Language-related Research Research Articles

Analysis of Trends in Children"s Language-related Research Using Research Trend Analysis Tools

Analysis of Trends in Children"s Language-related Research Using Research Trend Analysis Tools

Complexity of STG signals and linguistic rhythm: a methodological study for EEG data.

The superior temporal and the Heschl's gyri of the human brain play a fundamental role in speech processing. Neurons synchronize their activity to the amplitude envelope of the speech signal to extract acoustic and linguistic features, a process known as neural tracking/entrainment. Electroencephalography has been extensively used in language-related research due to its high temporal resolution and reduced cost, but it does not allow for a precise source localization. Motivated by the lack of a unified methodology for the interpretation of source reconstructed signals, we propose a method based on modularity and signal complexity. The procedure was tested on data from an experiment in which we investigated the impact of native language on tracking to linguistic rhythms in two groups: English natives and Spanish natives. In the experiment, we found no effect of native language but an effect of language rhythm. Here, we compare source projected signals in the auditory areas of both hemispheres for the different conditions using nonparametric permutation tests, modularity, and a dynamical complexity measure. We found increasing values of complexity for decreased regularity in the stimuli, giving us the possibility to conclude that languages with less complex rhythms are easier to track by the auditory cortex.

The CLARIN infrastructure as an interoperable language technology platform for SSH and beyond

AbstractCLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium developing and providing a federated and interoperable platform to support scientists in the field of the Social Sciences and Humanities in carrying-out language-related research. This contribution provides an overview of the entire infrastructure with a particular focus on tool interoperability, ease of access to research data, tools and services, the importance of sharing knowledge within and across (national) communities, and community building. By taking into account FAIR principles from the very beginning, CLARIN succeeded in becoming a successful example of a research infrastructure that is actively used by its members. The benefits CLARIN members reap from their infrastructure secure a future for their common good that is both sustainable and attractive to partners beyond the original target groups.

Illuminating insights into subjectivity: Q as a methodology in applied linguistics research

Abstract Applied linguistics (AL) is a broad field of study that often concerns subjective domains such as beliefs, opinions, perspectives, values and emotions. Q methodology (Q), a mixed methods approach to phenomenological and typological inquiry, is specifically designed to help researchers better understand individuals’ subjective viewpoints. Although Q has existed for eight decades, it rarely intersects with language-related research. This article offers AL researchers an overview of Q and examples of its application. The overview covers its brief history and underlying theoretical concepts. The application is illustrated using a case exemplar that investigates language learners’ perspectives regarding enjoyment in online learning. The advantages and limitations of Q are also discussed. There is plenty of room for AL researchers to advance Q, both as a standalone methodology and as an accompaniment to other methods.

Developmental Speech and Language Disorders According to ICD-11

Developmental Speech and Language Disorders According to ICD-11 Abstract. In ICD-11, similar to ICD-10, speech and language disorders are classified as neurodevelopmental disorders, which are part of ICD-11 Chapter 6 (Mental, Behavioural and Neurodevelopmental Disorders). The ICD-10 criteria were not well accepted by many professionals in research and clinic who work with children with speech and language disorders. Especially linguists and speech and language therapists see ICD-10 as too crude and lacking specification of individual language problems. Medical professions in turn criticize the missing aspect of organically caused speech and language problems. This paper presents the classification of speech and language problems or disorders according to ICD-11 compared to ICD-10. One essential aspect lies in the differentiation between "primary" and "secondary" neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition, we compare and discuss other recent classification approaches, such as DSM-5, CATALISE-2, and the classification "Auditory Processing Disorder" by pediatric audiologists. We present a classification approach based on ICD-11, supplemented by an additional specification of the respective impaired speech or language area in the individual child and based on a thorough speech and language assessment. We thus hope to pave the path for an interdisciplinary classification of speech and language disorders according to ICD-11, our aim being to establish a common terminology that can be used by all professions. We expect this common terminology to improve clinical care and to allow for the integration and comparability of speech- and language-related research efforts.

Diskursgemeinschaften in der digitalen Transformation. Begriffsbestimmungen, Zugänge und Ziele

<p>This article discusses the concept of discourse community in the context of language-related discourse research in the digital transformation. In a system-theoretical interpretation of digitalization, the understanding of 'discourse community' can become more profound. This new insight allows to analytically separate analog approaches and digital approaches to discourse communities with references to basic research and applied discourse linguistics. The article points out fundamental differences in the modeling of the concept of 'discourse community' based on theoretical and methodological positions.</p>

Ragnar Rommetveit: A full life

Over a long professional lifetime, Ragnar Rommetveit contributed to numerous disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting discussions in global social science and his own unending quest to understand social and individual life. His remarkable career and impact can be outlined in terms of four main phases. The first involved general social psychology in the 1950s and was reflected in Social Norms and Roles (1953/1955). In the second phase during the 1960s and 1970s, he focused on language-related psycholinguistic research leading to publications such as his 1968 volume Words, Meanings and Messages. The third phase came in the 1970s and 1980s and was motivated by his critique of formal linguistics and resulted in his short, magisterial 1974 volume On Message Structure. The fourth phase between 1980 and 2010 focused on “dialogism,” giving rise to works such as his 1992 article “Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication.” Along with his intellectual accomplishments, Rommetveit’s brilliance and generosity inspired students and colleagues at the University of Oslo, as well as from around the world. His capacity to engage with others in unending mediations on communication and mental life ranks among his most important legacies.

