Linguistic Domains Research Articles

Music Aptitude, Training, and Cognitive Transfer: A Mini-Review.

In this mini-review, the genetic basis of music aptitude and the effects of music training are discussed. The review indicates that regardless of levels of innate ability, experience-induced neuroplasticity can occur as a result of music training. When that happens, it can be expressed as functional or structural brain changes. These changes are often accompanied by improvement in performance in tasks involving auditory analysis. Specifically, music training effects can transfer to a closely related cognitive domain such as auditory processing (near transfer). Music training can also affect more distantly related cognitive domains such as spatial and linguistic domains. Lastly, music training can affect general intelligence (“g”) (far transfer). Music training can mold behavioral brain development and confers cognitive benefits beyond music.

L2 representation and processing of Spanish focus

ABSTRACT Research on second-language (L2) acquisition has identified linguistic domains that appear to be especially difficult to learn—one such sticking point being syntactic structures that depend on the surrounding discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (IH) explains what makes such constructions problematic by appealing to a modular view of language, arguing that integrating knowledge from language-internal domains (e.g., syntax) with language-external domains (e.g., discourse) overwhelms the finite processing resources of L2 learners, especially when integration happens in real time. We test the IH with a syntax-discourse interface phenomenon in Spanish: information focus. The facts about information focus in L1 and L2 Spanish have been enthusiastically debated, but what is missing from these debates is evidence that directly indexes processing, which is essential to evaluate the IH. We use an off-line forced-choice judgment task and an online self-paced reading task to provide a new source of evidence of L2 acquisition of Spanish focus. We find that L1-English/L2-Spanish learners largely resemble L1-Spanish natives in both their judgments and their processing of focus, contrary to the predictions of the IH.

Development and Validation of a Language Screening for Implementation in Pre-School Settings.

BackgroundTo prevent or mitigate long-lasting learning problems and emotional, behavioral, and social-adaption difficulties associated with language disorders, age-appropriate German language competence at school entry level is essential. Therefore, universal screening of children in their penultimate year of pre-school has been established in Upper Austria. So far, the screenings administered by speech and language pathologists to identify risk of language disorder (LD) were not based on standardized materials.ObjectiveTo develop a screening instrument to identify increased risk of LD and to evaluate its validity and feasibility within the constraints of regular universal pre-school language screening.DesignA two-component screening instrument including direct assessment of expressive and receptive grammar was used in a sample of 374 children with German as their dominant language attending a public pre-school in their penultimate year (age 4-5 ½ years) in the state of Upper Austria. Assessment by use of standardized German language tests including a variety of linguistic domains was considered reference standard for diagnosing LD. Feasibility was assessed by a self-developed questionnaire completed by the administrators of the screening.ResultsThe combination of the expressive and receptive grammar scales demonstrated excellent accuracy (area under the curve score 0.928). A cut-off of 18 resulted in a failing rate of 21.8% and showed good sensitivity (84.2%) and specificity (85.3%). Acceptance by children and testers, time-economy and sustainability of the screening were mostly rated as high.

LMFingerprints: Visual Explanations of Language Model Embedding Spaces through Layerwise Contextualization Scores

AbstractLanguage models, such as BERT, construct multiple, contextualized embeddings for each word occurrence in a corpus. Understanding how the contextualization propagates through the model's layers is crucial for deciding which layers to use for a specific analysis task. Currently, most embedding spaces are explained by probing classifiers; however, some findings remain inconclusive. In this paper, we present LMFingerprints, a novel scoring‐based technique for the explanation of contextualized word embeddings. We introduce two categories of scoring functions, which measure (1) the degree of contextualization, i.e., the layerwise changes in the embedding vectors, and (2) the type of contextualization, i.e., the captured context information. We integrate these scores into an interactive explanation workspace. By combining visual and verbal elements, we provide an overview of contextualization in six popular transformer‐based language models. We evaluate hypotheses from the domain of computational linguistics, and our results not only confirm findings from related work but also reveal new aspects about the information captured in the embedding spaces. For instance, we show that while numbers are poorly contextualized, stopwords have an unexpected high contextualization in the models' upper layers, where their neighborhoods shift from similar functionality tokens to tokens that contribute to the meaning of the surrounding sentences.

