End Of Word Research Articles

Challenges of Automatic Speech Recognition for medical interviews - research for Polish language

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are quickly becoming a crucial element in supporting healthcare providers, improving the flow of information among medical teams, and enhancing the patient's experience. However, to be fully supportive, these ASR systems must meet certain requirements dictated by market realities: high accuracy of speech recognition and low rate of errors, the possibility of additional training the model, and the possibility of on-premise system installation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of leading ASR systems available on the Polish market for the needs of conducting medical interviews. We selected three systems, Google ASR, Microsoft ASR, and Techmo ASR, and we compared their performance on a prepared data set of medical-related expressions spoken in Polish. The results of our analysis indicated that there are minor discrepancies in the accuracy of speech recognition between all three evaluated ASR systems, whereas only two ASR systems met the raised requirements, in both cases partially. Still, they all exhibited specific problems in recognising word endings or word boundaries. We were able to categorise such problems into: Misrecognitions, Quality Problems, and Word Boundaries, varying in their level of influence on the further speech recognition process. Our research findings are expected to provide valuable insights to a wide range of stakeholders facilitating the development of tailored speech recognition solutions that meet the specific needs of medical sector.

Japanese Learner’s Ability to Pronounce Nasal Consonant /N/ Located at The End of Words

Japanese Learner’s Ability to Pronounce Nasal Consonant /N/ Located at The End of Words

Nursing students’ attitudes toward caring for patients at the end of life and associated factors

Introduction: Understanding nursing students’ attitudes towards caring for patients at their end of life and associated factors will help to provide the best practice and contribute to improving the quality of life in patients. Objectives: To investigate the attitude of nursing students towards caring for patients at their end of life and its associated factors. Methodology: A descriptive cross-sectional design was conducted among 721 full-time nursing students from the 1st-4th year at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Hue University. Results: The attitude of nursing students towards caring for patients at the end of life has Mean = 103.7 + 8.32; score distribution ranges from 82 to 135 points, of which 76.4% of nursing students have a positive attitude. There was a correlation between age, grade, academic rating, clinical patient care experience, and end-oflife care experience with nursing students’ attitudes. Conclusion: The findings showed initial information to build a training program for palliative care. It is necessary to provide adequate knowledge and psychological support for nursing students to take care of the patient at the end of life Key words: attitude, dying patient, nursing student.

A Preliminary Study of the Subdialects of Sarawak Malay based on Phonological Features and Lexical Words

This article is a preliminary comparison of the phonological features of the subdialects of Sarawak Malay. The comparison covers basic phonological features that include phonemes inventory and their distribution in words, diphthongs, and vowel and consonant clusters. The survey is important as the basis for future research on the subdialect mapping of Sarawak Malay. Without the fundamental description of each subdialect in the aspects of phonology, lexical and, to some extent, grammar, it is difficult to research on the development of Malay subdialects in Sarawak. The data for this study were compiled by the present authors and also from the works of past researchers on the subject. The subdialects compared include those of Kuching, Tambirat, Kabong, and Debak, which also represent four focal areas of the Malay population in Sarawak. Two subdialect clusters were identified, namely the subdialect cluster of Kuching and another cluster spoken by the coastal Malays in Western Sarawak. The former group includes varieties in Malay villages in Bahagian Kuching, the surrounding basin of Sg. Sarawak, Sematan, Santubong, and Bako. The latter group includes varieties in the Kalaka-Saribas area in Bahagian Sri Aman and Betong, as well as in Bahagian Samarahan in Btg Sadong and its surrounding areas, namely Asajaya, Simunjan, and Sebuyau. This latter group is more phonologically heterogeneous than the former group, and shares some distinctive phonological features, such as the 8-vowel system, the absence of phoneme /-É£/ at word end, as well as diversity in diphthongs. At the same time, they also display phonological differences, such as the realisation of phoneme /-a/ to /-ə/ or /-o/, or maintenance of /-a/ at word end

The Patterns of Blends Found in Food and Beverage Names in Instagram

The present study discusses the patterns of blends found in the data collected which are food and beverage names found in Instagram and describe the possible new meaning of the blends. The researcher uses Mattiello’s classification of blends as the approach to analyze the data. From the findings, there are fiftythree data that can be considered as blends. The data are classified into three perspectives: the first is morphotactic, the second is morphonological (and graphic), and the third is morphosemantic. The result shows that morphotactically the most productive pattern of the blends is total blend more specifically the blend which the beginning of the first source word is followed by the end of the second source word with 19 data or 34.5 percent. Second, Morphonologically and orthographically, the most productive blend is non-overlapping blends with 31 data or 58.5 percent. Last, morphosemantically, the coordinate blend is more frequent than attributive blends with 30 data or 56.6 percent.

