Linguistic Levels Research Articles

Age differentially modulates the cortical tracking of the lower and higher level linguistic structures during speech comprehension.

Speech comprehension requires listeners to rapidly parse continuous speech into hierarchically-organized linguistic structures (i.e. syllable, word, phrase, and sentence) and entrain the neural activities to the rhythm of different linguistic levels. Aging is accompanied by changes in speech processing, but it remains unclear how aging affects different levels of linguistic representation. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography signals in older and younger groups when subjects actively and passively listened to the continuous speech in which hierarchical linguistic structures of word, phrase, and sentence were tagged at 4, 2, and 1Hz, respectively. A newly-developed parameterization algorithm was applied to separate the periodically linguistic tracking from the aperiodic component. We found enhanced lower-level (word-level) tracking, reduced higher-level (phrasal- and sentential-level) tracking, and reduced aperiodic offset in older compared with younger adults. Furthermore, we observed the attentional modulation on the sentential-level tracking being larger for younger than for older ones. Notably, the neuro-behavior analyses showed that subjects' behavioral accuracy was positively correlated with the higher-level linguistic tracking, reversely correlated with the lower-level linguistic tracking. Overall, these results suggest that the enhanced lower-level linguistic tracking, reduced higher-level linguistic tracking and less flexibility of attentional modulation may underpin aging-related decline in speech comprehension.

Verbal working memory capacity modulates semantic and phonological prediction in spoken comprehension.

Mounting evidence suggests that people may use multiple cues to predict different levels of representation (e.g., semantic, syntactic, and phonological) during language comprehension. One question that has been less investigated is the relationship between general cognitive processing and the efficiency of prediction at various linguistic levels, such as semantic and phonological levels. To address this research gap, the present study investigated how working memory capacity (WMC) modulates different kinds of prediction behavior (i.e., semantic prediction and phonological prediction) in the visual world. Chinese speakers listened to the highly predictable sentences that contained a highly predictable target word, and viewed a visual display of objects. The visual display of objects contained a target object corresponding to the predictable word, a semantic or a phonological competitor that was semantically or phonologically related to the predictable word, and an unrelated object. We conducted a Chinese version of the reading span task to measure verbal WMC and grouped participants into high- and low-span groups. Participants showed semantic and phonological prediction with comparable size in both groups during language comprehension, with earlier semantic prediction in the high-span group, and a similar time course of phonological prediction in both groups. These results suggest that verbal working memory modulates predictive processing in language comprehension.

Investigating the impact of structured reporting on the linguistic standardization of radiology reports through natural language processing over a 10-year period

ObjectivesTo investigate how a transition from free text to structured reporting affects reporting language with regard to standardization and distinguishability.MethodsA total of 747,393 radiology reports dictated between January 2011 and June 2020 were retrospectively analyzed. The body and cardiothoracic imaging divisions introduced a reporting concept using standardized language and structured reporting templates in January 2016.Reports were segmented by a natural language processing algorithm and converted into a 20-dimension document vector. For analysis, dimensionality was reduced to a 2D visualization with t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding and matched with metadata. Linguistic standardization was assessed by comparing distinct report types’ vector spreads (e.g., run-off MR angiography) between reporting standards. Changes in report type distinguishability (e.g., CT abdomen/pelvis vs. MR abdomen) were measured by comparing the distance between their centroids.ResultsStructured reports showed lower document vector spread (thus higher linguistic similarity) compared with free-text reports overall (21.9 [free-text] vs. 15.9 [structured]; − 27.4%; p < 0.001) and for most report types, e.g., run-off MR angiography (15.2 vs. 1.8; − 88.2%; p < 0.001) or double-rule-out CT (26.8 vs. 10.0; − 62.7%; p < 0.001). No changes were observed for reports continued to be written in free text, e.g., CT head reports (33.2 vs. 33.1; − 0.3%; p = 1).Distances between the report types’ centroids increased with structured reporting (thus better linguistic distinguishability) overall (27.3 vs. 54.4; + 99.3 ± 98.4%) and for specific report types, e.g., CT abdomen/pelvis vs. MR abdomen (13.7 vs. 37.2; + 171.5%).ConclusionStructured reporting and the use of factual language yield more homogenous and standardized radiology reports on a linguistic level, tailored to specific reporting scenarios and imaging studies.Clinical relevanceInformation transmission to referring physicians, as well as automated report assessment and content extraction in big data analyses, may benefit from standardized reporting, due to consistent report organization and terminology used for pathologies and normal findings.Key Points• Natural language processing and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding can transform radiology reports into numeric vectors, allowing the quantification of their linguistic standardization.• Structured reporting substantially increases reports’ linguistic standardization (mean: − 27.4% in vector spread) and distinguishability (mean: + 99.3 ± 98.4% increase in vector distance) compared with free-text reports.• Higher standardization and homogeneity outline potential benefits of structured reporting for information transmission and big data analyses.

