Linguistic Performance Research Articles

Comparing monomodal traditional writing and digital multimodal composing in EAP classrooms: Linguistic performance and writing development

In response to mixed perceptions about the digital multimodal composing (DMC) approach to conceptualizing and teaching second language (L2) writing, the purpose of the current study is to compare students' linguistic performance on traditional monomodal writing and DMC tasks, as well as writing development over time under traditional and DMC instructional conditions. A total of 41 Korean university English as a foreign language (EFL) students were randomly assigned to two instructional groups: traditional writing and DMC. Over one semester, both the DMC and the traditional writing groups completed TOEFL-style independent writing pretests and posttests, and depending on their intervention condition, they completed either monomodal writing or DMC tasks for two elemental genres (causal analysis and argumentation). For the first research question, focused on output of traditional writing and DMC tasks, the two groups' language use on each of the two assigned genres (causal analysis and argumentation) was analyzed separately, and their linguistic performance was compared using independent t-tests. For the second research question, the pretest and posttest essays were scored using an analytic rubric focused on content, organization and language, and the two groups’ timed writing performance was compared using linear mixed effect models. The findings indicated that students produced longer texts for DMC tasks, and that there were significant gains in writing development over time for both DMC and traditional writing instructed groups. The DMC-integrated group, however, showed greater gains. Pedagogical implications for the use of DMC in L2 writing instruction are discussed.

Effects of participatory structure of pre-task planning on EFL learners’ linguistic performance and alignment in the continuation writing task

Despite the fact that much research has been done on pre-task planning (PTP), none has explored its role in the continuation writing task. This study, therefore, attempted to investigate the effects of individual and collaborative planning on EFL learners' written production and linguistic alignment in the continuation task. Sixty-two Chinese college students were recruited and divided into groups of individual and collaborative planning conditions. They carried out the task in the following sequence: individual reading, individual or collaborative planning, and individual continuation writing. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), keyness analysis and Pearson correlation were conducted on the collected data. The analyses revealed the following findings: (a) individual planning led to more lexical and syntactic complexity, and slightly more fluency than collaborative planning; (b) both planning conditions yielded similar alignment effects with differential alignments in words, phrases and sentences; and (c) in both planning conditions lexical and syntactic complexity and alignment were negatively correlated with statistical significance, but only in collaborative planning condition coordination was positively correlated with partial alignment. These findings suggest that individual planning can be more advantageous to learners’ linguistic performance than collaborative planning in a cognitively simple continuation task. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The Role Of Context In Arabic Linguistics: The Story Of Abraham's Performance in Quran

This article investigates linguistic variance in narrating the same stories in different locations in the Quran. The research deals with repeating some scenes in the Qur’anic stories in multiple places in the Holy Qur’an, with the difference in the linguistic expression methods of the exact scene in its different locations, as well as the impact of the Qur’anic context on this difference. The study discusses the story of Abraham as a model for practice. The first topic was devoted to the theoretical study that sheds light on some crucial issues related to research. The second topic was devoted to the applied study in two parts. The conclusion presented the most important findings of the investigation, including that the Qur’anic stories do not have repetition in their literal sense. However, the Qur’an gives each place a part of the story according to what the context requires. The scene occurs in more than one location of the Qur’an. Yet, it is narrated in every place in a different linguistic performance in harmony with the Qur’anic context, represented in the present article’s evidence surrounding the Qur’anic story. Study findings help draw the attention of Arabic language learners to an interesting linguistic phenomenon in the Qur’anic levels and the function it serves in the story.

Language and Music: Designing a Course at an Academic Level

The parallels that are present between language and music, together with popular beliefs that musicality may be a factor enhancing language learning, especially with regard to pronunciation, prompted the idea of designing an academic course whose main aim was to demonstrate the relation between the two domains from the linguistic perspective. There were eighteen students participating in the course which was an elective for 1st year MA students of English at the University of Łódź. The course content included presentation of direct links between language and music, and of selected studies indicating the influence of music on developing various aspects of linguistic performance, e.g. second language learning (e.g. Pastuszek-Lipińska, 2008; Kolinsky et al., 2009), early reading abilities (Fonseca-Mora et al., 2018) or pitch processing (Besson et al., 2007). The practical part of the course involved testing the students' musical abilities with the use of various tools: tests available online and a sample of a music school entrance exam (based on Rybińska et al., 2016). The participants completed tasks related to their English speech performance, i.e. recording the passage The North Wind and the Sun and analysing their English speech production with the use of acoustic speech analysis software (Praat) in order to learn about the ways in which they could explore the possible links between their musicality and performance in L2 English. The majority of students claimed that they had not been aware of the degree of interplay between language and music, and had overestimated their musical abilities prior to taking the tests, but they saw the potential of music training not only in language learning, but other spheres of human activity.

