Longer Words Research Articles

The effect of recall, reproduction, and restudy on word learning: a pre-registered study

BackgroundCertain manipulations, such as testing oneself on newly learned word associations (recall), or the act of repeating a word during training (reproduction), can lead to better learning and retention relative to simply providing more exposure to the word (restudy). Such benefit has been observed for written words. Here, we test how these training manipulations affect learning of words presented aurally, when participants are required to produce these novel phonological forms in a recall task.MethodsParticipants (36 English-speaking adults) learned 27 pseudowords, which were paired with 27 unfamiliar pictures. They were given cued recall practice for 9 of the words, reproduction practice for another set of 9 words, and the remaining 9 words were restudied. Participants were tested on their recognition (3-alternative forced choice) and recall (saying the pseudoword in response to a picture) of these items immediately after training, and a week after training. Our hypotheses were that reproduction and restudy practice would lead to better learning immediately after training, but that cued recall practice would lead to better retention in the long term.ResultsIn all three conditions, recognition performance was extremely high immediately after training, and a week following training, indicating that participants had acquired associations between the novel pictures and novel words. In addition, recognition and cued recall performance was better immediately after training relative to a week later, confirming that participants forgot some words over time. However, results in the cued recall task did not support our hypotheses. Immediately after training, participants showed an advantage for cued Recall over the Restudy condition, but not over the Reproduce condition. Furthermore, there was no boost for the cued Recall condition over time relative to the other two conditions. Results from a Bayesian analysis also supported this null finding. Nonetheless, we found a clear effect of word length, with shorter words being better learned than longer words, indicating that our method was sufficiently sensitive to detect an impact of condition on learning.ConclusionsOur primary hypothesis about training conditions conferring specific advantages for production of novel words presented aurally, especially over long intervals, was not supported by this data. Although there may be practical reasons for preferring a particular method for training expressive vocabulary, no difference in effectiveness was detected when presenting words aurally: reproducing, recalling or restudying a word led to the same production accuracy.

What is the Longest Word in the English Language? What About Yiddish?

In this paper, we argue that English potentially has the longest word of any language. This word has 865 characters. Including neologisms and allowing for word borrowings from other source languages, it is argued here that English has a longest word length at least one, two or three more than that in any other language. It is also arguably the case that English has a word length at least twice that in any other language (2N+1, 2N+2 or 2N+3, depending on various aspects of the source language where N is the longest word in the source language). This is due to various aspects of other languages include the use of abugidas in Sanskrit (which may be said to currently hold the record), the regular use of certain prefixes to indicate neologisms in Yinglish and the phenomenon of shm-reduplication in Yinglish.

What is the Longest Word in the Yiddish Language?

In this paper, we argue that Yiddish potentially has the longest word of any language. This word has 865 characters. Including neologisms and allowing for word borrowings from other source languages, it is argued here that Yiddish has a longest word length at least one, two or three more than that in any other language. It is also arguably the case that Yiddish has a word length at least twice that in any other language (2N 1, 2N 2 or 2N 3, depending on various aspects of the source language where N is the longest word in the sourcelanguage). This is due to various aspects of other languages include the use of abugidas in Sanskrit (which may be said to currently hold the record), the regular use of certain prefixes to indicate neologisms in Yiddish and the phenomenon of shm-reduplication in Yiddish.

Word length modulates the effect of emotional prosody

Previous work has shown that emotional prosody, independent of the lexical carrier, activates words associated with the emotional information (Kim, 2015; Kim & Sumner, submitted). For example, hearing a non-emotional word (pineapple) uttered with angry prosody facilitates recognition of angry-associated words (mad). Building on this finding, the current study delves into the nature of the affective priming between emotional prosody and emotional words and tests if word length modulates affective priming. Word length is an important dimension in lexical processing, as longer words are shown to produce stronger lexical activation than shorter words (Pitt & Samuel, 2006). I hypothesize that social information shows a stronger effect in spoken word processing when lexical activation is weaker. Then we should find stronger affective priming with shorter words than longer words. This hypothesis was tested with a cross-modal priming experiment. The visual targets were 12 angry related words (e.g., mad, upset). The targets were preceded by two-, three-, or four-syllable non-emotional primes (e.g., atom, envelope, aluminum) spoken with angry prosody. Listeners recognized angry words faster after hearing angry prosody than after hearing neutral prosody when the prime words were short (2 syllables) but not when the prime words were longer (3-4 syllables). The current results provide evidence that social effects in word recognition are modulated by the strength of lexical activation.

