Lexical Links Research Articles

How morphological decomposition manifests itself in the duration of the inter-morpheme period of silence in Russian prefixed verbs

Summary This study tests the morphological gradience theory on Russian prefixed verbs. With the help of a specially designed experiment, I offer evidence that verbs with prefixes that have prepositional counterparts and verbs with prefixes that exist only as bound morphemes reveal significant differences in terms of their morphological decomposition. In the pronunciation of native speakers, there tends to be a significantly longer silent period between prepositional prefixes and bases than between unprepositional prefixes and bases due to the compositional nature of the former and the non-compositional nature of the latter. Drawing on these findings, I contend that Russian prefixed verbs can be analysed as constructional schemas and that the degree of their morphological decomposition depends upon the different levels of activation of their sequential and lexical links.

Lexical Repetition and Syntactic Parallelism in Selected Political Essays of Niyi Osundare and Ray Ekpu

This paper examines lexical repetition and syntactic parallelism in selected political essays of Niyi Osundare and Ray Ekpu, which have been relatively underexplored, in order to determine how they have been deployed to represent Nigeria’s socio-political concerns as well as the points of convergence and divergence in the use of these devices by both writers. M.A.K Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar served as the framework. Eighteen (18) essays were purposively sampled; 9 each from Osundare and Ekpu’s publications in Newswatch where they both published between the Second and Fourth Republics (1979–1999). The study shows that lexical repetitions underscore argument, expand the thematic range and create lexical links between words in the discourses. Syntactic parallelism creates a multidimensional representation of discourse themes such as deprivation, anarchy, civil unrest, moral decline, government’s harsh economic policies and intimidation of the press. These themes are situated within a specific context in order to reinforce their gravity. Osundare’s essays deployed the mhq patterns for effective description and thematic projection. Conversely, Ekpu’s essays use the mhq and hq patterns for effective description and thematic projection. The essays of Osundare employ the SPC1 structure to foreground the blatant disregard for human rights while Ekpu’s employs the SPCA and SPA structures in projecting the breach of the judiciary. These devices contribute to the structure of the selected essays and create room for according emphasis and explicitness to the discourse themes. Osundare and Ekpu draw on lexical repetition and syntactic parallelism to unveil and denounce socio-political ills in the country. They employ these devices to underscore their political stance.

Developmental changes in phonological and semantic priming effects in Spanish-speaking toddlers.

Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the development of this organization during infancy. Middle-high socioeconomic status Mexican toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a preferential looking task using an eye-tracker at 18, 21, and 24 months of age, manipulating semantic and phonological lexical links. The experimental task consisted of presenting an auditory label, which was phonologically or semantically related or unrelated, with a displayed target image. Mean proportion of target looking, time-course of fixations, pupillometry, and vocabulary network analysis were used to describe the properties of priming effects. The results showed that phonological priming developed earlier than semantic priming, and that they were produced by behavioral interference. In addition, pupil dilation showed differential use of cognitive effort in critical developmental periods. Finally, the density of vocabulary networks correlated with semantic effects, and vocabulary size and local network features with phonological effects. These findings extend our understanding of the development of the lexical-semantic system during infancy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Обобщенная контекстно-зависимая теоретико-графовая модель фольклорных и литературных текстов

One of the problems of automatic text processing is their attribution. This term is understood as the establishment of the attributes of a text work (determination of authorship, time of creation, place of recording, etc.). The article presents a generalized context-dependent graph-theoretic model designed for the analysis of folklore and literary texts. The minimal structural unit of the model (primitive) is a word. Sets of words are combined into vertices, and the same word can be related to different vertices. Edges and graph substructures reflect the lexical, syntactic and semantic links of the text. The characteristics of the model are its fuzziness, hierarchy and temporality. As examples, a hierarchical graph-theoretical model of components (on the example of literary works by A. S. Pushkin), a temporal graph-theoretic model of a fairy tale plot (on the example of Russian fairy tales by A. M. Afanasyev) and a fuzzy graph-theoretic model of «strong» connections of grammatical classes (on the example of anonymous articles from the pre-revolutionary magazines «Time», «Epoch» and the weekly «Citizen», edited by F. M. Dostoevsky). The model is built in such a way that it can be further explored using artificial intelligence methods (for example, decision trees or neural networks). For this purpose, a format for storing such data was implemented in the information system «Folklore», as well as procedures for entering, editing and analyzing texts and their graph-theoretic models.