Stylistic Fingerprints, POS-tags, and Inflected Languages: A Case Study in Polish

ABSTRACT In stylometric investigations, frequencies of the most frequent words (MFWs) and character n-grams outperform other style-markers, even if their performance varies significantly across languages. In inflected languages, word endings play a prominent role, and hence different word forms cannot be recognized using generic text tokenization. Countless inflected word forms make frequencies sparse, making most statistical procedures complicated. Presumably, applying one of the NLP techniques, such as lemmatization and/or parsing, might increase the performance of classification. The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of grammatical features (as assessed via POS-tag n-grams) and lemmatized forms in recognizing authorial profiles, in order to address the underlying issue of the degree of freedom of choice within lexis and grammar. Using a corpus of Polish novels, we performed a series of supervised authorship attribution benchmarks, in order to compare the classification accuracy for different types of lexical and syntactic style-markers. Even if the performance of POS-tags as well as lemmatized forms was notoriously worse than that of lexical markers, the difference was not substantial and never exceeded ca. 15%.

Rhythmic Notation in Plainchant from Sixteenth-Century Chaumont?

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century chant manuscripts from the collegiate church of St. John the Baptist in Chaumont, France, have a notational anomaly: among the standard features of square notation, graphically elongated forms are used. These signs, often two to three times the length of a standard square, are frequently found at the ends of words and sometimes in combination with other neumes. The use of the signs suggests that their presence is not merely space-filling or ornamental, but rather, that they must have been intended to influence some aspect of how the chant was sung. Using a series of six criteria alongside contemporary music theoretical writings, I investigate the use of the sign by the church’s scribes and propose likely interpretations.

Phonetic and phonological cues to prediction: Neurophysiology of Danish stød

A corpus study and a combined behavioural and neurophysiological study tested how phonetic and phonological features of the Danish creaky voice feature ‘stød’ influence predictive processing. Being associated with certain word endings, stød and its modal voice counterpart non-stød can cue upcoming speech. Stød has two phases. The first shows phonetic differences in pitch while the second, characterised by creaky voice, has been interpreted as the phonological stød proper. Participants listened to nouns cross-spliced between the two stød phases and between stem and a following singular or plural suffix. Suffixes invalidly cued by phonological stød or non-stød showed longer response times and N400 and P600 effects, the former suggesting that stød/non-stød are becoming grammaticalized as singular and plural morphemes. Even subtle phonetic differences preceding stød proper increased response times, but N400 and P600 amplitudes were not significantly increased. Results suggest predictive use of both phonetic and phonological features, but that phonological stød cues override phonetic cues. The corpus study indicated that word beginnings with stød are less frequent and have fewer possible continuations than non-stød. Stød yielded increased negativity 280–430 ms after stød proper onset, which might be interpreted as a pre-activation negativity for the more predictively useful cue.

Metode Scaffolding dengan Kartu Suku Kata Meningkatkan Kemampuan Membaca Permulaan Siswa Mild Intellectual Disabilities

Limited cognitive function students need special learning strategies in formal schools. This study analyzed students with Mild Intellectual Disabilities were based on psychological assessments based on observations, interviews, Binet Intelligence Tests, Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) tests, and reports on learning outcomes. Scaffolding method is a learning technique designed to change the support given to students during the learning session by adjusting the level of students' abilities. This study aims to improve reading skills in mild intellectual disabilities students, especially early reading skills. This research method uses a single case experimental design with scaffolding method intervention followed by the use of syllable cards in a 2nd year of elementary school students who comprehended Indonesian language material in class 1 semester I. The data were analyzed descriptively which reported the improvement in the subject's reading ability based on the results of the intervention. The intervention to the subject was preceded by psychoeducation to teachers and parents for the attainment of research objectives. The results showed that the scaffolding method, followed by the use of syllable cards, specifically affected the subject's ability to pronounce letters, read syllables, read words, complete words, write dictated words, and read simple sentences. As a result, the subject shows the ability to read three to five syllables in a word and the subject can read words containing consonants at the end of words.
 Keywords: Mild Intellectual Disabilities, Scaffolding Method, Syllable Cards, Beginning Reading, Children with Special Needs