Perception of Nuclear Stress in Vocabulary Items in Teacher Education in Terms of Shadow Listening

Abstract Words are made up of syllables in all languages. Some of these syllables are made more pronounced by bearing a primary stress phoneme which carries the highest prominence among in louder forms the surrounding syllables. The stressed syllable with a primary stress is an innate property of the word; each word carries a primary stress. The syllable with the primary stress is also known as tonic stress. The syllable with primary word-stress is most prominent because it is automatically placed upon the related syllable, drawing attention to native uses of pronunciation and intonation. Recognizing a stressed syllable requires us to perceive its prominence, which is actually an auditory signalling that the hearer's attention is centered upon. Perception of the nuclear stress escapes the attention of prospective Turkish students and English majors, especially in longer words. This research will investigate the perception of tonic stress placement in English words by the first year students in the English Language Education Department in one of the leading universities in Turkey. In the pre-test, the participants listened to 15 words given by a computer in audio forms and then were asked to single out the tonic syllable in a five-answer multiple choice test. After the evaluation of the pre-test results, the participants were taught for 3 hours on the inspection of tonic stress in words. Two weeks later, the same pre-test was administrated as post-test to the participants. While overall rate of success was 17.47% in the pre-test, it increased to 52.4% in the post-. These results indicate that the ability of nuclear stress perception in vocabulary items can be beneficial in learning listening comprehension.

Duration, Pitch, and Loudness in Kunqu Opera Stage Speech

Kunqu is a special type of opera within the Chinese tradition with 600 years of history. In it, stage speech is used for the spoken dialogue. It is performed in Ming Dynasty's mandarin language and is a much more dominant part of the play than singing. Stage speech deviates considerably from normal conversational speech with respect to duration, loudness and pitch. This paper compares these properties in stage speech conversational speech. A famous, highly experienced female singer's performed stage speech and reading of the same lyrics in a conversational speech mode. Clear differences are found. As compared with conversational speech, stage speech had longer word and sentence duration and word duration was less variable. Average sound level was 16 dB higher. Also mean fundamental frequency was considerably higher and more varied. Within sentences, both loudness and fundamental frequency tended to vary according to a low-high-low pattern. Some of the findings fail to support current opinions regarding the characteristics of stage speech, and in this sense the study demonstrates the relevance of objective measurements in descriptions of vocal styles.

Non-word repetition test: research into Lithuanian monolingual and Lithuanian-English bilingual children

The majority of studies comparing the language development of monolingual and bilingual children have found that bilinguals’ lexicon in each language is smaller than that of a comparable monolingual age-peers (Pearson et al. 1997; Werker et. al. 2009). Some studies have found that same-ages bilingual and monolingual children have relatively equal sized vocabularies when the vocabularies of both languages is taken into account (Bialystok 2001; Werker et al. 2009).The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to introduce the Lithuanian non-word repetition test; 2) to present the results of a test, when monolingual (Lithuanian) and bilingual (L1 – Lithuanian, L2 – English) children had to produce Lithuanian non-words. The main focus of the study was to investigate the performance of monolinguals and bilinguals during the test in reference to word length and word complexity, namely consonant clusters.The test results with monolingual and bilingual children have shown that the length of the word is a very important indicator: repetition accuracy was found to decline with the increasing number of syllables in both monolingual and bilingual groups. The results of the complexity demonstrated that both groups were better when performing initial clusters rather than medial clusters, especially in longer words (mostly 4-syllable). The study has shown that the test results improve with age: older monolingual and bilingual children repeat non-words more accurately than younger children.The overall Lithuanian non-word repetition test results show that bilinguals repeat non-words less accurately than monolinguals. In the future, more children should participate in the non-word repetition test.

