Lexical Difficulty Research Articles

THE PLACE OF TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE TITLES OF MOVIES

The article investigates the difficulties of translation of the titles of films. It explores the features of literal translation. The paper consists of translation the names of English movies and the examples which have the greatest difficulty in translation. It analyzes lexical difficulties in translation of literary texts. Translation of such works requires special skills in the field of translation, using appropriate types of transformations, concentration, knowledge, techniques and methods of translation.

Differences in the type of vocabulary understood by deaf and hearing students: Results to guide interventions

IntroductionVocabulary knowledge is an essential element in language development. There is evidence of significant differences in vocabulary knowledge between deaf children and hearing peers of the same age. These differences put deaf students at a disadvantage when compared to their hearing counterparts. The aim of this study was to investigate whether certain types of words characterise the lexical difficulties of deaf students. Our starting point is that this knowledge is needed to design interventions that are adapted to the particular needs of these students for their lexical development. MethodsWe evaluated the lexical comprehension of 90 Spanish students. The sample comprised 45 hearing students and 45 students with severe or profound hearing loss. Both groups were attending the later years of primary school (8 to –12-year-olds). They were tested using the Spanish Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III. The performance of both groups was statistically compared using percentiles and standard scores as well as a selected set of words from the test. ResultsNo significant differences between hearing and deaf groups were found by age, sex, and sociocultural level. Significant differences were found between groups in their percentile and standard scores. There were no significant differences in performance between the two groups on only five of the 25 words with the highest error rate in the deaf group. The qualitative analysis of the remaining 20 words that were especially challenging for deaf students reveals results of interest which could help guide interventions. ConclusionsThe results indicate the need for lexical intervention for deaf students in the final years of primary school. The specialised support service for deaf learners should approach the intervention by targeting a specific type of vocabulary, making the semantic relationships between these words more transparent and promoting a deeper understanding of them.

Exploring undergraduate students’ difficulties in EFL academic writing

This study aims to explore undergraduate students’ difficulties and how they cope with difficulties in EFL academic writing. Despite much research revealing the difficulties of undergraduate students in academic writing, relatively few studies implied academic writing difficulties in the higher education context. To fill this gap, this present study focused on exploring EFL students’ difficulties and how they cope with the difficulties in terms of lexical difficulties, grammar and punctuation, avoiding plagiarism, and text structure. This study used a qualitative approach with a phenomenological case study design. Three undergraduate students were recruited as participants for this study. The data were collected through interview sessions employing open-ended questions adopting a three series of interviews by Seidman (2013) consisting of thirteen questions. The result showed similarities and differences in difficulties and the ways to cope with it. The result of this research is expected to support the lecturer to consider the students’ difficulties and their ways to cope with the difficulties where it can be applied in academic writing subject. Moreover, the difficulty in academic writing is important for students to examine the effective ways to cope with difficulties to become better academic writers. Keywords: Undergraduate students; Academic writing; Academic writing difficulties

Lexical effects on talker discrimination in adult cochlear implant usersa).

The lexical and phonological content of an utterance impacts the processing of talker-specific details in normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Adult cochlear implant (CI) users demonstrate difficulties in talker discrimination, particularly for same-gender talker pairs, which may alter the reliance on lexical information in talker discrimination. The current study examined the effect of lexical content on talker discrimination in 24 adult CI users. In a remote AX talker discrimination task, word pairs-produced either by the same talker (ST) or different talkers with the same (DT-SG) or mixed genders (DT-MG)-were either lexically easy (high frequency, low neighborhood density) or lexically hard (low frequency, high neighborhood density). The task was completed in quiet and multi-talker babble (MTB). Results showed an effect of lexical difficulty on talker discrimination, for same-gender talker pairs in both quiet and MTB. CI users showed greater sensitivity in quiet as well as less response bias in both quiet and MTB for lexically easy words compared to lexically hard words. These results suggest that CI users make use of lexical content in same-gender talker discrimination, providing evidence for the contribution of linguistic information to the processing of degraded talker information by adult CI users.

