distinguish abstract and concrete words. We then choose a different appropriate modal feature and a different metaphor computational method for words with different concreteness. Additionally, we also improve the use of image features in the field of metaphor detection.

FEATURES OF DEVELOPMENT OF READING SKILLS IN JUNIOR SCHOOLCHILDREN USING THE METHOD OF "COLOR READING"

The article deals with the basic methods of teaching reading in a foreign language to elementary schoolchildren in domestic and foreign theory and practice. The role of early school foreign language reading as a kind of speech activity aimed at the perception and understanding of written text is defined. Reading technique is interpreted as forming automatic skills of quick perception and processing linguistic information (letters, letter combinations, words, punctuation, grammar structures of sentences), followed by correlation with semantic information. The article analyses the new and unique method of teaching students reading technique – the “colour reading”.To determine the rational order of teaching English reading techniques it is necessary to consider difficulties that arise while reading. There are three groups of them. The first group includes difficulties associated with differences between sound and spelling systems of the English language (intralingua interference). The second group includes problems related to stress in different types of words while reading. The third group includes difficulties that are based on differences between the rules of stress and word order in the sentence between native and foreign languages (interlingua interference). But all of the methods have its advantages and disadvantages, that’s why it’s really necessary to find and choose the best one for schoolchildren.

The Different Types of Words Meaning in Minangkabau Proverbs: A Stylistics Approach

The objective of this study is to find out the description of several different types of words meaning in Minangkabau Proverbs based on a stylistic approach. This research uses descriptive qualitative method in which the description and interpretation on the real fact or object of the research done by using Minangkabau proverbs recorded from about 8 respondents of Minangkabau Natives. The library study is also done to find several sources focused on stylistic devices based on different types of word meaning in Minangkabau proverbs. This research uses the theory from (Lethsalu, Liiv, & Mut, 1973). There are two types of stylistic devices, the first types of stylistic devices based on the interaction of lexical and contextual meaning consist of metaphor, metonymy, antonomasia, and irony.The second types of stylistic devices based on different types of word meaning consist of epithet, oxymoron, hyperbole, and meiosis. The findings show that there are several types of word meaning in Minangkabau Proverbs, namely Metaphor 68%, Metonymy 6%, Irony 8%, Epithet 2%, Hyperbole 6%, and Zeugma 10%. The dominant types of word meaning in Minangkabau Proverbs is Metaphor. It shows that people in Minangkabau always use decorated language that uses nature as its object, to show the nature, characteristics or condition of something. Minangkabau people learn about life from nature, the process of something become something better.

An Article Review on “The Use of Politeness Strategies in the Classroom Context by English University Students"

This study aims to review and look at politeness strategies in the Classroom Context by English University Students. Politeness in English language teaching is still a major concern. This is considered a way of ensuring positive contact in the classroom. As an essential actor in the class, teachers and students must also cultivate politeness as a way to establish positive engagement in the classroom. In order to investigate the politeness phenomenon in EFL interaction, the researchers applied a descriptive qualitative research method. Two sections of English literature were included in this research. The key data sources were the individual student presentations recorded. The recording took fifty transcripts, which lasted between five and seven minutes for each performance. The transcripts were examined and debated on the basis of Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness. The findings of this research indicate that English students used different types of words to express their courtesy within the classroom. Such phrases were in the form of greetings, thanks, apologies and fillers. Some terms were also taken from the vernacular language of students who acted as a tool to soften their presentation. Such words were marked as positive and negative politeness. The results of this study could be used as a means of establishing effective interaction between teachers and students in the classroom.

Associative Support in the Process of Learning Vocabulary of a Foreign Language: a Psycholinguistic Approach in Language Teaching

The subject of the article is description of the reserves for improving the efficiency of teaching foreign language vocabulary. The identification of effective strategies for mastering new words and supporting elements used in this case has been carried out taking into account the psycholinguistic theory of bilingualism as a basis for improving the theory and practice of teaching foreign languages. The illustrative part is presented by materials of the Russian lessons for students with native Turkish language.
 The support is defined as a sign getting into the focus of attention and directing the search in the previous experience of the individual. Associative supports help the implementation of Association strategy in the process of memorizing a foreign word. It is suggested that if associative supports («keys» in terms of techniques) are offered at the same time with the introduction of a new verbal unit for its memorization, it will accelerate the capture of sound and graphic image of the word, ensure its introduction into long-term memory, enhance storage, simplify search and reproduction.
 In order to optimize the memorization of lexical material, it is proposed to use: support on the morphemic component («familiar» roots in borrowings); support on the same sound-letter complex (interlingual homonyms); support on the language of personal meanings (etymological adaptation of the word); support on the pragmatic component (emotional-evaluative connotations of the word); support on a similar sound-letter complex («phonetic keys»); support on the grammatical analogy in the native language («positive transfer»); support on the previously formed speech skill.
 The application of the strategy of association while learning vocabulary of a foreign language helps to mobilize internal resources of the memory, and is a condition for optimization of the learning process and a factor in the successful accumulation of vocabulary. The more different associative supports are involved in the process of learning a new word, the faster the memorization and the stronger the result will be.
 Further methodological search in the framework of the lexical approach to language learning should be aimed at improving the teaching materials taking into account the associative principle and, in the long term, the creation of a «psycholinguistic version» of the methodological typology of vocabulary, taking into account the features of speech activity of students to learn different types of words.

