Native Speakers Of Language Research Articles

“Is COVID-19 a hoax?”: auditing the quality of COVID-19 conspiracy-related information and misinformation in Google search results in four languages

PurposeAccurate information is the basis for well-informed decision-making, which is particularly challenging in the dynamic reality of a pandemic. Search engines are a major gateway for obtaining information, yet little is known about the quality and scientific accuracy of information answering conspiracy-related queries about COVID-19, especially outside of English-speaking countries and languages.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted an algorithmic audit of Google Search, emulating search queries about COVID-19 conspiracy theories in 10 different locations and four languages (English, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew) and used content analysis by native language speakers to examine the quality of the available information.FindingsSearching the same conspiracies in different languages led to fundamentally different results. English had the largest share of 52% high-quality scientific information. The average quality score of the English-language results was significantly higher than in Russian and Arabic. Non-English languages had a considerably higher percentage of conspiracy-supporting content. In Russian, nearly 40% of the results supported conspiracies compared to 18% in English.Originality/valueThis study’s findings highlight structural differences that significantly limit access to high-quality, balanced, and accurate information about the pandemic, despite its existence on the Internet in another language. Addressing these gaps has the potential to improve individual decision-making collective outcomes for non-English societies.

Sentence-final completion norms for 2925 Mexican Spanish sentence contexts

Sentence-final completion tasks serve as valuable tools in studying language processing and the associated predictive mechanisms. There are several established sentence-completion norms for languages like English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, each tailored to the language it was designed for and evaluated in. Yet, cultural variations among native speakers of the same language complicate the claim of a universal application of these norms. In this study, we developed a corpus of 2925 sentence-completion norms specifically for Mexican Spanish. This corpus is distinctive for several reasons: Firstly, it is the most comprehensive set of sentence-completion norms for Mexican Spanish to date. Secondly, it offers a substantial range of experimental stimuli with considerable variability in terms of the predictability of word sentence completion (cloze probability/surprisal) and the level of uncertainty inherent in the sentence context (entropy). Thirdly, the syntactic complexity of the sentences in the corpus is varied, as are the characteristics of the final word nouns (including aspects of concreteness/abstractness, length, and frequency). This paper details the generation of the sentence contexts, explains the methodology employed for data collection from a total of 1470 participants, and outlines the approach to data analysis for the establishment of sentence-completion norms. These norms provide a significant contribution to fields such as linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning, among others, by enhancing our understanding of language, predictive mechanisms, knowledge representation, and context representation. The collected data is accessible through the Open Science Framework (OSF) at the following link: https://osf.io/js359/?view_only=bb1b328d37d643df903ed69bb2405ac0.

Commonplace Interpretation of Legal Utterances (Case Study of a Linguistic Test)

The article concentrates on solving the problem of commonplace interpretation of fragments of legal texts, the main characteristics of which is the presence of an inevitable multiplicity of interpretation options. The hypothesis of this study was the assumption that average native speakers understand legal statements ambiguously when reading and interpreting them. To obtain the evidence of linguistic consciousness in the ordinary interpretation of legal statements, the method of linguistic test is used; average native speakers of the Russian language (1st and 2nd year students). Through the application of this method, a fundamentally new result was obtained – the strategies of everyday interpretation of legal statements were identified and described: contextually-oriented, contextually-undirected and cognitively-oriented.

The communicative potential of Russian-speaking and English-speaking voice systems

The article describes the analysis of the "spontaneous" dialogue of two Russian and foreign voice systems. The study is relevant because the possibilities of communication of the introduction spontaneously dialogue between Russian-speaking and foreign voice systems have not been studied by now. The objects of research have become two Russian-speaking systems – Alice by Yandex, voice assistant application by Sberbank; two English voice systems – Siri by Apple Ink and Google Assistant, including their Russian version. The choice is due to their popularity among native speakers of the Russian language, which was determined by the requests of these voice assistants on the Internet. The sampling period was from January 1, 2021 to December 20, 2022. Russian-speaking and English-speaking voice systems were selected by a continuous sampling method. The article draws conclusions, including about the communicative capabilities of Russian-speaking voice systems and foreign analogues with a built-in translation function into Russian. The scientific novelty is the analysis of "spontaneous" dialogic speech and the analysis of its compliance with the norms of the modern Russian language. At the end of the article there are results of the analysis of foreign phrases and expressions with a small number of variants are summarized to generate a response to the user based on materials from the corpus of the Russian language. Also, it is not uncommon to identify features of machine translation in foreign voice analogues, unlike Russian-speaking voice assistants.

