Levels Of Linguistic Knowledge Research Articles

Measuring and implementing lexical alignment: A systematic literature review

Lexical Alignment is a phenomenon often found in human-human conversations, where the interlocutors converge during a conversation to use the same terms and phrases for the same underlying concepts. Alignment (linguistic) is a mechanism used by humans for better communication between interlocutors at various levels of linguistic knowledge and features, and one of them is lexical. The existing literature suggests that alignment has a significant role in communication between humans, and is also beneficial in human-agent communication. Various methods have been proposed in the past to measure lexical alignment in human-human conversations, and also to implement them in conversational agents. In this research, we carry out an analysis of the existing methods to measure lexical alignment and also dissect methods to implement it in a conversational agent for personalizing human-agent interactions. We propose a new set of criteria that such methods should meet and discuss the possible improvements that can be made to existing methods.

Exploring the relationship between linguistic knowledge and strategy use in listening comprehension

The language learner strategies research field has often tried to identify the good language learner (GLL) by distinguishing more proficient from less proficient learners. However the notion of ‘good’ may be problematic without taking into account an individual’s linguistic knowledge (LK). This article foregrounds LK in relation to strategy use in the context of ‘listening to the teacher’: a language use task relatively under-researched. Secondary school students in Hong Kong ( n = 646) completed a questionnaire and tests of LK including vocabulary and grammar. Lower LK learners reported using more translation strategies, whereas those with higher LK reported using a range of additional strategies. A further cluster analysis, however, indicated that a sub-group of lower LK learners were comparably strategic with the higher LK group perhaps compensating for low LK via strategy deployment. This article provides evidence that strategy deployment when listening to the teacher is not wholly constrained by levels of LK. Pedagogical implications are suggested.

Linguistic Approaches in Teaching History of Science and Technology Courses through a Content Block on Cognitive Sciences

History of Science and Technology (HST) courses are increasingly becoming part of core curriculums for undergraduate students due to an increased emphasis on scientific literacy. HST courses should aim to help students gain an understanding of the nature of science and should enable them to reflect epistemologically. The authors suggest teaching HST courses through several interchangeable content blocks, and herein, present the material and discussion topics that they believe should be implemented in a content block on cognitive sciences through a linguistic component. Language has a special meaning for humankind as it indicates its unique ability in the evolutionary development and in creating a new social environment. Therefore, paying special attention to the linguistic component when teaching HST courses helps students obtain a basic level of linguistic knowledge as its interdisciplinary approaches are increased through the study of cognitive sciences such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and artificial intelligence.In order to represent a practical meaning of linguistics in the processes of constructing social environment, the authors conducted an empirical study based on the analysis of media texts. We asked 63 sophomores majoring in social sciences and humanities, who are affiliated with the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations to choose 60 media texts, both broadsheets and tabloids, on social and political content. Estimating and analyzing the surveys allowed the authors to determine students’ abilities to identify communicative strategies that were used in the media texts, to understand the role of the strategies in forming the social environment of a person or a group, and to recognize how using the tools of cognitive linguistics enhances sophisticated thinking and develops synergetic perceptions of every individual.

“Hätte, wäre, wenn…”

The German subjunctive mood (‘Konjunktiv’) is a grammatical feature that attests to the freedom of human beings to step out of the boundaries of their immediate situation and explore new possibilities in hypothetical scenarios. It therefore plays a pivotal role in advanced learner argumentative writing, but due to its highly complex nature regarding both form and usage, the ‘Konjunktiv’ challenges learners on virtually all levels of linguistic knowledge. This paper presents the first learner corpus-based study of this phenomenon with a two-pronged Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis approach: comparing learner data to native-speaker data and learner data at different levels of proficiency using the Corpus of Learner German (CLEG). The investigation seeks to explain the detected patterns of over-, under- and misuse and developmental paths by drawing on cognitive theories of second language acquisition.

Perceived and actual levels of knowledge about language amongst primary and secondary student teachers: do they know what they think they know?

Previous research into student teachers’ knowledge about language concluded that overall the picture was fairly bleak. Such research focused on the knowledge about language that the student teachers possessed when they moved from secondary school education into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. However, few studies have investigated the impact of the increasing demands on teachers, made in curricular documents throughout the last 20 years, to improve students’ abilities in language and whether student teachers’ knowledge about language had improved as a result of these curricular imperatives. This article reports on research into perceived and actual levels of knowledge about language conducted in a university in Scotland with students training to be primary teachers and secondary English and modern language teachers. Findings reveal that student teachers’ levels of linguistic knowledge, as measured by the instrument employed in this study, are generally low contrasting with their own more positive perceptions of their competence.