Working memory load affects early affective responses to concrete and abstract words differently: Evidence from ERPs.

Early posterior negativity (EPN) is an early-occurring, event-related, potential that is elicited by pictures and words that have highly arousing characteristics. Whilst EPN has been found with words presented in isolation several times, different types of words have shown quite different effects across different types of tasks. One possible reason for this is that memory and attentional demands may affect the way semantic features of words are processed, and this may modulate EPN. This was investigated in a silent reading task using abstract and concrete words of negative and neutral valence and a dual phonological working memory task to manipulate memory load. The results showed that abstract but not concrete words elicited EPN, and this may have affected downstream processing. Further analyses examining alpha desynchronization showed that negative concrete words appeared to be significantly affected by the memory load manipulation, unlike negative abstract words. These results provide evidence that the processing of features in negative concrete words is more affected by working memory and attentional demands than the processing of features in negative abstract words, and this may be responsible for the failure of negative concrete words to elicit EPN in this study. Thus, the extent to which words elicit EPN appears to be dependent on both their semantic representations and competing cognitive processes. These results provide a potential explanation for some of the differences that have been reported in previous experiments as well as insight into how memory and attention can affect the processing of the semantic features of words.

Modulating Effects of Contextual Emotions on the Neural Plasticity Induced by Word Learning.

Recently, numerous studies have investigated the neurocognitive mechanism of learning words in isolation or in semantic contexts. However, emotion as an important influencing factor on novel word learning has not been fully considered in the previous studies. In addition, the effects of emotion on word learning and the underlying neural mechanism have not been systematically investigated. Sixteen participants were trained to learn novel concrete or abstract words under negative, neutral, and positive contextual emotions over 3 days; then, fMRI scanning was done during the testing sessions on day 1 and day 3. We compared the brain activations in day 1 and day 3 to investigate the role of contextual emotions in learning different types of words and the corresponding neural plasticity changes. Behaviorally, the performance of the words learned in the negative context was lower than those in the neutral and positive contexts, which indicated that contextual emotions had a significant impact on novel word learning. Correspondingly, the functional plasticity changes of the right angular gyrus (AG), bilateral insula, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) induced by word learning were modulated by the contextual emotions. The insula also was sensitive to the concreteness of the learned words. More importantly, the functional plasticity changes of the left inferior frontal gyrus (left IFG) and left fusiform gyrus (left FG) were interactively influenced by the contextual emotions and concreteness, suggesting that the contextual emotional information had a discriminable effect on different types of words in the neural mechanism level. These results demonstrate that emotional information in contexts is inevitably involved in word learning. The role of contextual emotions in brain plasticity for learning is discussed.

Mapping sentences to concept transferred space for semantic textual similarity

Semantic textual similarity ( $$\mathcal {STS}$$ ) seeks to assess the degree of semantic equivalence between two sentences or snippets of texts. Most methods of $$\mathcal {STS}$$ are based on word surface and deem words as meaning unrelated symbols, which makes these methods indiscriminative for ubiquitous conceptual association among words. Recently, concept transferred space (CTS) is proposed to solve word conceptual association problem. It is generated from the noun concepts with their IS-A relations in WordNet. However, the CTS-based model can only calculate nouns; as a result, a large number of words, i.e., verbs, adjectives, adverbs as well as out-of-vocabulary named entities (OOV NEs), are neglected, thus resulting in information loss in the semantic similarity evaluation. This paper presents ways to solve this problem: To involve words other than nouns, derivational links in WordNet are employed to associate verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with their corresponding noun concepts; to prevent information loss by OOV NEs, the increased quantity of information of them is predicted according to the tendency learned from known NEs. Moreover, to further improve the accuracy of the CTS-based model, we take the importance of different types of words into consideration by assigning corresponding weights for them. Experimental results suggest that the proposed comprehensive CTS-based model achieves significant improvement compared with the primitive one without the non-nominal words, OOV NEs, and word weights and also outperforms all the yearly state-of-the-art systems at the *SEM/SemEval 2013–2016 $$\mathcal {STS}$$ tasks. Additionally, at the SemEval 2017 $$\mathcal {STS}$$ task, our team with the comprehensive CTS-based model ranked the second and the first among all teams and on Track 1 dataset, respectively.

Input-output effects in the bilingual first language acquisition of English and Polish

Abstract This diary study looks at the acquisition of early words in two bilingual sisters (0;9–2;03.22 and 0;9–1;09.13) exposed to English and Polish from birth. It examines whether their parents’ input recorded on video can explain the proportions of different types of words learnt. Their bias for social words is explained by these words being heard in isolation; that for nouns by competitive proportions of noun types heard in the input. Contrarily, the late acquisition of closed-class items is explained by their high usage rates as part of constructions. Meanwhile, high numbers of early verbs in both children’s Polish are explained by inflected Polish verbs being heard (a) in isolation and (b) at the beginning and end of utterances more frequently than their uninflected English counterparts. These results are discussed within the context of the usage-based theory, with focus on the impact of word types for the acquisition of word groups.