Entre dicho y hecho …

Despite the problems presented by lexical errors in second language (L2) communication, most computer assisted language learning (CALL) programs tend to focus on the acquisition of grammar points rather than on the development of the L2 lexicon. In addition, CALL vocabulary tasks are typically limited in scope and mechanical in nature, covering mostly basic lexical meanings and ignoring many implications of language-related research that points out the need to focus on the layers of meanings associated with lexical items in various cultural contexts. This article brings together findings from research in various research fields related to Spanish SLA (e.g., cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics) in order to propose 10 design features (DFs) of CALL software that would apply these insights to the creation of various types of computer-based lexical acquisition activities. As the authors propose these principles, they review several examples of Spanish CALL lexical materials in terms of their application of current theory (SLA and related fields) to practice (the design of the software activities to teach vocabulary). To conclude, the authors discuss logistical barriers that complicate and inhibit the application of theory and empirical research to practice in the creation of Spanish CALL lexical materials.

The Critical Role of Journal Selection in Scholarly Publishing: A Search for Journal Options in Language-related Research Areas and Disciplines

Problem statement: With the globalization in academia, pressures on academics to publish internationally have been increasing all over the world. However, participating in global scientific communication through publishing in well-regarded international journals is a very challenging and daunting task particularly for nonnative speaker (NNS) scholars. Recent research has pointed out both linguistic and nonlinguistic factors behind the challenges facing NNS scholars in their attempts to publish internationally. Journal selection is suggested to be one of these critical determinants on the way to publication. Purpose of the study: The aim of this article, therefore, is to offer some suggestions about the journal selection process and to provide potential international journal options for especially newcomers to the field and the off-networked peripheral academics who may have limited access to journals. Method: First a framework is offered as guidance for the major points to be considered before deciding for a journal for manuscript subscription. Then, as a result of a search in major international databases, 17 tables are formed consisting international journal options according to their coverage by certain international indexes and according to their focus of interest in specific research areas in the disciplines of language education, applied linguistics, and linguistics. Conclusion: It is hoped that these suggestions and the compiled lists of available journals on specific topics would provide help for especially newcomers to the field and the off-networked peripheral academics who may have limited access to journals in language education and related fields while trying to publish internationally.

Career Development

Abstract:ANTHROPOLOGY WORKS:“Ties that Bind: Familial Space in Practice” by Elizabeth M Pulver Wendy D Bartlo and Antonio Chavarria are contributing editors of “Anthropology Works,” the AAA Committee on Practicing and Public Interest Anthropology column in Anthropology News.GATEWAY TO NSF:“NSF Funding Opportunities for Language‐Related Research” by Laura M AhearnKeywords:Family, kinship, NSF, language, linguistics

COMPARING TWO CORPUS-BASED METHODS FOR EXTRACTING PARAPHRASES TO DICTIONARY-BASED METHOD

Paraphrase extraction plays an increasingly important role in language-related research and applications in areas such as information retrieval, question answering and automatic machine evaluation. Most of the existing methods extract paraphrases from different types of corpora by using syntactic-based approaches. Since a syntactic-based approach relies on the similarity of context to identify and capture paraphrases, other than paraphrases, other terms which tend to appear in a similar context such as loosely related terms and functionally similar yet unrelated terms tend to be extracted. Besides, different types of corpora suffer from different kinds of problems such as limited availability and domain biased. This paper presents a solely semantic-based paraphrase extraction model. This model collects paraphrases from multiple lexical resources and validates those paraphrases semantically in three ways; by computing domain similarity, definition similarity and word similarity. This model is benchmarked with two outstanding syntactic-based approaches. The experimental results from a manual evaluation show that the proposed model outperforms the benchmarks. The results indicate that a semantic-based approach should be applied in paraphrase extraction instead of a syntactic-based approach. The results further suggest that a hybrid of these two approaches should be applied if one targets strictly precise paraphrases.