A corpus-based approach to author’s idiolect study: lexicological aspect

The aim of this paper is to present the application of a multimodal approach to the analysis of the writer’s lexicon. The versatility of the anthropocentric paradigm of modern linguistics and the approaches applied in our research are mindful of the choice of relevant research methods. The features of a writer’s lexicon (or idiolect in a broader sense) have been of great interest among scholars though they have been mostly explored by literary critics. Nowadays, more linguists are also interested in thorough research on the subject by applying more rigorous scientific methods like quantitative and statistical ones. The paper herewith focuses on a few of them as a preliminary attempt to showcase some results. The primary concern is to make this study corpus-based. Hence it is crucial to create a corpus of works based on the generally acknowledged rules and principles. Therefore, such a corpus may contribute to the development of corpus linguistics and be applicable to other research regarding studying the writer’s idiolect. Another point of interest is that such research may either support or somehow disprove established views regarding the writing style of a certain author (that is very useful when considering author attribution issues or even forensic linguistics, though that is not the case of the given research). Finally, lexical semantics plays one of the leading roles in defining dominant concepts of an author’s writing style corresponding to the cognitive linguistics domain. As a result of such an approach, it may help to construct the lexicon of the author into an ideographic entity. Furthermore, similar findings or comparative analysis of corresponding objects of study may contribute to displaying the author’s outlook and subsequently that of the whole nation.

Brief but Mighty? Sustained L2 Learning and Perceived Psychobehavioral Benefits After Short‐Term Study Abroad

AbstractEvidence suggests that short‐term study abroad experiences can help advance various dimensions of second language (L2) learners’ linguistic competence. However, the extent to which gains following a brief sojourn are durable and maintained after immersion remains an open question. The present study examined both the immediate and sustained learning outcomes following a short‐term study abroad program by considering L2 Spanish learners’ (a) linguistic gains in global proficiency, oral production, and L2 knowledge, and (b) nonlinguistic gains in perceived psychobehavioral flexibility, a trait that remains underresearched despite its broad relevance to study abroad contexts. Data were collected at the onset and end of a summer study abroad program in Spain, as well as 5 weeks post‐sojourn, after students’ reimmersion in the first language environment. Mixed‐effects models revealed that gains in global proficiency and some aspects of oral production and L2 knowledge, as well as increases in perceived psychobehavioral flexibility, were noticeable at the end of the program and were maintained for several weeks post‐sojourn in the absence of further L2 instruction. Findings provide a first look into the potential of short‐term study abroad for promoting durable developmental changes across linguistic and nonlinguistic domains.

Phonological patterns in Greek language in toddlers and children with Down syndrome and children with language impairment

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder which is represented by a variety of deficits in all linguistic domains including phonology. Previous research, mainly conducted in the English language, has documented phonological deficits in early childhood in Down syndrome. Given the paucity of research in the area of phonology in the Greek language, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the phonological skills of children with Down syndrome (N = 45) in the Greek language and compare them with those of age‐matched and non‐verbal age children with language impairment (N = 45). A test, standardized in the Greek language, was used for the above purpose which consisted of four subscales: articulation; phonemic analysis; phonemic completion; and phonemic distinction. The results showed that children with Down syndrome performed poorer on all four subscales than children with language impairment, and provided evidence for distinct difficulties in specific consonants and complex articulations inherent in the Greek language.

Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto‐instrument is a tool: a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category—instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.

A Domain-General Monitoring Account of Bilingual Language Control in Recognition: The Role of Language Dominance and Bilingual Experience.

