Frequent Function Words Research Articles

Overuse of familiar phrases by individuals with Williams syndrome masks differences in language processing.

We investigated whether individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) produce language with a bias towards statistical properties of word combinations rather than grammatical rules, resulting in an overuse of holistically stored, familiar phrases. We analysed continuous speech samples from English children with WS (n = 12), typically developing (TD) controls matched on chronological age (n = 15) and TD controls matched on language age (n = 14). Alongside word count, utterance length, grammatical complexity, and morphosyntactic errors, we measured familiarity of expressions by computing collocation strength of each word combination. The WS group produced stronger collocations than both control groups. Moreover, the WS group produced fewer complex sentences, shorter utterances, and more frequent function words than chronological-age matched controls. Language in WS may appear more typical than it is because familiar, holistically processed expressions mask grammatical and other difficulties.

«Сирин не уступает Леонову»: метод Delta для стилеметрического анализа русских романов межвоенного периода

The article analyzes the stylistic features of Nabokov’s Russian-language novels in the context of Russian interwar prose. The main method is Burrows’s Delta — one of the most reliable stylometric tools that allows comparing texts with each other based on the distribution of the most frequent function words. In addition, SVM and KNN methods are also used to classify texts. The study has two objectives: 1) to carry out a primary clustering of the styles of leading Russian prose writers of a certain era, and also, through the use of modern algorithms, to determine the place among them of the style of Nabokov (Sirin); 2) to test these algorithms for their ability to informatively and adequately solve the tasks of stylistic distribution and for the consistency of the results. It turns out that stylistically close to Nabokov’s novels are the texts of Leonov, Gazdanov and Grin. A particularly clear similarity is found between Nabokov’s late novels, Leonov’s Skutarevsky and Gazdanov’s An Evening with Claire. Nabokov’s eight Russian-language novels are divided into two groups. The first consists of Mashenka, The Defense, King, Queen, Knave, Glory, Laughter in the Dark. The second is made up of the novels of the 1930s: Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift.

Is the Missing Letter Effect Due Primarily to the Test Word Containing the Target Letter or to the Surrounding Words?

Abstract A simple letter detection task, in which subjects mark instances of a target letter in prose passages, has elucidated numerous cognitive processes involved in reading by examining the “missing letter” effect, in which readers’ detection accuracy is especially low on frequent function words. Two experiments explore the fundamental but novel issue of whether the missing letter effect is due to the test word containing the target letter or to the words surrounding the test word. College students searched for a target letter (e in Experiment 1, o in Experiment 2) in a passage that included unrelated sentences, with each sentence containing a single instance of 1 of 2 test words (the or one in Experiment 1, of or on in Experiment 2). The sentences were intact (prose), or the words in each sentence were randomly rearranged (scrambled). The 2 test words in an experiment were surrounded by the exact same words. If the word containing the target letter is primarily responsible for the missing letter effect, the proportion of correct letter detection responses should depend on the test word, whereas if the surrounding words are primarily responsible, it should depend on the text type (prose, scrambled). In fact, in both experiments a huge effect of test word was found but no effect of text type. These results provide clear evidence for the influence of the test word but, surprisingly, no evidence for the influence of the surrounding words on the missing letter effect in the letter detection task.

Language production and implicit statistical learning in typical development and children with acquired language disorders: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT Statistical properties of language provide important cues for language learning and may be processed by domain-general cognitive systems. We investigated the relationship between implicit statistical learning (the unconscious detection of statistical regularities in input) and language production. Twenty typically developing (TD) children and nine children with acquired language disorders (ALD) (aged 6–18 years) took part in a Boston Cookie Theft picture description task. Using a computerized analysis, we investigated statistical properties, such as usage frequency of words and collocation strength of word combinations. Participants also completed a non-linguistic serial reaction time (SRT) task, which tested non-verbal, implicit statistical learning in the visual-motor modality. We determined age effects, and compared language production and SRT performance between both groups. Older TD children produced more connected language, more words, less frequent function words, more rare or novel combinations, and showed better statistical learning. Children with ALD produced less connected language, more weakly collocated combinations, displayed less lexical diversity and showed poorer statistical learning. Post-hoc analyses found correlations between statistical learning and statistical properties of spoken language. Given the rarity and heterogeneity of children with ALD, group size was small and the study should be considered exploratory. However, we note that results are compatible with the view that language production draws on statistical learning and that impairment of statistical learning can be related to language disorders.