Joint attention and its linguistic representation in dialogue: embodiment revisited.

Lakoff and Johnson, among many others, have discussed the role of the human body in structuring meaning in communication, aiming to reveal the interrelation between the human body, language, and cognition. This study revisits the concept of embodiment and investigates its interactive nature functioning in speakers constructing repeated structures in conversation, based on the hypothesis made in this work that the joint attention of interlocutors essentially indicates the interaction of their embodied experience of the language used in the situated context, where speakers not only share their propositional commitments but also make individual contributions to establishing common ground in dialogue. Viewed in this way, at the linguistic level, the implicitly and/or explicitly repeated language resources displayed between utterances are in fact the encoding of speakers' co-construction of joint attention and demonstrate the interplay of speakers' syntactic and pragmatic knowledge in producing utterances in the talk turns. This research hopefully sheds some light on studies concerning the relationship between language and cognition as well as how language is constructed in dialogue from the interactive view of the syntax-pragmatics interface.

What Drives Task Performance in Animal Fluency in Individuals Without Dementia? The SMART-MR Study.

In this study, we aim to understand whether and how performance in animal fluency (i.e., total correct word count) relates to linguistic levels and/or executive functions by looking at sequence information and item-level metrics (i.e., clusters, switches, and word properties). Seven hundred thirty-one Dutch-speaking individuals without dementia from the Second Manifestations of ARTerial disease-Magnetic Resonance study responded to an animal fluency task (120 s). We obtained cluster size and number of switches for the task, and eight different word properties for each correct word produced. We detected variables that determine total word count with random forests, and used conditional inference trees to assess points along the scales of such variables, at which total word count changes significantly. Number of switches, average cluster size, lexical decision response times, word frequency, and concreteness determined total correct word count in animal fluency. People who produced more correct words produced more switches and bigger clusters. People who produced fewer words produced fewer switches and more frequent words. Concurrent with existing literature, individuals without dementia rely on language and executive functioning to produce words in animal fluency. The novelty of our work is that such results were shown based on a data-driven approach using sequence information and item-level metrics. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23713269.

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi: An annotated translation

This study presents an analysis of annotated translations focusing on the novel “Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi, published in 2019. The objective of this study is to identify suitable translation strategies for effectively translating cultural-specific terms encountered in Choi’s novel. Specifically, the annotations in this report pertain to Part 1 of the novel. The researchers identifies eight translation problems encountered in this section, the first being comprehension of the source text, including words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. To address these challenges, the researchers employed a simultaneous understanding and transferring approach, utilizing online dictionaries as translation aids. Moreover, the researchers adopted the most suitable translation strategy to enhance text comprehensibility. Semantic strategies were predominantly employed by the researchers, considering meaning at various linguistic levels, including words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.

