Linguistic Modalities Research Articles

Automatic Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Using Spontaneous Speech Only.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative syndrome which affects tens of millions of elders worldwide. Although there is no treatment currently available, early recognition can improve the lives of people with AD and their caretakers and families. To find a cost-effective and easy-to-use method for dementia detection and address the dementia classification task of InterSpeech 2021 ADReSSo (Alzheimer's' Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech only) challenge, we conduct a systematic comparison of approaches to detection of cognitive impairment based on spontaneous speech. We investigated the characteristics of acoustic modality and linguistic modality directly based on the audio recordings of narrative speech, and explored a variety of modality fusion strategies. With an ensemble over top-10 classifiers on the training set, we achieved an accuracy of 81.69% compared to the baseline of 78.87% on the test set. The results suggest that although transcription errors will be introduced through automatic speech recognition, integrating textual information generally improves classification performance. Besides, ensemble methods can boost both the accuracy and the robustness of models.

Rethinking “Equity Sticks”: Engaging Emergent Bilinguals in Discussing Texts

AbstractText‐related oral participation is ubiquitous in literacy and language instruction. As such, considering how invitations to these interactions are framed is critical, as this framing is directly implicated in the design of equitable classrooms. In this Teaching Tip, one common technique teachers have been encouraged to use—a class set of “equity sticks”—is reconsidered through the lens of asset‐based instruction for all learners including emergent bilinguals (EBs). Reframing how EBs are invited to respond to texts requires that teachers get to know their students, privilege multilingualism, provide scaffolding for oral discussion, and encourage responses that transcend linguistic modalities.

The First Translation of a Chinese Drama into a European Language

A partial translation of the Yuan dynasty drama The Orphan of the Zhao Family by the Jesuit missionary Joseph Henri-Marie de Prémare was published in Paris in 1735. As the first example of a Chinese theatrical work becoming known in Europe, the translation had a vast impact and gave rise to the composition of some European plays which, to varying degrees, were inspired by it. The present study focuses not on these adaptations, but on Prémare’s translation itself. In recognising its central role both in the formation of a European perception of Chinese literature and in the history of the development of Sinology, this study is an investigation of the linguistic and cultural modalities through which Prémare managed to present to the European reader, at least in part, the moral tension that animates the drama, despite the objective difficulty present in every transcoding operation – especially in the earlier works – and the subjective ambition to provide an image of China that was not excessively “pagan.”

Стаття Шарля Баллі «Syntaxe de la modalité explicite» («Синтаксис експліцитної модальності») і сучасна лінгвістика

The article examines the place of Charles Ballyʼs paper «Syntaxe de la modalité explicite» in the body of work of the prominent Swiss linguist on the category of modality and identifies the role of his ideas in modern description of syntax. In Charles Ballyʼs linguistic heritage the concept of modality plays an exceptionally important role. His views o n the modal organization of the sentence are based on the theoretical perspective to describing the phenomenon of language proposed by his teacher Ferdinand de Saussure. Charles Ballyʼs theory of modality is an integral part of his general theory of enunciation. Identification of the two components in the semantic structure of the sentence, namely the modus and the dictum, becomes some kind of a bridge between Saussureʼs intellectualized grammar of language and the grammar of speech, which specifically entails the study of emotional and affective factors, and also stylistic aspects of human language. According to Charles Bally, the modus is a combination of a modal verb, which may contain a variety of shades of opinion, feeling or will, and a modal subject, which can represent a speaking subject and also other subjects. Charles Ballyʼs studies significantly influenced the interpretation of the category of modality in modern linguistics. However, not every theory based on the idea of identifying the modus and the dictum in the sentence can be theoretically convincing. Identifying the dictum with the representation of the objective, and the modus with the subjective led to unsubstantiated theoretical opposition of objective and subjective modality. Only misunderstanding of Charles Ballyʼs ideas might explain the attempts to attribute the ability to express the category of evaluation and emotionality to the modus. Charles Ballyʼs original theoretical views proved to be productive in the development of the cognitive theory of modality, which in its turn is based on other theoretical views on the phenomenon of language. Within this theory, modality is defined as a category that describes the mental-sensory differentiation of the speakerʼs thoughts in the process of sentence formation. According to the active approach to sentence interpretation, the subject of the modus in cognitive modality theory is only the speaker. The paper «Syntaxe de la modalité explicite», which Charles Bally described as a program of studies, has not lost its relevance. The task of describing the semantic shades of modality, as well as various forms of its expression, the principles of classification of modal verbs outlined in the paper as the goal of linguistics, remains largely unresolved today.

