Letter Insertions Research Articles

‘By consultation of elevated minds’: the role of paratexts in Giovanni Battista Calderari's comedies

AbstractGenette's Seuils considers the dramatic paratext as the odd one out, and, indeed, the early‐modern theatrical paratext has remained understudied. This article discusses the paratexts of the comedies of Giovanni Battista Calderari, a sixteenth‐century author quite neglected by scholars, whose works were published in Vicenza and Venice. By focusing on the paratexts of La Mora (The Moorish Woman, 1588), La schiava (The Slave Woman, 1589), and Armida (1600), the article stresses Calderari's attempts to clarify his poetic ideas and his endeavours to create a network of intellectuals and obtain their opinions about his work. These interlocutors belonged to the knights of Malta and the Vicenzan Accademia Olimpica, two circles to which Calderari himself belonged, but they also were authoritative Venetian intellectuals. His insertion of poems and letters that praise his person and work, reveals his attempt to promote himself and his writings. He tries to promote himself not only as a military man or a great Vicenzan poet, but as a scholar of theatre who is able to juggle poetic discourse and is worthy to be considered by intellectuals, though he ultimately seems to have failed to really assert himself on the Venetian cultural scene and the Vicenzan stage.

Image of Russia in French-Language Comics

This article initiates research on the representation of Russia in French comic books. From 1849 to the present about 400 volumes have been published. In this paper, the notion “comics about Russia” include: a) a book of comics in which the action takes place either in the tsarist Russia, the USSR or contemporary Russia, b) a book in which a character or a place of the above period are involved. After an overview of the types of books and genres of comics about Russia (documentary, historical, adventure, science fiction, comical, as well as literary adaptations), an analysis of the visual aspect of comic books, mainly the covers, is given. Such recurring elements as snow, red color, five-pointed star, trains, blood, weapons, beautiful girls, ugly old ladies, and old cars are considered. We discuss the reasons for the practical absence of such stereotypes as black caviar, bears and some others. Then we analyze the role of the Russian language in the realization of the image of Russia, on the example of borrowed words, toponyms, anthroponyms, and utterances. Сyrillic, transliterated text and insertion of certain letters from Cyrillic into Latin are examined, as well as the presence or absence of translation and its correctness. The author underlines cases in which nonexistent toponyms, names and surnames, remotely resembling Russian words, are used. The question is whether such errors are accidental or indicate the authors' evident lack of interest in the adequate depiction of the reality. At the end of the paper the author proposes a frame for the analysis of any comic book about Russia. Apart from the mentioned above, this frame takes into account such aspects as characteristics of the "Russian" personages and their actions. Hopefully, the frame will make it possible to observe the evolution of the image of Russia, the link between stereotypes and the type of comic book as well as to compare the same image in French mass-media, literature, and movies. In the future we would like to find out whether the use of these stereotypes comes from the authors' insufficient knowledge of the Russian reality, or from their intention to create and reinforce the existing stereotypical image of this country.

The incidence of dysgraphia in Arabic language in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

BackgroundAttention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a brain disorder marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development. Although children with ADHD made much more spelling errors, they had a distinct pattern of letter insertions, replacements, transpositions, and omissions. This mistake type is sometimes referred to as graphemic buffer errors, and it is caused by a lack of attention required for motor planning. The aim of study was to assess the incidence of dysgraphia in Arabic language in children with ADHD for better helping, diagnosis and management of those children.ResultsTen percent of ADHD children had normal handwriting with no disability, 40% had excellent handwriting with a minimum of disability and 50% of ADHD children showed mild to moderate disability. There were significant differences between ADHD children and control children regarding results of each item on the subtest of handwriting of dysgraphia disability scale (DDS), respecting lines, spacing between words, letter direction, spelling a sentence, and punctuation. Drawing affected in ADHD children. The finger tapping speed was affected in almost ADHD children.ConclusionsDysgraphia highly presents in our sample of ADHD children with poor fine motor skills in ADHD children than normal children. ADHD children have illegible handwriting, not respecting lines, insufficient space between and within words, multiple spelling errors, and omissions of letters or words. Graphesthesia and stereognosis are affected more in ADHD children than in control children drawing and finger tapping speed affected in ADHD children.

