Linguistic Narrative Research Articles

Effects of predictability on visual and linguistic narrative comprehension in autistic and non-autistic adults

ABSTRACT Autistic individuals sometimes show differences from non-autistic individuals when understanding stories, regardless of whether those stories are told through words or pictures. In narrative comprehension, predicting upcoming words or events in a story may facilitate understanding. In studies measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) with non-autistic adults, more predictable words in a linguistic narrative or panels in a visual narrative typically elicit reduced N400 amplitudes compared to less predictable words/panels. However, the predictive processes used by autistic individuals may differ from those used by non-autistic individuals, which could contribute to differences in narrative comprehension. Here, we report two studies examining predictive processing in linguistic and visual narrative comprehension among autistic and non-autistic adults. Autistic adults showed earlier N400 modulations by cloze compared to non-autistic adults in both linguistic and visual modalities, which may reflect a more bottom-up processing style that relies less on active prediction of upcoming words or events.

Al-Basria Maqāmah: A Phenomenological and Interpretive Study Prof. Salamah Helil Al-Ghareeb

The paper investigates Al-Basria Maqāmat, an Arabic prosimetric literary genre, according to the phenomenology, hermeneutics and reception theory which contribute to immortalizing literary texts by opening them to multiple readings and interpretations. The researcher advocates the interpretive reading which is based on inductive reasoning. Such an approach enables the critic to interpret the dreams and fantasies which might not have occurred to the mind of the Maqāmah writer. 
 The paper seeks to find a reader or an addressee to reproduce the text and reinterpret the linguistic narratives which Badi' al-Zamān al-Hamadāni proposed. The reader, the paper argues, should be able to explore the hero’s fancy and telepathies, and to predict what s/he is thinking of. In this way, Maqāmah becomes a living blind text that is independent from readers’ social status or the time period they live in. Readers sometimes adopt the writer’s point of view. Yet, others may disagree with the writer. This is how interpretations immortalize literary texts.

Unpacking the Past in Wordless and Braided Comics: Contemporary Mizra?i Graphic Novelists&Traumatic Historical Memories

This article analyzes approaches to familial and communal memory in Carol Isaacs’s The Wolf of Baghdad and Asaf Hanuka’s Hayehudi haʿaravi, two Mizrahi graphic novels published in 2020. Both make use of comics-specific modalities to communicate the struggles of contemporary Mizrahim who feel burdened and bound to a past of which the authors possess no memories. Isaacs’s employment of wordlessness as she navigates 1930s and 1940s Jewish Baghdad facilitates an immersive sensory experience that enables her to extract meaning from the past and locate it in Mizrahi life in the present. Hanuka uses “braiding,” a concept described by Thierry Groensteen to refer to the complex interweaving of visual and linguistic narratives across a work, to link his own life story with the stories of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Doing so allows him to understand the ways in which his own life has paralleled his ancestors’ choices while leading him to make changes in order to avoid repeating their mistakes. Considered together, both artists model creative approaches to navigating the Mizrahi past and present and modelling ways to create a cohesive Mizrahi identity in the twenty-first century.

If pictures are stative, what does this mean for discourse interpretation?

The goal of this paper is to explore the consequences of adopting Abusch (2014)’s hypothesis about pictures—that they are stative depictions of the world—for the interpreta-tion of discourses. We focus on the phenomenon of narrative progression and reject Abusch’s proposal that aspectual differences between linguistic and pictorial narrative do not factor in providing a uniform analysis across media. Based on eventive-stative sequences in linguistic narrative, we develop a new answer within Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. We state a single pragmatic algorithm that exploits the aspectual differences between linguistic and pictorial narratives to derive the correct predictions.