Construct Validity of the Constructed Response Test Tasks in School-Based Assessment

This study aimed to examine the constructed response (CR) test tasks in school-based assessment with a focus on construct validity. To this end, the researcher collected 771 CR test items from the midterm and final exam papers of the 2021 academic year from 37 high schools across the country. Three Korean raters participated in analyzing the characteristics of the test tasks based on the modified Bachman and Palmer’s test method facet, and several corpus analysis tools including WordSmith 8.0, Range, LCA, L2SCA and readability calculators were applied. The result of the analysis clearly demonstrates a gap between the practice and the published guidelines of introducing CR test tasks. The analysis of the task characteristics showed that the CR test is mainly intended to assess students’ reading skills rather than writing skills, largely through short answer or completion form of the CR test tasks. The corpus analysis of the language input showed that lexical difficulty, diversity, and complexity, syntactic complexity, and textual difficulty varied depending on three source types: the textbook, the NCSAT (mock CSAT) and others. The findings of the study can give several pedagogical implications in regard to the CR test tasks in school-based assessments.

SONGS FROM ENGLISH-LANGUAGE CARTOONS AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS INTO UKRAINIAN AND GERMAN

Background. Songs in the field of film publishing play an important role in the understanding of the main characters’ emotions and thoughts, conveying a specific atmosphere, or even serving as a substitute for dialogues and words. But in most cases, songs are not translated into other languages during the release of the film, forgetting that the song lyrics can play a key role or even carry the inherent opinion of the producer. Due to the great need for film art now, its development in society and further prospects, there is a problem with the appropriate translation of songs and with insufficient research and materials on this topic.
 The purpose of the article is to identify difficulties in translating songs and analyze translation transformations using the example of the lyrics of the song «How Far I'll Go» from the cartoon «Moana».
 Methods. Classification and comparative method for determining difficulties in translation; generalization of the received information; practical analysis of translation methods on the example of a song from the cartoon «Moana»; synthesis of translation difficulties with translation methods and classification of ways to translate a song in films and cartoons.
 Results. The most common difficulties in translating songs are lexical difficulties: correctly understand the latest words in the original language, choose a synonymous word or meaning from the translation language, and determine the correct interpretation of texts with abbreviations. It is also important to preserve the main meaning of the text, its rhyming, and take into account cultural features when translating a song. The translator also needs to have knowledge in the field of poetics and music to accurately translate the song text while preserving the opinion of the author of the original song and the musical drawing. Insufficient theoretical base forces translators not to translate the original song and leave it in the original, which leaves the viewer without understanding the song and its role in the film, which also causes the loss of emphasizing the feelings of the scenes and the main idea of the author.
 Discussion. Studying this topic of translating songs from cartoons allows us to conclude that songs are an important part of cinema, which studios in most cases neglect when translating films into other languages. Only knowledge of the theory of Translation Studies is not enough for translators for professional and adequate translation, so there is a problem of insufficient number of professional and qualified translators. The study also found that lexical constructions are used by translators quite often when translating songs and are the main translation tool. The need for knowledge of ways and methods of correct translation of song texts in the film industry requires scientists and researchers to draw attention to this problem and engage in active research in the direction of song translation, which means a great prospect for creating a new direction in the field of translation studies due to the demand and necessity of song translations in the film industry.

INVESTIGATING THE ESSAY WRITING CHALLENGES EXPERIENCED BY STUDENTS AT BINA SARANA INFORMATIKA UNIVERSITY

The study of writing has become an essential contributor to language learning research. Over the years, the existence of writing has led students to gain competence in learning a language. Throughout the process, students might have problems and experience errors that hinder them from producing the written product, especially an essay. Therefore, this study aims to critically identify and evaluate the students’ problems in writing essays, especially at Bina Sarana Informatika University. The research was conducted using a close-ended questionnaire with 37 questions regarding essay writing problems. Four significant problems: plagiarism, grammatical errors, lexical difficulties, and lack of planning became the focus of this study. Moreover, a lack of confidence also becames one of the problems in writing an essay. The finding of this research was that students agreed that lexical difficulties become the most common problem while writing an essay, with an average of 2,92. Interestingly, with an average of 2,3, the least common problem wass a grammatical error. By seeing the results from 21 respondents, it wass evident that the main thing that hinders students’ performance in writing an essay wass the difficulty in using the appropriate words and dictions based on context<p> </p>

Lexical Demands of Academic Written English: From Students’ Assignments to Scholarly Publications

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which contained 2,761 student assignments, and the Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE) corpus which included 4,000 scholarly articles. Results from the analyses demonstrated significant differences in lexical difficulty between students’ assignments and scholarly publications. The proportion of academic vocabulary in written texts was also found to increase as the writers’ levels went up. Cross-discipline comparisons highlighted the difference in lexical difficulties between scientific disciplines.