EPIPHANIC SYNERGISM IN JAMES JOYCE’S “THE DEAD” and ROBERT MUSIL’S “TONKA”

The article uses the linguistic-synergetic approach to examine the narrative structure and verbalization patterns in modernist short fiction based on “The Dead” by James Joyce and “Tonka” by Robert Musil. From this perspective, the study relates the epiphany-oriented non-hierarchical LIKE-THAT – SOMETHING-LIKE-THAT – NEVER-SOMETHING-LIKE-THAT narrative structure to verbalization of self-organized simultaneity in modernist short fiction. From this study’s findings, both writers similarly replace a conventional narrative hierarchy with a verbal event whose verbalization, namely, repetitions at all linguistic levels, allusive associations, and aposiopesis, supports an epiphany-oriented attractor of change. The results of this study extend insights of current research on verbalization of self-organized simultaneity in the process of constructing a non-hierarchical epiphanic model. They contribute to the current linguistic-synergetic research on the emergence of modernist epiphany and have practical applications with regard to modernist writers across languages and cultures.

Rendition of Noncanonical Opposition: A Case Study of Qur’anic Composition in Bilingual Transposition

Grammar and meaning, form and function, are two linguistic levels intrinsic and indispensable to reading and rendering the Qur’an, the Divine Word of Islamic Scripture, in a foreign tongue. Nida and de Waard’s (1986) ‘functional equivalence’, an amalgamation of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence, posits that emphasis in translation activity and practice must also be laid on SL form which must be retained and maintained in TL where possible as long as it performs discourse functions and conciliates SL fidelity and TL legibility. The present study argues that the syntactic frames that host noncanonical oppositions in the Qur’an trigger distinct discourse functions that must be transposed as lexicosyntactic and lexicosemantic translation units into Qur’an translation. Building on a typological analysis of a representative dataset retrieved from Qur’anic Arabic Corpus (QAC), the study reveals remarkable variations among the translators in their renditions of noncanonical opposition frames and functions owing to explicitation and domestication. This study recommends revival and reuse of the grammar-translation method in Qur’an translation when SL meaning and function are based on SL grammar and form.

Изучение художественных текстов в аспекте практической лингвокультурологии с иностранными студентами гуманитарных специальностей

The research aims to present recommendations for the discipline “Russian as a foreign language” for foreign students at universities in the humanities on the basis of linguocultural analysis of literary texts. The paper, written at the junction of linguoculturology and linguodidactics, examines a number of works by A. S. Pushkin from the methodological perspective in the process of B2-C1 Russian language teaching. The scientific novelty of the paper lies in the fact that it proposes to build a methodology for working with a literary text based on a linguocultural description at the conceptual and linguistic levels using the notion of “concept”. As a result, a course in the study of Russian classical literature in the aspect of practical linguoculturology has been developed within the framework of Russian as a foreign language teaching.

History as translation / anachronism as synchronism

ABSTRACT When we speak and write, when we use language, we perform a temporal act which connects past, present and future. If we assume that the act of translating is the means through which we are linguistically able to connect past, present and future, then we can discern how, cognitively, every translation is intimately related to the problem of anachronism and to the presence of different temporalities at one and the same time. My interest in the concept of anachronism in history and historiography lies at the linguistic and cognitive levels. When we use a present word/concept with reference to a word/concept of the past (recent or distant), we perform a linguistic act that is unavoidably anachronistic, an act of translation. The idea of anachronism as synchronism implied by using language in respect of historians can be completely understood only if we think of it in cognitive terms. I wish to emphasize that the act of understanding past words and concepts is cognitively anachronistic, also in consequence of the fact that words are themselves things-objects and are apprehended by men and women as a concrete form. If we think of words as things-objects, similar perspectives and similar methodological issues are open to the investigation of historians. Words are as things-objects, materially and cognitively: they have emerged in a precise moment and place and have been reinterpreted through multiple receptions in different times and places, bearing in their existence the signs of their history. The notion of anachronism as synchronism must be related to the fact that words and things-objects coming from different times are all contemporarily present, and the task of the historian as a translator of the past consists exactly in unrolling and synchronizing their different temporalities.