The ability of bilingual individuals to manage two competing languages is assumed to rely on both domain-specific language control and domain-general control mechanisms. However, previous studies have reported mixed findings about the extent and nature of cross-domain generality. The present study examined the role of language dominance, along with bilingual language experience, in the relationship between word recognition and domain-general cognitive control. Two single-language lexical decision tasks (one in L1 and another in L2) and a domain-general flanker task were administered to bilinguals who live in the sociolinguistic context of a minority and a majority language, namely, Uyghur (L1) and Chinese (L2), respectively. The results showed a diversity in language dominance patterns with better performance in L2 than L1 in the recognition modality, even for participants who self-identified as globally being dominant in L1. This finding reflected all bilinguals’ self-evaluation that their preferred language for reading was L2, suggesting that language dominance is dynamic, depending on what language modality is measured. Furthermore, it was found that an earlier onset age of L2 acquisition (but not recent exposure) and a higher across-modality dominance in L2 were related to faster L2 word recognition. When self-reported language dominance was operationalised as a grouping variable, it was further found that both across-modality L1- and L2-dominant bilingual participants demonstrated a significant relationship between L2 word recognition and domain-general monitoring control, while only L1-dominant bilinguals additionally tapped into inhibitory control, indexed by the flanker effect during L2 word recognition. These findings suggest that language dominance has an impact on the extent and nature of the overlap in control mechanisms across specific linguistic and domain-general cognitive domains and add evidence to a domain-general monitoring account of bilingual word recognition.

A meta-study on the effect of extensive reading activities in elementary English

In this study, a meta-analysis was conducted on studies of extensive reading activities in the setting of Korean elementary schools to investigate the effects of extensive reading activities on the improvement of English proficiency, the affective domain of elementary school students, and the moderating effects of extensive reading activities. The research questions established through this meta-analysis are as follows: First, what is the overall effect size of elementary school English extensive reading? Second, what is the effect size of elementary school English extensive reading on linguistic domains (reading, listening, writing, vocabulary) and affective domains (interest, confidence)? Third, what is the effect size for each control variable of extensive reading (with or without teacher intervention, type of extensive reading, number of classes, and class time)? For this purpose, a total of 21 articles about extensive reading in elementary school from 2001 to 2020 were selected and investigative variables were coded. The meta-analysis was ensued to measure the effect size of overall, linguistic and affective domains, and effect sizes were compared for each moderating variable. As a result of this meta-analysis, extensive reading activity in elementary school showed a medium or higher effect size in both linguistic and affective domains, confirming that extensive reading was an effective activity to support English learning for elementary school students. In addition, it was checked as to which variables controlled the effect of extensive reading in elementary school. It was found that the longer the reading session performed per period, the higher the effect size.

Effects of Dominance in Exposure and Linguistic Distance in the Bilingual Proficiency Profiles of Dutch-German and Greek-German School-Age Bilinguals

Bilingual development is characterized by systematic variability, so called profile effects. This paper investigates dominance in exposure and linguistic distance as potential sources of bilingual profile effects by comparing the lexical and narrative profiles of Greek-German bilinguals to those of Dutch-German bilinguals. Both bilingual groups, aged 10–11 years, were recruited from bilingual school-contexts in Germany. The Greek-German bilinguals (N=15) constitute a classic heritage language population with a fairly distantly related language combination, the Dutch-German bilinguals (N=15) constitute an under-researched group of bilingual speakers with a very closely related language combination. Participants were asked about their language exposure and underwent a productive vocabulary task and a narrative production task in both languages. Findings indicate that dominance in exposure did not directly translate into dominance in lexical proficiency, which might be related to a cognate facilitation effect in the lexical tasks for the Dutch-German bilinguals. The narrative analysis indicates that, on group-level, dominance in exposure translated into dominance in narrative performance. A correlational analysis showed that dominance affected narrative measures differently and correlated differently with narrative measures depending on the group and, thus, language combination. However, it could not be affirmed that the linguistic proximity of Dutch and German balanced out dominance effects in general, since dominance in that group of bilinguals was too stark. It is concluded from this that dominance in exposure and linguistic distance interact in bilingual development, but that this relationship is also dependent on the magnitude of dominance and the type of task and linguistic domain under investigation.

Exploring Parental Attitude and Practices towards Story Book Reading

Storytelling can be a purposeful action leading to positive outcomes. Classroom teaching strategies can employ storytelling to develop the linguistic, cognitive, social and emotional domains of young children. Parents reading to their children can yield hurclean benefits to their overall development. This study intended to explore the parental attitude and practices towards story book reading. A cross sectional study design was approached for this survey. A cross-sectional survey study design was employed for this study. A universal sampling method was employed to seek the responses from the caregivers. All the caregivers who agree to provide consent filled the form. The questionnaire was made on a Google link and was shared in a caregiver’s educational Facebook group. The data was collected from August – September 2021. This findings of this study provides some insights into building awareness programs for the parents to provide them with hand on skills to initiate, sustain and promote story telling at home.