Análise de processos de formação de quadros psíquicos de surdos congênitos em psicoterapia / Analysis of processes of formation of psychic pictures of congenital deaf people in psychotherapy

Speech is one of the main tools of psychotherapy. This represent an obstacle to the treatment of congenital deaf patients who do not use the oral language. Here we aim to analyze processes of psychic construction in deaf patients who use sign language, its relationship with the linguistic modality and indicate possible considerations for psychotherapy whit this population. We carried out a mutiple case study through a psychotherapy program, planned to attend three congenital deaf subjects fron the deal community of Sao Jose do Rio Preto –SP, selected by lot, from a private clinical record. The program was structured in 26 sessions, developed by a psychoanalyst versed in the Brazilian Sign Language. The sessions tool place an individual and systematic basis, aiming to observe the patterns in the development of mental processes, held once a week, lasting 50 minutes. For data analysis we used Spink’s Association Maps and Trees (2010). The results indicate that differences in the semiotic system of language in congenital deaf people determine adaptations in the psychic development of these patients due the psychotherapeutic treatment for deaf people must take place in their own semiotic system, symbolic organization and culture.

Portrayal of Islamic Ideology: Modality analysis of PTB English language textbooks

This paper investigates English language textbooks from the point of view of cultural development in pedagogical text. The focus of present study was to analyze contrasting and shared perceptions of congenital Islamic culture in pedagogical text broadly written in English language textbooks formed by Punjab Textbook Board (PTB) at Elementary level i.e. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classes. Appropriate implications of linguistic modality make possible to build ideological viewpoint related to cultural development in political, social, institutional and media discourse, so, using critical approach with the combination of CDA framework by Fairclough and SFG by Halliday. This study examines the said institutional discourse from different perspectives to clue that how fundamental Islamic philosophy is sharply described under different circumstances. The study is also an exposure of authors’ viewpoint related to portrayal of Islamic culture and needs of cultural sensitivity in such a text related to young learners’ education. In this way, this paper reveals the straightforward instances related to implicit portrayal of Islamic ideology with the help of numerous modality indicators. It has been observed that language textbooks are not only an authentic source of language learning but also a reliable system of cultural development. Findings of this paper expose that writers, policy makers and publishers of PTB want to portray Islamic ideology intentionally within the pedagogical text of English language textbooks at elementary level, so, the findings of this paper would be helpful for learners, educationists, course designers, institutions and language teachers. 
 Keywords: Modality, Textbooks, Ideology, Discourse

WAYS TO EXPRESS THE AUTHOR'S MODALITY IN KAZAKH, KYRGYZ AND ENGLISH FICTION WORKS

The article widely describes the concept of author's modality in the context of linguistic research and provides a brief history of the study of the category of modality in modern linguo-stylistics and text linguistics. Author's modality is considered as a category that plays the role of compiler, organizer of the literary text. The author's modality was also studied as a communicative-pragmatic and subjective assessment category. In such works as Kazakh writer A. Kekilbayev's novel "Aṅızdıṅ aqırı" and Kyrgyz writer Sh. Aitmatov's novel "Kıyamat", famous American writers Theodore Dreiser's novel "Jennie Gerhardt", Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" the different ways of expression the category of author's modality were studied, and similarities and differences were identified.

Paradigm of a New Type of Engineer Training in Earth Sciences

This paper attempts to define key trends observed in new-generation mining engineer training today. A comparative analysis, which looked at recent developments in teaching concerned with innovative technology and transformation of scientific knowledge in general, indicates the need for a new educational paradigm. Actual interaction between humans and their environment was taken as a hypothesis about professional knowledge and skills. The role of the axiological components of the new paradigm was revealed in the light of the communication nature of the society. A methodology was developed to build a new-generation engineer model. The paper reveals the role of a learner’s metacognitive ability in the development of new teaching techniques. The paper highlights how important it is that an engineer was striving for environmentally friendly technology. The authors defined the effect of the altered environment on engineering. The paper substantiates why one can only be said to have hard & soft skills if one is able to apply critical and creative thinking. It was found that training an engineer under the new paradigm is inevitably related to the ability to reflect. Analysis of the linguistic modality serves to support this statement.

