Kinds Of Words Research Articles

Letter names and sounds: their implications for the phonetisation process

Our aim was to analyse the impact of the characteristics of words used in spelling programmes and the nature of instructional guidelines on the evolution from grapho-perceptive writing to phonetic writing in preschool children. The participants were 50 5-year-old children, divided in five equivalent groups in intelligence, phonological skills and spelling. All the children knew the vowels and the consonants B, D, P, R, T, V, F, M and C, but didn’t use them on spelling. Their spelling was evaluated in a pre and post-test with 36 words beginning with the consonants known. In-between they underwent a writing programme designed to lead them to use the letters P and T to represent the initial phonemes of words. The groups differed on the kind of words used on training (words whose initial syllable matches the name of the initial letter—Exp. G1 and Exp. G2—versus words whose initial syllable is similar to the sound of the initial letter—Exp. G3 and Exp. G4). They also differed on the instruction used in order to lead them to think about the relations between the initial phoneme of words and the initial consonant (instructions designed to make the children think about letter names—Exp. G1 and Exp. G3—versus instructions designed to make the children think about letter sounds—Exp. G2 and Exp. G4). The 5th was a control group. All the children evolved to syllabic phonetisations spellings. There are no differences between groups at the number of total phonetisations but we found some differences between groups at the quality of the phonetisations.

Young Children’s Knowledge About Printed Names

Four experiments examined young children's knowledge about the visual characteristics of writing, specifically personal names. Children younger than 4 years of age, even those who could read no simple words, showed some knowledge about the horizontal orientation of English names, the Latin letters that make them up, and their left-to-right directionality. Preschoolers also had some familiarity with the shapes of the letters in their own first name, especially the leftmost letter. Knowledge of the conventional capitalization pattern for English names emerged later, after a period during which children preferred names in all uppercase letters. When tested with personal names, the kind of word they know best, young children are surprisingly knowledgeable about the visual characteristics of writing.

Twenty-Five Thousand Entries in One Book!

After the psychologist administered the MMPI, the CPI, the WAIS–III, and the DIS to the client, she gave him a diagnosis of anxiety disorder and insisted that he was suffering from lygophilia. The psychologist's supervisor questioned the validity of the diagnosis because the client's presenting symptoms were formication (not fornication), possibly based on a prick experience, and indirect speech acts, which irritated both the client's wife and the psychometrician. The patient (a term that the client actually prefers when it comes to the patient–client issue) managed to perform a mental rotation on the psychologist's handwriting and accused her of graphorrhea. It turned out that the client had studied psychology as an undergraduate and suffered from a collecting mania restricted to rare psychological terms, oddly enough. He accused the psychologist of an ontogenetic fallacy and of abuse. The psychologist finally threw the client out of her office when he pointed out that the WAIS–III scores failed to generate a ratio scale and insisted that she use a memory drum to test his memory. After that Sturm und Drang period, he went home, returning to his dictionary to look for rare psychological terms or neologisms, as he preferred to call them, wondering about his libidinal transference to a psychologist he had only just met. Using a method employed by public school teachers to demonstrate the learning of new words, I subjected myself to the same kind of test described above to see the kinds of words (italicized above) one can learn from reading the APA Dictionary of Psychology.

Serbo-Croat Clitics and Word Grammar

Serbo-Croat has a complex system of clitics which raise interesting problems for any theory of the interface between syntax and morphology. After summarising the data we review previous analyses (mostly within the generative tradition), all of which are unsatisfactory in various ways. We then explain how Word Grammar handles clitics: as words whose form is an affix rather than the usual ‘word-form’. Like other affixes, clitics need a word to accommodate them, but in the case of clitics this is a special kind of word called a ‘hostword’. We present a detailed analysis of Serbo-Croat clitics within this theory, introducing a new distinction between two cases: where the clitics are attached to the verb or auxiliary, and where they are attached to some dependent of the verb.

Impact or explosion? Technological culture and the ballistic metaphor

The term ‘impact’ has become the kind of word which, when it relates to the evaluation of technological advances in contemporary culture, suggests signs of erosion, debilitation and evasion. The misinformed and indiscriminate use of the term in the most varied of contexts has created an impasse in the cultural semiotic approach, where sign systems are viewed in terms of borders and relations. The objective of this article is to examine the trivialisation of the use of the ballistic metaphor in this explosive moment of the culture. For this, we will refer to the formulations presented by the semiotician, Juri Lotman, in his book, appropriately entitled Culture and Explosion. To what degree is the concept of explosion presented as a counterpart to the notion of impact? The desire to find answers to this question is what motivated this inquiry.

