Orthographic Word Research Articles

Patterns of Language Impairment in Early Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

To investigate the incidence and nature of language change and its relationship to executive dysfunction in a population-based incident amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) sample, with the hypothesis that patterns of frontotemporal involvement in early ALS extend beyond areas of executive control to regions associated with language processing. One hundred seventeen population-based incident ALS cases without dementia and 100 controls matched by age, sex, and education were included in the study. A detailed assessment of language processing including lexical processing, word spelling, word reading, word naming, semantic processing, and syntactic/grammatical processing was undertaken. Executive domains of phonemic verbal fluency, working memory, problem-solving, cognitive flexibility, and social cognition were also evaluated. Language processing was impaired in this incident cohort of individuals with ALS, with deficits in the domains of word naming, orthographic processing, and syntactic/grammatical processing. Conversely, phonological lexical processing and semantic processing were spared. Although executive dysfunction accounted in part for impairments in grammatical and orthographic lexical processing, word spelling, reading, and naming, primary language deficits were also present. Language impairment is characteristic of ALS at early stages of the disease and can develop independently of executive dysfunction, reflecting selective patterns of frontotemporal involvement at disease onset. Language change is therefore an important component of the frontotemporal syndrome associated with ALS.

Pronunciation Errors Committed by EFL Learners in the English Department in Faculty of Education - Sana'a University

Abstract This study aimed to, first, investigate the common pronunciation errors committed by EFL fourth level learners in the Department of English, Faculty of Education-Sana'a, Sana’a University, in the academic year 2019-2020; second to find out the reasons of producing mispronounced segments among University students when speaking; third to offer possible solutions that may help Yemeni students overcome pronunciation difficulties. The sample was 30 students selected randomly. Also, ten teachers were part of the sample in which they were given a close-ended questionnaire. A descriptive method was used to carry out the study. For gathering data, a close-ended questionnaire and a test were used. Data were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science). The study concluded that EFL learners mispronounce certain phonemes that are in a mismatch with word orthography and consonant cluster. Moreover, vowels were mispronounced by students. The strongest factors that contribute to this problem, according to this study, were due to learners' mother tongue interference, and other causative factors such as limited language exposure. The study recommends that teaching should focus more on pronunciation along with preparing suitable material. Keywords: pronunciation errors, learners, EFL

Not completed but still identified: orthographic closure and word recognition among poor and typical native Arab readers.

The current study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the orthographic representations among poor readers compared to typical readers. For this aim, an orthographic visual closure task was used. One hundred and twenty native Arab readers, 60 typical and 60 poor, from third, fifth and seventh grades, were participated in the current study. A computerized tool was designed to test the orthographic closure ability, where the stimuli were orthographic patterns of words in Arabic. For each orthographic pattern of each word, eight levels of appearance display were created: Level 1 showed the most completed level of the image and Level 8 showed the most fragmented one. Throughout the experiment, participants were required to look at the screen and tell their answer loudly as soon as the pattern was identified. The level at which each correct identification has occurred was recorded. The results revealed significant differences between the two groups of readers and between the different ages regarding the level at which they were able to identify the presented words. The findings showed that the identification of written words, like pictures, can be activated even that the orthographic information is not fully presented while the effectiveness of such activations depends on the effectiveness of the orthographic representations.

Distinguishing Syntactic Markers From Morphological Markers. A Cross-Linguistic Comparison.

This brief review summarizes findings about syntactic markers, i.e., graphemic elements that indicate syntactic relations, such as inflection morphemes. Current spelling models subsume inflection with derivation and stem alternations under “morphological spellings.” They hence consider inflection only in relation to the orthographic word. This paper argues that syntactic markers are a specific category as they are part of the orthographic word but also systematically tied to the presence of syntactic features above the word level. Syntactic spelling refers thus not only to the correct spelling of a syntactic marker but to its correct application within a given syntactical context. In syntactic reading, (proof)readers must notice the marker and interpret it correctly to understand the sentence. Syntactic spelling and reading have hence been found to be highly demanding in many languages. Syntactic information is not decisive for sentence understanding in many cases, since the information can be deduced from the context. In order to focus the definition of syntactic markers, this paper restricts them to those graphemic elements that convey syntactical but no lexical features and are further unrelated to phonology. The paper concludes that syntactic markers and spelling should be distinguished from morphological spelling. Examples are given for English, French, Dutch, and German.