Smoke, Dust, and Blood

Smoke, Dust, and Blood

The Dynamic Dialectic and the Eclectic Plaintive Rhythm in Bembeya Jazz’s, Black Beats Music

The foremost line of the post-independent music evolves especially, from a simple to a more compound whole within the understanding of convention of representation and the association of experience become structural materials. Thereby, the basic component of conventional imagery, and the colonialist dynamic straightforward influences frame a new idiosyncratic type that evaluates the establishment of realty, memory and symbol. Correspondingly, through the foundation of intellectual and artistic image, the commensurate imagination of the musical nationalism schedule moves afar unconscious and insensate sensitivity. Indeed, the cultural and artistic body of the Bembeya Jazz and the Black Beats Band deconstruct the colonialist conventional perception of productivity; then, through extensive collective relation with their time and space, their nationalistic music exhibits boundaries of cross-examination regarding the realm of recombination, reconciliation and re-appropriation. Within the respect of material imagination and objective reality, verbal text, and contemporary Western musical instruments become the developing artistic cosmos within a new social and linguistic narrative is structured. Hence, the commitment of this article stands as a diagnostic process within we try to grasp the rapport of the indigenous value of imagination and the transcontinental stylistic effects inside the historio-context of redefining the self, sociolinguistic reflectivity, and perceptive sensibility in post-independent era.

Referential Activity Differentially Mediates Expression of Positive and Negative Emotions in Borderline Personality Disorder.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a high risk and prevalent personality disorder that is associated with increased negative emotions, decreased positive emotions, and impairments in symbolization and impaired reflective functioning. These dimensions, while they may impact one another, have not been investigated concurrently from qualitative, linguistic narratives. We hypothesized a BPD group would have lower expression of positive emotions and greater expression of negative emotions and less reflective function than healthy controls. Additionally, we explored the role of referential activity (an index of symbolic capacity) between BPD and healthy controls in the context of valenced emotional expression. An adult, female BPD group (n = 13) and a demographically matched healthy control group (n = 14) were recruited and administered the Adult Attachment Interview and/or the Object Relations Inventory. Computerized text analyses were used to assess positive emotion and negative emotion, the Weighted Referential Activity Dictionaries to assess referential activity, and the Computerized Reflective Function dictionary. On the Object Relations Inventory, the BPD group expressed more frequent negative emotions and less frequent positive emotions; on the Adult Attachment Interview, the BPD group exhibited less expression of positive emotions. There were no differences between BPD and controls on referential activity or reflective functioning on either interview. However, BPD status fully mediated the significant relationship between referential activity and negative emotion expression. The BPD group utilized more referential activity when expressing negative emotions than controls. Conversely, the control group utilized more referential activity when expressing positive emotions than controls. Referential activity seems to play an important role in explaining the BPD versus control difference in valenced linguistic emotional expression. Furthermore, these results suggest the object relations inventory elicits more robust linguistic features relevant to BPD.

مرویات أبى الجراح العقیلى فی التراث اللغوی جمعًا ودراسة وتحقیقًا

وقد أردت من خلال هذا البحث تسليط الضوء على جهد علم من هؤلاء الأعلام وهو أبو الجراح العقيلى أحد الأعراب المشهود لهم بالفصاحة وأحد الحکام اللغويين الثقات ، وأحد من حکم بين أعلى قمتين في النحو العربى وهما سيبويه والکسائى في مجلس البرمکى ، وذلک عن طريق جمع مروياته اللغوية وتصنيفها ، ودراستها وتقديمها فى معجم لغوي تسبقه دراسة تعريفية بتلک الشخصية العلمية ، ودراسة تحليلية لمروياته وفق مستويات الدرس اللغوى الحديث Through this research, I wanted to shed light on a learned effort from these notables, who is Abu Al-Jarrah Al-Aqili, one of the acclaimed Arabs for eloquence and one of the trusted linguistic rulers, and one of the rulers between the two highest peaks in Arabic grammar, namely Sibawayh and Al-Kasai in the Barmaki Majlis. His linguistic narratives, their classification, study and presentation in a linguistic dictionary preceded by an introductory study of that scientific personality, and an analytical study of his narrations according to the levels of the modern linguistic lesson.