14-month-olds exploit verbs' syntactic contexts to build expectations about novel words.

During their second year of life, infants develop a rudimentary understanding of grammatical categories based on their knowledge and use of frequent function words. The current study inquired whether, at only 14months of age, infants can track co-occurrence patterns between function words and content words (e.g., determiners can precede nouns, and pronouns can precede verbs), and use these previously encountered syntactic contexts to build expectations about which function words can co-occur with novel words. Using a habituation paradigm, French-learning 14-month-olds were presented with utterances containing two novel words preceded by function words (either two determiners in the Novel Nouns condition or two pronouns in the Novel Verbs conditions). We found that at test, infants looked longer during trials in which the novel words occurred in an unexpected syntactic context (following a pronoun for infants in the Novel Nouns condition and following a determiner for infants in the pooled analysis of the three Novel Verbs conditions). Hence, our results confirm previous findings on infants' sensitivity to noun contexts and most importantly demonstrate that their sensitivity to the co-occurrence of verbs with pronouns begins much earlier than previously understood.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles* Paul D. Cannan, Steven Scherwatzk, Ian Sullivan, Steven Scherwatzky, Taylor Corse, J. T. Scanlan, Jacub Lipski, Jack Lynch, Alex Wetmore, Shane Herron, and James Ward BEHN Beebe, Ann. "'I Sent Over These Adventures': Women in The Female American and The Widow Ranter," WS, 45.7 (2016), 624–637. Ms. Beebe's discussion of the similarities between Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter (pub. 1690) and the anonymous The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767) largely serves to establish the growing importance of Behn's play and the continuing interest in finding a proper, literary home for the intriguing Female American. What it does not do is deliver on its promise to demonstrate a "compelling correspondence between Behn's female characters and Unca Eliza Winkfield." More rightly, it demonstrates how acts of thoughtful, detailed comparison between texts can generate correspondence even without evidence of direct lines of influence. Ms. Beebe concedes this latter point right away: "While the author of The Female American may not have read The Widow Ranter specifically, he or she is likely familiar with Restoration drama and Aphra Behn." Yet having acknowledged the greater likelihood of a familiarity with Restoration drama and with Aphra Behn by reputation (largely scandalous by 1767), she still organizes her argument around The Widow Ranter "serv[ing] as an inspiration for The Female American." This claim of direct inspiration rests on thin evidence throughout. A key point of comparison, for instance, is the novel's tragicomic plot and its generic hybridity, two features of Restoration drama in general. Discovering a quest for "voice" and "autonomy" for the female characters is likely enough for any text viewed through a feminist perspective. At the end of Ms. Beebe's argument, crossdressing emerges as a final example of what unites the characterization of these two works' eponymous heroines, The Widow Ranter and Unca Eliza—but crossdressing has long served as one of the most generic of subversive techniques for questioning patriarchal authority. Even Ms. Beebe's more interesting discussion of how each work employs humor to assert "woman's right to make her own financial and matrimonial decisions" suggests more differences than similarities, as Widow Ranter's "bawdy humor" contrasts with Unca Eliza's "sly humor." This essay makes a productive case for [End Page 1] the significance of colonial America as an imaginative context for women-centered narratives during the long eighteenth century. As Ms. Beebe notes, both "the novel and the play reference historical documents from colonial North America in order to authenticate and authorize the distinctly female stories at their centers," and each "imagines a feminist colonial utopia, however briefly, in which a woman's story is valued enough to be returned to England and shared with the public." These works may not share a direct relationship, but considering them together helps us to see how the contested, "unruly" spaces of an imagined new world can result in more fluid, hybrid, femalecentered narratives. ________ Evans, Mel. "Style and Chronology: A Stylometric Investigation of Aphra Behn's Dramatic Style and the Dating of The Young King," Lang&Lit, 27.2 (2018), 103–132. The Young King was staged in 1679 but not printed until early 1683 (entered, Michaelmas 1682). This alone attracts attention since Behn's plays were usually published within six months of production. Adding to the questions is Behn's dedication to Philaster; all of her other dedications were to identifiable persons. Further, Behn signs her dedication to Philaster not with initials or name, but with her spy name, Astrea. Finally, in her dedication, Behn raises still more questions by terming the play a "youthful sally of my Pen, this first Essay of my Infant-Poetry," adding that she waited to bring this play forward because she "feared reproach of being an American." Might The Young King have been written—or at least started—while she was in the New World in the early 1660s? Ms. Evans addresses this and related questions through stylometric analysis. Using databases of frequently used words, most frequent function words, and mid-frequency words (called zeta words), computers develop a signature "fingerprint," which differs from writer...