EFFECTS OF LEARNING DIRECTION IN RETRIEVAL PRACTICE ON EFL VOCABULARY LEARNING

AbstractIn paired-associate learning, there are two learning directions: L2 to L1 (L2 words as stimuli and L1 words as responses) and L1 to L2 (L1 words as stimuli and L2 words as responses). Results of previous studies that compared the effects of the two learning directions are not consistent. We speculated that the cause of this inconsistency may be L2 proficiency, as the strengths of the lexical links between L2 and L1 are different depending on the learner’s L2 proficiency. This hypothesis was examined with 28 native speakers of Japanese learning English. Participants studied novel English words in the two learning directions. The results of posttests showed that for lower-proficiency learners, L2-to-L1 learning was more effective than L1-to-L2 learning, while for higher-proficiency learners, L1-to-L2 learning was more effective. The findings suggest that L2 proficiency influences the effects of learning direction on vocabulary learning.

دلالة الحیوان فی الروایة - دراسة لغویة تطبیقیة على روایة (القندس) لـ محمد حسن علوان

هدفت الدراسة إلى الترکيز على الجانب اللغوي، في رواية تحمل اسم حيوان، حيث إن أکثر الدراسات – في حدود ما قرأت - التي قامت على روايات يشکل فيها الحيوان محورا رئيسا، کانت دراسات أدبية وقراءات نقدية. أما المنهج المتبع في البحث فهو المنهج الوصفي التحليلي، ويقوم على قراءة الرواية قراءة معمقة يتم فيها: ـ رصد المادة موضوع البحث لفظة (القندس) في سياقاتها المختلفة. ـ تصنيف هذه المادة صرفيا، ونحويا. ـ التحليل الدلالي لبعض الصيغ الصرفية والروابط النحوية والمعجمية، ومدى تأثيرها وتأثير الموقعية الإعرابية في بناء الرواية ودلالاتها المختلفة. وقد توصل البحث إلى عدد من النتائج منها: ـ لحياة المؤلف تأثير على عمله الأدبي، وقد ظهر ذلک في الرواية ؛ حيث تعرف الکاتب إلى (القندس) أثناء تواجده في بورتلاند وعلى ضفاف نهر ويلامت، وجعله محورا لروايته.. ـ ظهور دور الإحالة في الربط بين أجزاء النص الروائي وإزالة ماقد يعتريه من لبس أو غموض ومن ذلک استخدام الضمائر التي کان أکثرها ضمائر للمتکلم التي تناسب الروائي الذي اعتمد على المسرود الذاتي وضمائر الغائب التي تناسب الأحداث والأشخاص والأماکن التي في ذهن السارد. ـ ظهور دور الربط المعنوي بوجود التکرار في بعض ألفاظ الرواية الذي حقق التماسک في النص إضافة إلى وظائفه الدلالية من تأکيد وتنبيه وغيرها. ـ اختلاف دلالة الفعل المضارع المنفي ب (لا) عن المنفي ب (لن) و(لم)، وظهور ذلک في تطبيقه على الرواية. ـ ثراء الرواية بدلالات لغوية يحفز إلى دراستها والتطبيق في جوانب أخرى لم يتم التطبيق فيها خشية الإطالة، مما يفتح بابا لدراسة هذه الرواية وغيرها من الروايات من هذا المنطلق. The present study aimed to focus on the linguistic side in a novel holding the name of an animal as most of the studies - within the limits of what I read - that were based on novels in which the animal constituted a main focus, were literary studies and critical readings. The study adopted the descriptive and analytical method and it was based on reading the novel in depth in which: investigation of the subject matter in question (the beaver) in its various contexts, classification of this material morphologically and grammatically, semantic analysis of some morphological formulas, grammatical and lexical links and the extent of their influence and the effect of locational syntactic in the construction of the novel and its various connotations. The research reached a number of results as the author's life has an impact on his literary work, and this has appeared in the novel as the writer got acquainted with (the beaver) while he was in Portland and on the banks of the Willam River, and he made it the focus of his narration. The emergence of the referral role in linking the parts of the narrative text and removing the existing ambiguity including the use of pronouns of the speaker that fit the novelist who rely on the narratives the self and third person pronouns that fit the events, people, and places in the narrator's mind. The role of the moral link with the presence of repetition in some of the words of the novel was emerged, which achieved coherence in the text in addition to its semantic functions of affirmation.