Activating words without language: beta and theta oscillations reflect lexical access and control processes during verbal and non-verbal object recognition tasks.

The intention to name an object modulates neural responses during object recognition tasks. However, the nature of this modulation is still unclear. We established whether a core operation in language, i.e. lexical access, can be observed even when the task does not require language (size-judgment task), and whether response selection in verbal versus non-verbal semantic tasks relies on similar neuronal processes. We measured and compared neuronal oscillatory activities and behavioral responses to the same set of pictures of meaningful objects, while the type of task participants had to perform (picture-naming versus size-judgment) and the type of stimuli to measure lexical access (cognate versus non-cognate) were manipulated. Despite activation of words was facilitated when the task required explicit word-retrieval (picture-naming task), lexical access occurred even without the intention to name the object (non-verbal size-judgment task). Activation of words and response selection were accompanied by beta (25-35Hz) desynchronization and theta (3-7Hz) synchronization, respectively. These effects were observed in both picture-naming and size-judgment tasks, suggesting that words became activated via similar mechanisms, irrespective of whether the task involves language explicitly. This finding has important implications to understand the link between core linguistic operations and performance in verbal and non-verbal semantic tasks.

The sociopragmatics of compliment in the media discourse

Abstract This study investigated whether and how the gender of the judges in the TV talent competitions affects the pragmatics of the compliments in their evaluative comments addressed to the contest participants. The explicitness of the compliments, the distribution of positive semantic carriers and intensifiers, the personal focus of the compliments, and the supportive discursive moves in the male and female judges’ complimenting speech events were qualitatively analysed and statistically compared. Results, however, do not support the general belief that women’s complimenting style is more socioemotional than men’s. The function of the compliments that the judges would like to accentuate in the formal institutional setting appears to have a greater impact on their linguistic performances than their gender role. The male and female judges’ complimenting styles seem to be strategic manoeuvres to create their preferred social image in the public media discourse.

LANGUAGE LEARNING, MULTILINGUALISM AND LITERARY TRANSLATION

In the following paper we try to discern the complex translation mechanisms seen in the light of the person performing this delicate operation. The study will focus on investigating and defining the nature, skills, capacities and specific talents that a person able to execute a literary translation has. We will deal with linguistic competences, simultaneous bilingualism and sequential bilingualism, as well as with grammatical versus communicative competences. Along with bilingualism, we will focus also on the topic of multilingualism as a social phenomenon governed by globalization, interculturality and social openness. In this sense, the interest on multilingual individuals, generally referred to as polyglots, could help our approach by providing important information in order to realise a comprehensive analysis of the literary translation process in particular. Operating with terms belonging to the sphere of language use and language learning, the paper aims to explore the topic in an interdisciplinary manner, to create a bridge between the linguistic performance and the translation act itself. At the same time, it outlines how languages, during centuries, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development are of strategic importance for people and the planet.

Identity, language socialization, and family language policies in dialect contact: the case of Argentinean immigrants in Malaga, Spain

AbstractThis paper explores from a qualitative and quantitative approach, the complex interactions between second dialect accommodation or acquisition, language socialization, ideologies, family language policies, and identity, among Argentinean immigrants living in Malaga, Spain (n = 72). We found that family language policies – and more specifically mothers’ language policies and their stances towards both varieties in contact – shape their children’s development, connect with their formal school success, determine D1 maintenance, and even affect identity projection. We also found discrepancies between conservative family language policies and linguistic production: what families try to do with language does not always match their own linguistic performance. Through the analysis of different language components – phonological, morpho-syntactic, and lexical – we conclude that linguistic accommodation or second dialect acquisition does not always follow a linear path to assimilation, but it is related to early stages of exposure and formal education in the D2 community (optimal age acquisition period), takes place to improve mutual intelligibility, derives from both unconscious and conscious decisions to change D1, and allows speakers to showcase different identities through accommodation or divergence.