On non-adjacent letter repetition and orthographic processing: Lexical decisions to nonwords created by repeating or inserting letters in words

Informal observation suggests that it is harder to notice the spelling mistake in “silencne” than “silencre.” This concurs with current evidence that non-adjacent letter repetition in correctly spelled words makes these words harder to recognize. One possible explanation is provided by open-bigram coding. Words containing repeated letters are harder to recognize because they are represented by fewer bigrams than words without repeated letters. Building on this particular explanation for letter-repetition effects in words, we predicted that nonwords in a lexical decision task should also be sensitive to letter repetitions. In particular, we examined two types of nonwords generated from the same baseword: (1) nonwords created by repeating one of the letters in the baseword (e.g., silence => silencne); and (2) nonwords created by inserting a letter that is not present in the baseword (e.g., silencre). According to open-bigram coding, nonwords created by repeating a letter are more similar to their baseword than nonwords created by inserting a letter, and this should make it harder to reject letter repetition nonwords than letter insertion nonwords. We put these predictions to test in one on-line pilot study (n=31), one laboratory experiment (n=36), and one follow-up on-line experiment (n=40) where we manipulated the distance between repetitions (one, two, three, or four letters). Participants found it harder to reject repetition nonwords than insertion nonwords, and this effect diminished with increasing distance.

FOR THE QUESTION OF LEARNING LOCALIZATION AND COMPOSITION OF TOPONYM OF THE PRONE VALLEY

Ущелье реки Проне расположено в среднем Картли, на правом берегу Куры. Включает в себя Дванис-цкали, Алис-цкали, Пцис-цкали и Сурамис-цкали. В соответствии с историческим термином и сегодня эти реки население называет Проне. Для диахронного изучения существующих в этом ущелье топонимов, с точки зрения лингвистики существенными справками располагают приходская книга Руиси или летопись Руиси, составленная Николозом Мровели Орбелишвили или Капланишвили в 1715 году; «Описание царства грузинского (География Грузии)» Вахушти Багратиони (середина XVIII века); «Описание Картли и Кахетии» Иоанна Багратиони (1794-99 годы) и материалы, в разное время записанные и проанализированные грузинскими исследователями (С. Макалатия, Ал. Глонти, М. Коберидзе, Н. Отинашвили) с точки зрения диалектологии. Речь деревень Дванис-цкали и Пцис-цкали относится к шида картлийскому говору, а речь жителей сел Алис-цкали и Сурамис-цкали относится к западно-картлийскому. Топонимы ущелья реки Проне по своему содержанию и образованию разнообразны, существующие средства образования слов подобны грузинскому литературному языку и другим диалектам грузинского языка. Встречаются как субстантивированные, так и атрибутивные субстантивные микро (Накедлареби, Сакидула ...), макро (Дванисцкали, Проне…) и собственные топонимы (Двани, Дирби, Тахтидзири ...), где составляющей частью композита встречаются «цкали»(вода), «тба»(озеро), «геле»(речка), «чала» (роща), «хеви» (ущелье), «чаоби» (болото), «мореви»(водоворот). Детерминантой к топонимам такого типа подтверждаются как общественные, так и собственные имена. Фонетические процессы, характерные для грузинской языковой системы, также встречаются в топонимах ущелья реки Проне. Например: потеря звука, замещение звуков, включение звука… Активно используется суффиксальное (- ет, - ит , - ат, ис-и, ат (а), - aт (a), - та, - еул, - ул , - ур, - ован, -осан, -ин-а, -еб, -мар (нар) и преффиксально-суффиксальное образование (на-ев, са-е, са-ур, са-иа. Различие создает ареал распространения топонимов и частота производного средства. Различные случаи указывают на тенденцию унификации и случаи переключения речевого кода. Встречается территороиальная локализация использования диалектной лексики в топонимии. Проанализированный материал по содержанию и образованию разнообразен. Образование грузинское, не встречаются заимствованные термины. По частоте использования выделяются топонимы с основой на «цкал» и «цкар». Большинство топонимов сложные слова. К топонимам такого типа определителем выступают как нарицательные, так и собственные имена.

Leçons de Tenebrae: Brian Cherney, Paul Celan, and a Music of Witness

In several compositions, Brian Cherney has reflected on the Holocaust and its impact, exploring how music can respond to such tragedy; his recent engagement with the poetry of Paul Celan is a natural extension of these preoccupations. This article offers a close reading of Cherney’s choral setting of Celan’sTenebrae.The composer incorporates several additional texts that create a genealogy of the poem, from biblical passages to fragments of Dante and Hölderlin to accounts of the Holocaust itself; he arranges these texts to highlight semantic and sonic features of Celan’s work. Perhaps Cherney’s boldest move is his insertion of Hebrew letters, linking his composition to the long tradition of Lamentations settings—a link cemented by a quotation from Couperin’sLeçons de Ténèbres,which provides important motivic material. Through these additions, Cherney turns the poem towards us, inviting us to respond to its call for reflective witness.

