Lexical Level Research Articles

Neural tracking of speech acoustics in noise is coupled with lexical predictability as estimated by large language models.

Adults heard recordings of two spatially separated speakers reading newspaper and magazine articles. They were asked to listen to one of them and ignore the other, and EEG was recorded to assess their neural processing. Machine learning extracted neural sources that tracked the target and distractor speakers at three levels: the acoustic envelope of speech (delta- and theta-band modulations), lexical frequency for individual words, and the contextual predictability of individual words estimated by GPT-4 and earlier lexical models. To provide a broader view of speech perception, half of the subjects completed a simultaneous visual task, and the listeners included both native and non-native English speakers. Distinct neural components were extracted for these levels of auditory and lexical processing, demonstrating that native English speakers had greater target-distractor separation compared to non-native English speakers on most measures, and that lexical processing was reduced by the visual task. Moreover, there was a novel interaction of lexical predictability and frequency with auditory processing; acoustic tracking was stronger for lexically harder words, suggesting that people listened harder to the acoustics when needed for lexical selection. This demonstrates that speech perception is not simply a feedforward process from acoustic processing to the lexicon. Rather, the adaptable context-sensitive processing long known to occur at a lexical level has broader consequences for perception, coupling with the acoustic tracking of individual speakers in noise.Significance Statement In challenging listening conditions, people use focused attention to help understand individual talkers and ignore others, which changes their neural processing for speech at auditory through lexical levels. However, lexical processing for natural materials (e.g., conversations, audiobooks) has been difficult to measure, because of limitations of tools to estimate the predictability of individual words in longer discourses. The present investigation uses a contemporary large language model, GPT-4, to estimate word predictability, and demonstrates that listeners make online adaptations to their auditory neural processing in accord with these predictions; neural activity more closely tracks the acoustics of the target talker when words are less predictable from the context.

Textual Cohesion in Surah Al- Kahf through the Element of Repetition.

The study of textual cohesion is a recent trend in the linguistic lesson. Recurrence is one of the topics of textual cohesion at the lexical level through which the existence of textual cohesion can be determined through the effect that repetition has on textual cohesion. Studies have been striving to investigate the effect of repetition on textual cohesion through text grammar, so the importance of this study lies in the fact that it made a contribution in this field. This study examines the textual cohesion in Surah Al-Kahf through the element of repetition, as it is one of the prominent aspects of textual cohesion. The study relied on choosing Surah Al-Kahf specifically due to the abundance and variety of repetition found within this surah, encompassing repetition at the level of letters, words, sentences, and entire Quranic verses.

Coronal underspecification as an emerging property in the development of speech processing.

Is the developing lexicon phonologically detailed or are representations underspecified? Experimental results from toddlers suggest phonological specificity. By contrast, the featurally underspecified lexicon theory (Lahiri, 2018; Lahiri & Reetz, 2010), motivated by evidence such as the cross-linguistic prevalence of phenomena such as coronal assimilation (rainbow → rai[m]bow), proposes that coronal sounds are unspecified for place of articulation even in the adult lexicon. The featurally underspecified lexicon, therefore, predicts that asymmetries in mispronunciation sensitivity are also present in the developing lexicon. Recent research (Ren et al., 2019) has rejected this, reporting similar sensitivity to mispronunciation of coronals and noncoronals at 19 months. Using a more sensitive experimental paradigm, we provide new evidence demonstrating a lack of asymmetries at 18 months, but mispronunciation sensitivity for coronals disappears by 24 months. In an intermodal preferential looking study, growth curve analysis shows that 18-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of words with a coronal (e.g., duck vs. *buck) and noncoronal (e.g., bird vs. *dird) onset. At 24 months, mispronunciations of coronal-onset words were treated just like the accurate pronunciations. We conclude that coronals are underspecified in the developing lexicon at 24 months. We propose a model under which initial representations are phonetic in nature and require exact acoustic input, whereas phonological coronal underspecification at the lexical level emerges gradually as a result of exposure to variation in the input such as coronal assimilations that only become detectable patterns with growing lexical and segmentation skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