The Specialization and Semantics Interpretation of Teacher Talk of Civil Engineering English MOOC In China: The Legitimation Code Theory Perspective

With the economic development of China, the need for Civil Engineering talents with English language skills is continuously increasing. To meet this need, Civil Engineering English teaching plays a significant role. This paper takes the Civil Engineering English MOOC provided by a university located in eastern China, as an example, and takes two dimensions of the Legitimation Code Theory, specialization and semantics to investigate the following research questions: (RQ1) What are the textual semantic features, specialization and semantics characteristics of the selected Civil Engineering textbook? (RQ2) What “unpacking” strategies does the teacher adopt in the teaching process and what are the textual semantic features, specialization, and semantics characteristics of teacher talk in the MOOC? (RQ3) From the perspective of specialization and semantics dimensions, are there any deficiencies in this MOOC? The purpose is to analyze the “unpacking” strategies in teacher talk and the possible problems in the teaching process. The content analysis method is employed, and the data include two aspects: one is the textbook the MOOC adopted; the other is the teacher talk. Through the analysis, we draw the following conclusions: the teaching material shows the characteristics of high lexical difficulty and high semantic density; in the teaching process, the teacher, who works as an “intermediary”, mainly adopts “unpacking” strategies such as transforming knowledge code into knower code, improving learners’ knowledge code, and reducing semantic density. However, some defects such as the lack of knower code in teaching content, semantic wave fracture, and the weak comprehensibility of the input content make it difficult to achieve the teaching goal of mastering the elite code. Given these defects, this paper tentatively puts forward some suggestions based on the adopted theory.

Lexical difficulties in the acquisition of German

This study is focused on interference-related errors in German students' written papers. These errors are caused mostly by the differently structured non-linguistic reality, which results in asymmetries of language signs. Mistakes occur particularly in polysemous words, words with different semantic ability to combine, fixed phrases, and prepositional phrases. Concerning foreign words, interference-related errors arise from their asymmetric occurrence in the mother and the target languages, and also from their different meanings in both languages.

Is spelling related to written composition? A longitudinal study in French

This research aims at exploring in an irregular orthographic system like French, if spelling is related to written composition. French spelling is particularly interesting because it includes phonographic irregularities (i.e., inconsistencies), lexical difficulties and numerous morphological silent marks (e.g., plural noun, adjective, and verb agreement). In a longitudinal study from the beginning of Grade 3 to the end of Grade 4, pupils (N = 173) were asked twice in every grade to compose narrative texts from strips. Text length, text completeness and three categories of spelling errors were coded and analyzed through multilevel growth curve models. Results show (1) a growing relationship between text production and orthographic performance, (2) that this relationship varied according to whether it related to text length or to text completeness, and (3) its strength and evolution depended on the type of errors (phonographic, lexical, or morphological).

Intelligent Modeling for In-Home Reading and Spelling Programs

Technology-based in-home reading and spelling programs have the potential to compensate for the lack of sufficient instructions provided at schools. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic showed the immaturity of the existing remote teaching solutions. Consequently, many students did not receive the necessary instructions. This paper presents a model for developing intelligent reading and spelling programs. The proposed approach is based on an optimization model that includes artificial neural networks and linear regression to maximize the educational value of the pedagogical content. This model is personalized, tailored to the learning ability level of each user. Regression models were developed for estimating the lexical difficulty in the literacy tasks of auditory and visual lexical decision, word naming, and spelling. For building these regression models, 55 variables were extracted from French lexical databases that were used with the data from lexical mega-studies. Forward stepwise analysis was conducted to identify the top 10 most important variables for each lexical task. The results showed that the accuracy of the models (based on root mean square error) reached 88.13% for auditory lexical decision, 89.79% for visual lexical decision, 80.53% for spelling, and 83.86% for word naming. The analysis of the results showed that word frequency was a key predictor for all the tasks. For spelling, the number of irregular phoneme-graphemes was an important predictor. The auditory word recognition depended heavily on the number of phonemes and homophones, while visual word recognition depended on the number of homographs and syllables. Finally, the word length and the consistency of initial grapheme-phonemes were important for predicting the word-naming reaction times.

A new dynamic word learning task to diagnose language disorder in French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children.