How emotion is learned: Semantic learning of novel words in emotional contexts

The present paper addresses two under-studied dimensions of novel word learning. We ask (a) whether originally meaningless novel words can acquire emotional connotations from their linguistic contexts, and (b) whether these acquired connotations can affect the quality of orthographic and semantic word learning and its retention over time. In five experiments using three stimuli sets, L1 speakers of English learned nine novel words embedded in contexts that were consistently positive, neutral or negative. Reading times were recorded during the learning phase, and vocabulary post-tests were administered immediately after that phase and after one week to assess learning. With two of three stimulus sets, the answer to (a) was positive: readers learned both the forms, definitional meanings and emotional connotations of novel words from their contexts. We confirmed (b) in two of three stimulus sets as well. Items were learned more accurately (by 10% to 20%) in positive rather than negative or neutral contexts. We propose the transfer of affect to a word from its collocations to be a virtually unstudied yet efficient mechanism of learning affective meanings. We further demonstrate that the transfer that occurs over a few exposures to a novel word in context is sufficient to elicit a long-lasting positivity advantage previously shown in existing words only. Null results in one stimulus set suggest that contextual transfer of affect is contingent on other contextual properties, such as text complexity. These findings are pitted against theories of vocabulary acquisition.

Probing language processing in cochlear implant users with visual word recognition: effects of lexical and orthographic word properties

ABSTRACT Deaf individuals who learned a spoken language with the aid of a cochlear implant (CI) often experience difficulties with reading. In the present study, we investigate this issue by assessing the impact of lexical and orthographic predictors on visual word recognition in early and late deaf CI-users. Early deaf CI-users were comparable to age-matched hearing controls, for both response accuracy and latencies, whereas late deaf CI-users were slower albeit similarly accurate with respect to age-matched controls. Analyses of the impact of lexical and orthographic predictors, however, revealed that early deaf-CI users were slower than controls in recognising low frequency words and words with high proportion of consonants. In conclusion, early deaf individuals who developed their language using a CI show qualitative differences in visual word processing, above and beyond the overall performance. This suggests that typical overall performance may emerge also in the context of atypical lexical and word form representations.

Consistency measures individuate dissociating semantic modulations in priming paradigms: A new look on semantics in the processing of (complex) words.

In human language the mapping between form and meaning is arbitrary, as there is no direct connection between words and the objects that they represent. However, within a given language, it is possible to recognise systematic associations that support productivity and comprehension. In this work, we focus on the consistency between orthographic forms and meaning, and we investigate how the cognitive system may exploit it to process words. We take morphology as our case study, since it arguably represents one of the most notable examples of systematicity in form-meaning mapping. In a series of three experiments, we investigate the impact of form-meaning mapping in word processing by testing new consistency metrics as predictors of priming magnitude in primed lexical decision. In Experiment 1, we re-analyse data from five masked morphological priming studies and show that orthography-semantics-consistency explains independent variance in priming magnitude, suggesting that word semantics is accessed already at early stages of word processing and that crucially semantic access is constrained by word orthography. In Experiments 2 and 3, we investigate whether this pattern is replicated when looking at semantic priming. In Experiment 2, we show that orthography-semantics-consistency is not a viable predictor of priming magnitude with longer stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). However, in Experiment 3, we develop a new semantic consistency measure based on the semantic density of target neighbourhoods. This measure is shown to significantly predict independent variance in semantic priming effect. Overall, our results indicate that consistency measures provide crucial information for the understanding of word processing. Specifically, the dissociation between measures and priming paradigms shows that different priming conditions are associated with the activation of different semantic cohorts.

New loan words in the Neologismenw\xf6rterbuch: corpus-based development of lexicographic information for an online dictionary of contemporary German

The majority of new words in dictionaries are included following a certain period of time during which they have become more frequent in use and established morphosyntactic and orthographic features consistent with the language system they are borrowed into. In case of borrowed new words, inclusion often takes place at a transitional state of assimilation to the language system, where delayed orthographic or phonetic change cannot be ruled out and the differentiation between standard-conforming and non-standard orthographic word forms of a lemma oftentimes depends on the proximity between the writing systems of the donor and the recipient language. Following a brief overview of loan words and their lexicographical description in the Neologismenwörterbuch, a specialized online dictionary for neologisms in contemporary German, this paper presents findings of an investigative case study on dictionary entries for a neologism borrowed from a logographic language system and discusses the potential of a corpus-based description of new loan words.