Kaleidoscope substitutions and pairwise well-formed modes: major-minor duality transformationally revisited

Pairwise well-formed modes are investigated as substitutions on words over a three-letter alphabet. Motivating examples are the major and minor modes, here described in terms of the substitutions and . Pairwise well-formedness is investigated through the inspection of the two-letter-mergings of a substiution, namely concatenations with letter insertions from the right and letter projections from the left. The appropriate generalizations of the two mentioned examples are the plain and twisted kaleidoscope substitutions. Four of their mergings turn out to be Sturmian morphisms with interesting interdependencies. The diatonic mergings are musically related to the medieval modes, which are fifth-generated. The syntonic mergings are third-generated and provide a common neutral anchor for the major and minor modes. The paper thus provides a new proposal in order to integrate the diatonic side of harmonic tonality with its triadic aspects, which we characterize as its syntonic side.

Plastic letters

This article examines the complex intersection of language ideologies shaping alphabetic choices in Ukrainian outdoor advertising and shop signs, focusing on alphabet mixing through the insertion of Latin letters into Cyrillic texts and the juxtaposition of parallel or alternating texts using both of these writing systems. Drawing upon ethnographic data from work with graphic designers and consumers as well as analysis of language use in signs, I argue that while alphabet mixing is often characterized as “faddish” or “youth-oriented” these practices also reflect Soviet-era ideological stances towards both Latin typefaces, seen as “plastic” letters associated with Western capitalism, and Cyrillic typefaces, seen as “rigid” forms subject to strong central control by the Soviet state. The increasing availability of personal computers with word-processing and graphic design software in Ukraine has both increased access by individuals to print technology, and promoted a new typographic aesthetic through the dissemination of Cyrillic fonts based on Latin, not Soviet or pre-Soviet Cyrillic, models.

Is descriptive writing useful in the differential diagnosis of logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia, Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment?

Current classification of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) encompasses three variants: non-fluent (nfvPPA), semantic (svPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA). Previously lvPPA was regarded as aphasic form of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, not all patients with lvPPA phenotype present with AD pathology. Despite abundant literature on differentiation of lvPPA from svPPA and nfvPPA, studies comparing lvPPA with AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are scarce. This study aimed at analyzing written descriptive output in lvPPA, AD and MCI. Thirty-five patients participated in the study: 9 with lvPPA, 13 with AD and 13 with MCI. Most aspects of writing performance were comparable in three groups. However, letter insertion errors appeared in 44% patients with lvPPA, while they were absent in AD and MCI. Patients with lvPPA used more verbs than patients with AD. Writing profile may complement other neuropsychological assessment results in the differential diagnosis of lvPPA. Letter insertion errors and frequent verb use may raise a query of lvPPA.

An ERP investigation of orthographic priming with superset primes

Prime stimuli formed by inserting unrelated letters in a given target word (called “superset” primes) provide a means to modify the relative positions of the letters shared by prime and target. Here we examined the time-course of superset priming effects in an ERP study using the sandwich-priming paradigm. We compared the effects of superset primes formed by the insertion of unrelated letters (e.g., maurkdet–MARKET), or by the insertion of hyphens (e.g., ma-rk-et–MARKET), with identity priming (e.g., market–MARKET), all measured relative to unrelated control primes. Behavioral data revealed significantly greater priming in the hyphen-insert condition compared with the letter-insert condition. In the ERP signal, letter-insert priming emerged later than hyphen-insert priming and produced a reversed priming effect in the N400 time-window compared with the more typical N400 priming effects seen for both hyphen-insert priming and identity priming. The different pattern of priming effects seen for letter-insert primes and hyphen-insert primes suggests that compared with identity priming, letter superset priming reflects the joint influence of: (1) a disruption in letter position information, and (2) an inhibitory influence of mismatching letters.

Error Analysis of Brailled Instructional Materials Produced by Public School Personnel in Texas

In this study, a detailed error analysis was performed to determine if patterns of errors existed in braille transcriptions. The most frequently occurring errors were the insertion of letters or words that were not contained in the original print material; the incorrect usage of the emphasis indicator; and the incorrect formatting of titles, exercises, and directions.