Explicating Cultural Concepts

Ethnolinguistics deals with collective identities and reality-interpreting narratives. Collective identity (beliefs, values, and their symbolisations shared by a community) is defined as a mental construct, access to which can be obtained through complementary and linguistically “externalised” images. Inquiry into identity is the most effective when it is concerned with language, both in the narrower sense of linguistic structure and textual narratives, and in the broader semiotic sense. Whichever option is selected, the important issues to be addressed include the linguistic phenomena that make up identity, the methodology of identity research, as well as the data on the basis of which collective identity can be reconstructed.In this study, attention is paid to narrative linguistic phenomena: language is viewed as a most human phenomenon and a significant social fact that contributes to the construction of collective identity. The notion of “reality-interpreting narratives” pertains to subjectivised stories of the world, more or less stable judgements, stories that interpret reality and assume the shape of cognitive definitions.In the course of thirty years of work on and with the cognitive definition, two types of ethnolinguistic description have emerged: holistic (integrated) and separated (isolated). The former is preferred in the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols, the latter in the Axiological Lexicon of Slavs and Their Neighbours. Both types of description reveal the functioning of images (sterotypes/concepts) in a network of relationships that allows one to capture the system of values that underlies the languages and cultures being studied. These relationships are here illustrated with the Polish images of róża ‘rose’ and wolność ‘freedom’.

Injury severity on traffic crashes: A text mining with an interpretable machine-learning approach

The analysis of traffic crash severities provides significant information for the development of safety countermeasures. Most available traffic crash datasets contain rich information including linguistic narratives with details about crash events and contexts, which can reveal new insights regarding severity and associated causality factors. Previous research has paid insufficient attention to this source of information. This study proposes an approach to analyze traffic crash narratives to identify factors associated with high injury-severity levels. The proposed approach explicitly seeks global interpretability of the results by expanding the capabilities of the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) method. Our proposed new approach, Global Cross-Validation LIME (GCV-LIME), aggregates individual LIME explanations using cross-validation. Thus, this study combines machine learning-based text mining with GCV-LIME to identify likely causality factors for injury severities while providing interpretability as required by traffic safety analysts. Data for heavy vehicle crashes collected from 2007 to 2017 in Queensland, Australia, were used to evaluate the proposed approach. Six different machine-learning models were tested, and global explanations were generated using GCV-LIME. The results indicated a strong association among a set of terms, such as “collided_headon,” “side_collided,” “motorcycle,” “cab,” and “pedestrian” with fatal crashes. Results from GCV-LIME were compared with those obtained using the corresponding available tabular data and classic regression analysis. The comparison suggest that the proposed approach has great potential to provide additional insights as well as enables to confirm results obtained with classic analysis on tabular data. Results from GCV-LIME combined with knowledge and experience from safety analysts can help establish effective safety countermeasures based on factors likely causing crashes and/or increasing their severity.

‘He Wasn’t Able to Understand What I Was Saying’: The Experiences of Returnees’ Speaking Western Armenian in ‘Eastern’ Armenia

Since Armenia’s independence in 1991, thousands of diasporans have made the decision to return and settle in the ancestral homeland. The returnees, who speak Western Armenian, one of the two standardised forms of modern Armenian, are switching to the use of Eastern Armenian, the official variant of the homeland. Using two determinants of language perception—standardisation and vitality—this paper analyses the reactions received by thirty returnees who emigrated from nine countries, when speaking Western Armenian to an Eastern Armenian-speaking society. The vitality of the language shows signs of increasing through an encouragement by locals aware of the language’s historical significance, and an admiration of its ‘beauty’ and terminology. A heightened vitality has led returnees to feel confident about its use during social interactions and the possibility of the standard being incorporated into the nation’s linguistic narrative. However, confusion and ridicule due to a differing pronunciation, vocabulary, terminology, and the inability to be understood by some in Armenian society, has led to discomfort by returnees who are shifting to the usage of Eastern Armenian. At present, the use of Western Armenian in the homeland remains within the confines of family, friends and returnee circles. Despite the changing status of Western Armenian through a notable welcoming of the language into the linguistic narrative of the country, some segments of Armenian society do not perceive Western Armenian as an acceptable standard for broader use in Armenian society and national institutions. The homeland’s inconsistent, and at times questionable, acceptance of the language perpetuates the status quo that Western Armenian remains an unacceptable standard within the homeland and for use only in the diaspora.

Dismantling the "Visual Ease Assumption:" A Review of Visual Narrative Processing in Clinical Populations.