J.A. HEIM‘S TEXTBOOK “ RUSSISCHE SPRACHLEHRE FüR DEUTSCHE”: METATEXTUAL PRINCIPLES OF DESCRIPTION

The article is devoted to the period of the origin of Russian textbook studies in foreign languages, a significant contribution to the formation of which was made by Professor of Imperial Moscow University Ivan Andreevich Нeim (1759–1821), an encyclopedic scholar, teacher, and public figure. The article provides a brief description of the professional scientific and pedagogical biography of I.A. Нeim, who was at different periods of his academic activity not only a professor, but also the first Dean of the Faculty of Philology and the Rector of the University. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the structural and substantive characteristics of the first edition of the textbook by I.A. Heim “Russian Grammar for Germans” in 1789 (German: “Russische Sprachlehre für Deutsche”). Variant features of the metalanguage of the book in the field of translation of terms, as well as units at the graphical, orthographic, morphological and lexical levels are revealed. The content of the book, on the one hand, includes a theoretical description of the structure of the Russian language (in German), on the other hand, it is practical in nature, which is manifested in the absence of a large number of definitions, the presence of sections on teaching phonetics, a mini-dictionary and bilingual dialogues on everyday topics. The analysis of the textbook provides us with insights into the formation of textbook studies at the end of the 18th century and enables us to discuss the creation and development of prototypes of a modern tutorial book and phrase book of foreign languages.

Mono-lingual text reuse detection for the Urdu language at lexical level

Text reuse is the process of creating new texts from pre-existing ones. In recent years, Urdu Text Reuse Detection (U-TRD) has garnered the attention of researchers due to the ready availability of digital text all over the internet, which can be copied or paraphrased from other sources without proper attribution, making it easier to reuse but challenging to detect. Previous studies have explored the issue of U-TRD at the phrasal, sentence/passage, and document levels, using benchmark corpora and methods. However, the problem of U-TRD has not been investigated at the lexical level in terms of corpora and methods. To address this research gap, our study has developed a large benchmark corpus manually annotated at the lexical level. This corpus consists of 22,184 text pairs categorized into two levels of rewrite: (1) Derived (8,660) and (2) Non-Derived (13,524). Additionally, our research has involved the development, application, evaluation, and comparison of a range of methods, including baseline methods (uni-gram overlap and word embedding-based methods), along with state-of-the-art transformer-based methods and feature-fusion-based methods, using the proposed UTRD-Lex-23 corpus. Our study concludes that one of our proposed feature-fusion methods outperforms all other methods. The model we propose, which combines seven different Sentence Transformers (ST) (each producing 768 dimension vectors) with one uni-gram (at word level) and sixteen different features extracted from four different Word Embedding (WE) based models (yielding 300 dimension vectors), achieves an F1 score of 0.70601 using 10-fold cross validation. To foster and promote research in Urdu (a low-resourced language) proposed corpus will be freely and publicly available for research purposes.

Cultural and Lexical Challenges: Analyzing Untranslatability in The French Subtitles of 'The Big 4' Film

The present study aims to analyze the untranslatability occurred in the subtitle of The Big 4 (2022) movie from Indonesian as the source language (SL) to French as the target language (TL). The words or phrases in the subtitles taken from a movie streaming platform, Netflix, were analyzed using a qualitative method to analyze the type of untranslatability; whether it is a lexical or cultural untranslatability, factors that influence, and the techniques used by the translator to overcome the issues. The findings showed the existence of untranslatability in 107 instances, 24 of which were at the lexical level and 83 in cultural aspects. The translator utilized nine different translation techniques to address the untranslatability, including borrowing, naturalization, adaptation, particularisation, modulation, generalization, calque, established equivalence, and transposition. However, regardless of the phenomenon of untranslatability, the act of translation must continue. It is the duty of translators to be skillful in finding the equivalent expressions in the TL.