GUM: The generalized upper model

GUM is a linguistically-motivated ontology originally developed to support natural language processing systems by offering a level of representation intermediate between linguistic forms and domain knowledge. Whereas modeling decisions for individual domains may need to be responsive to domain-specific criteria, a linguistically-motivated ontology offers a characterization that generalizes across domains because its design criteria are derived independently both of domain and of application. With respect to this mediating role, the use of GUM resembles (and partially predates) the adoption of upper ontologies as tools for mediating across domains and for supporting domain modeling. This paper briefly introduces the ontology, setting out its origins, design principles and applications. The example cases for this special issue are then described, illustrating particularly some of the principal differences and similarities of GUM to non-linguistically motivated upper ontologies.

Listening-Based Communication Ability in Adults With Hearing Loss: A Scoping Review of Existing Measures.

IntroductionHearing loss in adults has a pervasive impact on health and well-being. Its effects on everyday listening and communication can directly influence participation across multiple spheres of life. These impacts, however, remain poorly assessed within clinical settings. Whilst various tests and questionnaires that measure listening and communication abilities are available, there is a lack of consensus about which measures assess the factors that are most relevant to optimising auditory rehabilitation. This study aimed to map current measures used in published studies to evaluate listening skills needed for oral communication in adults with hearing loss.MethodsA scoping review was conducted using systematic searches in Medline, EMBASE, Web of Science and Google Scholar to retrieve peer-reviewed articles that used one or more linguistic-based measure necessary to oral communication in adults with hearing loss. The range of measures identified and their frequency where charted in relation to auditory hierarchies, linguistic domains, health status domains, and associated neuropsychological and cognitive domains.Results9121 articles were identified and 2579 articles that reported on 6714 discrete measures were included for further analysis. The predominant linguistic-based measure reported was word or sentence identification in quiet (65.9%). In contrast, discourse-based measures were used in 2.7% of the articles included. Of the included studies, 36.6% used a self-reported instrument purporting to measures of listening for communication. Consistent with previous studies, a large number of self-reported measures were identified (n = 139), but 60.4% of these measures were used in only one study and 80.7% were cited five times or fewer.DiscussionCurrent measures used in published studies to assess listening abilities relevant to oral communication target a narrow set of domains. Concepts of communicative interaction have limited representation in current measurement. The lack of measurement consensus and heterogeneity amongst the assessments limit comparisons across studies. Furthermore, extracted measures rarely consider the broader linguistic, cognitive and interactive elements of communication. Consequently, existing measures may have limited clinical application if assessing the listening-related skills required for communication in daily life, as experienced by adults with hearing loss.

Linguistic Priming and Learning Adjacent and Nonadjacent Dependencies in Serial Reaction Time Tasks

AbstractAlthough syntactic priming has been well studied and is commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. Recent studies have suggested that exposure to nonlinguistic statistical patterns may influence language users’ relative clause attachment biases, but whether the priming effect comes from implicit learning or explicit experimental task demands has remained unclear. In this study, we tested whether implicit learning of adjacent and nonadjacent sequences occurs in a nonlinguistic task (the serial reaction time task), and if so, whether these implicitly learned dependencies can cause syntactic priming in the linguistic domain. We found no priming effects even though dependencies in the serial reaction time task were successfully learned: learning of nonlinguistic dependencies did not prime relative clause attachment biases when dependency learning was strictly implicit in nature. This work provides novel evidence that implicit knowledge from a domain‐general sequencing task alone does not necessarily induce syntactic priming.

Textomatify – A Web Application to Automate Multiple Task like Text Recognition from Image, Speech Recognition, Machine Translation

The aim of our project to automate the application to overcome from the language barrier among countries and also states within the country, the above-mentioned application will perform the various features in the application. Language technology has become pervasive in everyday life. Neural networks are a key component in this technology thanks to their ability to model large amounts of data. Text recognition in images is a research area which attempts to develop a computer system with the ability to automatically read the text from images. Speech is the first important primary need, and the most convenient means of communication between people. The communication among human computer interaction is called human computer interface. Machine translation is a domain of computational linguistics, which explores the use of software to translate text from one language to another. Machine translation simply performs substitution of words in one language for words in other, but that may not assure good translation. In the Project we combine all three domains in one system. Here we integrate Text extract from image, Speech recognition and Text translation from one language to another in one web application.