A Novel Approach to Text Dependent Writer Identification of Kannada Handwriting

In this paper a text dependent writer identification method based on Kannada handwriting is proposed. The database of Kannada handwritten words collected from 25 writers is intended to provide training and testing sets for Kannada writer identification research, because there is no well-known database containing Kannada handwritten words available for writer identification problem. A feature vector consisting of directional multi-resolution spatial features based on Radon Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform and structural features such as aspect ratio and on-pixel ratio are extracted from word images. The novel approach of combining the features of two or more words is proposed and performance analysis is done through nearest neighbor classifier with modified 5-fold cross-validation. An average identification accuracy of 93.2582% is achieved by using only the single words, and accuracy of 100% is achieved using the combination of features of three or more words. The writer identification results show that feature vectors extracted from longer words, words having more structural variation and combination of features of two or more words have higher impact on writer identification.

Experimental investigations on the prosodic realization of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in German

This study reports on experimental investigations on the prosodic patterns of restrictive and appositive relative clauses (RRCs and ARCs) in German. RRCs and ARCs are associated with distinct prosodic patterns: While RRCs involve prosodic integration with their antecedent and may involve an accent shift from the antecedent to the determiner, ARCs are prosodically separated from their host clause. In the framework of two production experiments and one perception experiment, RRC and ARC constructions were tested in regard to F0 scaling, segment duration, silent pauses, and accent placement under different conditions. The results support the intuitive prosodic patterns described in the literature: ARC constructions were realized with higher F0 scaling and longer word duration preceding the relative clause, which indicates the presence of a prosodic phrase boundary, and accentuation of the determiner occurred only with RRC constructions. In perception, silent pauses were taken as cues to ARCs and accent shift as a cue to RRCs. These results suggest a difference in prosodic phrase structure reflecting the different syntactic structures. However, the production experiments also revealed that the prosodic differences are absent when the communicative situation does not require the disambiguation of the relative clause types.

Lexical processing in children and adults during word copying

Copying text may seem trivial, but the task itself is psychologically complex. It involves a series of sequential visual and cognitive processes, which must be co-ordinated; these include visual encoding, mental representation and written production. To investigate the time course of word processing during copying, we recorded eye movements of adults and children as they hand-copied isolated words presented on a classroom board. Longer and lower frequency words extended adults' encoding durations, suggesting whole word encoding. Only children's short word encoding was extended by lower frequency. Though children spent more time encoding long words compared to short words, gaze durations for long words were extended similarly for high- and low-frequency words. This suggested that for long words children used partial word representations and encoded multiple sublexical units rather than single whole words. Piecemeal word representation underpinned copying longer words in children, but reliance on partial word representations was not shown in adult readers.

Unpredictable and unintelligible: Individual differences in predictability-based reduction affect speech intelligibility

Words spoken in high predictability (HP) contexts tend to be phonetically reduced and less intelligible than words spoken in lower predictability (LP) contexts. However, individual differences in degree and strategies of reduction, and their effects on intelligibility, are largely unexplored. This study examined the role of autistic traits in speech intelligibility. Sixteen participants completed a speech in noise word identification task at 2dB SNR. Stimuli were recordings of words spoken in HP and LP contexts, extracted from sentences produced by talkers ranging in autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) scores. After the identification task, listeners also completed the AQ questionnaire. A higher AQ score indicates a greater prevalence of autistic traits in one's cognitive style. Logistic mixed effect regression modeling revealed an expected effect of duration, such that longer words were more likely to be correctly identified. Further, talkers with higher AQ scores were less intelligible than talkers with lower AQ scores. Unexpectedly, no effect of predictability condition was observed: LP words were not consistently more intelligible than HP words. No effect of individual differences in listener AQ scores was observed. These results suggest that predictability-based enhancement and reduction strategies vary between individuals and are not necessarily for the benefit of the listener.

Longer words or shorter words: Which one is more effective in distinguishing between self-identified gay and heterosexual male speakers?