Function words in statistical machine-translated Chinese and original Chinese: A study into the translationese of machine translation systems

Abstract Statistical approaches have become the mainstream in machine translation (MT), for their potential in producing less rigid and more natural translations than rule-based approaches. However, on closer examination, the uses of function words between statistical machine-translated Chinese and the original Chinese are different, and such differences may be associated with translationese as discussed in translation studies. This article examines the distribution of Chinese function words in a comparable corpus consisting of MTs and the original Chinese texts extracted from Wikipedia. An attribute selection technique is used to investigate which types of function words are significant in discriminating between statistical machine-translated Chinese and the original texts. The results show that statistical MT overuses the most frequent function words, even when alternatives exist. To improve the quality of the end product, developers of MT should pay close attention to modelling Chinese conjunctions and adverbial function words. The results also suggest that machine-translated Chinese shares some characteristics with human-translated texts, including normalization and being influenced by the source language; however, machine-translated texts do not exhibit other characteristics of translationese such as explicitation.

The impact of familiarization strategies on the missing-letter effect.

When reading a text and searching for a target letter, readers make more omissions of the target letter if it is embedded in frequent function words than if it is in rare content words. While word frequency effects are consistently found, few studies have examined the impacts of passage familiarity on the missing-letter effect and studies that have present conflicting evidence. The present study examines the effects of passage familiarity, as well as the impacts of passage familiarization strategy promoting surface or deep encoding, on the missing-letter effect. Participants were familiarized with a passage by retyping a text, replacing all common nouns with synonyms, or generating a text on the same topic as that of the original text, and then completed a letter search task on the familiar passage as well as an unfamiliar passage. In Experiment 1, when both familiar and unfamiliar passages use the same words, results revealed fewer omissions for the retyping and synonyms conditions. However, in Experiment 2, when different words are used in both types of texts, no effect of familiarization strategy was observed. Furthermore, the missing-letter effect is maintained in all conditions, adding support to the robustness of the effect regardless of familiarity with the text.

The Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension

When participants search for a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss more instances if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This phenomenon, called the missing-letter effect, has been considered a window on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the visual processing of written language. In the present study, one group of participants read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter, and another group listened to a narration of the same two texts while listening for the target letter’s corresponding phoneme. The ubiquitous missing-letter effect was replicated and extended to a missing-phoneme effect. Item-based correlations between the reading and listening tasks were high, which led us to conclude that both tasks involve cognitive processes that reading and listening have in common and that both processes are rooted in psycholinguistically driven allocation of attention.

Sex differences in the missing-letter effect: A question of reading or visual–spatial skills?

When readers must search for a target letter while reading a continuous text, they are more likely to miss targets in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This missing-letter effect has been found across many languages, methodologies, and types of reading materials. Despite the ubiquity of the missing-letter effect, sex differences have been reported, but their pattern is conflicting and no clear interpretation has been offered so far. In two experiments, sex differences were examined in the letter search task, while also measuring spatial and reading skills. In both experiments, the missing-letter effect was found for both genders and a larger missing-letter effect was found for faster readers. It is concluded that when sex differences are observed in the missing-letter effect, they are likely due to reading speed and not to spatial skills as previously hypothesized. Results are interpreted in light of the Attentional Disengagement model of the missing-letter effect.

The role of eye movements in the missing-letter effect revisited with the rapid serial visual presentation procedure.