Graded Effects of Number of Inserted Letters in Superset Priming

Three masked priming experiments investigated the effects of target word length and number of inserted letters on superset priming, where irrelevant letters are added to targets to form prime stimuli (e.g., tanble-table). Effects of one, two, three, and four-letter insertions were measured relative to an unrelated prime condition, the identity prime condition, and a condition where the order of letters of the superset primes was reversed. Superset primes facilitated performance compared with unrelated primes and reversed primes, and the overall pattern showed a small cost of letter insertion that was independent of target word length and that increased linearly as a function of the number of inserted letters. A meta-analysis incorporating data from the present study and two other studies investigating superset priming, showed an average estimated processing cost of 11 ms per letter insertion. Models of letter position coding are examined in the light of this result.

ADHD and Dysgraphia: Underlying Mechanisms

Multiple complaints in the domain of writing are common among children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In this work we sought to characterize the writing disorder by studying dysgraphia in twenty 6 th grade boys with ADHD and normal reading skills matched to 20 healthy boys who served as a comparison group. Dysgraphia, defined as deficits in spelling and handwriting, was assessed according to neuropsychological explanatory processes within 3 primary domains: linguistic processing, motor programming and motor kinematics. Children with ADHD made significantly more spelling errors, but showed a unique pattern introducing letter insertions, substitutions, transpositions and omissions. This error type, also known as graphemic buffer errors, can be explained by impaired attention aspects needed for motor planning. Kinematic manifestations of writing deficits were fast, inaccurate and an inefficient written product accompanied by higher levels of axial pen pressure. These results suggest that the spelling errors and writing deficits seen in children with ADHD and normal reading skills stem primarily from non-linguistic deficits, while linguistic factors play a secondary role. Recommendations for remediation include educational interventions, use of word processing and judicious use ofpsychostimulants.

Progressive Dysgraphia in a Case of Posterior Cortical Atrophy

Dysgraphia (agraphia) is a common feature of posterior cortical atrophy (PCA). However, detailed analyses of these spelling and writing impairments are infrequently conducted. LM is a 59-year-old woman with dysgraphia associated with PCA. She presented with a two-year history of decline in her writing and dressmaking skills. A 3D T 1 -weighted MRI scan confirmed selective bi-parietal atrophy, with relative sparing of the hippocampi and other cortical regions. Analyses of LM’s preserved and impaired spelling abilities indicated mild physical letter distortions and a significant spelling deficit characterised by letter substitutions, insertions, omissions, and transpositions that was systematically sensitive to word length while insensitive to real word versus nonword category, word frequency, regularity, imagery, grammatical class and ambiguity. Our findings suggest a primary graphemic buffer disorder underlies LM’s spelling errors, possibly originating from disruption to the operation of a fronto-parietal network implicated in verbal working memory.

Spanish recognizer of continuously spelled names over the telephone

In this paper we present a hypothesis–verification approach for a Spanish recognizer of continuously spelled names over the telephone. We give a detailed description of the spelling task for Spanish where the most confusable letter sets are described. We introduce a new HMM topology with contextual silences incorporated into the letter model to deal with pauses between letters, increasing the Letter Accuracy by 6.6 points compared with a single silence model approach. For the final configuration of the hypothesis step we obtain a Letter Accuracy of 88.1% and a Name Recognition Rate of 94.2% for a 1000 names dictionary. In this configuration, we also use noise models for reducing letter insertions, and a Letter Graph to incorporate N-gram language models and to calculate the N-best letter sequences. In the verification step, we consider the M-best candidates provided by the hypothesis step. We evaluate the whole system for different dictionaries, obtaining more than 90.0% Name Recognition Rate for a 10,000 names dictionary. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of incorporating a Spelled Name Recognizer in a Directory Assistance Service over the telephone increasing the percentage of calls automatically serviced from 39.4% to 58.7%.

L2 Users and English Spelling

This paper compares the spelling of adult L2 users of English with native L1 users,both children and adults, using data from the 1993 NFER survey of L1 children, from the 1980 Wing and Baddeley corpus, from a UK university EFL test for overseas students and from work by overseas students in England.An overallcomparison showed similar error rates in L1 children and L2 adults and a similar distribution of errors both for L1 adults and children and for L2 users across the familiar categories of letter insertion, omission, substitution and transposition, apart from a lower proportion of omission errors for L2 users. More detailed comparisons found that, while some errors were particular to certain groups, such as <l>, <r> and epenthetic <e> for Japanese, others were common with all users, such as consonant doubling, vowels representing schwa and digraph reversals <hg>. Much of the errors reflect problems with sound/letter correspondences, some with individual words such as because. Yet overall L2 users can perform at a levelequivalentto a 15-year-old child,unlike mostother areas of language.