Discourse abilities in euthymic elderly patients with bipolar disorder: a preliminary study.

The aim of this study was to evaluate discourse abilities in euthymic elderly individuals with BD. We studied 19 euthymic elderly patients with BD and a control group of non-BD, which performed a cognitive assessment of attention, memory, executive functions, and visual abilities. All participants produced a description from the Cookie Theft Picture in oral and written modalities that was analyzed according to micro- and macrolinguistic aspects. Generalized linear models were performed to compare intergroup linguistic performance and to determine whether any cognitive domain was associated with linguistic outcomes. The BD group produced more cohesion errors in the oral and written modalities (p=0.016 and p=0.011, respectively) and fewer thematic units in the oral modality (p=0.027) than the control group. BD patients presented minimal changes in the descriptive discourse task. The BD group produced more cohesion errors than the control group in the oral (p=0.016) and written discourse (p=0.011); also, the BD group produced fewer thematic units than controls in the oral discourse (p=0.027).

Tattooing of the Lips by Needle Technique: Artwork and Performance.

Lip tattooing for cosmetic or medical purposes is a difficult operation with indications and contraindications. Lips have a refined microanatomy and many functions ranging from aesthetics and mimics supporting facial expressions to entirely biological functions such as supporting oral functions and servicing sound expression as part of linguistic performance. The anatomy of the lip is explained and illustrated. In lip tattooing, the outlining and enhancement of contour particularly towards the philtrum is important along with keeping symmetry and shape right and as intended. The coloring of the vermilion and dosing of tattoo pigment is another challenge. The article reviews the technical and artistic aspects of lip tattooing down to detail and step by step procedures starting with client selection, strategy planning, and informed consent. Pitfalls and complications are described. When applied as a corrective operation as part of reconstructive plastic surgery, a close cooperation with medical specialists is needed. Lip tattooing appears underrated regarding medical usefulness. The review can be used as a tutorial in the training of newcomers in the field, having a cosmetic or a medical purpose, same technique.

Designing speaking tasks for different assessment goals

Abstract This study explored the role of cognitive task complexity in designing speaking assessment tasks. A sample of 120 English learners at different proficiency levels engaged in four narrative tasks with distinct levels/types of cognitive complexity. Performances were assessed using linguistic measures and a task accomplishment rubric. Findings revealed that one of the middle-complexity tasks with moderate intrinsic, moderate germane, and low extraneous complexity elicited the best linguistic performances overall, while the lowest complexity task elicited the highest task accomplishment ratings. Focusing on distinguishing among learner abilities, however, the highest complexity task demonstrated the best discrimination. Cognitive task complexity was also found to moderate the relationship between task accomplishment ratings and linguistic measures. Implications for research into task design, learner performance, and assessment purpose are considered.

‘Authentic’ Language as a Contested Concept in Brittany

The question of authenticity in language has been approached from a number of theoretical standpoints. A significant type of feature which may bestow authenticity and legitimacy is the linguistic. Linguistic performance can be viewed in terms of either the unreflectingly fluent and competent use by the ideal native speaker or, in opposition, the inauthenticity of the non-native language learner. As pointed out by Martin Gill in his paper “Exclusive Boundaries, Contested Claims: Authenticity, Language and Ideology”, authentic speech is romanticised as “native, spoken, verbatim, unrehearsed, off-the-record, sincere, vernacular and non-standard”. Such a definition is easily understandable by the wider public outside of academia. However, it begs the question: who has the authority to make this distinction and who can validate these authenticity claims? Mary Bucholtz proposes instead the concept of authentication, or the outcome of constantly negotiated social and linguistic practices. Debates over what constitutes ‘authentic’ language in minority language settings are particularly noticeable, given the processes of revitalisation many of them are going through. This paper aims to move the discussion away from the purely linguistic when considering what authenticity means, and investigate the concept from a more speaker-centred perspective. The example of Breton in Brittany is taken as the case study here – what it means to speak Breton ‘authentically’, according to whom, and to which norms. In particular, attention is paid to the authentication process of negotiation and how different actors approach and manage this dynamic.