From symbol grounding to socially shared embodied language knowledge

Much language-related research in cognitive robotics appeals to usage-based models of language as proposed in cognitive linguistics and developmental psychology [1, 2] that emphasise the significance of learning, embodiment and general cognitive development for human language acquisition. Over and above these issues, however, what takes centre stage in these theories are social-cognitive skills of “intention-reading” that are seen as “primary in the language acquisition process” [1] – and also as difficult to incorporate into computational models of language acquisition. The present paper addresses these concerns: we describe work in progress on a series of experiments that take steps towards closing the gap between ‘solipsistic’ symbol grounding in individual robotic agents and socially framed embodied language acquisition in learners that attend to common ground [3] with changing interlocutors.

Language and Literature Division, Faculty of Education, Hong Kong University

The Language and Literature Division (LLD) is the largest of the six divisions of the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong (HKU). It is currently home to 34 academic staff, who specialize either in the fields of Chinese Language, English Language and/or Literature Education, and to 60 full-time and 28 part-time doctoral students, who are researching a wide range of topics including subjects as diverse as corpus-aided language learning, task-based language teaching in primary schools, the English writing of Chinese undergraduates, and the impact of school-based assessment. Staff are very active in conducting their own research, much of which is rooted in classrooms and focuses on issues that directly concern the teaching and learning of languages, such as reading literacy, school-based assessment and assessment for learning in English Language, the teaching of Chinese characters, and good practices in English Language Teaching in Hong Kong secondary schools (see http://good-practices.edb.hkedcity.net/). Colleagues in the English Language area have played important roles in the HKU Strategic Research Theme ‘Language in education and assessment’. This initiative brought together staff from a range of disciplines in various forms of language-related research collaboration, culminating in two large and highly successful international conferences in June 2008: one focusing on language awareness and the other on language issues in English-medium universities (see http://www.hku.hk/clear/).

Language development: Progress and challenges in a multilingual Zimbabwe

Monolingual communities are an extremely rare phenomenon. Instead, most communities are multilingual in that there is usually more than one language spoken. Although multilingualism has been viewed in some circles as an asset in that different languages can be assigned different functions, it sometimes poses a multiplicity of challenges to language planners and researchers. Taking the Zimbabwean situation as a case study, this article highlights some of the problems and challenges that language researchers face in their bid to develop the country's languages. It specifically focuses on issues of language development that came as a challenge to language researchers involved in lexicographic and other language-related research in the African Languages Lexical (ALLEX) Project as well as in the African Languages Research Institute (ALRI). Some such challenges discussed include issues like language selection for development, absence of clear language policy and the important issue of attitudes of respective language communities towards language research programmes. The article also looks at how the project and the institute have managed to make meaningful contributions within the context of the research-unfriendly environment that the researchers found themselves in. The article is based on the writer's experiences as a researcher of both the ALLEX Project and ALRI.

The Shrinking Horizons of Computational Linguistics

Understanding language is one of the great challenges of science, and languagerelated technology is one of the great opportunities of Information Technology. Consequently, many different kinds of researchers work on language issues. Within the computer science community, language is studied by the “ACL community,” by which I mean researchers who regularly publish in Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) venues, such as the journal Computational Linguistics and ACL conferences. But language-related research is also carried out by researchers in other areas of computer science, including knowledge representation, cognitive modeling, vision and robotics, and human–computer interaction communities. Additionally, there are even more people outside computer science who study language, including linguists, psycholinguists, philosophers, and sociolinguists. This is fine; understanding language and developing language technology are huge problems, and it is very useful to have many research communities from diverse backgrounds working on language. This will be especially true if the different research communities are aware of each other, so they can share insights, observations, problems, and so forth. Unfortunately, my impression is that the ACL community is much less interested in research with other language-related research communities than it used to be. This impression is mostly based on discussions I have had with researchers who are on the border between ACL and another language-research community. Several such people have told me that whereas ten years ago they occasionally submitted papers to ACL venues and attended ACL conferences, now they do not bother, because they believe that the ACL community has no interest in their research. In attempt to quantify this insight, I have analyzed citations from papers published in Computational Linguistics in 1995 and in 2005. Specifically, I extracted all citations from Computational Linguistics (CL) articles (excluding book reviews) in these years to journal papers. I then classified the cited journal papers into one of the categories shown in Table 1; whenever possible this classification was based on the subject category assigned by ISI Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to the cited journal. For example, a citation of a paper in Cognitive Science would count as a psychology citation, since ISI JCR classifies Cognitive Science as “Psychology, Experimental.” I counted citations myself, rather than relying on ISI JCR’s count, as there were some mistakes in JCR’s counting. I also created my own “other NLP and speech” classification (that is, references to speech and NLP

