Grammatical Word Class Research Articles

ФУНКЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ ДИСКУРСИВНЫХ МАРКЕРОВ В НЕМЕЦКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

The article aims at studying the functions of discourse markers of the German language in communication. Despite a considerable number of Russian and foreign works researching discourse markers, there is still no common opinion about the boundaries of this group of words, neither there are principles and criteria for their classification. We identify and summarize possible functions of discourse markers in different types of discourse. It was discovered that being the units of functional-pragmatic level, they provide text cohesion. Discourse markers are represented by various grammatical word classes, are used mostly in preposition and are characterized by dynamic nature.

Pedagogic Value of 'Inflectional Morphology for Grammar Teaching

A sound knowledge of inflectional morphology is imperative for successful grammar teaching. Though modern English is a derivational language as far as its vocabulary is concerned, it is also inflectional as far as its grammar is concerned. The inflectional nature of English grammar constitutes the contents of English grammar teaching to a very large extent. Many practicing English grammar teachers do not know where to start or how different grammar elements are interrelated. Hence, they simply follow the order of units as provided either in the curriculum or in the contents of grammar books. Inflectional morphology is to grammar improvement what derivational morphology is to vocabulary development. This descriptive and reflective paper provides a bird’s eye-view of how four major grammatical classes of words are related to different grammatical sub-categories or notions, such as number, case, gender, person, degree, mood, voice, tense, and aspect.

Neural correlates of object and action naming: Complementary evidence from Primary Progressive Aphasia and acute stroke

Neural correlates of object and action naming: Complementary evidence from Primary Progressive Aphasia and acute stroke

Learning to Read Words on Flashcards: Effects of Sentence Contexts and Word Class in Native and Nonnative English-Speaking Kindergartners

This study investigated three questions: 1) Does clarifying the meanings of words during flashcard reading better support word learning over not providing meanings? 2) Does grammatical word class affect word learning? 3) Do these manipulations affect word learning differently in native and nonnative speakers of English? Native (n=40) and nonnative (n=41) English-speaking kindergartners practiced learning to read nouns and function words on flashcards in a repeated measures, counterbalanced design with random assignment. In one condition words were taught in meaningful sentences. In the other condition words were taught in isolation. Results of ANOVAs revealed that both native and nonnative speakers of English were better able to read words when they were taught in isolation than in sentences, and native speakers were better able to spell the words as well. However, both groups showed better ability to express their meanings when words were read in semantically rich sentences than when read in isolation. Children learned to read, spell, and produce sentences for content words more easily than for function words. Results indicate that the way children practice reading words and the type of words being read influence what they learn about the words.

ВОЗРАСТНАЯ ДИНАМИКА РАСПРЕДЕЛЕНИЯ ГРАММАТИЧЕСКИХ КЛАССОВ СЛОВ В ИНДИВИДУАЛЬНОМ ЛЕКСИКОНЕ

ВОЗРАСТНАЯ ДИНАМИКА РАСПРЕДЕЛЕНИЯ ГРАММАТИЧЕСКИХ КЛАССОВ СЛОВ В ИНДИВИДУАЛЬНОМ ЛЕКСИКОНЕ

Do Function Words Belong to Part of Speech?

The term (auxiliary part of speech) in traditional grammars of Kazakh and Russian languages have different connotations due to its functions. In foreign linguistics function words generally are not regarded in opposition to the traditional grammatical classes of words, although sometimes stand for relatively close category of words, which include articles, prepositions (postpositions) and conjunctions. In the 60-70 years of the twentieth century the function words in Kazakh language have sufficiently been investigated, but within the development of linguistics in the Kazakh according to some scholars the function words as a complex phenomenon suggested to regard them as a separate set of words. The theoretical significance of this article is the author's attempt to reveal the linguistic characteristics of function words in Kazakh language, to show their place in language, as well as to determine their nature as a part of speech.