Exploring the effectiveness of linguistic knowledge for biographical relation extraction

AbstractMachine learning techniques have been implemented to extract instances of semantic relations using diverse features based on linguistic knowledge, such as tokens, lemmas, PoS-tags, or dependency paths. However, there has been little work aiming to know which of these features works better in the relation extraction task, and less in languages other than English. In this paper, various features representing different levels of linguistic knowledge are systematically evaluated for biographical relation extraction. The effectiveness of these features was measured by training several supervised classifiers that only differ in the type of linguistic knowledge used to define their features. The experiments performed in this paper show that some basic linguistic knowledge (provided by lemmas and their combination in bigrams) behaves better than other complex features, such as those based on syntactic analysis. Furthermore, some feature combinations using different levels of analysis are proposed in order (i) to avoid feature overlapping as well as (ii) to evaluate the use of computationally inexpensive and widespread tools such as tokenization and lemmatization. This paper also describes two new freely available corpora for biographical relation extraction in Portuguese and Spanish, built by means of a distant-supervision strategy. Experiments were performed with five semantic relations and two languages, using these corpora.

Linguistic interfaces and language acquisition in childhood: Introduction to the special issue

Much contemporary L1 acquisition theory and empirical research are guided by the hypothesis that acquisition delays in children are often related to the integration of information across grammatical and other cognitive modules, such as syntax and discourse-pragmatics (see e.g., Grinstead, 2010). This special issue brings together cutting edge research from all relevant paradigms addressing interface issues in child language acquisition and provides a platform for the study of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge. In this introduction, we present the reader with the tools needed to best understand the contributions of the individual studies and what they bring to bear on larger theoretical questions as a collective.

Non-Finiteness in Early Hebrew Verbs

The study investigates the gradual development of morphological specification, as reflected in use of early non-finite verb forms in the speech of three Hebrew-acquiring children (mean age range 1;4–2;2). Children acquiring different languages have been shown to make use of non-finite forms in their initial verb usage. Use of uninflected verbs in matrix clauses has been attributed to the Root or Optional Infinitives phenomenon in generative frameworks, or to the generally stepwise path of acquisition in developmental approaches. Analyses of the longitudinal data presented here suggest that Hebrew-acquiring children do not use infinitival forms before they begin to master inflections productively. Instead, they rely, for several months, on non-affixed “bare stems” as their initial verb forms. Prefix-marked “full” infinitives occur later, typically in well-formed syntactic contexts, alongside productive use of affixed Present-tense (benoni) participial forms. Hebrew-acquiring children thus appear to make selective use of different types of nonfinite forms (initial bare stems followed by Infinitives and benoni), each representing different levels of inflectional knowledge. It is therefore argued here that non-finiteness in early child language is in itself a developmental concept consisting of several sub-phases each of which demonstrates a particular level of linguistic knowledge, motivated by typological features of the ambient language.

Children's use of phonological information in ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking to assess children's use of stress in resolving structural ambiguities. Experiment 2 took advantage of special properties of Mandarin to investigate whether children can use intonational cues to resolve ambiguities involving speech acts. The results of our experiments show that children's use of prosodic information in ambiguity resolution varies depending on the type of ambiguity involved. Children can use prosodic information more effectively to resolve speech act ambiguities than to resolve structural ambiguities. This finding suggests that the mapping between prosody and semantics/pragmatics in young children is better established than the mapping between prosody and syntax.

Second Language Listening Strategy Research: Methodological Challenges and Perspectives

Abstract This paper explores methodological issues related to research into second language listening strategies. We argue that a number of central questions regarding research methodology in this line of enquiry are underexamined, and we engage in the discussion of three key methodological questions: (1) To what extent is a verbal report a valid and reliable way of eliciting information about strategies? (2) Should we control for learners’ level of linguistic knowledge when examining their listening strategy use? and (3) What are the problems surrounding the analysis of data gained through verbal reports? We discuss each of these three methodological issues within the framework of a research project investigating listening strategies deployed by learners of French in secondary schools in England. Implications from these findings for future research are discussed.

Form–meaning mappings in the aspectual domain: What about the L1? A response to Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulasserandestaris very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2 instructors of Spanish, since most pedagogical explanations of the uses ofserandestarprovided in textbooks are incomplete and inaccurate. However, the acquisition of copular constructions has not received the attention it deserves in the acquisition literature, making a special issue ofBilingualism: Language and Cognitiondedicated to this topic particularly welcome. A reason for the scarcity of research in this area may be related to both the linguistic complexity of Spanishserandestarand the inadequacy of many available theoretical treatments to explain their complementary distribution. Although constructions withserandestarare highly frequent in the input, they are grammatically quite intricate, straddling between the levels of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Accordingly, Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela correctly frame their study within the current debate on interface vulnerability in language development in general, and in adult L2 acquisition in particular (Sorace, 2004; White, in press). In a nutshell, grammatical areas which require the integration of different levels of linguistic knowledge (e.g., syntax–discourse, syntax–morphology, morphology–semantics, etc.) for processing, production, or interpretation, show developmental delays and instability in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. In the case of monolingual acquisition, instability or non-target-like behavior is temporary, but in L2 grammars, instability can persist up to very advanced levels of proficiency, eventually leading to fossilization.

