Number Of Words In Language Research Articles

Family instability in childhood affects language and memory in adulthood: results from the Pró-Saúde Study, Brazil.

The study aims to investigate associations between adverse childhood psychosocial exposures and declarative memory, language, and executive function in adults with secondary schooling or more and without dementia. In 361 participants from the Pró-Saúde Study, we estimated associations between maternal educational attainment, principal source of the family´s income, food insecurity, and childhood family structure and performance in learning, word recall, and semantic and phonemic verbal fluency tests using multiple linear regression models. Individuals whose mother was the family breadwinner (mean difference: -1.97, 95%CI: -3.27; -0.72) and head-of-household (mean difference: -1.62, 95%CI: -2.89; -0.35) or who lived with a non-parental caregiver or in institutions in childhood (mean difference: -2.19, 95%CI: -4.29; -0.09) showed a reduction in the mean number of words in language and memory in adulthood. The results provide further evidence of the effect of adverse exposures in childhood. Without effective interventions, such exposures are likely to have far-reaching impacts on cognition.

Measuring the Semantic Distance between Languages from a Statistical Analysis of Bilingual Dictionaries*

A bilingual dictionary is a valuable linguistic resource which records, among other things, the differences in the segmentation of semantic space by the two languages and hence the difficulty in producing faithful translations between the two languages. Statistical analysis of nearly a hundred dictionaries has allowed us to determine how best to measure the semantic distance between languages from bilingual dictionaries. The distribution of the number of words in language A having n translations in language B, for n = 1, 2, 3, etc., was found to have a specific shape depending on the semantic distance between the two languages. A sample of only a thousand words was sufficient to obtain an estimate of semantic distance. We give a theoretical justification for this distance based on models of the historical evolution of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. Among our linguistic findings, we discovered, for example, that French is semantically closer to Basque than to German. We envisage an application of our semantic distance measure in the choice of an intermediate language when performing indirect translation, i.e. translating from language A to language B via a third language C.