When participants read a text while searching for a target letter, they are more likely to miss the target letter embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This effect is usually observed with a text displayed normally, for which it has been found that frequent function words are fixated for a smaller amount of time than less frequent content words. However, similar pattern of omissions have been observed with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure in which words appear one at a time. These parallel results would demonstrate that fixation duration per se is not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect only if eye movements are not made during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Therefore, the authors performed eye monitoring during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Results revealed that, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants fixated function and content words for almost the entire presentation duration. It is concluded that eye movements are not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect.

Solving the chicken-and-egg problem of letter detection and fixation duration in reading

When asked to detect target letters while reading a text, participants miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. According to the truncation assumption that characterizes most models of this effect, misses occur when word-processing time is shorter than letter-processing time. Fixation durations for detections and omissions were compared with fixation durations from a baseline condition when participants were searching for a target letter embedded in different words. Although, as predicted by truncation, fixation durations were longer for detections than for omissions, fixation durations for detections were also longer than those for the same words in the baseline condition, demonstrating that longer fixation durations when targets are detected are more likely to be due to demands associated with producing a detection response than to truncation. Also, contrary to predictions from the truncation assumption, the standard deviation of fixation durations for detections was larger than that from the baseline condition.

Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English

In a regression study of conversational speech, we show that frequency, contextual predictability, and repetition have separate contributions to word duration, despite their substantial correlations. We also found that content- and function-word durations are affected differently by their frequency and predictability. Content words are shorter when more frequent, and shorter when repeated, while function words are not so affected. Function words have shorter pronunciations, after controlling for frequency and predictability. While both content and function words are strongly affected by predictability from the word following them, sensitivity to predictability from the preceding word is largely limited to very frequent function words. The results support the view that content and function words are accessed differently in production. We suggest a lexical-access-based model of our results, in which frequency or repetition leads to shorter or longer word durations by causing faster or slower lexical access, mediated by a general mechanism that coordinates the pace of higher-level planning and the execution of the articulatory plan.

Familiarization effects for bilingual letter detection involving translation or exact text repetition.

In two experiments, English-Spanish bilinguals read passages, performing letter detection on some passages by circling target letters as they read. Detection passages were sometimes familiarized (primed) by prior reading of the same passage or a translation of it. Participants detected letters in English passages in Experiment 1 and in Spanish passages in Experiment 2. For both experiments, a missing letter effect occurred (depressed detection accuracy on frequent function words relative to less frequent content words). Familiarization promoted overall improvements in letter detection only for English passages, suggesting that reprocessing benefits depend on high language fluency. For Spanish passages, cognates engendered greater error rates than noncognates; the visual similarity of Spanish and English cognates apparently enabled faster identification of Spanish cognates in a way unaffected by familiarization of the whole text passage. Priming by familiarized text was significantly higher when the passages were in the same language than when they were in different languages, suggesting that the reprocessing benefits are at the word level instead of the semantic level. These results are consistent with the GO model of reading (Greenberg, Healy, Koriat, & Kreiner, 2004) but require an expanded consideration of attention redistribution processes in that model.

The influence of multiple readings on the missing-letter effect revisited

In searching for a target letter while reading, participants make more omissions when the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than when it is embedded in less frequent content words. According to the guidance-organization (GO) model, this occurs because high-frequency function words are processed faster than low-frequency content words, leaving less time available for letter processing. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments by increasing word-processing speed through text repetition, which should translate into higher omission rates. Participants either read the text and searched for the target letter once or read the text three times and searched for a target letter on all readings or the final reading only. In all the experiments in which participants could not anticipate the target letter to be used, results revealed the presence of a large missing-letter effect that was unaffected by familiarity with the text. In addition, when participants knew from the start the target letter to be used on the final reading, the missing-letter effect was eliminated. Repeated search of the same text for different targets increased omissions equally for function words and content words, but this finding was present even when a new text was used, suggesting that repetition of the search task, rather than familiarity with the text, was responsible.