Second Language Listening Strategy Research: Methodological Challenges and Perspectives

Abstract This paper explores methodological issues related to research into second language listening strategies. We argue that a number of central questions regarding research methodology in this line of enquiry are underexamined, and we engage in the discussion of three key methodological questions: (1) To what extent is a verbal report a valid and reliable way of eliciting information about strategies? (2) Should we control for learners’ level of linguistic knowledge when examining their listening strategy use? and (3) What are the problems surrounding the analysis of data gained through verbal reports? We discuss each of these three methodological issues within the framework of a research project investigating listening strategies deployed by learners of French in secondary schools in England. Implications from these findings for future research are discussed.

College teachers' perceptions of English language characteristics that identify English language learning disabled deaf students.

Deaf individuals typically experience English language difficulties at all levels of linguistic knowledge. Hearing individuals with English language learning disabilities (LD) can exhibit the same kinds of English language difficulties as deaf individuals. Although the existence of deaf individuals who also have LD has long been recognized, no definite criteria for identifying them exist, partly because of the confounding effects of deafness and LD on English language development. Despite the confound, previous surveys suggest that teachers believe atypical English-language behavior is a potential diagnostic marker for LD in deaf individuals. In the present study, a survey solicited the intuitions of experienced teachers and tutors of English to deaf college students regarding the degree of difficulty deaf students with and without LD might be expected to have in dealing with 30 specific English language phenomena. Spelling knowledge and a variety of English discourse, lexical syntactic, and morphological phenomena emerged as candidates for further study as potential markers of LD in the deaf population.

Morphophonology and the hierarchical lexicon

That morphology has to have an interface with both syntax and phonologyis a commonplace in linguistics. Separating phonological and morphologicalinformation results in redundant duplication of information and is bound toresort to unmotivated diacritic annotation of properties relevant at the interfaceswith other levels. This supplies motivation for such approach to grammar inwhich the representational levels of linguistic knowledge are integrated.Such anintegrated model of language questions the autonomy of linguistic modulesand attempts to represent theintricate correlations between the various levelsof linguistic representation directly by assuming a homogeneous architecture.These tenets are embraced by most monostratal theories of grammar. In thisspirit we provide a novel account of anumber of phenomena of Hungarian morphophonologyusing the concept of hierarchical lexicon.

A speech understanding and dialog system with a homogeneous linguistic knowledge base

This article presents the speech understanding and dialog system EVAR. All levels of linguistic knowledge are used both to control the analysis process and for the interpretation of an utterance. All kinds of knowledge are integrated in a homogeneous knowledge base. The control algorithm used for the analysis is defined within the representation scheme and does not depend on the application. One of the aims of EVAR is to develop a system structure where linguistic and nonlinguistic expectations could be used not only for the interpretation but also as predictions for the recognition process.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The level of linguistic knowledge and awareness amongst students training to be primary teachers

Abstract The Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language recommends that a substantial part of the initial training of primary teachers should involve a systematic study of language. The study described here predates publication of this report, but investigates the current levels of some aspects of student knowledge and awareness about language. The measures include: knowledge of grammatical terminology, the ability to perceive and articulate patterns in language and awareness of concepts such as language variation and change. Students’ attitudes towards the use of grammatical terminology in the classroom are also investigated. Results indicate that levels of knowledge and awareness may be somewhat higher than pessimists might suppose, although there are considerable gaps. The most significant determinant of students’ structural knowledge (though not general awareness), would appear to be their background in foreign languages, although the teacher training itself appears to make a contribut...

Literature in the ESL Classroom

This paper examines the pros and cons of using literature in an ESL classroom. The author argues that if literary texts are to be used successfully in the classroom, they must be carefully selected and approached in a manner which promotes an aesthetic interaction between the reader and the text. The paper concludes with a specific example of how a literary text might be approached so as to foster this type of interaction. Should literature to be part of an ESL curriculum? Today with the current focus in ESL on meeting the particular academic and occupational needs of the students, it is easy to view any attention to literature as unnecessary. Is there a rationale for including literature in the curriculum? Let's first examine the common arguments against using literature. The most common ones are the following. First, since one of our main goals as ESL teachers is to teach the grammar of the language, literature, due to its structural complexity and its unique use of language, does little to contribute to this goal. Second, the study of literature will contribute nothing to helping our students meet their academic and/or occupational goals. Finally, literature often reflects a particular cultural perspective; thus, on a conceptual level, it may be quite difficult for students. These arguments certainly need to be addressed if we are to reach a decision as to whether or not to use literature. Clearly, we all share the objective of promoting our students' awareness of the structure of the language. However, there are as Widdowson (1978:3) points out two levels of linguistic knowledge: the level of usage and the level of use. According to his definition, usage involves a knowledge of linguistic