Attentive Excitation and Aggregation for Bilingual Referring Image Segmentation

The goal of referring image segmentation is to identify the object matched with an input natural language expression. Previous methods only support English descriptions, whereas Chinese is also broadly used around the world, which limits the potential application of this task. Therefore, we propose to extend existing datasets with Chinese descriptions and preprocessing tools for training and evaluating bilingual referring segmentation models. In addition, previous methods also lack the ability to collaboratively learn channel-wise and spatial-wise cross-modal attention to well align visual and linguistic modalities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Linguistic Excitation module to excite image channels guided by language information and a Linguistic Aggregation module to aggregate multimodal information based on image-language relationships. Since different levels of features from the visual backbone encode rich visual information, we also propose a Cross-Level Attentive Fusion module to fuse multilevel features gated by language information. Extensive experiments on four English and Chinese benchmarks show that our bilingual referring image segmentation model outperforms previous methods.

Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension for Referring Segmentation.

Given a natural language expression and an image/video, the goal of referring segmentation is to produce the pixel-level masks of the entities described by the subject of the expression. Previous approaches tackle this problem by implicit feature interaction and fusion between visual and linguistic modalities in a one-stage manner. However, human tends to solve the referring problem in a progressive manner based on informative words in the expression, i.e., first roughly locating candidate entities and then distinguishing the target one. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal progressive comprehension (CMPC) scheme to effectively mimic human behaviors and implement it as a CMPC-I (Image) module and a CMPC-V (Video) module to improve referring image and video segmentation models. For image data, our CMPC-I module first employs entity and attribute words to perceive all the related entities that might be considered by the expression. Then, the relational words are adopted to highlight the target entity as well as suppress other irrelevant ones by spatial graph reasoning. For video data, our CMPC-V module further exploits action words based on CMPC-I to highlight the correct entity matched with the action cues by temporal graph reasoning. In addition to the CMPC, we also introduce a simple yet effective Text-Guided Feature Exchange (TGFE) module to integrate the reasoned multimodal features corresponding to different levels in the visual backbone under the guidance of textual information. In this way, multi-level features can communicate with each other and be mutually refined based on the textual context. Combining CMPC-I or CMPC-V with TGFE can form our image or video version referring segmentation frameworks and our frameworks achieve new state-of-the-art performances on four referring image segmentation benchmarks and three referring video segmentation benchmarks respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/spyflying/CMPC-Refseg.

Bilingualism Impact on Intelligence and Scholastic Achievement

Bilingualism can refer to the ability to preserve linguistic skills, to a certain level, at two separate linguistic systems, in the four linguistic modalities: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It is related to social, psychological, economic, and political factors. The aim of this study is to review previous studies that targeted the influence, whether positive or negative, a second language may have on the intelligence and then on scholastic achievement of bilingual students versus the intelligence and scholastic achievement of monolinguals.

POWER IN INDONESIAN PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES: AN ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC MODALITY

This paper discusses the relationship between the language and power in the presidential speech text, which is projected through linguistic features, especially modalities. The data was obtained from a speech delivered by President Joko Widodo during the plenary session of the Indonesian People's Consultative Assembly (MPR RI) for the inauguration of the elected president for the 2019-2024 period and the delivery of the president's vision for Indonesia better. Analysis of this paper from linguistic modalities uses a three-dimensional model of Fairclough's critical discourse (CDA) analysis to answer its research questions. The results show that Jokowi used several linguistic modal verbs in projecting his strength. Based on the modality's context, it can be understood that the president conveyed his strategic desire to be himself when he tried to connect with the audience and build his image, audience, and relationship. The President produces a discourse that embodies assumptions about his leadership and audience's social relationship and affirms his legal authority as president and his power. Through the language used, Jokowi creates, maintains, and explains power he holds in these forums.