Prior research demonstrated that listeners relied primarily on vowels to determine a male speaker’s sexual orientation (Tracy and Satariano, 2011). Additionally, listeners became more confident in their sexual orientation judgments if the utterance included more vowels (Tracy, 2013). Since multisyllabic utterances also contain more consonants, are listeners’ judgments based on the number of vowels or consonants in an utterance? To investigate this question, monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and trisyllabic words were selected. Within each group of words, the number of phones varied. For example, a trisyllabic word contained either seven phones (“division”) or nine phones (“contribute”). Listeners became more confident of the speaker’s sexual orientation if the word included more vowels. With respect to the monosyllabic and bisyllabic items, listeners were less confident if the number of consonants in the word increased. Ratings were more confident for “have” compared to “help”. The results for the trisyllabic words differed. Listeners became more confident if the word contained more consonants. “Contribute” resulted in more confident ratings than “division”. The results demonstrated that listeners were more confident in the speaker’s sexual orientation if the word included more vowels, but under certain conditions, confidence ratings did not improve if the utterance included additional consonants.

Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words by Anne Cutler (review)

Reviewed by: Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words by Anne Cutler Annie Tremblay Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words. By Anne Cutler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. xvii, 555. ISBN 9780262017565. $50 (Hb). Listening to one’s native language (L1) seems effortless. Native listeners recognize words rapidly and efficiently using a wide range of linguistic information, from subsegmental (acoustic-phonetic, allophonic) cues to segmental (transitional, phonotactic) cues, rhythmic cues, suprasegmental (stress, prosodic) cues, and contextual (syntactic, semantic) cues. Native listeners are also adept at recognizing words under more difficult listening conditions. This efficiency, however, comes at a cost when listening to a second/foreign language (L2). The cues that make native listening efficient are often not useful for recognizing L2 words, and those that would be are typically not used by nonnative listeners. In her book, Anne Cutler provides a comprehensive review of native and nonnative speech-processing research over the past four decades, much of which she has conducted. She argues, quite convincingly, that speech processing is shaped almost exclusively by native listening experience. Through studies that employ a variety of experimental paradigms, she demonstrates that native listeners use all information available in the signal to maximize efficiency and minimize interference. C argues that it is this efficiency that results in less-than-optimal nonnative listening. Nonnative listeners experience more lexical activation and competition than native listeners due to asymmetrical mappings between the L1 and L2 sound systems. C assumes that the processing system remains adaptive throughout life, as evidenced by native listeners’ adaptation to regional-and foreign-accented speech and their adjustment of phonetic categories. It is thus the native listening experience, and not a biologically determined time-sensitive period for speech learning, that C holds responsible for nonnative listeners’ inefficient processing. Universal to native listeners is the ability to segment continuous speech into discrete units such as words and phonemes. By the end of the first year of life, infants have already tuned in to native phonemes and can locate words in speech. Although this ability is universal, the knowledge that results from it is language-specific. It is only by conducting crosslinguistic research that psycholinguists can specify what aspects of speech processing are universal and what aspects are language-specific. This argument, made explicit in Ch. 1, is central to C’s book and to her extensive research, which has focused on no less than twelve languages (Cantonese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Sesotho, Spanish, and Telugu). Understanding language-specific aspects of speech processing begins with an examination of the types of information that distinguish words from one another in different languages. C exemplifies this in Ch. 2. She shows that languages do not have enough segments for words to be sufficiently distinct, in part because short words can be embedded segmentally within longer words (e.g. can in candle). However, with the addition of stress information, for example, the number of lexical embeddings decreases considerably. As C further illustrates, phonetic differences in how languages instantiate phonemic distinctions can also impact how listeners categorize speech, and so will the nature of the segment (consonant vs. vowel) that carries the distinguishing information. [End Page 294] Lexical characteristics that may also impact speech processing include morphological structure, word type (open vs. closed class), and frequency. One universal aspect of speech processing is that words that completely or partially match the signal are activated and compete for selection. C discusses this in Ch. 3. She demonstrates how these lexical processes are modeled in auditory word-recognition models, including Norris’s (1994) connectionist shortlist a model and Norris and McQueen’s (2008) Bayesian shortlist b model. Based on some of her research, C provides evidence that phonological and conceptual representations are separate, with lexical competition involving only phonological representations but with lexical activation passing rapidly to conceptual representations. She further shows that lexical activation can be affected by suprasegmental information, morphological structure, gender, and word type (open vs. closed class). Lexical activation and competition do not, on their own, provide a satisfactory explanation of how listeners recognize words in continuous speech, however. These two processes imply a lexicon...