HANDSHAKE ACROSS THE NIGER: A STUDY OF LINGUISTIC OUTCOME IN YORÙBÁ-HAUSA CONTACT

This paper examined the relationship between the Yoruba people of South-western Nigeria and the Hausa people of Northern Nigeria within the scope of linguistics. The objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship that exists between these two tribes using linguistic evidence which include analysis of Yoruba borrowed words from Hausa language and Hausa related Yoruba proverbs and proverbial expressions. This work is descriptive in nature and data were gathered from existing literature and from ideal native speakers of Yoruba language with the aid of selected Hausa language helpers. The research findings revealed that Yoruba borrowed words from Hausa language can be classified into two classes which are Alternative borrowing and Non-alternative borrowing. It also discovered that Hausa related Yoruba proverbs and proverbial expressions can be classified to Derogatory Hausa related proverbs which show some form of hate speech and Non-derogatory Hausa related Yoruba proverbs.

Историческая фонетика бурятского языка в русскоязычной документации XVII в. (к постановке проблемы). Часть 1

Introduction. It is in the mid-to-late 18th century at latest that the main phonetic characteristics of Buryat that distinguish the latter from other Mongolic languages — reflected in its western and eastern dialects — took shape. The initial period that had witnessed the formation of these specific elements still remains somewhat unclear. The paper analyzes authentic sources and attempts to show a possibility that the areal phonetic features of Buryat emerged within local population groups of Baikalia as far back as the early-to-mid 17th century. Goals. The article analyzes ethnonyms (and other onyms) relating to the Buryat population and recorded in seventeenth-century Russian-language documents to identify spelling (pronunciation) specificities characteristic of Buryat dialects. Materials and methods. Part One of the study deals with discussions over some general chronology of phonetic changes that have resulted in the shaping of Buryat, and distinguish the latter from other Mongolic languages. The paper examines major related works, analyzes methods and approaches employed by the researchers. Results. Our insights into scholarly publications conclude there is no compromise view on the lower chronological limit that would serve as terminus a quo for Buryat phonetic features. According to some researchers, key processes that fundamentally rebuilt the Buryat consonant system had begun in the 17th century and proceeded to completion by the early 18th century, while others insist those had emerged only in the late 17th century to culminate throughout the 18th century. Conclusions. Scholars that have dealt with Buryat phonetics tended to focus on eighteenth-century linguistic materials and rarely turned to other sources, such as Russian loanwords in Buryat, Mongolian loanwords in Evenki and Yakut, chronological attributions of the latter be further explored in historical contexts of phonetic systems of recipient languages, with due account for actual circumstances of interaction with native speakers of Mongolic languages. The absence of original written sources shall definitely leave these questions unanswered. So, historical linguistics can independently serve as a promising tool for such historical reconstructions.

Methods of teaching graphic-symbolic analysis in the literary and cultural-historical context of the 20th century (in terms of the novel ‟The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov)

The paper discusses the methodology for teaching graphic-symbolic analysis in the literary and cultural-historical context of the 20th century in terms of the novel ‟The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov. This method of analysis is an effective method of teaching oral monologue speech to foreign students. The purpose of this study is to develop the oral coherent speech of foreign students with the help of a graphical and symbolic analysis of the text of the novel ‟The Master and Margarita”. The set goal involves solving the following tasks: to help students from China understand the artistic features of the works by Mikhail Bulgakov, to acquire the skills of literary text analysis and, in general, to study Russian literature more deeply. The material of the presented study can be used in the preparation of training courses designed to teach the Russian language and literature to Chinese students, as well as in the development of special courses on the specifics of literature. The research methods were chosen in accordance with the object of study, its subject, purpose and objectives, our methodology is based on the use of practice-oriented provisions of semiotics, artistic and graphic-symbolic analysis of the text and the introduction of a new concept of ‟sign word” into the system of dictionary work. This study determines the effectiveness of using the method of teaching graphic-symbolic analysis in the educational process at different stages of teaching literature and the Russian language to foreign students. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of materials relating to the peculiarities of the perception of Russian fiction by native speakers of the Chinese language. The theoretical significance of the work lies in the study of the specifics of Russian works and language in the aspect of Russian as a foreign language. The practical significance lies in the prevention of lexical and grammatical errors when using the Russian language and semantic errors in the analysis of Russian literature.