Cross-linguistic Transfer Effects as a By-product of Grammatical Word Class and Language Proficiency: A Case Study from Bilingual Aphasia

Cross-linguistic Transfer Effects as a By-product of Grammatical Word Class and Language Proficiency: A Case Study from Bilingual Aphasia

Lexical retrieval for nouns and verbs in typically developing bilectal children

Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a non-standard variety, Cypriot Greek (CG), but instructed scholastically in the official variety, Standard Modern Greek (SMG). Participants were typically developing Greek Cypriot preschoolers and early school-aged children who completed the Cypriot Object and Action Test (COAT). Results revealed a significant grammatical word class effect favoring nouns over verbs in Modern Greek, with a developmental change in the size of the noun–verb gap. Both age groups showed similar error patterns for both object and action targets. For action names, children produced more semantic descriptions or circumlocutions (e.g., hitting the nail for hammering), whereas omissions were the prominent error type for object names. The findings are discussed in relation to cross-linguistic evidence of grammatical word class differences using the picture naming paradigm for monolingual (pre)school-aged children.

Comparing multilingual children with SLI to their bilectal peers: evidence from object and action picture naming

Against the background of the increasing number of multilingual children with atypical language development around the world, this study reports research results on grammatical word class processing involving children with specific language impairment (SLI). The study investigates lexical retrieval of verbs (through picture-naming actions) and compares performances for the same children with noun retrieval (through picture-naming objects). It was found that nouns (object names) were better retrieved than verbs (action names) in the multilingual group with SLI, a finding similar to bilectal peers with SLI and typically developing language-matched controls. The results suggest that grammatical class is an organising principle shared across languages. Moreover, when tested in first and third language, multilingual children with SLI revealed a comparable verb–noun dissociation both in terms of the direction of the effect (V < N) and major error type. These findings are discussed in relation to the delayed acquisition hypothesis for SLI and psycholinguistic models of multilingualism.

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism in Children's Verb Learning

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extended work suggests that such early sensitivity is not limited to children whose language supports such word classes. The present study further considers the use of sound-symbolic words in verb-learning context by conducting systematic cross-linguistic comparisons on early exposure to and effect of sound symbolism in verb mapping. Experiment 1 is an observational study of how English- and Japanese-speaking parents talk about verbs. More conventionalized symbolic words were found in Japanese-speaking parental input, and more idiosyncratic use of sound symbolism was found in English-speaking parental input. Despite this different exposure of iconic forms to describe actions, the artificial verb-learning task in Experiment 2 revealed that children in both language groups benefit from sound–meaning correspondences for their verb learning. These results together confirm more extensive use of conventionalized sound symbolism among Japanese speakers and also support a cross-linguistic consistency of the effect, which has been documented in the recent work. The work also points to the potential value of understanding the contexts in which sound–meaning correspondences matter in language learning.

Patterns of breakdown in spelling in primary progressive aphasia

IntroductionThe objective of this study is to determine which cognitive processes underlying spelling are most affected in the three variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA): Logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA), Semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), and Nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). Methods23 PPA patients were administered The Johns Hopkins Dysgraphia Battery to assess spelling. Subtests evaluate for effects of word frequency, concreteness, word length, grammatical word class, lexicality (words vs pseudowords), and “regularity” by controlling for the other variables. Significant effects of each variable were identified with chi square tests. Responses on all spelling to dictation tests were scored by error type. 16 of the 23 subjects also had a high resolution MRI brain scan to identify areas of atrophy. ResultsWe identified 4 patterns of spelling that could be explained by damage to one or more cognitive processes underlying spelling. Nine patients (3 unclassifiable, 4 with lvPPA, 2 with svPPA) had dysgraphia explicable by impaired access to lexical representations, with reliance on sublexical phonology-to-orthography conversion (POC). Two patients (with nfvPPA) showed dysgraphia explicable by impaired access to lexical representations and complete disruption of sublexical POC. Seven patients (4 with lvPPA, 1 with svPPA, 2 unclassifiable) showed dysgraphia explicable by impaired access to lexical-semantic representations and/or lexical representations with partially spared sublexical POC mechanisms. Five patients (1 with nfvPPA, 2 with svPPA, 1 with lvPPA, and 1 unclassifiable) showed dysgraphia explicable by impairment of the graphemic buffer. ConclusionsAny cognitive process underlying spelling can be affected in PPA. Predominance of phonologically plausible errors, more accurate spelling of regular words than irregular words, and more accurate spelling of pseudowords than words (indicating spared POC mechanisms) may indicate a low probability of progression to nfvPPA.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Word Classes

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

Naming action in Japanese: Effects of semantic similarity and grammatical class

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic similarity between distracters and targets (similar vs. dissimilar verbs) and the grammatical class of semantically dissimilar distracters (verbs, verbal nouns, and also nouns in Experiment 3) in addition to task demands (single word naming vs. phrase/sentence generation). While Experiment 1 used visually presented distracters, Experiment 2 and 3 used auditory distracter words to rule out possible confounding factors of orthography (kanji vs. hiragana). We found the same results for all three experiments: robust semantic interference in the absence of any effects of grammatical class. We discuss the lack of grammatical class effects in terms of structural characteristics of the Japanese language.