Resolving Prokaryotic Taxonomy without rRNA: Longer Oligonucleotide Word Lengths Improve Genome and Metagenome Taxonomic Classification

Oligonucleotide signatures, especially tetranucleotide signatures, have been used as method for homology binning by exploiting an organism’s inherent biases towards the use of specific oligonucleotide words. Tetranucleotide signatures have been especially useful in environmental metagenomics samples as many of these samples contain organisms from poorly classified phyla which cannot be easily identified using traditional homology methods, including NCBI BLAST. This study examines oligonucleotide signatures across 1,424 completed genomes from across the tree of life, substantially expanding upon previous work. A comprehensive analysis of mononucleotide through nonanucleotide word lengths suggests that longer word lengths substantially improve the classification of DNA fragments across a range of sizes of relevance to high throughput sequencing. We find that, at present, heptanucleotide signatures represent an optimal balance between prediction accuracy and computational time for resolving taxonomy using both genomic and metagenomic fragments. We directly compare the ability of tetranucleotide and heptanucleotide world lengths (tetranucleotide signatures are the current standard for oligonucleotide word usage analyses) for taxonomic binning of metagenome reads. We present evidence that heptanucleotide word lengths consistently provide more taxonomic resolving power, particularly in distinguishing between closely related organisms that are often present in metagenomic samples. This implies that longer oligonucleotide word lengths should replace tetranucleotide signatures for most analyses. Finally, we show that the application of longer word lengths to metagenomic datasets leads to more accurate taxonomic binning of DNA scaffolds and have the potential to substantially improve taxonomic assignment and assembly of metagenomic data.

Overcoming the effect of letter confusability in letter-by-letter reading: A rehabilitation study

Patients who read in a letter-by-letter manner can demonstrate effects of lexical variables when reading words comprised of low confusability letters, suggesting the capacity to process low-confusability words in parallel across the letters (Fiset, Arguin, & McCabe, 2006). Here a series of experiments is presented investigating letter confusability effects in MAH, a patient with expressive and receptive aphasia who shows reduced reading accuracy with longer words, and DM, a relatively “pure” alexic patient. Two rehabilitation studies were employed: (i) a word-level therapy and (ii) a letter-level therapy designed to improve discrimination of individual letters. The word-level treatment produced generalised improvement to low-confusability words only, but the serial processing treatment produced improvement on both high and low confusability words. The results add support to the hypothesis that letter confusability plays a key role in letter-by-letter reading, and suggest that a rehabilitation method aimed at reducing ambiguities in letter identification may be particularly effective for treating letter-by-letter reading.

Maccus vortit barbare? Eine übersehene Lizenzstelle im iambischen Senar

AbstractThe Law of Hermann and Lachmann stipulates that in the iambo-trochaic verses of Roman drama the two shorts of a resolved element must not be the final syllables of a trisyllabic or longer word. The exceptions are covered by the ‘rule for places with licence’ (‘norma delle sedi con licenza’), for which a redefined and extended version is given in this paper. Its purpose is to show that a dactylic word can be placed behind the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic senarius. The paper discusses the transmitted evidence for this licence and argues that the place after the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic senarius corresponds to the place after the median diaeresis in the trochaic septenarius, a well established licence-place which permits dactylic words.

Characteristics of early spelling of children with Specific Language Impairment

The present study investigated active grapheme knowledge and early spelling of 59 first grade children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Speed, nature, and knowledge transfer of spelling acquisition were taken into account. Four orthographic characteristics that influence early spelling, namely, ‘Type of Grapheme’, ‘Grapheme Position’, ‘Number of Graphemes’, and ‘Word Structure’ were examined at the middle and at the end of first grade. At the beginning of first grade when children were between 71 and 97 months, they performed well below national norms on assessment of active grapheme knowledge. The delay in word spelling persisted, but decreased between the middle and the end of first grade. Despite this delay, the findings suggest that characteristics of early spelling for children with SLI are rather similar to those of children with typical language development. For example, children with SLI represented more graphemes at the end of first grade than at the middle of first grade, found it easier to represent the initial grapheme in words than the final or medial grapheme (Grapheme Position), were more successful spelling shorter than longer words (Number of Graphemes), and spelled words with simple structures (CVC) more accurately than those with complex structures (CVCC and CCVC; Word Structure). Finally, participants demonstrated that they can use known graphemes to spell words, but the transfer between active grapheme knowledge and word spelling was not always stable.Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, readers will be able to explain the speed and the nature of spelling acquisition of children with SLI. As a result of this activity, readers will be able to explain what skills are most important for teachers to practice with children with SLI to improve the spelling skills of these children.