High-performance alphabet recognition

Alphabet recognition is needed in many applications for retrieving information associated with the spelling of a name, such as telephone numbers, addresses, etc. This is a difficult recognition task due to the acoustic similarities existing between letters in the alphabet (e.g., the E-set letters). This paper presents the development of a high-performance alphabet recognizer that has been evaluated on studio quality as well as on telephone-bandwidth speech. Unlike previously proposed systems, the alphabet recognizer presented is based on context-dependent phoneme hidden Markov models (HMMs), which have been found to outperform whole-word models by as much as 8%. The proposed recognizer incorporates a series of new approaches to tackle the problems associated with the confusions occurring between the stop consonants in the E-set and the confusions between the nasals (i.e., letters M and N). First, a new feature representation is proposed for improved stop consonant discrimination, and second, two subspace approaches are proposed for improved nasal discrimination. The subspace approach was found to yield a 45% error-rate reduction in nasal discrimination. Various other techniques are also proposed, yielding a 97.3% speaker-independent performance on alphabet recognition and 95% speaker-independent performance on E-set recognition, A telephone alphabet recognizer was also developed using context-dependent HMMs. When tested on the recognition of 300 last names (which are contained in a list of 50,000 common last names) spelled by 300 speakers, the recognizer achieved 91.7% correct letter recognition with 1.1% letter insertions.

Facilitation and Interference in Indirect/Implicit Memory Tests and in the Process Dissociation Paradigm: The Letter Insertion and the Letter Deletion Tasks

This paper introduced the letter insertion and letter deletion tasks. In these tasks participants are presented with letter strings and are instructed to insert or delete a letter to create a word. Experiment 1 demonstrated facilitation priming and established these tasks as sensitive indirect measures of memory. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated interference priming effects. In Experiment 4 the process dissociation paradigm (Jacoby, 1991) was applied to investigate the contributions of automatic and consciously controlled processes to performance on the letter insertion task. In addition, performance in the exclusion condition demonstrated an interference effect caused by automatic retrieval. Potential applications for the letter insertion and letter deletion tasks are discussed.

Identification of Skilled Typists

Skilled typists are less likely to show idiosyncratic patterns of capitalization, punctuation and spelling and are thus more difficult to identify than self-taught typists. However, categorization of the ordinary, single-letter errors made by all typists reveals differences in the error patterns among skilled typists. Initially, these errors are classified as letter insertions, omissions, substitutions and transpositions. The distribution of errors across these categories varies widely from one typist to another. Further subdividing of these categories is outlined. This approach may aid in screening possible typists of questioned documents, and possibly a similar taxonomy of handwriting errors may assist in identifying the source.

The MSS. of Callimachvs' Hymns

F is Milan, Ambrosianus 120 (B 98 sup.);. foll. III. (paper) + 227 (parchment); cmm. 25, 1 × 17, 8, with thirty lines to the page; cent. early XV. Contents: ff. 1v–125v, Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, with marginal and interlinear scholia; followed by his Life. 127, Batrachomyomachia. 132v, Pseudo-Herodotus, Life of Homer. 142v Maximus of Tyre, πῶς &lt;ἄν&gt; τις ἄλνπος ἐἲη (Dissert. XXXIV. Dübner). 145, Orpheus, Argonautica. 168v, ἐπήκοοι καἰ πρòς ἑρπετἀ, i.e. Orpheus, Lithica, Il. 91–110, 115–140, 145–171, 176–202, 207–233, 238–266, 271–300, 305–332, 337–364, 369–398, 467–498, 500–531, 533–564, 566–774. 178v–209r, Homeric Hymns III.–XXXIII. 209r, ‘Homeric’ epigram εἰς ξένους (Hom. Epigr. I. Baum.). 209r–227v, Callimachus, Hymns, with marginal and interlinear scholia. 227V, four lines (ύμνῶ τòν έψίζυγον…τὴν παλαιτέ-ραν). The manuscript is bound in leather. Marks of gatherings are lacking from the Callimachean portion. All the writing is in the same small and very neat hand. Ligatures abound. In the text, final letters (one, two, or three together, in full or abbreviated forms) are frequently written above those which precede them; in the same position, but in the middle of a word, α and abbreviated εν appear frequently; αι, ε, σ or ς, and abbreviated ον and ας, rarely. Iota subscr. is not regularly employed. Horizontal supralinear strokes are used 38 times to indicate names of persons. The scribe was a careful copyist. His major errors, not found in the common stock either of the manuscripts in general or of the z group, nor shared with G and H, number only 25 (permutation of letters, 7; omission and insertion of letters, 15; mis-division of words, 3); his minor, 43 (including 35 of accent).