Observations on Basic Intonational Patterns of Questions and Statements in Standard Lithuanian

This paper discusses the results of the pilot study on intonational patterns of questions and statements in Lithuanian. Special attention is devoted to the tone changes at the end of the intonational phrase, i.e. to the boundary tone and the pitch accent of the last word. In order to identify the main patterns, a corpus of 96 tokens (statements, questions with wh-word ‘kada’ and yes/no questions with and without interrogative word ‘ar’ read by four speakers) has been examined. F0 measurements were extracted using Praat. The audio files were annotated based on the main principles of the autosegmental-metrical phonology: high tone is marked with H, low tone – L, pitch accent – ‘*’ and boundary tone – ‘%.’ In the perception experiment, the participants were asked to identify the statements and questions (the interrogative words were removed). 21 native speakers participated in the experiment.The results have shown that the end of the statements in Standard Lithuanian is described by low tones (L* L%), whereas questions can have tones as follows: high-low (HL* L%), low (L* L%) and low-high (LH* H%). The tone patterns at the end of the questions depend on the presence or absence of the interrogation word: wh- questions are characterized by low tones at the end of phrase (L *L%), yes/no questions with an interrogative word ‘ar’ may have low (L* L%) or rising tones (LH* H%), and yes/no questions without an interrogative word end in rising (LH* H%) or falling (HL* L%) tones. The patterns with low or falling tones are common for the questions with an interrogative word and (or) focus word in a non-final position of the phrase. The results of the perception experiment allow us to draw preliminary conclusions that the high boundary tone, the interrogative word and the pitch accent of the focused word are equivalent markers of a question in Lithuanian.

NOTES ON GENUS SYSTEM AND GENUS INHERENCE PERSONAL NOMINA IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN

In Contemporary Transnational German (CTG) there is no biological and linguistically consistent congruency alongside of genders. Usually three genders are defined in German: masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, there is also a distinctive Common gender, and many Epicenes can be found in German as well. Moreover, an additional Dubium, Incertain or Diverse gender may be distinguishable among up to six genders. Word endings in and by themselves don`t reveal grammatical gender thoroughly within current German. In addition, you have to consider set theoretical aspects, intersections and certain propositional connectives. Different aspects of German nouns, selected distinctions and relations between gender inherence and grammatical German gender on the other hand are addressed here from a systematic point of view.

Multinomial regression modeling of vowel insertion patterns: adaptation of coda stops from English to Korean

Abstract When an English word ending in a stop is adapted to Korean, a vowel is variably inserted after the final stop. Vowel insertion in this position is surprising because voiceless stops are permissible in coda position in Korean and it is not motivated by Korean native phonology. This study examines five factors that have been hypothesized to affect the likelihood of vowel insertion, i.e., tenseness of the pre-final vowel, voicing and place of the English final stop, word size and final stress. These possibilities were tested using a corpus of Korean loanwords whose source word ends in a stop. Patterns of vowel insertion were classified as no vowel insertion, vowel insertion, or optional vowel insertion, and analyzed using multinomial regression modeling. The results confirmed that all the relevant factors significantly increased the likelihood of vowel insertion and optional vowel insertion patterns relative to no vowel insertion patterns compared with the reference condition rates. These findings suggest that particular features indeed impact production patterns in loanword phonology. My Results support the need for further research into how other possible auditory factors such as stop release may shape speech perception in loanword adaptation.

Does the use of Gender-Fair Language Impair the Comprehensibility of Video Lectures? – An Experiment Using an Authentic Video Lecture Manipulating Role Nouns in German

Gender-fair language makes women and other genders, their interests, and their achievements more visible and is particularly relevant to grammatical gender languages such as German, in which most nouns and personal pronouns are assigned to a specific gender. The present study tested the often repeated critical claims that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of videos. In an experiment with N = 105 students, participants watched a video on self-determination theory, either with masculine-only forms or using the glottal stop, a form of spoken gender-fair language that inserts an abrupt and sustained closure of the vocal cords in the larynx between the masculine form or the stem and the feminine ending of words (e.g. in German “Leserʔinnen”, ∼feʔmale readers). Subsequently, participants completed a questionnaire regarding the video's comprehensibility. The results show no statistically significant impairment regarding the general subjective comprehensibility (partial η2 < .01), the ease of ascribing meaning to the words (partial η2 < .01), the ease of decoding the syntax of the sentences (partial η2 = .03), or the aesthetic appeal of the videos (partial η2 = .02). The critics’ claims are therefore questioned.