Perception of grammatical tone in Akan patients with left and right hemisphere brain damage

ABSTRACT It remains a matter of debate what roles the left and right hemispheres play in processing speech prosody. Brain lesion studies have demonstrated that lexical tone perception among native speakers of tonal languages is more disrupted in left hemisphere damaged (LHD) individuals than right hemisphere damaged (RHD) individuals. This has been taken to suggest that linguistically-relevant prosodic cues are predominantly left-lateralised, whereas non-linguistic stimuli are predominantly right-lateralised. However, this phenomenon has only been examined in lexical tone, leaving grammatical tone perception unexplored. The aim of this study was twofold: Firstly, to examine how individuals with LHD and RHD perceive grammatical tone, and secondly to compare grammatical tone to non-linguistic tone perception. Therefore, native Akan speakers with LHD, RHD and no-brain damage (NBD) controls were tested in two discrimination tasks that examined linguistic and non-linguistic tone perception. The results showed that while both the individuals with LHD and RHD show impairment in grammatical tone perception, there was a trend of a better performance for the RHD group. Nonetheless, for non-linguistic tone perception, individuals with LHD outperformed the RHD individuals, although both had reduced performance compared to the NBD individuals. A further analysis revealed that the reduced perceptual abilities of both the LHD and RHD groups in grammatical tone perception can be attributed to grammatical problems rather than tone per se. We conclude that there is potentially a bilateral involvement of the two hemispheres in grammatical tone processing, with the left being the dominant hemisphere.

Транслингвизм как повседневная практика (на материале русско-татарско-удмуртского многоязычия)

The paper is devoted to the study of spontaneous speech of polylinguals in situations of everyday communication in the setting of Russian-Tatar-Udmurt multilingualism based on the speech material of the native speakers of the Udmurt language in the village of Staraya Ucha in the Kukmorsky district of the Republic of Tatarstan. The aim of the research is to identify the features peculiar to the manifestation of translanguaging as a daily practice in the setting of interaction between Russian, Tatar and Udmurt. The scientific novelty lies in describing the strategies of the matrix (Udmurt) language and guest (Russian and Tatar) languages functioning in everyday communication practice; identifying the features of translanguaging as an everyday language practice. The research findings showed that the phenomenon of translanguaging in the speech of the native speakers of the Udmurt language on the territory of the Kukmorsky district of the Republic of Tatarstan is conditioned by extra- and intralinguistic factors. From the perspective of semantics, the foreign-language inclusions found in the speech of the native speakers of the Udmurt language tend to be names of specific objects, realities reflecting the peculiarities of Tatar material culture or intangible culture. The Russian inclusions in most cases are represented by adverbial forms, numerals, set expressions. The matrix Udmurt language is used usually in the predicative part of the sentence.

MNEMONICS AND ITS USAGE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH LANGUAGE

This study focuses on the development of memory retention, the most difficult and basic approach for learners. The purpose of this study was to find a way to improve memorizing retention after removing all the factors that prevent learners from dismissing data from the mind. The qualification research paper proposes several techniques and methods developed by renowned methodologists and teachers. These techniques and methods reveal mnemonics as a means of improving vocabulary retention for per-intermediate students in the learning centre which the researcher worked with. The subjects ranged in age from 14 to 16 and they are native speakers of Uzbek language. Number of learners in both groups almost the same: control group consists of 13 learners along with another group. In addition, the research paper describes the role of teachers and learners in collaborative language learning, possible obstacles to methods in their implementation, and how to overcome problems encountered. This study proposes strategies and sample activities for improving memory retention based on the experience and data collected. In addition, the qualification form shows the criteria for students taught in co-operative learning. Therefore, this paper consists of an introduction, a literature review, methods that describe the objectives of experiments and experiments, and discussions that disclose the results and results of the experiments. When reading a study, keep in mind that the improvement of remembering foreign words through mnemonics is a very broad subject and researchers have narrowed it down to make it easier for the reader to read.