Textual Effects in Compound Processing: A Window on Words in the World

We sought to move beyond single word and sentence processing experiments in order to examine textual effects on the processing of compound words in English. We developed minimal texts (sentences pairs that together constitute a story) that had neutral, semantic or lexical relations between the last word of the first sentence and the second word of the second sentence (which was always a compound noun). This generated minimal text triplets that differed only in the last word of the first sentence (e.g., “She walked down to the path/river/water. The waterfall roared in the distance”). Four experiments were conducted with a total 143 native speakers of English. Experiment 1 employed a Modified Maze Task to identify cross-sentence effects on compound processing. Sentence pairs with lexical links differed from those with semantic links, which, in turn differed from neutral pairs, providing evidence of cross-sentence influence on compound processing. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, we examined compound production using typing tasks. Results indicated that morphological effects found in single word typing persisted in text typing. In addition, constituent priming effects on typing were seen in both single word typing and sentence typing. Finally, morphological effects were correlated with overall story ratings. We thus conclude that morphological effects are not restricted to single word processing, but rather reflect the dynamics of real-world language processing.

Russian prefixed verbs as constructional schemas

This study tests the morphological gradience theory on Russian prefixed verbs. With the help of a specially designed experiment, in which participants were asked to evaluate the semantic transparency of a prefixed nonse verb given in minimal context, as well as to semanticise it by suggesting an existing Russian verb with the same prefix, we offer evidence that these verbs can be analysed as constructional schemas and that the degree of their morphological decomposition depends upon the different levels of activation of their sequential and lexical links. We prove that speakers of Russian are very sensitive to the etymological connection between verb prefixes and the prepositions they are related to. Thus, prefix-stem constructions with prefixes that correspond to prepositions are more likely to be morphologically decomposed, while prefix-stem constructions with prefixes that do not relate to prepositions tend to be regarded as single lexical units. Moreover, the general, highly abstract semantics of Russian prefix-stem constructions, especially of those that retain their ‘prepositional’ meaning, is undoubtedly accessible to language users, which is confirmed by the fact that the interpretability of these constructions is affected by priming.

THE PLACE OCCUPIED IN ALBANIAN BY SCIENTIFIC TERMS SOURCED FROM GREEK

Greek is a language that has given a considerable amount of words and terms to other languages. Lexicon enrichment is more pronounced in the terminologies of the various fields of science and technology, which operate in the general terminology lexicon as organized, connected and co-conditioned systems in accordance with the systems concepts of the fields of responsibility. From this point of view the terminological lexicon is distinguished for its more organized character than the non-terminological lexicon. Studying the terminology lexicon of different areas of knowledge has taken the form of a study method to discover the real nature of the terminology of the respective language, as well as to systematize and refine it further. For the purpose of this purpose, terminologyhas been developed for various languages, which are based on certain scientific criteria. But the rapid development of science and technology requires the repeated reassessment of the terms created. Based on current publications, dictionaries and studies on terminology as well as the close lexical links between neighboring languages, the desire and motivation for a specific work on Greek-sourced terminology in Albanian arose.