First Language Literacy and Second Language Oracy: A Partial Replication of Foster and Skehan (1996)

AbstractThis article responds to calls for greater inclusivity in second language acquisition research and, more specifically, to calls to explore further the impact of first language literacy on second language oracy (e.g., Tarone et al., 2009). We conducted a partial replication of Foster and Skehan's (1996) influential study of task complexity, planning time, and performance over measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The initial study and others had provided robust evidence to suggest that planning time had a positive impact on task performance, particularly for more cognitively demanding tasks. We conducted our replication with adult second language learners with low first language literacy, most of whom were former refugees. Contrary to previous studies, the findings indicate little to no evidence that planning time led to improved linguistic performance. It is not immediately clear why this should be so, and our findings highlight the need for further research with this underrepresented group.

Writing Task Complexity, Task Condition and the Efficacy of Feedback

Background. Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is still attracting considerable interest from second language teachers and researchers, partly due to unresolved issues of task sequencing and task complexity. Moreover, in spite of burgeoning attention to writing at the present stage of evolution of TBLT, the interaction of task complexity and corrective feedback in writing performance of language learners has not been explored well.
 Purpose. To fill in this research gap, the present study aimed to explore the role of task complexity and task condition in learners’ gain from corrective feedback in second language writing.
 Methods. A pretest-immediate posttest-delayed posttest design was adopted in this study. The participants of the study were 114 English as foreign language learners, randomly assigned to one of the five groups: four experimental groups and a control group. The four experimental groups differed in (a) whether they carried out the simple or complex version of a task (b) whether they did the writing task individually or collaboratively. They received feedback on their writing in three treatment sessions.
 Results. Statistical analyses revealed that task condition played a larger role than task complexity in the linguistic performance of language learners who received feedback on their writing.
 Conclusion. The findings add support to the view that selecting appropriate levels of task complexity and suitable task implementation conditions alongside providing corrective feedback enhances the different dimensions of the written performance of language learners.

Cross-lingual transfer of knowledge in distributional language models: Experiments in Hungarian

AbstractIn this paper, we argue that the very convincing performance of recent deep-neural-model-based NLP applications has demonstrated that the distributionalist approach to language description has proven to be more successful than the earlier subtle rule-based models created by the generative school. The now ubiquitous neural models can naturally handle ambiguity and achieve human-like linguistic performance with most of their training consisting only of noisy raw linguistic data without any multimodal grounding or external supervision refuting Chomsky's argument that some generic neural architecture cannot arrive at the linguistic performance exhibited by humans given the limited input available to children. In addition, we demonstrate in experiments with Hungarian as the target language that the shared internal representations in multilingually trained versions of these models make them able to transfer specific linguistic skills, including structured annotation skills, from one language to another remarkably efficiently.

Bilingual Partners Turn into Bilingual Parents: Reporting on Decisions and Consequences

The article aims to contribute to our understanding of bilingual couples’ language choices with regard to childrearing in the less studied Polish setting. Bilingual partners often rethink their communication patterns when faced with the perspective of parenthood. A qualitative study featuring 24 in-depth interviews was conducted with linguistically mixed couples of Poles and non-Poles who represented 22 nationalities and came from six continents. In total, the target couples communicated in seven languages, including Polish. The duration of their relationships ranged from one year to over thirty. By adopting the conceptual framework of the Family Language Policy, the study identified types of bilingual families in Poland by showing that they share parallel educational experiences. Results showed no major differences in the appreciation of bilingual couplehood in the context of their children’s linguistic future and overall satisfactory evaluations of their bilingual performance. However, the analysis of interview extracts revealed differences found in parental attitudes towards the strategies of bilingual upbringing and in the reactions of children as described by the bilingual couples. The most satisfactory evaluations of the parents dissembled their once higher expectations regarding their children’s linguistic performance. There were also differences in the reported sources of knowledge about how to successfully raise a child in two languages. This indicates that the identification of parenting styles and the ensuing experiences have a crucial bearing for the understanding of bilingual communication between parents and children.

Citizenship, Pain, and Disability in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Citizenship is popularly associated with able-bodiedness, both physically and cognitively. However, disability studies over the last few decades has revealed the extent to which the idea of the nation as composed of able-bodied constituents is little more than fantasy, one that can create or galvanize barriers to full political and social participation. Part of this task has involved re-evaluating key works of canonical literature through the lens of disability. In the following paper, I apply this approach to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and argue that Beckett’s play disrupts not just the fantasy of a nation composed of able-bodied citizens but the language of able-bodiedness itself, which has implications for how we conceive of citizenship and participatory politics. While impairment has been critiqued in Beckett before, the extensive examples of pained and impaired characters in his works have often been subsumed under broader philosophical themes, such as existentialism, nihilism, or Cartesian dualism, and rarely linked to issues of citizenship, politics, or the social and built environment. I explore how Beckett’s approach to theatrical and linguistic performativity contributes to how he staged the experience of pain and disability that has implications for how we conceive of and practice citizenship.