The trouble with nouns and verbs in Greek fluent aphasia

In the past verb retrieval problems were associated primarily with agrammatism and noun retrieval difficulties with fluent aphasia. With regards to fluent aphasia, so far in the literature, three distinct patterns of verb/noun dissociations have been described for individuals with fluent anomic aphasia in languages with different underlying forms; better verb retrieval, poorer verb retrieval and equal retrieval difficulties for verbs and nouns. Verbs and nouns in Greek are considered of similar morphological complexity thus it was predicted that anomic aphasic individuals would suffer from a non-dissociated impairment of verbs and nouns. Problems with verbs and/or nouns may arise at any stage in the process of lexical retrieval, i.e. lexical-semantic, lemma, lexeme or articulation. The aim of this research was to investigate verb and noun retrieval using a picture-naming task to explore any possible selective noun and/or verb comprehension or retrieval deficits in Greek individuals with anomic aphasia. The results revealed a significant verb/noun dichotomy with verbs significantly more difficult to retrieve than nouns. These findings lend support for the growing body of evidence showing a specific verb impairment in fluent anomic individuals as well as Broca's patients. Given the prevailing view, that anomic patients experience difficulty retrieving the morpho-phonological form of the target word, the results show that specific information of the grammatical category is also important during word form retrieval. Learner outcomes: The reader will become familiar with (i) studies investigating grammatical word class breakdown in individuals with aphasia who speak different languages, (ii) the application of the serial model to word production breakdown in aphasia and (iii) the characteristics of verbs and nouns in Greek. It will be concluded that successful verb retrieval for fluent aphasic individuals who speak Greek is dependant on the retrieval of the morpho-phonological information of the target verb.

Naming and comprehension in primary progressive aphasia: The influence of grammatical word class

Background: Various clinical types of primary progressive aphasia have been associated with distinct areas of atrophy and pathological changes. Therefore, differences in the patterns of language deterioration in the various types might reveal the types of language processes and representations that depend on the areas of brain that are disproportionately affected. Aims: To test the hypotheses (1) that individuals with progressive nonfluent aphasia (associated with left posterior, inferior frontal, and insular atrophy) show progressive motor speech impairment and disproportionate deterioration in naming actions relative to objects, and (2) that individuals with semantic dementia (associated with anterior and inferior temporal atrophy) show disproportionate deterioration in semantic representations of objects relative to actions. Methods & Procedures: The study population consisted of 56 participants with primary progressive aphasia, including 27 with progressive nonfluent aphasia, 16 with semantic dementia, and 13 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis‐frontotemporal dementia (ALS‐FTD). Participants were given tests of oral and written naming and tests of picture and word association with object and action stimuli. Differences across tests within each group were evaluated. Associations between motor speech impairment (based on a clinical motor speech examination) and naming impairment in each grammatical word class were evaluated. Outcomes & Results: Participants with progressive nonfluent aphasia and ALS‐FTD showed significantly more impairment in naming actions than objects. In contrast, participants with semantic dementia were significantly more impaired in naming objects than actions, and more impaired on semantic tests of objects relative to actions. In all groups, all participants who were more impaired in naming actions also had impaired motor speech (dysarthria and/or apraxia of speech). Conclusions: Distinct patterns of deterioration across grammatical word classes in these clinical subtypes were documented. Together with evidence that these clinical subtypes are associated with different areas of brain atrophy in other studies, our results are consistent with a role of posterior inferior frontal cortex and insula in motor speech and naming actions, as well as the essential role of anterior temporal lobes in semantic representation of objects.

Accuracy of Four Language Analysis Procedures Performed Automatically

Most software for language analysis has relied on an interaction between the metalinguistic skills of a human coder and the calculating ability of the machine to produce reliable results. However, probabilistic parsing algorithms are now capable of highly accurate and completely automatic identification of grammatical word classes. The program Computerized Profiling combines a probabilistic parser with modules customized to produce four clinical grammatical analyses: MLU, LARSP, IPSyn, and DSS. The accuracy of these analyses was assessed on 69 language samples from typically developing, speech-impaired, and language-impaired children, 2 years 6 months to 7 years 10 months. Values obtained with human coding and by the software alone were compared. Results for all four analyses produced automatically were comparable to published data on the manual interrater reliability of these procedures. Clinical decisions based on cutoff scores and productivity data were little affected by the use of automatic rather than human-generated analyses. These findings bode well for future clinical and research use of automatic language analysis software.