Исследования и преподавание тувинского языка в Турции (краткий обзор)

Первые исследования тувинского языка в Турции связаны с грамматикой А. Дж. Эмре 1949 г., который впервые в стране провел сравнительное исследование фонетики тюркских языков. В 1960-е годы вышли исследования тюрколога С. И. Чагатай. Первые уроки тувинского языка в Турции в 1980-х гг. стал давать профессор, доктор Талат Текин в Университете Хаджеттепе, автор статьи является его учеником.Сам автор изучал тувинский язык в 1986–1987 гг. в аспирантуре. Опираясь на исследования советских ученых, автор опубликовал статьи об исторической фонетике, архаичных аспектах тувинского языка. В 2007 г. автор издал «Словник тувинского языка» (более чем 4500 единиц). В нем удалось проследить лексическую связь древнетюркского языка с тувинским, описать влияние монгольского языка на тувинскую лексику. В 2009 г. у автора вышел сборник 100 тувинских поговорок. Публикации вышли после работы автора в Туве, в том числе в библиотеке Тувинского института гуманитарных исследований.Педагогическая практика автора проводится с 2000-х годов. Под его руководством защитила магистерскую и докторскую диссертацию А. С. Уста (Фындык); магистерскую — Х. Арас. Исследование и изучение тувинского языка в Турции помимо Университета Хаджеттепе ведется теперь в Университете Анкары и Университете Гази. В настоящее время в Турции помимо кафедр современных тюркских языков и литературы тувинский язык изучают на кафедрах турецкого языка и литературы.Автор полагает, что исследования тувинского языка и изучение тувинского языка в Турции со временем будет только расширяться и распространяться.

Processing backward translation at intermediate L2 proficiency

Abstract This study opens a window into the mapping of the lexical structure of bilinguals as they reach intermediate-level L2 proficiency. A group of 32 Persian-speaking English learners participated in a translation recognition task, where they had to decide whether the sequentially presented English-Persian word pairs were translation equivalents. The Persian words in the experimental trials were not translation equivalents, but they either shared lexical or semantic features with the correct translations or shared phonological features with the preceding English words. For example, the Persian word /bɒːzuː/ in the word pair arm – /bɒːzuː/ was manipulated to create three categories of ‘no’ trials: (a) orthographically related to the translation equivalent (arm – /bɒːziː/ ‘game’), (b) semantically related to the translation equivalent (arm – /ʃɒːne/ ‘shoulder’), (c) phonologically related to the English word (arm – /ɒːrmɒːn/ ‘goal’). A significant interference effect was observed in response to the items in the first two categories, which indicates extensive utilization of both lexical and conceptual links in backward translation. However, the observed interference effect in the third category did not reach statistical significance, which calls into question the integrated activation of L1 and L2 prior to high level L2 proficiency. These results are discussed within the context of the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002).

Lexical and semantic connections in number words translation

The present study investigated the influence of lexical links and conceptual mediation in number word translation. In four experiments, a semantic blocking paradigm was used with numerical stimuli and stimuli from other non-number categories. The performance of Spanish L1–English L2 bilinguals was examined in backward and forward translation (Experiment 1 and 3), in naming Arabic digits and pictures (Experiment 2A) and in reading L1 and L2 words (Experiment 2B). The blocked context produced a facilitatory effect for numerical stimuli in the lower range. This result contrasts with the interference effect observed for stimuli from non-number categories in translation and naming tasks. These results are interpreted to mean that the translation of number words, particularly those in the lower range of the numeric sequence, takes place with a large influence of the lexical connections. It supports the suggestions that the influence of processing routes depends on the type of items.