Multimodal affect analysis of psychodynamic play therapy

Objective: We explore state of the art machine learning based tools for automatic facial and linguistic affect analysis to allow easier, faster, and more precise quantification and annotation of children’s verbal and non-verbal affective expressions in psychodynamic child psychotherapy. Method: The sample included 53 Turkish children: 41 with internalizing, externalizing and comorbid problems; 12 in the non-clinical range. We collected audio and video recordings of 148 sessions, which were manually transcribed. Independent raters coded children’s expressions of pleasure, anger, sadness and anxiety using the Children’s Play Therapy Instrument (CPTI). Automatic facial and linguistic affect analysis modalities were adapted, developed, and combined in a system that predicts affect. Statistical regression methods (linear and polynomial regression) and machine learning techniques (deep learning, support vector regression and extreme learning machine) were used for predicting CPTI affect dimensions. Results: Experimental results show significant associations between automated affect predictions and CPTI affect dimensions with small to medium effect sizes. Fusion of facial and linguistic features work best for pleasure predictions; however, for other affect predictions linguistic analyses outperform facial analyses. External validity analyses partially support anger and pleasure predictions. Discussion: The system enables retrieving affective expressions of children, but needs improvement for precision.

Toward Multimodal Modeling of Emotional Expressiveness.

Emotional expressiveness captures the extent to which a person tends to outwardly display their emotions through behavior. Due to the close relationship between emotional expressiveness and behavioral health, as well as the crucial role that it plays in social interaction, the ability to automatically predict emotional expressiveness stands to spur advances in science, medicine, and industry. In this paper, we explore three related research questions. First, how well can emotional expressiveness be predicted from visual, linguistic, and multimodal behavioral signals? Second, how important is each behavioral modality to the prediction of emotional expressiveness? Third, which behavioral signals are reliably related to emotional expressiveness? To answer these questions, we add highly reliable transcripts and human ratings of perceived emotional expressiveness to an existing video database and use this data to train, validate, and test predictive models. Our best model shows promising predictive performance on this dataset (RMSE = 0.65, R 2 = 0.45, r = 0.74). Multimodal models tend to perform best overall, and models trained on the linguistic modality tend to outperform models trained on the visual modality. Finally, examination of our interpretable models' coefficients reveals a number of visual and linguistic behavioral signals-such as facial action unit intensity, overall word count, and use of words related to social processes-that reliably predict emotional expressiveness.

On the History of Studying Modal Verbs in the German Language

The article is an overview and a summary of the study of modal verbs in the German language in Russian and foreign linguistics, from Antiquity to the present day, in line with the holistic study of modality in world linguistics. Using the methods of generalization and systematization, the author analyzes monographs and articles by Russian and foreign experts in the field of the history of the German language, functional grammar, and morphology. While a considerable number of works by foreign and Russian linguists in the 20th century are devoted to the issues of semantics of preterite-present and modal verbs in specific historical periods of the development of the German language, there are still many open questions in this area. Throughout almost the entire 20th century, Germanists viewed modal verbs mainly as a means of expressing internal modality, i.e., the attitude of the speaker to the action being performed. However, in the late 20th and early 21st century, they began to actively study the subjective use of modal verbs. Much modern literature on the subject is devoted to the study of German modal verbs in the function of subjective (epistemic) modality. This article focuses on etymological, semantic, grammatical, and functional features of modal verbs in modern German and discusses a number of controversial issues, such as the question of whether modal verbs are a closed or open cluster of vocabulary, that is, whether it is possible, at the present stage of language history, to include other linguistic units into the category of modal units, it these other units answer certain semantic or grammatical criteria. It is also open to discussion whether there is a one-to-one corre-spondence between a modal verb and the type of modal relations that is expressed with the help of this verb in speech, and vice versa. The author highlights such significant aspects as grammaticalization of modal verbs, correlation of modal verbs with various types of modal relations, primary and secondary meanings of modal verbs, characteristics of the preterito-presentia, compatibility of modal verbs, and syntactic features of their usage. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that it gives a more comprehensive understanding of functions and pragmatics of modal verbs as a special lexical cluster in speech.

What makes the difference? An empirical comparison of fusion strategies for multimodal language analysis

Multimodal video sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing area. It combines verbal (i.e., linguistic) and non-verbal modalities (i.e., visual, acoustic) to predict the sentiment of utterances. A recent trend has been geared towards different modality fusion models utilizing various attention, memory and recurrent components. However, there lacks a systematic investigation on how these different components contribute to solving the problem as well as their limitations. This paper aims to fill the gap, marking the following key innovations. We present the first large-scale and comprehensive empirical comparison of eleven state-of-the-art (SOTA) modality fusion approaches in two video sentiment analysis tasks, with three SOTA benchmark corpora. An in-depth analysis of the results shows that the attention mechanisms are the most effective for modelling crossmodal interactions, yet they are computationally expensive. Second, additional levels of crossmodal interaction decrease performance. Third, positive sentiment utterances are the most challenging cases for all approaches. Finally, integrating context and utilizing the linguistic modality as a pivot for non-verbal modalities improve performance. We expect that the findings would provide helpful insights and guidance to the development of more effective modality fusion models.