Using Literal and Grammatical Statistics for Authorship Attribution

Markov chains are used as a formal mathematical model for sequences of elements of a text. This model is applied for authorship attribution of texts. As elements of a text, we consider sequences of letters or sequences of grammatical classes of words. It turns out that the frequencies of occurrences of letter pairs and pairs of grammatical classes in a Russian text are rather stable characteristics of an author and, apparently, they could be used in disputed authorship attribution. A comparison of results for various modifications of the method using both letters and grammatical classes is given. Experimental research involves 385 texts of 82 writers. In the Appendix, the research of D.V. Khmelev is described, where data compression algorithms are applied to authorship attribution.

Comparison between Oral and Written Spelling in Alzheimer's Disease

Written and oral spelling were compared in 33 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 25 control subjects. AD patients had poorer spelling results which were influenced by orthographic difficulty and word frequency, but not by grammatical word class. Lexical spelling was also more deteriorated than phonological spelling. Moreover, oral spelling was more impaired than written spelling in AD patients, whereas no difference was present between oral and written spelling of controls. Analysis of spelling errors showed that, for controls, errors were predominantly phonologically accurate in both spelling tasks. Significantly, AD patients produced more phonologically accurate than inaccurate errors in written spelling, whereas these errors did not differ in oral spelling. In contrast to controls who produced more constant than variable responses in oral and written spelling, AD patients made more variable responses (words correctly spelled in one task but incorrectly in the other) and they showed many instances of variable errors (different misspellings from one spelling task to the other). Two stepwise regression procedures showed that written misspellings were specifically correlated with language impairment, whereas oral spelling errors were correlated with attentional and language disorders. These results suggest that AD increases the attentional demands of oral spelling process as compared to written spelling. This dissociation argues, either for a unique Graphemic Buffer in which oral spelling requires more attentional resources than written spelling or for the hypothesis of separate buffers for oral and written spelling.

Microstates in Language-Related Brain Potential Maps Show Noun–Verb Differences

Brain processing of grammatical word class was studied analyzing event-related potential (ERP) brain fields. Normal subjects observed a randomized sequence of single German nouns and verbs on a computer screen, while 20-channel ERP field map series were recorded separately for both word classes. Spatial microstate analysis was applied, based on the observation that series of ERP maps consist of epochs of quasi-stable map landscapes and based on the rationale that different map landscapes must have been generated by different neural generators and thus suggest different brain functions. Space-oriented segmentation of the mean map series identified nine successive, different functional microstates, i.e., steps of brain information processing characterized by quasi-stable map landscapes. In the microstate from 116 to 172 msec, noun-related maps differed significantly from verb-related maps along the left–right axis. The results indicate that different neural populations represent different grammatical word classes in language processing, in agreement with clinical observations. This word class differentiation as revealed by the spatial–temporal organization of neural activity occurred at a time after word input compatible with speed of reading.

Lexical organization of nouns and verbs in the brain

The analysis of neuropsychological disorders of lexical processing has provided important clues about the general organization of the lexical system and the internal structure of the processing components. Reports of patients with selective dysfunction of specific semantic categories such as abstract versus concrete words, living things versus inanimate objects, animals, fruits and vegetables, proper names and so forth, support the hypothesis that the neural organization of the semantic processing component is organized in these categories. There are reports of selective dysfunction of the grammatical categories noun and verb, suggesting that a dimension of lexical organization is the grammatical class of words. But the results reported in these studies have not provided unambiguous evidence concerning two fundamental questions about the nature and the locus of this organization within the lexical system. Is the noun-verb distinction represented in the semantic or in the phonological and orthographic lexicons? Is grammatical-class knowledge represented independently of lexical forms or is it represented separately and redundantly within each modality-specific lexicon? Here we report the performance of two brain-damaged subjects with modality-specific deficits restricted principally (H.W.) or virtually only (S.J.D) to verbs in oral and written production, respectively. The contrasting performance suggests that grammatical-class distinctions are redundantly represented in the phonological and orthographic output lexical components.