Directionality and context effects in word translation tasks performed by conference interpreters

AbstractProfessional interpreters employed by international institutions usually work into their L1 from their L2, while freelance interpreters tend to work both into and from their L1. A study was devised to see if the long-term interpreting unidirectional practice (in the L2–L1 direction only), in contrast to bidirectional practice (in the L2–L1 and L1–L2 direction), influences the speed of lexical retrieval manifested through shorter translation latencies. Forty-eight professional conference interpreters produced oral translations of nouns presented in isolation, in high context constraint sentences and in low context constraint sentences. Contrary to predictions, unidirectional interpreters did not manifest directionality asymmetry and their L2–L1 translation latencies were not shorter than L1–L2 translation latencies. Surprisingly, the L2–L1 direction advantage was found in the group of bidirectional interpreters. The data suggest that the dominant directionality in interpreting practice has little impact on the strength of interlingual lexical links in the interpreter’s mental lexicon or that other factors (such as language use, exposure and immersion) might offset any such impact. The study also revealed an expected context effect, which shows that interpreters use semantic constraint to anticipate sentence-final words.

Decolonizing Creole on the Mauritius islands: Creative practices in Mauritian Creole

Many Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands have a common history of French and British colonization, where a Creole language developed from the contact of different colonial and African/ Indian languages. In the process, African languages died, making place for a language which retained close lexical links to the colonizer’s tongue. This paper presents the case of Mauritian Creole, a language that emerged out of a colonial context and which is now the mother tongue of 70% of Mauritians, across different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. It pinpoints the residual colonial ideologies in the language and looks at some creative practices, focusing on its oral and scribal aspects, to formulate a ‘decolonial aesthetics’ (Mignolo, 2009). In stressing the séga angazé (protest songs) and poetry in Mauritian Creole in the history of resistance to colonization, it argues that the language is, potentially, a carrier of decolonial knowledges.

Through the Lens of the Adam Narrative: A Re-consideration of Sūrat al-Baqara

The thesis of a single pillar or axis around which the longer Medinan suras are structured has been highly influential in the field of sura unity, and scholarship on the structure and coherence of Sūrat al-Baqara has tended to work towards charting the progress of a dominant theme throughout the textual blocks that make up the sura. In order to achieve this, scholars have divided the sura into discrete blocks; many have posited a chain of lexical and thematic links from one block to the next; some have concentrated solely on the hinges and borders between these suggested textual blocks. The present article argues that such methods, while often in themselves illuminating, are by their very nature reductive. As such they can result in the oversight of important elements of the sura. From a starting point of the Adam pericope provided in Q. 2:30–9, this study will focus on the recurrence of a number of its lexical items throughout Sūrat al-Baqara. By methodically tracing the passage of repeated, loosely Fall-related, vocabulary, it will attempt to widen the contextual lens through which the sura's textual blocks are viewed, and establish a broader perspective on its coherence. Via a discussion of the themes of ‘gardens’, ‘parable’, ‘prostration’, ‘covenant’, ‘wrongdoing’ and finally ‘blindness’, this article will posit ‘garments’, not as a structural pillar, but as a pivot around which many of the repeated lexical items of the sura rotate.

A Contrastive Analysis of the Links of Textuality in Abstracts Written by Persian and English Writers in Clinical Psychology Journals

It is generally agreed today that lexical cohesion is one of the fundamental elements of the text texture achieved through lexical semantic relations dominating the arrangement of propositional units in a text. Accordingly, this study sought to compare and contrast the textual links or lexical cohesive devices enlisted in the psychological abstracts written by Persian and English writers. To this end, 40 abstracts from Persian and English articles, 20 in each language, published in clinical psychology journals were randomly selected. The framework serving as tertium comprationis for analyzing lexical cohesion markers was derived from Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) model [Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English . London: Longman]. A frequency count analysis was employed to gauge the number of occurrences of cohesive links in the selected corpus. The results revealed that lexical links of synonymy and repetition were more frequent than other cohesive devices in both English and Persian abstracts.