Application of Free Translation Method in Lexical and Syntactic Level of Translation of Investigating Classroom Discourse

Based on practical experience translating Steve Walsh s Investigating Classroom Discourse, this paper explores the application of free translation in academic contexts. Despite high scholarly regard for classroom discourse analysis, this study delves into the role of free translation in this field, highlighting its theoretical and practical feasibility. This approach aims to make such analysis more accessible to Chinese educators, enhancing domestic teaching practices and deepening insights into bilingual education.

MANIPULATION AS A TYPE OF SPEECH INFLUENCE IN SPORTS ARTICLE

Background. The article focuses on the manipulative influence issues in sports analytical articles. Nowadays our life is significantly affected by sport and key sports events are covered by mass media. Since one of the major functions of mass media is the function to influence the reader, an attempt to analyze the mechanisms of manipulation within the framework of sports discourse seems to be reasonable. Based on the theoretical research study, it is established that manipulation is primarily characterized by its covert nature. In the practical part an analysis of linguistic ways of representation of manipulation on lexical and syntactical levels is given. Purpose. The purpose of the study is to define the mechanisms of manipulation in sports analytical articles and to analyze their linguistic side. Materials and methods. The research material comprises 7 sports analytical articles of 2024 taken from digital versions of the British magazines such as The Guardian and The Sun. The main research methods include analysis and synthesis of theoretical materials, discourse and contextual analysis together with descriptive method. The methods enumerated have given an opportunity to obtain accurate data on linguistic representation of various ways of manipulation in sports discourse. Results. The results of the study have shown that sports analytical articles possess a significant potential to influence the reader due to some manipulative methods such as hedges, labels, first person pronoun in a plural form, rhetorical questions and multiplication. The ways of linguistic representation of these manipulative methods are analyzed. Practical implications. The research results can be used for further investigation of ways of manipulation within sports analytical articles as well as in the development of courses on speech influence and sports discourse.

POLITICAL INTERNET MEMES: A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of memes, which are a controversial aspect of modern communication, the subtleties of which have not yet been studied. The analysis of language material shows that the combination of verbal and non-verbal components of memes creates an autonomous information entity that is capable of self-reproduction of the representation of a linguistic personality at the phonetic, lexical, grammatical, cognitive and pragmatic levels in political discourse. In this realm, the concept of the “political internet meme” emerges, denoting a specialized form of political discourse that combines visual and verbal components to sway an audience into the realm of political communication. These memes combine traditional political terminology with colloquial vocabulary strategically designed to achieve persuasive goals. Generally, political internet memes are created through affixation and the use of simplified grammatical structures without articles, often intentionally including spelling and grammatical errors to increase their impact. In pursuit of a comedic effect, the creators of political Internet memes use a whole arsenal of stylistic and linguistic means. These include complex wordplay involving phonetic and morphological manipulations, various expressive techniques, and playful experiments with typography and punctuation. Thanks to such means, memes go beyond the simple transmission of information, turning into powerful tools of political expression and persuasion.

The Influence of Mass Media on the Modern Japanese Language

The purpose of this study is to examine the key influence of mass media on different language levels based on analysing several modern newspapers and magazines published in Japan. The article uses the following methods of analysis: structural analysis, lexical and semantic analysis, stylistic analysis, analytical and synthetic method, and contextual analysis. The results of the study showed that the most noticeable influence of mass media on the modern Japanese language was observed at the lexical and stylistic levels and less noticeable – at the phonetic, word-forming, morphological, and syntactic levels. Phonetic changes in the Japanese press were associated with the adaptation of non-equivalent vocabulary from European languages using the Japanese alphabet (katakana). At the word-forming level, the changes concerned primarily uncharacteristic derivational units that came to Japanese from English, and at the morphological level, the influence was conducted mainly through the demonstration of samples of the correct use of case endings, tenses and coordination of parts of speech. At the syntactic level, there was a variety of syntactic constructions, in particular, to expand the content, introduce additional sentences, and change the topic of conversation. The stylistic influence of mass media on the Japanese language system consisted in the use of artistic tropes and stylistic figures, in particular, metaphors, hyperbole, and periphery, which can be considered patterns for communicative behaviour.