Conceptual Graph Grammar – A Simple Formalism for Sublanguage

There are a wide variety of computer applications that deal with various aspects of medical language: concept representation, controlled vocabulary, natural language processing, and information retrieval. While technical and theoretical methods appear to differ, all approaches investigate different aspects of the same phenomenon: medical sublanguage. This paper surveys the properties of medical sublanguage from a formal perspective, based on detailed analyses cited in the literature. A review of several computer systems based on sublanguage approaches shows some of the difficulties in addressing the interaction between the syntactic and semantic aspects of sublanguage. A formalism called Conceptual Graph Grammar is presented that attempts to combine both syntax and semantics into a single notation by extending standard Conceptual Graph notation. Examples from the domain of pathology diagnoses are provided to illustrate the use of this formalism in medical language analysis. The strengths and weaknesses of the approach are then considered. Conceptual Graph Grammar is an attempt to synthesize the common properties of different approaches to sublanguage into a single formalism, and to begin to define a common foundation for language-related research in medical informatics.

The Interactive Videodisc and Its Potential for Second Language Acquisition

While it would be exaggerated to state that CAI (computer assisted instruction) or CALL (computer assisted language learning) is widely used in a systematic fashion in U.S. post secondary foreign language instruction, it is a fact that practically every institution of higher learning has one or several individuals playing around with applications to language learning.1 Almost a dozen books have appeared in last three years which focus on assisted language learning and instruction, and CALICO Database which provides a reference service to information relating to applications of high technology to language since 1980 has over 46,000 entries. (Of these 3,240 list software packages and 393 name researchers.) Much of professional literature still focuses on drill/practice applications of for grammar and vocabulary learning, but as our knowledge about artificial intelligence increases, a number of additional applications have emerged which offer considerable potential for language instruction. There is computerized adaptive testing, computer-aided testing, computer-assisted composition, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine-assisted translation, interactive audio, interactive videotape, and interactive videodisc, to mention just a few. The remainder of this report will be devoted to discussing potential of interactive videodisc for language acquisition, since I agree with Morgenstern's opinion that of currently available technology the videodisk option offers most promise for language learning materials that stress conversation and cultural awareness (p. 28). An important question to ask for those investigating use of assisted instruction (CAI) is not what technical devices can do, but what they can do better than a teacher. Hertkorn, for instance, maintains that if instructional goals can be achieved via personal contact, no technology or mediated delivery systems are needed. While I certainly recognize capability of as a patient, efficient and economic drill master, I believe that intensive drilling conducted by a well trained and committed teacher (utilizing, for instance, drilling techniques advocated by John Rassias for Dartmouth Intensive Model Approach)2 would for most students be more effective than machine-conducted drill. An interactive videodisc system, however, can do something even well trained and committed teacher cannot do readily: it can bring into classroom a large sampling of visually presented, contextually coherent, culturally and linguistically authentic situations and, with help of computer, permit students to interact in simulated fashion with individuals of target language culture in realistic settings. In Findley's words, Like no other medium, interactive videodisc brings together emotional, affective power of television with processing power of computer (p. 10). And Rowe, after pointing out that classroom model of teaching at present does not meet nation's need for fluent speakers of foreign languages, calls interactive video technology answer to problem and the training medium of our time (p. 46). Although language-related research with laserdisc technology in U.S. dates back to 1973, wide-spread educational applications have only become possible since 1982 with marketing of SONY SMC-70 microcomputer which could be easily interfaced with a videodisc player and color monitor.3 The videodisc resembles in size and shape phonograph record. Each side of a CAV (constant angular velocity) disc can hold up to 54,000 frames. This translates into thirty minutes of motion at thirty frames per second, or a combination of motion and stills. A still frame is achieved by allowing reading head to dwell on same frame (one revolution) of disc indefinitely. Because there is no contact, disc cannot wear out. In addition to video portion of disc there are two audio channels and an optional data channel. The data channel can contain digital information for level II use, i.e., automatic stops, options to transfer to other

Machine learning and grammar induction

Despite its complexity, the task of natural language processing can be divided into a number of well-defined subtasks, and one of these centers on syntax. This aspect of language has been studied in detail by linguists, and developmental studies have provided a variety of empirical generalizations about the stages that children traverse in their acquisition of grammar. Because our knowledge of syntax is more complete than that for other components of language, the vast majority of language-related research in machine learning has focused on the task of grammar induction.

Aspects of language use in cross-cultural psychology

Language and language use are such pervasive yet unobtrusive features of cross-cultural psychological research that their impact on studies is often underestimated or overlooked. In this paper three major aspects of language use in cross-cultural psychological research are discussed: (a) language as a field of study, (b) language of tests or measuring instruments as a methodological problem in studies, and (c) language as a medium in which studies are done and communicated. The paper provides a brief overview of language related research and methodology in cross-cultural psychology.

Local Language-related Research: Some Trends and Issues

(1985). Local Language-related Research: Some Trends and Issues. Singapore Journal of Education: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-3.