The Language Attitudes of Indonesian Language Teachers Toward the Acehnese Language

Language attitudes are one area in sociolinguistics that needs to be explored. This research highlights the language attitudes of Indonesian language teachers and lecturers in Banda Aceh city toward their own mother tongue, the Acehnese language. This paper aimed to figure out the attitudes of teachers as native speakers of the Acehnese language and their language of preference in the educational context. The novelty of this research lies in the object of the research, that is, teachers, keeping in mind that recent publications about language attitudes have only revolved around students or parents. In executing the research, the researchers opted for qualitative methods to describe the phenomenon under study. The researchers used a descriptive approach to link, depict, and formulate the results and discussion. Questionnaires were used openly and closely to interview the respondents. The results of this research explained that Indonesian language teachers demonstrated strong, confident, affirmative, and flexible attitudes toward the Acehnese language.
 Keywords: sociolinguistics, language attitudes, language usage, Indonesian language teachers

CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE OF L2 ON COMPREHENSION OF L1 ACADEMIC VOCABULARY

This article reports on the findings of an empirical study of cross-linguistic lexical influence on the comprehension of cognates in Serbian and French, Italian or German language on one hand and non-cognates on the other hand. The lexical items chosen for the study are considered to belong to academic vocabulary. The participants are third and forth-year undergraduate students of French, Italian and German language respectively. They are all native speakers of Serbian language and speak English and at least one more foreign language. The participants took a multiple-choice test consisting of four types of words based on their formal similarities between Serbian and the three analysed L2 languages. Based on the results obtained in the study, we discuss cross-linguistic influence of foreign lexis on comprehension of words in participants’ L1, with special attention to both positive and negative effects of such an influence. We argue that multilingualism can be an important factor in the comprehension of academic vocabulary and can facilitate manipulation with this specific type of lexis.

Language and music: Singing voices and music talent

Native speakers of tonal languages show enhanced musical melody perception but diminished rhythm abilities. This effect has now been rigorously demonstrated in a new study that tested the musical IQ of half a million human participants across the globe.

Интернет-сленг в виртуальном общении как языковой феномен

The aim of the study is to identify trends in the development of Internet slang caused by transformations in the field of politics, economics and culture. The paper discusses the features of Internet slang functioning in the communication of Internet users. The formation of Internet slang testifies to the functional dynamics of the modern Russian language, therefore it is of particular interest to linguists. The scientific novelty of the study lies in developing the word-formation and functional-semantic classifications of Russian Internet slang. The paper presents the analysis of 120 lexical units related to Internet slang. These units are considered in three aspects: meaning, word-formation types and intentions. As a result, it has been proved that Russian Internet slang as an ambivalent phenomenon, on the one hand, contributes to an increase in the expressiveness and emotionality of virtual communication and, on the other hand, it can negatively affect the literacy level of native speakers of the Russian language.

Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages

Tonal languages differ from other languages in their use of pitch (tones) to distinguish words. Lifelong experience speaking and hearing tonal languages has been argued to shape auditory processing in ways that generalize beyond the perception of linguistic pitch to the perception of pitch in other domains like music. We conducted a meta-analysis of prior studies testing this idea, finding moderate evidence supporting it. But prior studies were limited by mostly small sample sizes representing a small number of languages and countries, making it challenging to disentangle the effects of linguistic experience from variability in music training, cultural differences, and other potential confounds. To address these issues, we used web-based citizen science to assess music perception skill on a global scale in 34,034 native speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, Yoruba). We compared their performance to 459,066 native speakers of other languages, including 6 pitch-accented (e.g., Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages (e.g., Hungarian). Whether or not participants had taken music lessons, native speakers of all 19 tonal languages had an improved ability to discriminate musical melodies on average, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages. But this improvement came with a trade-off: tonal language speakers were also worse at processing the musical beat. The results, which held across native speakers of many diverse languages and were robust to geographic and demographic variation, demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes music perception, with implications for relations between music, language, and culture in the human mind.

Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?

Italian is sexy, German is rough-but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features-the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener's first language-were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker's voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.

CULTURAL-NATIONAL CODE AND LANGUAGES OF WISDOM

The article highlights the issues of the linguocultural approach to the study of the lexical features of Kazakh and Russian languages. Language, being a mirror reflection of the mentality of the people, has a unique ability to capture and preserve cultural and historical information. It also acts as the main form of storing knowledge about the culture of the people, the phenomena of traditional and modern life, customs that reflect the national identity of spiritual and material culture. Ethnic diversity, national stereotypes of self-identification and perception of another culture are preserved and manifested in the language of native speakers and makes it possible to compare linguocultural codes and perceive them through the prism of the language of wisdom of a particular society

Factors Responsible for Wrong Pronunciation of English Words by Students at Undergraduate Level in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan

One of the many challenges which ESL/EFL learners face is the issue of incorrect pronunciation of English words. This issue is more serious in ESL contexts like Pakistan where learners get limited or no exposure to authentic language use. This paper attempts to explore the factors contributing to incorrect pronunciation of English words by ESL learners at undergraduate level in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. To this end, a questionnaire was distributed among 72 BS English students of three different colleges. The descriptive analysis of the data highlighted eight factors which appeared to cause incorrect pronunciation by students. These included learners’ weakness in phonetics and phonology, Teacher's wrong pronunciation, first language interference, words related to military discourse, poor oral fluency and inaccessibility to authentic language use. The study recommends learners should improve pronunciation of English words through listening to native speakers of English language, watch YouTube videos and English movies and should own and consult a standardized phonetic dictionary.

Представление о счастье в языковом сознании носителей русской культуры: психолингвистический аспект

The comprehensive description of the Russian language consciousness fragment, which is associated with the feeling of happiness, is introduced in conformity with the psycholinguistic approach to the analysis of linguistic facts. The article describes the associative field of the happiness lexeme in the Russian language. Some culturally rich cognitive features that form the content of the happiness as the feeling in the Russian linguistic consciousness have been identified with consideration of associative dictionaries. The analysis has resulted in determining some basic cognitive categories in the Russian language consciousness: emotion and feeling, belonging, object, evaluation, being, volume, space, time, state, action, characteristic, quality, expression, subject-person, reason, light, distance, goal, animals, desire, weight, color, place, food, value, attitude, degree, plant, others. The metaphorical models of the Happiness concept realization have been observed: happiness is a living being; happiness is light; happiness is a place to be; happiness is food; happiness is an object. They are characteristic and significant for the mentality of the Russian language native speakers. The algorithm suggested for the linguistic analysis of Happiness concept may be applied to the description of other emotive concepts. All the results obtained during the analysis, are relevant for the development of psycholinguistics and emotive linguistics.

Multilingual Communication in Francophone Bandes Dessinées about Russia

In this paper we examine how the communication of characters speaking different languages is reflected in French and Belgian graphic novels about Russia. We propose to distinguish the situation of bilingual (plurilingual) communication on one hand and the reflection of this situation on the other hand. We built different schemes in order to describe the character’s choice of the language of communication, taking into account the existence of a common language, the communicant’s level of proficiency in different languages, the environment. The choice of French (correct or not) or Russian (correct or not, Cyrillic or transliterated, translated or not) in the following modules of bilingual communication has been analyzed: 1) a speaker of Russian communicates with native speakers of French, 2) he communicates with other native speakers of Russian in a francophone environment, 3) he speaks to himself (or swears), 4) he communicates with native speakers of other languages, 5) a native speaker of French uses Russian languages in communication with native speakers of Russian. In francophone graphic novels, French language is used when English-speaking and Russian-speaking characters communicate. We analyze whether the text in Russian is correct or not, whether it is written in Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, the presence or absence of translation, its correctness, the means to reflect the accent or character’s poor knowledge of French language. In conclusion we propose to discuss the reasons for the common ignorance of language contact in graphic novels.