Frequency factor in the segmentation of function words in French-learning infants

Previous work showed that 8-month-old French-learning infants segment both highly and moderately frequent function words from continuous speech [Shi and Gauthier, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 2426 (2005)]. In the present study we examine if high-frequency function words are segmented by even younger infants. Participants were 6-month-old Quebec-French-learning infants. As in the previous study, infants in the high-frequency condition were familiarized with a target functor (des or la) and were then tested with phrases containing the target versus those containing the nontarget. Thus, for infants familiarized to la, la-phrases were the target phrases and des-phrases were the nontarget phrases during Test. The reverse was the case when des was the familiarization target. The lower-frequency condition included a target functor mes versus ta (prosodically analogous to the functors in the high-frequency condition). The results show that 6-month-olds listened significantly longer to phrases containing the familiarized target than those containing the nontarget during Test, suggesting that they segmented the target. No difference was observed in the lower-frequency condition. Thus, while 8-month-olds segmented both high- and lower-frequency functors [Shi and Gauthier, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 2426 (2005)], 6-month-olds showed evidence of segmentation only for high-frequency functors. These findings suggest that frequency is a determining factor in the development of the segmentation of function words.

Short Article: The interaction of word frequency and word class: A test of the GO model's account of the missing-letter effect

When asked to detect target letters while reading a text, participants miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. In this phenomenon, known as the missing-letter effect, two factors covary: word frequency and word class. According to the GO model, there should be an interaction between word class and word frequency with more omissions for function than for content words only among high-frequency words. This pattern would be due to the fact that function words could only assume a structure-supporting role if they are identified rapidly, which is only possible for high-frequency words. These predictions were tested by assessing omission rate for frequent and rare function and content words. Results lend support to the GO model with more omissions for frequent than for rare words, and more omissions for the function than for the content word among high-frequency words, but not among low-frequency words. These results were observed both in English (Experiment 1) and in French (Experiment 2).

Age changes in the missing-letter effect revisited

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. Reflecting developmental changes in component language and literacy skills, the size of this effect increases with age. With adults, the missing-letter effect is due to both word function and word frequency. With children, it is unclear whether the growing size of the missing-letter effect across development is due to a larger effect of word function, word frequency, or both because previous studies with children seeking to isolate the influence of word frequency and word function suffer from important methodological limitations. With these methodological limitations eliminated (Experiments 1 and 2), performance in a letter detection task was assessed for children in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 as well as for undergraduate students. The results revealed that the influence of word function increases with age, whereas the effect of frequency is fairly stable across ages. Furthermore, normative predictability data collected in Experiment 3 revealed that third graders and undergraduate students were equally good at predicting function slots in a sentence.

The GO model: a reconsideration of the role of structural units in guiding and organizing text on line.

Healy (1994) and Koriat and Greenberg (1994) offered different theoretical accounts of the missing-letter effect (MLE) in the letter-detection task, whereby a disproportionate number of letter-detection errors occur in frequent function words. Healy emphasized identification processes, whereas Koriat and Greenberg viewed the structural role of the embedding word to be crucial. Recent research suggests that neither position alone can account for the complete set of observations pertaining to the MLE. The present paper offers a theoretical integration of these competing explanations of letter detection in terms of a GO (guidance-organization) model of reading. This model specifies how structural processing of connected text helps guide eye movements to semantically informative parts of the text, enabling readers to achieve on-line fluency.

Phonetic representation of frequent function words in 8-month-old infants

Recent work by a number of researchers showed that even preverbal infants detect and recognize functors in continuous speech. In our research, English-learning infants aged 11 to 13 months, but not 8 months, recognized frequent and infrequent functors as a class, and represented them in segmental detail (Shi et al., 2003; Shi et al., 2004). Here we report a study on 8-month-old infants’ recognition and representation of high versus low frequency functors. Infants heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a high frequency functor ‘‘the,’’ versus a nonsense functor ‘‘kuh,’’ differing from ‘‘the’’ only in the initial consonant, with the prosody unchanged. Another group of 8-month-olds heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a low frequency functor ‘‘its,’’ versus a nonsense functor ‘‘ots.’’ Recognition of functors would be indicated by longer listening time to sequences containing real functors. Results reveal no differential listening time between ‘‘the+lexical word(LW)’’ and ‘‘kuh+LW,’’ nor between ‘‘its+LW’’ and ‘‘ots+LW;’’ however, ‘‘the+LW’’ and ‘‘kuh+LW’’ together induced longer listening time than ‘‘its+LW’’ and ‘‘ots+LW.’’ We conclude that 8-month olds recognize the frequent, familiar ‘‘the’’ in continuous speech, but it is underspecified phonetically in infants’ initial lexicon. Our previous work indicates detailed specification by 11 months.