Translation recognition in highly proficient Hindi–English bilinguals: The influence of different scripts but connectable phonologies

This study investigates the phonological nature of the lexical links in the bilingual lexicon using different-script bilinguals. Highly proficient Hindi–English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task (i.e., decide whether two words presented sequentially are a correct translation pair). For the critical trials, the second word was a nontranslation distractor word and thus required a no response. The properties of the no trials were manipulated to examine participants' sensitivity to orthographic and phonological relations. The first manipulation investigated whether different-script bilinguals utilise the L1 translation equivalent link in a similar fashion as same-script bilinguals and tested the generalisability of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) to the case of different-script bilinguals. The second manipulation tested the predictions of the Bilingual Interactive Activation plus model (BIA +) regarding phonological nonselectivity in the bilingual lexicon. Results suggest that these highly proficient different-script bilinguals utilise translation equivalent lexical links in a distinct manner from same-script bilinguals, but do display nonselective phonological activation in the form of facilitation across languages that do not share script.

Intact discourse cohesion and coherence following bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Discourse cohesion and coherence give communication its continuity providing the grammatical and lexical links that hold an utterance or text together and give it meaning. Researchers often link cohesion and coherence deficits to the frontal lobes by drawing attention to frontal lobe dysfunction in populations where discourse cohesion and coherence deficits are reported and through attribution of these deficits to underlying cognitive impairments putatively associated with the frontal lobes. We examined the distinct contribution of a region of the frontal lobes, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), to discourse cohesion and coherence across a range of discourse tasks. We found that bilateral vmPFC damage does not impair cohesion and coherence in spoken discourse. This study provides insights into the contribution of the major anatomical subdivisions of the frontal lobes to language use and furthers our understanding of the neural and cognitive underpinnings of discourse cohesion and coherence.

When does iconicity in sign language matter?

We examined whether iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL) enhances translation performance for new learners and proficient signers. Fifteen hearing nonsigners and 15 proficient ASL–English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task and a production translation task. Nonsigners were taught 28 ASL verbs (14 iconic; 14 noniconic) prior to performing these tasks. Only new learners benefited from sign iconicity, recognising iconic translations faster and more accurately and exhibiting faster forward (English–ASL) and backward (ASL–English) translation times for iconic signs. In contrast, proficient ASL–English bilinguals exhibited slower recognition and translation times for iconic signs. We suggest iconicity aids memorisation in the early stages of adult sign language learning, but for fluent L2 signers, iconicity interacts with other variables that slow translation (specifically, the iconic signs had more translation equivalents than the noniconic signs). Iconicity may also have slowed translation performance by forcing conceptual mediation for iconic signs, which is slower than translating via direct lexical links.

On the translation routes in early and highly proficient bilingual people: Evidence from an individual with semantic impairment

Background: One of the major interests in bilingualism research has been the extent to which the two lexicons of a bilingual speaker are directly linked and the role that this hypothetical link plays during language production. Up to now, most of the research on this issue has focused on either low or high proficient late‐bilingual people, whereas little information has been provided on the functionality of this hypothesised link in highly proficient bilinguals who acquired their two languages early in life. Aims: The aim of the present study is to provide information on the functionality of the direct link between the two lexicons of early and highly proficient bilingual people. Methods & Procedures: In this report we assess the functionality of lexical links between translation words in an early and highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilingual patient (JFF) who suffers from a semantic deficit as a consequence of Alzheimer's disease. The integrity of JFF's conceptual and lexical representations is examined by means of semantic, picture‐naming, and translation tasks. We pay special attention to JFF's translation performance to assess whether such performance is affected by his semantic deficit. Outcomes & Results: We argue that if lexical links between translation words are functional, then such links would guarantee error‐free production in translation. Contrary to this prediction, errors observed in JFF's translation performance indicated that the semantic system was involved in JFF's forward and backward translation. Conclusions: On the basis of this result, we suggest that lexical links in early and highly proficient bilingual people are not functional.