Visual narratives, such as wordless picture books and picture sequences like comics, have a long history in clinical testing, research, and intervention settings. The widespread "Visual Ease Assumption" rests on the premise that visual narratives, given their non-linguistic nature, may alleviate processing difficulties in populations that struggle with language. In this paper, I review the evidence for and against this Visual Ease Assumption in three clinical populations in which language deficits are common or diagnostic: autism spectrum disorder (ASD), specific language impairment (SLI; now known as Developmental Language Disorder, DLD), and aphasia. I first redefine the Visual Ease Assumption as two testable predictions: (a) that visual narrative processing should be unimpaired for clinical populations compared to neurotypical (NT) populations; and (b) that in clinical populations, visual narrative processing should be less impaired than linguistic narrative processing. Through a review of the limited evidence available to test these predictions in ASD, SLI, and aphasia, I show that the Visual Ease Assumption is largely unsupported in empirical studies. Furthermore, I outline three additional limitations of the Visual Ease Assumption regarding the complexity of narrative processing, visual narrative tasks, and cognitive deficits in different clinical populations. Therefore, visual narratives should not be assumed to be "easier" for clinical populations that struggle with language; instead, a more thorough consideration of the cognitive processes involved in visual narrative processing is needed.

Images of entrepreneurship: Using drawing to explore entrepreneurial experience

Entrepreneurship is a generative and transformative process of altering convention where personal/social history, assets, technologies, and trading activity are gathered in organizational form. How entrepreneurs frame this process, and are, in turn, organised by this process, constitutes the entrepreneurial experience. Typically this framing has been researched using narrative methods: how entrepreneurs tell their stories. In this paper we develop an emerging branch of inquiry challenging a sole focus on linguistic narrative in favour of accessing the experience of entrepreneurs by asking them to draw an image of their venture using pencils and paper. Drawing has long been recognised in other social science disciplines as an empirical method for eliciting in-depth and latent information about complex or difficult experiences. In this paper we show some indicative drawings created by entrepreneurs, accompanied by their verbal explanations of what these drawings represent for them, and we highlight how the process was a generative exercise for the entrepreneurs. We focus on two aspects of drawing, which we refer to as “beginnings”, and “traces”, that we feel are particularly relevant to why this medium is valuable for exploring the experience of entrepreneurs.

Memory in Linguistic Narrative vs. Postmodern Multitasked Multimedia Art Memory

<p><em>In addition to the well-known classification of long-term and short-term memory, we are also interested in distinguishing episodic, semantic and procedural memory in the areas of linguistic narrative and multimedial semantic deconstruction in postmodernism. We compare the liveliness of memorization in literary tradition and literature art with postmodernist divisions and reverberations of traditional memorizations through human multitasking and performative multimedia art, as well as formulate the existence of creative, intuitive and superhuman paradigms.</em></p><em>Since the memory can be physical, psychological or spiritual, according to neurobiologist Dr. J. Bauer (Das Gedächtnis des Körpers, 2004), the greatest importance for memorizing has the social role of collaboration, and consequently the personal transformation and remodelling of genomic architecture, yet the media theorist Mark Hansen thinks technology brings different solutions of framing function (Hansen, 2000). We believe that postmodern deconstruction does not necessarily damage memory, especially in the field of human multitasking that utilizes multimedia performative art by means of anthropologization of technology, thereby enhancing artistic and affective pre&post-linguistic experience while unifying technology and humans through intuitive empathy in society.</em>

Visual and linguistic narrative comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: Neural evidence for modality-independent impairments

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have notable language difficulties, including with understanding narratives. However, most narrative comprehension studies have used written or spoken narratives, making it unclear whether narrative difficulties stem from language impairments or more global impairments in the kinds of general cognitive processes (such as understanding meaning and structural sequencing) that are involved in narrative comprehension. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we directly compared semantic comprehension of linguistic narratives (short sentences) and visual narratives (comic panels) in adults with ASD and typically-developing (TD) adults. Compared to the TD group, the ASD group showed reduced N400 effects for both linguistic and visual narratives, suggesting comprehension impairments for both types of narratives and thereby implicating a more domain-general impairment. Based on these results, we propose that individuals with ASD use a more bottom-up style of processing during narrative comprehension.