Teaching Implication of Meaning Construction at Morphological Level of Affixation in a Complex Indonesian Verb Formation

A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings. This meaning construction (thinking), mainly using language, is to make sense of and interpret the world. Meanings should be the primary motivation underlying linguistic constructions at all levels. This paper investigates meaning constructions at the lexical level of affixation by focusing on semantic behaviours of verbs in a complex word formation as an attempt: 1) to find out the semantic patterns of verb-based complex word formation, 2) to reveal if there is an iconic relationship of a sign (signifier) and its meaning (signified), and 3) to suggest for its teaching. Using semantic classes of verbs, based on situation types in deriving complex words, this study attempts to find out semantic patterns of such complex word formation and the possibility of revealing its iconicity. Using Antconc software, this study scrutinized linguistic expressions involving related verbs of state, event, and action in a corpus to reveal meaning construction at that level. The findings show several semantic patterns of verb-based complex word formation and an indication of the iconicity of signs. The paper also offers suggestions for teaching affixation

Коммуникативная трансформация образа России в недружественных СМИ в контексте современных межцивилизационных обострений

The article examines the transformation of the communicative image of Russia in the British media in the context of a special military operation in Ukraine. The scientific problem lies in the fact that in the conditions of the global information space, the communicative dialogue of states is carried out not only through factual information, but also through the prism of the linguistic features of a particular civilization, through which a negative image is built. Based on a comprehensive linguistic analysis key trends and means of constructing a negative image of Russia have been identified. The research methodology includes content analysis, which made it possible to determine the most frequent contexts of the use of the lexeme "Russia", and critical discourse analysis aimed at identifying the deep meanings and ideological attitudes behind specific language forms. The results show that the lexical and semantic level is dominated by militaristic discourse At the level of rhetoric and stylistics, negatively colored metaphors play a key role. At the syntactic level, attention is drawn to the abundance of parallel constructions that escalate the series of negative characteristics of Russia. It is concluded that the communicative image of Russia in the British media is undergoing a radical negative transformation.

Do translation universals exist at the syntactic-semantic level? A study using semantic role labeling and textual entailment analysis of English-Chinese translations

Albeit extensive studies of translation universals at lexical and grammatical levels, there has been scant research at the syntactic-semantic level. To bridge this gap, this study employs semantic role labeling and textual entailment analysis to compare Chinese translations with English source texts and non-translated Chinese original texts. The research has found substantial evidence for translation universals like explicitation, simplification, and levelling out at the syntactic-semantic level, which is illustrated by significant differences between syntactic-semantic features of Chinese translations and those of English source texts and Chinese original texts. This suggests a distinct syntactic-semantic uniqueness of Chinese translations, wherein the overall features exhibit an “eclectic” characteristic, showcasing contrasting outcomes such as explicitation identified as S-universal and implicitation deemed T-universal. This could be attributed to the gravitational pull from the two language systems. In the inspection of specific semantic roles, features of agents and discourse markers are found to be evidence for both S-explicitation and T-explicitation, potentially reflecting the role of socio-cultural factors in shaping the uniqueness of syntactic-semantic features of Chinese translations. These findings further underscore the complexity inherent in translation, highlighting its function as a dynamic balance system.