Development and Standardization of Persian Language Developmental Battery

Objective In the absence of an age normed developmental battery for Persian, the major objectives of this research are to develop a reliable and valid clinical linguistic battery to collect normative data from 3 to 7-year-old healthy Persian speaking children. The battery can also be used to measure severity of language impairments in 3 to 7-year-old Persian speaking children as compared with their aged matched peers. Materials &amp; Methods Development of this battery is considered as a descriptive tool in which reliability and validity of the normative data were developed in 3 stages. The first version with 9 different sub-tests, 180 items and two descriptive pictures was developed after cultural and linguistic adaptations for the Persian language for different linguistic levels of phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics. The first draft was performed using 200 3 to 8-year-old healthy children in Tehran to measure the sensitivity of different tasks of the test for different age groups. This draft was not sensitive for 8-year-old children. The CVR of the first draft of the battery was checked by 3 Persian speaking clinical linguistic experts and 3 expert speech therapists and also was introduced to 20 SLP experts in a clinical linguistic workshop. In the second stage, based on the results and suggestions, necessary corrections were made in the test structure and items. Also, plural morpheme task of the previous version which was not sensitive enough, was removed and a new semantic task (word definition) as a sensitive semantic task used in other developmental language batteries was added to the battery. The results showed that the diagnostic sensitivity of the test for the 8-year-old age group is not satisfactory. The final version of the battery consisted of 9 subtests with 105 items and two descriptive pictures were used to collect normative data from 200 children. To evaluate reliability and validity of the final version, the opinions of 8 speech therapists and linguists were used.and to evaluate the construct validity, the correlation matrix and confirmatory factor analysis and for its validity Cronbach’s alpha were used. The final version of the battery was sent to expert speech therapists in 5 selected target group provinces (Tehran, Mazandaran, Fars, Esfahan and Khorasan) to collect normative data from 1200 3 to 7-year-old typically developement children in available kindergartens and schools. Finally, the collected data for task items and connected speech measures were processed and analyzed using SPSS software, version 20. Results The content validity was 0.78 and test reliability was 0.76. In addition to confirm the construct validity and diagnostic validity of the test, the correlation between the sub-tests and the overall test scores were also significant at the level of 0.01 (with a correlation of 0.20 to 0.83). The norm for each age group was six months and one year and was calculated as a standard score and reported in the tables. Conclusion Finally, the results of the normative data of this battery are proved to be clinically normative as an indication of the level of linguistic development for each age group and also determine the severity of their language impairment. The battery can also be used to measure the efficacy of rehabilitation in 3 to 7-year old Persian speaking children.

A Corpus-based Analysis of the Linguistic Complexity Levels of the Reading Passages in Three Asian EFL Countries’ College Entrance English Exams

This study investigates the linguistic complexity levels of the reading passages of the foreign language (English) domain of the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) in Korea and compares them with those in two other Asian EFL countries. For the study, the reading passages of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese college entrance English exams from the 2018 to 2020 academic year were collected and analyzed based on the length, propositional content and organizational characteristics by using a variety of corpus linguistic tools. The Kruskal-Wallis test was administered in order to see if there was a statistically significant difference among the tests. Also, when between-group differences were detected, the Mann-Whitney U post hoc test was conducted to further look into significant differences between the CSAT and the other tests. Overall findings suggest that the reading passages of the CSAT English exam maintained the highest difficulty level among the three Asian EFL countries’ college entrance English exams, with cognitively demanding academically-oriented items, highly advanced vocabulary, complex syntactic structure and low readability. Based on the findings, this research is expected to shed light on the intention of incorporating criterion-referenced English assessment into the CSAT as well as provide pedagogical implications for test developers and education policy makers in Korea.