Statistische Kenngrössen der prosodischen Wort- und Silbenstruktur in der litauischen Standardsprache

THE STATISTICAL STRUCTURE OF WORDS AND SYLLABLES IN STAND­ARD LITHUANIAN Summary A statistical analysis carried out by computer (programming language PL/1) shows that in the texts of Standard Lithuanian the vast majority of words are composed of two, three and four phonological syllables (the average length of the words being 2.9 syllables). All longer words belong to the periphery of the system. Stressed monosyllabic words are rare. In most of the polysyllabic words the stress falls on the penultimate syllable (paroxytonic stress), but in very long words it usually falls on the third last syllable. In the texts analysed, long (heavy, two mora) syllables are more common than short (light, monomora) ones. Long circumflex syllables occur approximately 1.4 more frequently than acute ones. Two relatively autonomous prosodic subsystems can be distinguished: word ending and word stem. These subsystems considerably differ in respect of the ratio of stressed and unstressed long and short vowels. In word-final syllables stressed short and unstressed long vowels in the stem of a word are more common than long acute vowels. The obtained statistical results can be used in both synchronic and diachronic linguistic research; perhaps they can account for certain tendencies in the development of dialectal accentuation and vowel quantity.

Lexical Influences on the Perceptual Categorization of French Stops

Lexical effects on speech perception are not very reliable and they have been shown to depend on various factors among which word length. In the current models of phonemic decision, lexical effects are conceived as arising from top-down processing, with or without feedback, depending on the model. Lexical effects tend to be stronger in longer words, which can be ascribed to an increase in the amount of lexical evidence. The present study was aimed at collecting further evidence on this point. The existence of lexical effects was confirmed in a series of two experiments on voicing identification in French initial stops. The effects were present for stops in monosyllables and polysyllables whereas they were almost absent in bisyllables. We tentatively explain the U-shaped relationship between lexical evidence and phonemic identification by two different mechanisms which would be both weakly effective with moderate amounts of lexical evidence (in bisyllables). With fairly large amounts of lexical evidence (in polysyllables) the lexical effect would be due to the fairly complex top-down processes postulated in the literature. With low amounts of lexical evidence (in monosyllables), a much simpler mechanism based on a re-analysis of the acoustic input would be at work.

Gamma-oscillations modulated by picture naming and word reading: Intracranial recording in epileptic patients

Objective We measured cortical gamma-oscillations in response to visual–language tasks consisting of picture naming and word reading in an effort to better understand human visual–language pathways. Methods We studied six patients with focal epilepsy who underwent extraoperative electrocorticography (ECoG) recording. Patients were asked to overtly name images presented sequentially in the picture naming task and to overtly read written words in the reading task. Results Both tasks commonly elicited gamma-augmentation (maximally at 80–100 Hz) on ECoG in the occipital, inferior–occipital–temporal and inferior-Rolandic areas, bilaterally. Picture naming, compared to reading task, elicited greater gamma-augmentation in portions of pre-motor areas as well as occipital and inferior–occipital–temporal areas, bilaterally. In contrast, word reading elicited greater gamma-augmentation in portions of bilateral occipital, left occipital–temporal and left superior–posterior-parietal areas. Gamma-attenuation was elicited by both tasks in portions of posterior cingulate and ventral premotor–prefrontal areas bilaterally. The number of letters in a presented word was positively correlated to the degree of gamma-augmentation in the medial occipital areas. Conclusions Gamma-augmentation measured on ECoG identified cortical areas commonly and differentially involved in picture naming and reading tasks. Longer words may activate the primary visual cortex for the more peripheral field. Significance The present study increases our understanding of the visual–language pathways.