Intelligent Text Sentiment Analysis of Emotional Beauty in the English Translation: Based on TB-LSTM Algorithm

In the existing deep learning sentiment analysis methods, text is directly processed into a sequence of words, which often ignores the important components of the text and the topic of the text. To solve these problems, the topic of text is extracted through Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, and then a method for integrating topic information into neural networks is proposed. Furthermore, an emotion classification model that integrates the topic information is constructed. An attention mechanism is used at the lexical level and the sentence level, paying attention to the more and less important content separately when building the document presentation. The results show that the proposed model has excellent performance in all four kinds of data, among which the accuracy rate, recall rate and F1-score of CCF-BDC are the best, reaching 0.63, 0.72 and 0.7 respectively. The translation accuracy also reaches 0.85. These results show that the model proposed in this study has better performance in sentiment analysis. These research results will help improve the user's reading experience and make machine translation better meet the needs of human language expression.

The reduction of Netspeak in Mandarin computer-mediated communication: a least effort motivation at the utterance level

This article addresses the phenomenon of Netspeak reductions with special reference to Mandarin computer-mediated communication. A tentative classification of Chinese Netspeak reductions is first provided, namely, two-, three-, or four-character reductions occurring at both the lexical and the syntactic levels and other atypical reductions. It is then proposed that Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, which usually works at the lexical level, can work as well at the utterance level and can account for the increasing number of Netspeak reductions in daily communication, that is, the frequency of using Netspeak reduction determines its vitality and distribution.

French medical memes: Themes, language, functions

The study concerns the organisation and content of both the visual and verbal elements within the polycode text of French-language memes that pertain to medical discourse. The meme’s connection to medical discourse is established through its subject matter, the incorporation of medical symbols in its visual elements, and the inclusion of medical terminology in its written content. It also involves depicting communication scenarios between doctors, between doctors and patients, and between nursing staff and patients at both the image and text levels. The study’s novelty lies in its dual approach: firstly, it examines French memes as subjects for linguistic analysis, and secondly, it explores them as a genre of polycode text within medical discourse. The research material comprises 100 French memes centred on medical themes, obtained through continuous sampling from the internet. Study results revealed that memes pertaining to medical discourse are dynamic, viral, and eclectic texts that encapsulate the distinctive elements of institutional medical discourse. Thematically, the meme encompasses various medical topics and addresses social issues prevalent in France. Deciphering the author’s intention behind the meme relies on a layer-by-layer examination of how the idea is expressed through the polycode text, as well as an understanding of the sociocultural context that informs the text, which requires presuppositional knowledge on the part of the recipient. Linguo-cultural characteristics observed in the verbal component, as identified through the analysis, include the use of language play at phonetic and lexical levels, inclusion of colloquial and slang vocabulary alongside emotionally charged expressions within doctor-patient communication contexts, and the utilisation of phonetic spelling. The visual component of the polycode text in French medical memes is distinguished by the incorporation of elements from civilisational phenomena, such as political figures from the country, film protagonists, and globally recognised actors. The analysis revealed that the meme serves various functions including comedic, informative, compensatory, and appellative roles. The article constitutes a segment of a broader study examining polycode texts within medical discourse across multiple genres including memes, medical posters, and demotivators in languages such as Russian, French, English, Chinese, and Arabic.

LEXICAL AND POST-LEXICAL PROSODIC DOCUMENTATION OF EMBALOH LANGUAGE

This research investigated the prosody of the Embaloh language, which has yet to be widely explored, to document and preserve the language. The method used is data collection of spontaneous and non-spontaneous speeches from 12 native speakers. Prosodic analysis was then carried out based on visualising and observing speech sound waves using the autosegmental-metrical theory (AM) framework. The results show that prominence tends to be on the right edge at both lexical and post-lexical prosodic levels. The findings show that the Embaloh language is outside the mainstream of Austronesian languages, which places word stress at the penultimate syllable. At the post-lexical level in interrogative intonation, phrases with a question word are marked by the pitch accent located at the target question word in the nuclear contour of the phrase. The pitch accent follows the position of the question word in the intonation phrase, forward or backward, with one of the following tones: H* (high), LH* (low-high), or LHL* (low-high-low). The intonation of the question is indicated by the H(high) tone at the end of the phrase. The H (high) tone also acts as a boundary tone represented by H*% (high).