Pro-Syrian Regime Versus Anti Regime Outlets: A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis

The Syrian conflict that erupted in 2011 became a global crisis and attracted the international social media attention, leading to the engagement of international superpowers. Based on the assumption that social media discourse is not neutral and impacted by social, political, and economic contexts [1], this paper employs van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to investigate the role of social media discourse in protracting the Syrian conflict. It analyzes two main local, anti-, and pro-regime, social media outlets’ posts, and tweets to expose their discursive strategies and embedded ideologies. This article exposes the manipulation practices on the discoursal and linguistic level. It conducts a complex analysis to uncover hidden messages and manipulation techniques that has been delivered and utilized by conflicting parties in Syria, influencing people’s minds, increasing their polarity, altering the Syrian revolution’s conception, and protracting the tragedy. The findings indicate that social media discourse vis-à-vis the Syrian context is biased. Syrian conflicting parties, especially pro-regimes outlets, manipulate discourse with the aim of influencing people’s understandings and beliefs and hence actions. Anti-government actors are always stereotyped as foreign backed, extremists, and terrorists. International outlets, impacted by the local outlets, have contributed to altering the perception of the Syrian conflict, from a popular social movement to a violent civil war.

Spelling of the Language of Outdoor Visual Advertising

In Turkestan, advertising in a market economy has become an integral part of the social life of the city. Advertising is politics, economics, culture, the ideology of the city and activities combined with linguistic science, which should attract the attention of the country. It is obvious that advertising in Turkestan permeates all spheres of human activity and meets the needs of society. The effectiveness of an advertising campaign depends on the rationality of the language design of the advertising text. An important point in the preparation of an advertising text is the choice of language means used in the text, compliance with spelling rules. The identification of the features of the language of the advertising text within the framework of advertising propaganda is carried out within the framework of sociolinguistics, pragmalinguistics, functional stylistics and the theory of communicative linguistics. From a linguistic point of view, there is an interest in language. The correct understanding of the psycholinguistic effectiveness of advertising impact is an assessment of the direct relationship between advertising and the sale of goods, that is, the ability of advertising to influence consumer preferences. More importantly, advertising is understandable to the consumer, it is designed in such a way as to attract attention, be easily remembered and evoke positive emotions. The problems of the theory of psycholinguistics in this direction include the psychological structure of the perception of advertising and, accordingly, advertising activities. The cognitive component depends on a person's perception of advertising information. The main characteristic of the article is the increasing role of Turkestan advertising in the development of society, in particular, significant activity in the development of tourism, patterns of participation, features of the use of language units in psychological impact, the spelling of advertising, how well spelling patterns are observed at the linguistic level, consideration of ways to convey spelling principles in the language of Turkestan advertising.

Gendering Advertisements: A Comparative Study of Pakistani Print Media Semiotic Discourses

Print media advertisements are one of the most influential means of propagating a desired ideology to the target audience. The present study attempts to decode critically representation of Fe / male genders through the advertisements of two Pakistani daily newspapers, Dawn and Jung. The time span for data collection ranges from 1st June to 30th June 2022. The data has been analyzed by employing Kress and Hodge's (2010) model of social semiotics. This model focuses on the analysis at linguistic and semiotic levels. It finds that percentage of female representation in the advertisements is higher than male representation. The males and females have been shown in the advertisements of banking and finance, education, showbiz and media, and real-estate business. It contends that word picture conjunction works effectively in propagating desired ideologies. Therefore, the study concludes that genre of advertisement is one of the best sites for ideological investment.

Spelling Variation in Inner-Circle Englishes

English is the language with the largest number of speakers in the world, when both native and non-native speakers are included. With an estimated 1,268 million users around the globe, linguistic variation is bound to occur. Research on World Englishes focuses on the study of this variation, though it has systematically disregarded the linguistic level of orthography. This neglect has operated under the assumption that most contemporary varieties must adhere to British English spelling norms. Nevertheless, recent studies on the Americanisation of English worldwide (Mair 2013; Gilquin 2018; Gonçalves et al. 2018) have brought the question of spelling variation back to the fore. The present paper thus analyses the distribution of the most distinctive spelling variants—i.e. -our/-or, -re/-er and -isation/-ization—in the varieties of the inner circle from a synchronic perspective. By means of a corpus-based investigation of English online, this study will outline the spelling usage patterns for the aforementioned varieties and will analyse the highly-likely Americanisation process in spelling on the Internet.