Phonetically incomplete neutralisation can be phonologically complete: evidence from Huai’an Mandarin

AbstractThe phenomenon of incomplete neutralisation describes a situation where a putative case of categorical phonological neutralisation is observed to be phonetically non-neutralising. This has been argued to be a problem for phonological theories that employ categorical features. Here, we use two distinct feeding orders of tone sandhi processes from Huai’an Mandarin to show that incomplete phonetic neutralisation is compatible with categorical phonological phenomena. Therefore, incomplete phonetic neutralisation does not automatically inform us of gradient phonological representations. We further show that incomplete phonetic neutralisation can in fact have a large effect size. Such results are not surprising from a classic generative view of phonology where linguistic performance is argued to be a multi-factorial problem, and linguistic knowledge (i.e., competence) is only one of the many factors involved. Furthermore, our results suggest that the observed incompleteness or gradience may have a source outside phonological knowledge.

Social network geometry, linguistic ideologies, and identity negotiation among Latinx English speakers in New Orleans

AbstractThis article presents an analysis of the role of social networks in shaping patterns of /æ/ realization among Latinxs in Post‐Katrina New Orleans. Social network metrics are shown to be statistically significant predictors of pre‐nasal /æ/ tensing. I argue that social network metrics operationalize important aspects of the sociolinguistic context and contribute to our understanding of factors influencing how Latinx speakers recruit locally significant sociolinguistic variables in linguistic performance. The data and analysis strongly argue against distinctiveness approaches to studies of language and ethnicity, where “racial categories are equated with empirically distinctive sets of linguistic features” (Rosa & Flores, 2017), by demonstrating that Latinx speakers participate in a local change‐in‐progress in ways that are shaped by the same types of sociolinguistic factors that shape linguistic variation generally. The analysis is based on excerpts from a series of interviews conducted with Latinxs in the city (n = 33) in 2017–2018. The interviews were transcribed and coded for tokens of /æ/. Participants were categorized into one of three systems of /æ/ realizations, and tokens of /æ/ were further analyzed using inferential statistics to determine which independent variables were significant predictors of pre‐nasal /æ/ tensing. This research contributes to a growing body of work rejecting distinctiveness approaches to the linguistic performance of minoritized speakers, focusing instead on the ways in which individual speakers recruit linguistic features in the negotiation of identity (Eckert, 2008, 2018; Rosa & Flores, 2017; King 2016, 2018) and helps advance our understanding of how linguistic ideologies and articulations of ethnicity shape linguistic performance.

Code-Mixing in the Conversation of Northern Khmer Speakers in Thailand: A Case Study of Teenagers and Middle-Aged Northern Khmer Speakers in Buriram Province

This study aims to examine the linguistic performance of code-mixing by Northern Khmer (NK) teenagers in Buriram Province while conversing with NK middle-aged speakers in their community. It focuses on types of linguistic units or categories of code-mixing that occur in NK conversation and also on the various situations in which that linguistic unit occurs. It is found that code-mixing between NK and the Thai language occurs on three linguistic levels: morphological, syntactic, and discourse. On the morphological level, 7 categories of Thai words are found: noun, verb, adjective, final particle, quantifier, conjunction, and exclamation word. Three types of code-mixing are found on the syntactic level: Inter-Sentential, Intra-Sentential, and Extra-Sentential Code-Mixing. On the discourse level, code-mixing occurs in the middle and at the end of the NK discourse. There are 6 different situations in NK conversations where these types of code-mixing occur: (1) Greetings (2) Expressing appreciation (3) Expressions of politeness (4) Telling information (General and Specific) (5) Indicative mood, Lexical meaning, and Sentence structure, and (6) English loan words further borrowed from the Thai language. It is also found that NK speakers adopt the morphological processes of reduplication, the sentential structure, and serial verb construction when utilizing the Thai language to mix in their NK word formation and NK sentence structure. Lastly, NK speakers borrow English loanwords from Thai, instead of borrowing them directly from English.