The Contributions of Short-Term Memory to Writing at the Sublexical, Lexical, and Discourse Level in Beginning Writers

ABSTRACT Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect relations between short-term memory (STM), reading, oral language, and writing at the letter, word, and discourse levels in young, developing writers both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Method Participants were 449 English-speaking kindergarten students (52% female) from 41 schools in the U.S. Results The cross-sectional analysis indicated that STM was directly related to oral language (β = 0.62), letter naming fluency (β = 0.43), word reading (β = 0.54), and reading comprehension (β = 0.42), all of which were statistically significant. Results supported a complete mediation model with STM having an indirect effect on writing via reading and oral language. In the cross-sectional analysis, the total effects of STM on handwriting (β = 0.51), spelling (β = 0.57), and written composition (β = 0.47) were substantial and statistically significant. In the longitudinal analysis, the total effects of Fall STM on Spring writing outcomes, handwriting (β = 0.42), spelling (β = 0.70), and written composition (β = 0.44) were also substantial and statistically significant. Conclusion Findings confirm that STM is a foundational cognitive skill necessary for early writing; however, they provide a more nuanced understanding by showing that the contribution of STM is indirect through reading and oral language. Writing is complex, requiring interaction among higher-order domain-specific and domain-general components. Along with other recent studies, our findings highlight the need to examine the direct and indirect effects for a more precise understanding of skills that support writing development.

When minds meet machines: A pilot programme of using Chat-GPT to teach political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom

This piece of reflection draws on a pilot programme of using Chat-GPT in the teaching of political speech translation in a Chinese-to-English translation classroom. The conduction of this pilot was driven by, among others, a growing concern by the third-year undergraduates doing Chinese-English translation as their major; they have aired worries that human translators might be replaced by large language models capable of doing the translation. The students observed and compared the human translation (by institutional interpreters) and the Chat-GPT translation of four political speeches delivered by Chinese government officials at the General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly. While acknowledging some strengths of Chat-GPT, they found that the GPT translation stayed too ‘close’ to the source text Chinese, potentially leading to issues at the lexical, sentence, and contextual levels. The author (also the course convenor) then reflected on the strengths and limitations of Chat-GPT in conjunction with pedagogical considerations regarding the ethical and practical implications of GPT-enabled machine translation. The paper concludes that GPT is not, and will not be, an adequate substitute for the language expertise, cultural awareness, ideological sensitivity, and creative abilities to ‘re-write’ on the part of professional human translators.

Musical Advantage in Lexical Tone Perception Hinges on Musical Instrument

Different musical instruments have different pitch processing demands. However, correlational studies have seldom considered the role of musical instruments in music-to-language transfer. Addressing this research gap could contribute to a nuanced understanding of music-to-language transfer. To this end, we investigated whether pitched musicians had a unique musical advantage in lexical tone perception relative to unpitched musicians and nonmusicians. Specifically, we compared Cantonese pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and nonmusicians on Thai tone discrimination and sequence recall. In the Thai tone discrimination task, the pitched musicians outperformed the unpitched musicians and the nonmusicians. Moreover, the unpitched musicians and the nonmusicians performed similarly. In the Thai tone sequence recall task, both pitched and unpitched musicians recalled level tone sequences more accurately than the nonmusicians, but the pitched musicians showed the largest musical advantage. However, the three groups recalled contour tone sequences with similar accuracy. Collectively, the pitched musicians had a unique musical advantage in lexical tone discrimination and the largest musical advantage in level tone sequence recall. From a theoretical perspective, this study offers correlational evidence for the Precision element of the OPERA hypothesis. The choice of musical instrumental may matter for music-to-language transfer in lexical tone discrimination and level tone sequence recall.