The effect of distributional information on children’s use of phonemic contrasts

Several recent experiments indicate that, when learning words, children are not as sensitive to phonemic differences (e.g., /d/ vs. /t/) as they are in discrimination tasks [Pater, J., Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (2004). The perceptual acquisition of phonological contrasts. Language, 80, 384–402; Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381–382]. In particular, 14-month-olds who can hear the difference between similar words such as “daw” and “taw” treat these labels as interchangeable when they refer to newly learned objects. We hypothesize that experience with the distribution of phonemes in their native language helps children use these phonemic distinctions in a word-learning task. Children receive distributional information when they experience different phonemes in different words. To test this hypothesis, we exposed children to two kinds of words: words in which phonemes occurred in very similar contexts, and words in which phonemes occurred in dissimilar contexts. Children who experienced phonemes in dissimilar contexts were more successful in using the contrast between the phonemes in a word-learning task.

Editorial

Editorial

(Silence on) Adverbs in Plutarch Plat. Quaest. 10

ABSTRACT: In order to justify the Platonic formula that speech results from the blend of nouns and verbs, Plutarch tries to demonstrate that all other kinds of words are not autonomous parts of speech (tenth platônikon zêtêma). Strangely enough, he does not discuss adverbs, even while they were recognised by Alexandrinian grammarians, as he himself seems to acknowledge when he mentions them at the very beginning of his discussion. We will try to show that adverbs are not victims of an involuntary omission. Plutarch based his overall demonstration on a strictly grammatical understanding of Plato’s metaphysical viewpoint; he is therefore forced not to discuss adverbs, since they possess peculiar morpho-semantic features which could show the inconsistency of his reconstruction.

Are There Semantic Natural Kinds of Words?

Gareth Evans proposes that there are semantic natural kinds of words. In his development of this theory, he argues for two constraints on the identification of these kinds. I argue that neither of these constraints are justified. Furthermore, my argument against Evans’ second constraint constitutes a direct argument for the existence of semantic natural kinds, something Evans himself never offers. I conclude by sketching some positive details of a more plausible theory of semantic natural kinds.

La comprensión escrita de preposiciones y partículas interrogativas: un estudio en sujetos sordos

The aim of this study was to examine the reading comprehension problems in deaf people. Two kind of words were chosen to analyse these problems: prepositions and interrogative particles, both being very frequently found in texts and essential in the correct understanding of a sentence. Each category was evaluated with 55 items. 40 deaf people between 13 and 58 years old took part in this research. Age, moment in which hearing loss took place, degree of hearing loss and communication system were used as independent variables, and used to classify them. A group of non-deaf children aged 7 and 8 acted as control. The results show the existence of significant differences between the different subgroups indicating the difficulties that deaf people has in understanding both, prepositions and interrogative particles

Self‐references among children's first fifty words: Indications for an emerging sense of self in Dutch‐speaking children

AbstractThe present study investigated at what age self‐references would turn up for the first time in young children's language and what kind of words these were. This was studied for a corpus of the first 50 words, produced by ten children, five boys and five girls, collected through parental reports. Self‐references were defined as all words that referred in one way or another to the speakers themselves. They were not restricted to utterances containing pronominals of the first person singular or the child's first name. The appearance of self‐references varied with the onset of speech. Children who started to speak early also produced self‐referent words at an early age (between 12 and 16 months). Self‐references could be satisfactorily classified into three lexical categories: nominals, action words and modifiers, containing words (a) labelling body parts, (b) verbalizing action plans and ongoing actions, and (c) expressing characteristics of outer appearance and actions, and physical sensations, respectively. This indicates that young children's sense of self is not restricted to an awareness of their own actions, but that a variety of experiences contribute to this. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Role of study strategy in recall of mixed lists of common and rare words.

Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings that common words are more recallable than are rare words when the 2 kinds of words are presented in separate lists but not when they are presented in the same list. Experiment 2 showed much the same pattern when an orienting task was performed during word presentation. In Experiment 3 common words were found to be more recallable than rare words even for mixed lists when no warning was given of the memory test, although the effect was less pronounced than for pure lists. In Experiment 4 stronger measures were taken to preclude anticipation of the memory test, and the effect of word commonness was found to be just as pronounced with mixed lists as it was with pure lists. It was suggested that lists are studied in a way believed to optimize recall and that mixed lists foster a strategy of favoring the rare words.

A division of labor between nouns and verbs in the representation of motion.

This study examines the association of nouns and verbs with 2 different kinds of motion. Extrinsic motion is the motion of 1 object with respect to another object, whereas intrinsic motion is the motion of an object (or its parts) defined with respect to itself. Several experiments are reported that compare the association of these types of motion with novel nouns and verbs. Adult participants demonstrated a bias to associate verbs with extrinsic motion to a greater extent than intrinsic motion and a bias to associate nouns with intrinsic motion to a greater extent than extrinsic motion. These results suggest a division of labor between nouns and verbs, with verbs specialized to convey relational information, whereas nouns are specialized to convey information about individual objects. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motion may be related to the neuroanatomical distinction between the what and where systems. Verbs are often thought of as the primary vehicles for conveying motion. Most verbs, however, only describe certain aspects of a motion event, and other kinds of words are necessary to provide a more complete description of motion: Prepositions, verb particles, and adverbs are examples of other word classes that may participate in the description of motion. Nouns are not generally thought to describe motion. Nouns are instead thought of as labels for the objects participating in an event. Yet many nouns label objects that have characteristic manners of motion, and knowledge of how an object moves may help one to interpret a sentence containing that noun. If both nouns and verbs convey motion, communication would be most efficient if one used nouns and verbs to convey different aspects of a motion event, creating a division of labor between nouns and verbs in the description of motion.

Expression of superordinates in children's word definitions.

This study investigated developmental changes in the expression of superordinates in children' word definitions. Children in Grades 1, 3, and 5 attempted to define words from 3 parts of speech (i.e., nouns, verbs, and adjectives) and 4 morphologically defined word types (i.e., compound, root, inflected, and derived words). Superordination increased significantly and changed qualitatively with age, but across grades children produced greater proportions of superordinates for nouns than adjectives and verbs, and for compound and root words than inflected and derived words. These findings may be accounted for by increases in the size or changes in the organization of the mental lexicon with grade, children's increasing awareness that superordinates are conventionally used in definitions, and the differential organization of concepts in the mental lexicon for different kinds of words.

Los diccionarios bilingües castellano-catalanes de orientación escolar

In this paper we have tried to determine if bilingual scholastic Spanish- Catalan Dictionaries are suitable for users that they are made and they take into account their necessities. We have studied the nomenclature of dictionaries to see what kind of words they choose and which criterion they use for that.

Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition: what do they mean?

ABSTRACTObservational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition have both recently been used to look at the absolute proportion of nouns in children's early vocabularies. However, they have tended to generate rather different results. The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between such measures in a sample of 26 children between 1;1 and 2;1 at approximately 50 and 100 words. The results show that although observational and checklist measures are significantly correlated, there are also systematic quantitative differences between them which seem to reflect a combination of checklist, maternal-report and observational sampling biases. This suggests that, although both kinds of measure may represent good indices of differences in vocabulary size and composition across children and hence be useful as dependent variables in correlational research, neither may be ideal for estimating the absolute proportion of nouns in children's vocabularies. The implication is that questions which rely on information about the absolute proportion of particular kinds of words in children's vocabularies can only be properly addressed by detailed longitudinal studies in which an attempt is made to collect more comprehensive vocabulary records for individual children.

Hebb's concept of cell assemblies and the psychophysiology of word processing.

Hebb's brain-theoretical approach suggests that tightly connected networks of neurons, Hebbian cell assemblies, are the building blocks of cognitive functions. These assemblies are not necessarily restricted to a small cortical locus but may be dispersed over distant cortical areas. Assemblies with different topographies can be postulated for different kinds of words, such as meaningful content versus grammatical function words or words eliciting motor versus visual associations. Evidence from evoked potentials and gamma-band electrocortical responses elicited by lexical material supports a cell assembly model of language and other higher cognitive functions.