Difficulties in Learning English Plural Formation by EFL College Students

Freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in plural formation. Instruction covered regular plural nouns, irregular plural nouns, plural formation of words ending in –f, and –o, nouns that have the same plural and singular form, and words with Latin and foreign plurals. The students did all the exercises in the textbook, then took an immediate test a week after instruction and a delayed test at the end of the semester (3 months later). Responses were scored and a corpus of 3099 errors was collected from both tests. No significant differences were found in the amount and types of errors made by the students in the immediate and delayed tests. Results revealed that freshman students tended to regularize English plural formation and overgeneralize regular English plural morphemes (63.28%), i.e., they deleted the regular plural suffix from nouns ending in an –s or –es (35.37%) or tended to add the regular plural suffix to words that do not have it (27.91%). They also confused singular and plural endings of Latin words (15.07%). They either confused the singular and plural forms of the same Latin word or added a faulty Latin suffix to a Latin word or even a non-Latin word such as criterium, *curriculon, *natia, *salma, *petrolea. In other cases, they thought the singular and plural forms of a word were the same (7%). In addition, findings showed that the most difficult plurals to master were those of words that end with an –s or –es but have no singular form such as measles, news, pajamas, means, linguistics (28.85%); words with Latin plurals (21.85%); non-count nouns such as information, electricity, petroleum, salmon with no plural form (21.4%), and words that have a plural, but they thought they have no plural form such as nation, illness, infection, African (8.55%). Interference among the English plural morphemes themselves and confusing plural formation rules caused most errors. No interference from Arabic pluralization was found. Recommendations for improving students’ English plural formation competence are given.

Morphological Analysis Of Names Ending With Alif-Nun, Which Is Not Actually

Aslında olmayan harf ilave edilen kelimeye “mezid” denir. Bu harfler bir tür yapım eki görevi görürler ve ilave edildikleri kelimeye artı anlamlar katarlar. Bu cümleden olmak üzere Arapçada isim, sıfat ve mastarların sonuna eklenen elif-nun harfleri kelimeye ekstra anlamlar katmaktadır. Bu çalışmada morfolojik olarak sonunda elif-nun bulunan isim, sıfat ve mastarlar ele alınmıştır. 
 Bilindiği üzere elif ve nun kelimelere ya irab (kelimelerin cümledeki konumuna bağlı olarak sonlarında meydana gelen değişim) veya sarf (kelimeye ilave anlamlar katmak için kelime türetme) nedeniyle eklenmektedir. İrab nedeniyle yapılan elif-nun ilavesi Nahiv ilmimdeki musennâ / ikil konusunu ilgilendirdiği için çalışmada konuya değinilmemiştir. 
 Bu çalışmada hangi kelimelere elif-nun eklendiği, hangilerinin tekil-çoğul oldukları ve asıllarının ne oldukları konuları üzerinde durduk. Ayrıca elif-nun ile biten bazı isimler gayri munsarif olduğu için, elif nun alan gayri munsarif isimler ve ism-i tasgir konularını detaylıca ele aldık.

Prosodic characteristics of prepausal words produced by patients with neurodegenerative disease.

Prosody of patients with neurodegenerative disease is often impaired. We investigated changes to two prosodic cues in patients: the pitch contour and the duration of prepausal words. We analyzed recordings of picture descriptions produced by patients with neurodegenerative conditions that included either cognitive (n=223), motor (n=68), or mixed cognitive and motor impairments (n=109), and by healthy controls (n=28; HC). A speech activity detector identified pauses. Words were aligned to the acoustic signal; pitch values were normalized in scale and duration. Analyses of pitch showed that the ending (90th-100th percentile) of prepausal words had a lower pitch in the mixed and motor groups than the cognitive group and HC. The pitch contour from the midpoint of words to the end showed a steep rising slope for HC, but patients showed a gentle rising or flat slope. This suggests that HC signaled the continuation of their description after the pause with rising contour; patients either failed to keep describing the picture due to cognitive impairment or could not raise pitch due to motor impairments. Prepausal words showed longer duration relative to non-prepausal words with no significant differences between the groups. This suggests that prepausal lengthening is preserved in patients.