The Impact of Incentives on Early Childhood Teachers’ Proficiency in Lubombo Region, Eswatini

Early childhood development programmes have been found to be crucial in the development of children in physical, cognitive, socio-emotional and linguistic domains. For early childhood development (ECD) programmes to be effective, several factors need to be considered, among them human and material resources. Although the availability of the aforementioned factors is of the utmost importance, there is also a need to establish the unforeseen factors that can help ECD programmes to be more effective. Currently, there is little information regarding what can facilitate proficiency among early childhood teachers in their daily practice. This study focused on the impact of incentives on the performance of early childhood development teachers in the Lubombo region in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland. The objectives of the study were to find out the types of incentives given to ECD teachers, to examine the factors affecting the ECD teachers’ incentives and proficiency, and to explore the best ways of incentivising ECD teachers to improve their effectiveness. The research questions guiding the study were derived from the research objectives and the approach used in the study was purely qualitative. The study adopted a case study design and used unstructured questionnaires, cell phone interviews and focus group discussions as data collection tools. The research was confined to Lubombo, where a sample of 30 participants was selected. The sample included 10 ECD teachers, 10 parents and 10 administrators. The findings of the study were that ECD teachers are paid low salaries, which are not sustainable, and they are not hired by the government and so have no pensionable benefits. The study recommends that the use of incentives can improve the proficiency of early childhood teachers; ECD teachers should be paid salaries like any other teacher that are scaled according to their qualifications. Scholarships to further their studies should also be made available to them. More research is essential in areas of teachers’ proficiency and quality early childhood development programmes.

Increased associative interference under high cognitive load

Associative processing is central for human cognition, perception and memory. But while associations often facilitate performance, processing irrelevant associations can interfere with performance, for example when learning new information. The aim of this study was to explore whether associative interference is influenced by contextual factors such as resources availability. Experiments 1–3 show that associative interference increases under high cognitive load. This result generalized to both long-term and short-term memory associations, and to both explicitly learned as well as incidentally learned associations in the linguistic and pictorial domains. Experiment 4 further revealed that attention to associative information can delay one’s perceptual processing when lacking resources. Taken together, when resources diminish associative interference increases, and additionally, processing novel and ambiguous information is hindered. These findings bare relevance to other domains as well (e.g., social, educational), in which increased load or stress may prompt an undesirable bias towards prior, misleading information.

Changes in Pronoun Use a Decade before Clinical Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Dementia-Linguistic Contexts Suggest Problems in Perspective-Taking.

The use of pronouns has been shown to change pathologically in the early phases of Alzheimer’s Dementia (AD). So far, the findings have been of a quantitative nature. Little is known, however, about the developmental path of the change, its onset, the domains in which it initially occurs, and if and how it spreads to other linguistic domains. The present study investigates pronoun use in six speakers of German a decade before they were clinically diagnosed with AD (LAD) and six biographically matched healthy controls (CTR). The data originate from monologic spoken language elicited by semi-spontaneous biographical interviews. Investigation of nine pronoun types revealed group differences in the use of three pronoun types: D-pronouns—a specific pronoun type of German for reference to persons and objects; the impersonal pronoun man ‘one’, and the propositional pronoun das ‘this/that’. Investigation of the linguistic contexts in which these three pronoun types were used revealed a correlation with declines in elaborative and evaluative information; that is, information the hearer would benefit from in creating an informed model of the discourse. We, therefore, hypothesize that the early changes in language use due to AD point to problems in perspective-taking, specifically in taking the hearer’s perspective.

Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well as various aspects of narrative structure, communicative competence, and language use (such as code-switching). It is particularly well suited to the study of discourse cohesion, referential adequacy and informativeness, and of course to the study of narrative structure and richness, and the acquisition of a more formal or literary register. In this commentary article, I reflect on the five empirical papers included in the special issue. I focus on methodological challenges for the analysis of narratives and identify outstanding questions.