Tools to effectively assess the language performance of bilingual children are lacking. Static tests assessing vocabulary knowledge (e.g., naming task) are not appropriate for testing bilingual children due to different types of bias. Alternative methods have been developed to diagnose bilingual children, including measuring language learning (e.g., word learning) through dynamic assessment. Research conducted with English-speaking children indicates that DA of word learning is effective in diagnosing language disorders in bilingual children. In this study, we examine whether a dynamic word learning task, using shared-storybook reading, can differentiate French-speaking (monolingual and bilingual) children with developmental language disorder (DLD) from those with typical development (TD). Sixty children (4-8 years), 43 with TD and 17 with DLD, participated: 30 were monolinguals and 25 were bilinguals. The dynamic word-learning task used a shared-storybook reading context. The children had to learn four non-words, paired with novel objects, as well as their semantic characteristics (a category and a definition) during the reading of a story. Post-tests assessed the recall of the phonological form and the semantic features of the objects. Phonological and semantic prompts were given if the child was unable to name or describe the objects. Results indicated that children with DLD performed less well than those with TD on phonological recall, leading to fair sensitivity and good specificity at delayed post-test for young children (4-6 years). Semantic production did not differentiate the two groups: all children performed well at this task. In sum, children with DLD have more difficulties encoding the phonological form of the word. Our findings suggest that a dynamic word learning task using shared-storybook reading is a promising approach for diagnosing lexical difficulties in young French-speaking, monolingual and bilingual, children.

Vocabulary Demands of Academic Spoken English Revisited: A Case of University Lectures and TED Presentations

The article shines light upon the differences in the vocabulary demands of academic spoken discourse between three broad scientific disciplines: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. By employing the Academic Word List (AWL) and British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) wordlist, the present study analyzed data of the transcripts from 160 university lectures, 39 seminars, and 600 TED talks. Results from the analysis of the 2.5-million-token corpus demonstrated an order of lexical difficulty in which Life Sciences and Social Sciences were the most and least lexically demanding fields of study, correspondingly. Research findings also indicated a strong supportive relationship between the AWL and the BNC/COCA wordlist. Learners with limited vocabulary knowledge at 1,000 and 2,000 levels could significantly increase their lexical coverage for academic lectures, seminars, and presentations with the support of the AWL. For disciplines with low lexical demands like Social Sciences, the vocabulary knowledge of nearly 2,570 word families (BNC/COCA 2,000 + AWL) could help students understand 95.07% of the running words in universities lectures and seminars. Research findings offer implications for vocabulary teaching and learning.

Word in the Dictionary and Discourse (a Case Study of German Language Vocabulary)

The article explores the functioning of usual words and neologisms in the German-language print media discourse as well as in mono- and bilingual dictionaries. Particular attention is given to the lexicographic and contextual translation of the lexemes and the problem of lexicographic underrepresentation of mass media vocabulary. The methods applied include semantic, contextual, discourse and corpus analysis. The article provides examples of potential lexical difficulties which may be faced by a translator or a speaker of German as a foreign language. The academic novelty of the research is due to the unique lexical material presented in the article, which is either absent in dictionaries or has an incomplete lexicographic explication or translation. The translation of these lexemes should not be verbatim and literal, as the translator must take into account extralinguistic realities, linguistic and cultural aspects of word semantics and that of a particular discourse type, collocation and usage of lexemes in the original and the target language. For instance, the translation of international terms is often reduced to loan translations (calques) that require an explanation or translation commentary. The article concludes that there is a need for linguistic, linguacultural and extralinguistic analysis, which has to be conducted by a translator or a reader of a text in a foreign language. The data obtained by the research can be used in translation, lexicographic and teaching activities.

Maintenance of phonological contrast in speech production of cochlear implant users

Prior work has shown that normal-hearing (NH) talkers produce more distinct vowels in words having a lower word frequency (WF) and higher neighborhood density (ND). Phonological contrast in speech production may differ between post-lingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) users and individuals with NH due to the degraded auditory input provided by CIs. The current study sought to determine whether the same pattern of vowel production exists in CI users. CI users were recorded reading monosyllabic words that were lexically “hard” (low WF, high ND) or “easy” (high WF, low ND). For each participant, vowel dispersion was calculated as the Euclidian distance from the center of the acoustic vowel space. If degraded acoustic input affects phonological contrast in CI users, we would not expect vowel dispersion to differ between vowels in “hard” and “easy” words, contrary to talkers with NH. Preliminary results revealed a significant effect of lexical difficulty on vowel dispersion, indicating that CI users produced more distinct vowels in “hard” words than in “easy” words. These preliminary findings could suggest that degraded auditory input does not substantially affect phonological contrast in vowel production in CI users, or that long-term adaptation to CI input can restore contrast after auditory deprivation.