Specific and infraspecific epithets in P.H. Davis' Flora of Turkey

The examination of specific and infraspecific epithets given in P.H. DavisÕ Flora of Turkey reveals that grammatically the great majority are adjectives, participles and nouns. Very rarely we see as an epithet a verb, pronoun, interjection or another kind of word. The sum of adjectives and participles forms 70 % of the total. Information on adjectival and substantival epithets, on their orthographic variations and origins is given. An index of the Turkish botanists whose names have been used as epithets is added.

Syntactic cues in the acquisition of collective nouns

One basic finding in the study of word learning is that children tend to construe a word describing an object as referring to the kind of whole object, rather than to a part of the object, one of its properties, or the substance it is made of. This has been taken as evidence that there exist certain special constraints on word meaning that guide children to favor the kind-of-object interpretation when exposed to a new word. There are descriptive problems with this proposal, however, as it cannot explain how children learn other kinds of words, such as names for specific people, substances, parts, events, collections, and periods of time. These problems motivate an alternative theory in which young children possess several distinct conceptual categories - including “individual”, which is more abstract than “whole object” - and can use syntactic cues to determine the conceptual category that a new word belongs to. This theory is explored in two experiments in which we attempt to use syntactic cues to teach children and adults novel collective nouns - words that refer to groups of objects. The results indicate that children can use such cues to learn names for kinds of individuals that are not whole objects, although they are less able to do so than adults. Candidate explanations for why this developmental difference exists are discussed and implications are drawn for theories of word learning and conceptual representation.

Personal Names as Narrative in Fiji: Politics of the Lauan Onomasticon

In every society, proper names, as well as all words that are being used to make to a specific object rather than a class or category, are a point of contact between language and local, concrete reality of world. Culturally specific of language and constitute, in a broad sense, differences among societies, while concrete, physical, and biological reality represents a starting point of commonality from which some degree of commensurability is attainable. Perhaps this is an underlying basis for idea that the understanding of names and naming [can provide] most valuable key to elucidation of ... social systems (Maybury-Lewis 1984:2). One way that naming of various communities can be compared concerns pattern of interactions each creates among three basic elements of discourse: onomasticon, lexicon, and history. The onomasticon is body of names used as identifying and individuating labels, lexicon is body of words used in general reference, and history is body of narratives that define individual and collective identity. When personal names are considered as words, they link individuals to general, descriptive categories of in group, and when names are considered as narratives they link individuals to politics and social control. Names form linkages among these discourse elements in all societies, but emphases placed on such connections can vary widely. WORDS AND NAMES The relationship between and has provoked considerable discussion among students of language and in western tradition of language philosophy. One appealing functional distinction has it that a word has meaning while a name has reference (Gasque 1991:219). The widespread, perhaps universal, form of verbal art based on possibility of meaningful names - names that exploit play between particular and general and dynamic tension among indexical, iconic, and symbolic senses of - requires such a distinction. But while practitioners of language have enjoyed this ambiguity, philosophers of language have struggled with it. In Augustinian tradition, of every is object that it names. Wittgenstein (1922:47;3.203) says (or shows) that words can be analyzed into primitive elements he calls names, and he asserts that the means object, and the object is its meaning. Meaning and thus being equated, distinction between and on this basis collapses. Wittgenstein's (1958) later work also implies that and cannot be distinguished on basis of meaning, but now reason is that neither one has any. For Wittgenstein, both are game pieces, distinguished by uses to which either may be put under rules of socially constructed language games. The pragmatists, too, led by James and Peirce, tend to question concept of as something that exists on its own, and they view it instead as a social or psychological effect produced by use of a or (James 1907; Peirce 1934:5.411-34). Peirce's discussion of index as a particular type of sign that points something out by virtue of a cause-and-effect relationship with its object provides another way of distinguishing a personal from other kinds of words, but Peirce (1931:2.274-302) insists that there are no pure indices, icons, or symbols; every sign is mixed and combines in some degree characteristics of each type. It follows, perhaps, that there are no pure names and that names and words continually cross and recross in process of usage, whatever boundaries one tries to draw between them. LEXICON, ONOMASTICON, AND HISTORY Usage, context, and convention, then, are central to problem of relationship between and name. For this reason, question cannot be fully framed and answered in discourse of language philosophy, which is located in imaginary, universal object domain - a domain outside of history and social context of usage - that might be called language in general. …