The Language of the Weather Forecast in Italian and Spanish Television Broadcasts: Linguistic-Descriptive Analysis of the End of Winter on RTVE and TG5 Television Channels

Weather information is of great importance to society due to the impact of the physical environment on everyday life. As a result, popular tradition has disseminated many proverbs related to human activities that have been the subject, over time, of scientific studies, intending to verify the veracity of such predictions. For this reason, this article initially presents a brief bibliographical and regulatory analysis of the evolution of atmospheric language and a presentation of the bodies that regulate its communication in Spain and Italy. Subsequently, a corpus of weather reports extracted during December 2022 from an Italian and Spanish news channel will be illustrated to study the communication of weather forecasts from a macro- and microstructural linguistic level, given the need for studies in both languages. For this purpose, Speechnotes will be used for the transcriptions, and Sketch Engine to create the corpus. As a result of the analysis, Spanish news programmes devote more time to the space of time, show a much higher speed of locution than the Italian corpus, provide a more significant number of mechanisms to show probability and uncertainty, and a great variety of linguistic-discursive strategies to exemplify the scientific context. We also find a recurrent gerund, which we will call an "atmospheric gerund". In Italian, on the other hand, we find greater deixis, more synthetic information, and less dynamism in the interaction with the data. Funding This work has been funded by the Margarita Salas grants for the training of young doctors (2021-2023) of the University of Salamanca

Cicho pjd w nowe dni cisza w poezji Stanisawy Plewiskiej

Plewiska drew creative inspiration from multi-sensory contact with nature in the countryside. For her, auditory perception was extremely important. In addition to sounds, however, the sensations resulting from their absence were equally significant. The state of silence is present in each of her poetry books. At the linguistic level, it is conveyed conventionally, i.e. using the noun cisza [silence], and its derivatives such as cicho [quietly], cichutko [very quietly], cichy [quiet], cichn [to fall silent], as well as milczenie [stillness] and milcze [to be silent], and zamilkn [to fall silent]. Similarly to folk tradition, the state of silence is used to celebrate transition (from life to death, from adulthood to old age) and to evoke the unknown and mysterious, i.e. the afterlife.

Pojęcie dziennikarza w prawie polskim

A journalist is one of the professions that has high public support and should be characterised by high moral and ethical requirements when performing their work, which is to provide information to the public. The aim of this article is to analyse the notion of journalist on a linguistic and legal level. It was made by analysing the definition of a journalist in dictionaries of the Polish language and in the science of social communication and the media, as well as by analysing the dogmatic legal definition of the notion of journalist contained in Article 7(2)(5) of the Press Law.

An L-MOOC to Improve Communicative Competence: From Blended Learning to OERs in the University Classroom

Language MOOCs (L-MOOCs) are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that focus on language learning. They may often present several problems in their design and development, such as their feasibility to improve students’ linguistic levels or in their materials’ adequacy and variety. Many of these courses have subsequently become Open Educational Resources (OERs), and their activities can be implemented in different learning situations. Our paper discusses the evaluation of the integration of the L-MOOC titled “Learn academic Spanish” (Aprende español académico) into existing curricula and the validation process carried out to evaluate its validity for the purpose of learning languages. The L-MOOC was developed within the MOOC2move project between 2018–2021 and was designed by the Open University, with the collaboration of the Spanish universities of León and Alicante. The evaluation and validation were carried out in October 2020. In an exceptional hybrid teaching situation, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the L-MOOC was taken by 345 students from the Faculty of Education of the University of Alicante. The validation of the course consisted of taking the L-MOOC, participating in the forums on the MOOC and completing the questionnaires to improve the materials. In our study, a quantitative analysis was carried out through two questionnaires provided to the students before and after implementing this L-MOOC. The results obtained underlined the effectiveness of this L-MOOC. This course and the materials provided allowed the use of OERs to practice academic Spanish and improve communicative competence of its users.