Latin Vocabulary Knowledge and the Readability of Latin Texts: A Preliminary Study

Studies have found a strong correlation between vocabulary knowledge and L2 reading comprehension. This preliminary study of the readability of Latin texts considers how common measures of lexical complexity (word length, word frequency, lexical sophistication, lexical density, and lexical variation) can inform instructors about what texts have the least (and most) lexical complexity. By defining several key measurements of Latin lexical complexity, we establish a provisional account of the lexical difficulty of some familiar Latin texts that are frequently taught in elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, and propose LexR, a single, informative, integrated score that provides a sense of the comparative lexical complexity of Latin texts.

Comparing Individuals With PPA to Individuals With AD: Cognitive and Linguistic Profiles

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative condition characterized by the progressive loss of language function. In PPA, aphasia is the most prominent deficit at onset. On the other hand, memory deficits are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The first aim of the study was to establish differences on neuropsychological testing and connected speech production between Greek-speaking individuals with AD and PPA. The second aim was to investigate the executive deficit involvement in the two conditions. Ten individuals with PPA and 9 individuals with AD took part in a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic evaluation. Fifteen demographically matched neurologically healthy adults served as controls. Participants were evaluated using a battery of neuropsychological measures. Quantitative production analysis and acoustic analysis were performed to calculate narrative and temporal measures of the participants' speech. Participants with PPA differed significantly from participants with AD on linguistic measures. They performed worse on the long frequent sentences' subtest of the Sentence Repetition Test and they produced fewer narrative and unique words in picture description. They also produced shorter, less elaborated sentences, and made more phonological errors. The two groups did not differ significantly on memory, executive, visuospatial and semantic composite measures. Compared to neurotypical adults, participants with AD were impaired in memory, and executive function. They also exhibited lexical retrieval difficulties, as well as difficulties in linguistic tasks with an increased processing load. Participants with PPA performed within normal limits on the delay conditions of episodic memory measures. However, they too were impaired in executive tasks, especially for short-term memory and verbal fluency. The production of phonological errors, difficulty in repeating long frequent sentences, and the production of simple and short sentences has differentiated participants PPA not only from neurotypical controls but also from participants with AD. No single measure could differentiate the AD group from the other two groups. These findings should be interpreted with caution considering the small sample size.

Designing the Golden Calf: Pens and Presumption in the Production of a “Divine” Image

Abstract This article reexamines the creation of the golden calf in Exod 32:4a. Though the text in question is brief, it has been a puzzle to translators and commentators since the time of the LXX and warrants reassessment in light of new inscriptional and linguistic data. Syntactical analysis and comparative Semitics show that Aaron not only produced the calf but designed it as well. This interpretation requires glossing the verb in the passage, , according to its cognates in Akkadian and Aramaic as “to draw” or “to design.” The resulting translation solves the grammatical difficulties of the text and fits a greater cultural concern for the “divine design” of cultic objects. I will also suggest that the implement Aaron used to design the calf was not an engraving tool but a rush pen. Artifacts from Egypt as well as from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud evidence how ancient scribes sketched, played with, and practiced their craft with ink and pen before creating a final product. Understanding the tool in this manner also suits its usage in Isa 8:1 as a writing instrument used on a large piece of papyrus. In sum, the translation “and he designed it with a rush pen and made it into a cast-metal calf” solves the grammatical and lexical difficulties of the passage while adding to our understanding of Exodus’s overall polemic against the bovine image.

Factors affecting cross-language activation and language mixing in bilingual aphasia: A case study

ABSTRACT Background Some bilinguals with aphasia tend to mix languages within a single utterance. Two opposing views attribute this to difficulty with either language control or word retrieval. Aims This study investigated the influence of factors that increase activation of the non-target language on the occurrence of language mixing errors. This increased activation predicts more language mixing errors if there is a language control issue, but not if they stem from word retrieval difficulties. Methods and procedures A picture naming experiment was conducted with a bilingual individual with aphasia who showed language mixing. We investigated the influence of four factors likely to influence activation of representations of the non-target language on response accuracy, response latency and the occurrence of language selection errors: language, language mode, task, and phonological overlap between the target word and its translation equivalent. Outcomes and results The increased activation of the non-target language induced by language mode, task and phonological overlap with the translation equivalent did not lead to an increase in language selection errors when compared to correct responses. This is despite the fact that these factors affected accuracy and response latency, in the direction that is expected in unimpaired bilingual performance. Conclusions Results were not consistent with a disruption of the cognitive control needed to respond in the intended language. Instead, they highlight that language mixing in this individual, rather than being “pathological”, is instead used as a strategy to potentially improve communication when lexical retrieval difficulties occur. Language mixing behaviours in aphasia may not be due to issues of control and have a communicative value that should be recognised.