Agency and ideology in language maintenance: Hungarian immigrants’ narratives on assimilationist post-war Australia

ABSTRACT This study explored stories of intergenerational language maintenance narrated by first- generation Hungarian immigrants in Australia. It sought an understanding of Hungarian immigrants’ positioning vis-à-vis their language ecology during the assimilationist post-war era of Australia. The narratives reveal that some families accepted the monolingual norms of using English in public spaces and gave in to the pressures of homogenising schools. However, in some families, agency was deployed to resist these normalising monolingual ideologies. These families had stronger intergenerational language maintenance of Hungarian. The findings of this research contribute to our understanding of the interactions between external factors (such as policy), and the subjective factors such as the individuals’ agency in managing language use in immigrant contexts. The study discusses the way ideologies were shaped and negotiated and highlights the benefits of using linguistic narratives to reveal variability within seemingly homogenous communities.

Korean Cuties: Understanding Performed Winsomeness (Aegyo) in South Korea

Aegyo (performed winsomeness) is a layered articulation of behaviours, gestures, vocal and linguistic adjustments, narratives and fashions that serve to enact child-like charm and infantilised cuteness. It is a widely debated but poorly studied phenomenon observed especially among younger South Korean women and, more seldomly, among men. This article will provide a preliminary ethnographic description of aegyo based on the fieldwork performed in Seoul, Incheon and Seongnam in 2015 and 2016, supported by the results of two online questionnaires from early 2016. The article tackles three separate dimensions. First, it briefly relates aegyo to comparable articulations of performed winsomeness in the broader East Asian context. Second, it relates it to the elements of Korean traditional or indigenous knowledge. Third, it explores the meaning of these performances with regards to contemporary figurations of femininity and the local politics of gender, with aegyo seen as a marked but normalised multidirectional process between various social actors.

Funding the story of hybrid ventures: Crowdfunder lending preferences and linguistic hybridity

Prosocial crowdfunding platforms are venues for individual lenders to allocate resources to ventures that specifically pursue economic and social value. In a setting where hybridity is expected, do crowdfunders respond positively to category-spanning ventures, or do they prefer to fund ventures that are more clearly situated within a single category? Drawing on theory rooted in category membership and spanning, our hypotheses test whether prosocial crowdfunding lenders will more quickly allocate resources to hybrid microenterprises that communicate their hybridity, or to those that communicate a single one of their dual aims. Our study demonstrates that even in such a setting, crowdfunders lend more quickly to microenterprises that position themselves within a single linguistic category in which the social is emphasized over the economic. This suggests that how hybrid organizations position themselves in their linguistic narratives has a significant impact on resource allocation by external prosocial audiences.

Heteroglossic ideologies in world Englishes: an examination of the Hong Kong context

Much research in world Englishes centers on examining the linguistic features of a particular region. Such work can give the false impression of a collective homogeneous ideology of English within a geographic space. We refer to this limiting monolithic perspective of language ideology as ‘the single linguistic narrative.’ The present study builds on this body of work by investigating how often competing ideologies of English can circulate within a region. Focusing on the Hong Kong context, we adapt the concept of Bakhtinian heteroglossia to consider the simultaneous co‐presence of varying ideologies of English. Through an analysis of self‐narratives, we examine how Hong Kong university students construct expectations regarding how English should be used and what the colonial language means to their regional identity.

Mode, Metadata, and Montage

Simple shifts are capable of producing significant changes in perspective. For me, two drawn lines fundamentally altered my research into learning disability by incorporating visuality and image building. My contribution to this special issue is an arts-based offering in two parts. It is organized around a central narrative, a moment between myself and my learning disabled son where the traditional linguistic mode of communication broke down and was reestablished outside of word-based format. The first part is presented below and written in traditional academic format. It is expressed linguistically and linearly with an introduction and central narrative, followed by a brief conclusive discussion. The second part augments the central linguistic narrative by hyperlinking some of our subsequent visual conversations to illustrate metadata that are linguistically limited, but whose narrative is imbued with rich ethnographic data.