More efficient formation of longer-term representations for word forms at birth can be linked to better language skills at 2 years

Infants are able to extract words from speech early in life. Here we show that the quality of forming longer-term representations for word forms at birth predicts expressive language ability at the age of two years. Seventy-five neonates were familiarized with two spoken disyllabic pseudowords. We then tested whether the neonate brain predicts the second syllable from the first one by presenting a familiarized pseudoword frequently, and occasionally violating the learned syllable combination by different rare pseudowords. Distinct brain responses were elicited by predicted and unpredicted word endings, suggesting that the neonates had learned the familiarized pseudowords. The difference between responses to predicted and unpredicted pseudowords indexing the quality of word-form learning during familiarization significantly correlated with expressive language scores (the mean length of utterance) at 24 months in the same infant. These findings suggest that 1) neonates can memorize disyllabic words so that a learned first syllable generates predictions for the word ending, and 2) early individual differences in the quality of word-form learning correlate with language skills. This relationship helps early identification of infants at risk for language impairment.

CIRC Type Cooperative Learning Model in Learning Arabic Rules

Arabic rules are one of the elements of language other than sounds (al-Aswat) and vocabulary (al-Mufrodat) and are important in learning sentence structure in Arabic. Without it, Arabic would not be understood, because it could not determine subjects, predicates, objects, and descriptions. However, most students have difficulty in understanding it, in addition to many new terms that are unfamiliar when compared to terms in Indonesian or English also changes at the end of words (i'rob) whether the change is in the form of letters or letters. Based on that problem, the right learning model is needed in its delivery. This article will discuss one of the models for learning Arabic rules, namely the CIRC (Cooperative Integrated Reading And Composition) learning model. This article uses the Library Research method, with data sources in the form of books, and journals, both online and offline, to obtain information relevant to the problem discussed, especially to describe theoretical studies that have been determined. The findings of this article explain that the CIRC learning model is more appropriate in improving reading and writing skills because the rules of Arabic are only limited to being a medium, not a goal, learning it is more appropriate by using direct methods by providing exercises related to the number of sentences in Arabic. The implication of this article states that CIRC is one of the learning models that can be developed to achieve competency in understanding the Arabic rules of students.

Perception and expression of talker gender at the beginning and end of words

Among the common acoustic differences between the voices of women and men are the spectral characteristics of fricatives. Akin to pitch and formant frequencies, the frequency characteristics of fricatives are lower in men than in women. These fricative characteristics are learned social cues that help to express the talker’s gender. Listeners reliably incorporate these differences into perceptual judgments by categorizing the same sound differently depending on what they perceive the gender of the talker to be; a fricative that is intermediate to “s” and “sh” will be labeled “s” when thought to be spoken by a man, but “sh” if by a woman. However, the acoustic descriptions and the perceptual consequences of these gender-related acoustic differences have been explored almost exclusively at syllable-onset position. Here we use both word-onset and -offset positions in both perception and production tasks. The perceptual accommodation of talker gender is weaker when the fricative is at syllable offset, inviting questions about whether the extent of gender-related changes in acoustics are simply commensurate with salience of word position. We will present both the perception and production data in an attempt to unify both phenomena in relation to each other.

Practical Prosody: New Hope for Teaching German Plurals

AbstractGerman plural formation appears unsystematic and largely arbitrary to many second language (L2) learners. While some approaches have attempted to identify patterns and rules to help L2 learners (e.g., Anton et al., 2017; Di Donato & Clyde, 2020; Kraiss, 2014), one central observation from linguistic analysis has been absent from pedagogical advances: German plurals show a strong tendency to end in a syllabic trochee (e.g., Wegener, 1999; Wiese, 2000, 2001, 2009). This article seeks to bridge the gap between linguistic insights and L2 pedagogy by presenting an instructional approach integrating the trochee. We provide support for this approach based on an exploratory study comparing two groups of L2 speakers that both received several suffix‐predicting rules for specific word endings and completed controlled practice exercises on plurals. Crucially, only one group received additional instruction on the prosodic pattern of German plurals. While both groups made gains, the prosodic training group showed a greater increase in confidence and accuracy in plural formation, particularly among lower‐proficiency speakers. The prosodic training group also produced more trochaic plurals for nonce words, thus responding more like native speakers. Overall, we suggest that this linguistically‐informed strategy might help students learn plurals more effectively by delimiting suffix options based on prosody.