Action processing in the motor system: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) evidence of shared mechanisms in the visual and linguistic modalities

In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words.Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles.We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs’ suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities.

Hearing impairment and higher education: perceptions of students and employees in a Brazilian Public Institution

The aim of this study was to identify the perceptions of the hearing impaired students and the Accessibility Center employees of a Public Higher Education Institution regarding the policies and actions of accessibility and permanence in the education offered in the institution in which they are linked. Also, to verify the association between the preferential linguistic modality of the hearing impaired students and their responses regarding the policies of accessibility and permanence in education in a Higher Education Institution. As well as to identify the architectural and communicational barriers that undermines the academic performance of these students. 14 hearing impaired students and 5 Accessibility Center employees of a Higher Education Institution participated in this study. The data collection occurred through an online questionnaire. It was verified that the two groups did not obtained similar perceptions regarding accessibility and permanence. There was no statistical difference between the linguistic modality and the responses regarding accessibility and permanence in higher education. The students report as main architectural and communication barriers: classroom, learning disability and difficulty in following the contents during classes. This research verified that there is a divergence between students and employees´ perceptions. Regardless of the preferred linguistic modality, students with hearing impairment have the same perceptions regarding accessibility and permanence in higher education. The architectural and communicational barriers were identified in the studied sample.

FUNCTIONING OF THE CATEGORY OF MODALITY IN ENGLISH- LANGUAGE DISCOURCE

The category of modality in linguistics is considered to be not fully investigated phenomenon. Not all authors clearly distinguish between two types of modality, namely grammatical and logical ones. There is still no consensus on the question of whether the modality is assigned to the category of modality: whether modality is a category of morphology, syntax or semantics. The concept of modality (from Latin modus – measure, method), which was introduced in relation to the logic of judgment, in fact, yet by Aristotle and which was further developed in the works by I. Kant, further passed into classical philosophical systems, and later found its application in linguistics. The term “modality” is used to define a wide range of phenomena that are heterogeneous in their volume, grammatical properties and degree of decoration at different levels of linguistic structure. The modality sphere includes the following: opposition of statements by the nature of their communicative goal (statement–question– motivation); opposition with the sign of “statement–negation”; gradation of values in the range of “reality–irreality” (reality–hypothetical reality– irreality); different degrees of confidence of the speaker in the reliability of the content of the statement; various modifications of the relationship between the subject and the predicate, expressed by various lexical means (“wishes”, “can”, “should”, necessary”), etc. By modality, we mean the integral system of those aspects of meanings of expression that manifest the speaker’s attitude to the following: to the type of connection between the meaningful content of the utterance and the fragment displayed beyond linguistic reality; to the beyond linguistic reality fragment reflected in the statement; to the type of relationship between the subject and the subject of the propositional content of the utterance; to the listener (analyzing the interaction between the speaker and the listener), that is the relationship that emerges in the speaker’s desire to influence the listener in an informed aspect.

Usvajanje znakovnog jezika kod gluve i nagluve dece predškolskog uzrasta

This study analyses the process of adopting of the sign language with deaf and hard of hearing preschool children in the context of the result of linguistic and psycholinguistic research. The importance of the sign language is emphasized and its historical development is analyzed. It is pointed to the significance of the critical period for the adoption and the learning of the sign and spoken language with deaf and hard of hearing preschool children. The sign language is natural and primary linguistic expression of deaf children. Deaf and hard of hearing children are exposed to the sign and spoken language, they have better understanding and linguistic production than the children who are only exposed to the spoken language. Bilingualism involves the knowledge and the regular use of the sign language, which is used by the deaf community, and of the spoken language, which is used by the hearing majority. Children at the preschool age should be enabled to continue to adopt the language they started to adopt within the family (the sign language or the spoken language). Children will adopt the best both linguistic modalities through the interaction with other fluent speakers (the adults and children).