Word processing deficits in children with isolated and combined reading and spelling deficits: An ERP-study

Dissociations between reading and spelling deficits are likely to be associated with distinct deficits in orthographic word processing. To specify differences in automatic visual word recognition, the current ERP-study compared children with isolated reading fluency deficits (iRD), isolated spelling deficits (iSD), and combined reading fluency and spelling deficits (cRSD) as well as typically developing (TD) 10-year-olds while performing a variant of the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm: children had to indicate which of two letters occurred at a given position in a previously presented word, legal pseudoword, illegal pseudoword or nonword. Event-related potentials (N200 and N400) associated with sublexical orthographic and lexical orthographic processing as well as phonological word processing were analyzed. All groups showed a word superiority effect, both on the behavioral and the neurophysiological level. Group differences occurred for phonological word processing. TD and iRD groups showed a higher N400 activation for illegal pseudowords than for nonwords, while the two spelling deficit groups showed no activation differences between these two stimuli conditions. The findings suggest that differences in phonological word processing are associated with spelling problems: children with iSD showed reduced sensitivity for phonological word processing, while these deficits were not evident in children with iRD.

An orthographic prediction error as the basis for efficient visual word recognition

Most current models assume that the perceptual and cognitive processes of visual word recognition and reading operate upon neuronally coded domain-general low-level visual representations – typically oriented line representations. We here demonstrate, consistent with neurophysiological theories of Bayesian-like predictive neural computations, that prior visual knowledge of words may be utilized to ‘explain away’ redundant and highly expected parts of the visual percept. Subsequent processing stages, accordingly, operate upon an optimized representation of the visual input, the orthographic prediction error, highlighting only the visual information relevant for word identification. We show that this optimized representation is related to orthographic word characteristics, accounts for word recognition behavior, and is processed early in the visual processing stream, i.e., in V4 and before 200 ​ms after word-onset. Based on these findings, we propose that prior visual-orthographic knowledge is used to optimize the representation of visually presented words, which in turn allows for highly efficient reading processes.

Transfer learning for Turkish named entity recognition on noisy text

AbstractIn this article, we investigate using deep neural networks with different word representation techniques for named entity recognition (NER) on Turkish noisy text. We argue that valuable latent features for NER can, in fact, be learned without using any hand-crafted features and/or domain-specific resources such as gazetteers and lexicons. In this regard, we utilize character-level, character n-gram-level, morpheme-level, and orthographic character-level word representations. Since noisy data with NER annotation are scarce for Turkish, we introduce a transfer learning model in order to learn infrequent entity types as an extension to the Bi-LSTM-CRF architecture by incorporating an additional conditional random field (CRF) layer that is trained on a larger (but formal) text and a noisy text simultaneously. This allows us to learn from both formal and informal/noisy text, thus improving the performance of our model further for rarely seen entity types. We experimented on Turkish as a morphologically rich language and English as a relatively morphologically poor language. We obtained an entity-level F1 score of 67.39% on Turkish noisy data and 45.30% on English noisy data, which outperforms the current state-of-art models on noisy text. The English scores are lower compared to Turkish scores because of the intense sparsity in the data introduced by the user writing styles. The results prove that using subword information significantly contributes to learning latent features for morphologically rich languages.

MiNgMatch—A Fast N-gram Model for Word Segmentation of the Ainu Language

Word segmentation is an essential task in automatic language processing for languages where there are no explicit word boundary markers, or where space-delimited orthographic words are too coarse-grained. In this paper we introduce the MiNgMatch Segmenter—a fast word segmentation algorithm, which reduces the problem of identifying word boundaries to finding the shortest sequence of lexical n-grams matching the input text. In order to validate our method in a low-resource scenario involving extremely sparse data, we tested it with a small corpus of text in the critically endangered language of the Ainu people living in northern parts of Japan. Furthermore, we performed a series of experiments comparing our algorithm with systems utilizing state-of-the-art lexical n-gram-based language modelling techniques (namely, Stupid Backoff model and a model with modified Kneser-Ney smoothing), as well as a neural model performing word segmentation as character sequence labelling. The experimental results we obtained demonstrate the high performance of our algorithm, comparable with the other best-performing models. Given its low computational cost and competitive results, we believe that the proposed approach could be extended to other languages, and possibly also to other Natural Language Processing tasks, such as speech recognition.

A corpus-based study of 16th-century Slovene clitics and clitic-like elements

This paper undertakes a corpus-based linguistic investigation of the spelling variation in 16th century Slovene both from the diachronic and synchronic points of view. The investigation is based on a manually annotated sample (approx. 14,000 word tokens) from Primož Trubar’s Ta pervi deil tiga Noviga teſtamenta, 1557, and Hiſhna poſtilla, 1595, and Jurij Juricic’s Poſtilla, 1578, and it concentrates on clitics and clitic-like elements. Statistical analysis, based on comparison of the spelling conventions of the early modern period to those of contemporary Slovene using normalised forms of the originals, where we observe cases where one orthographic word is nowadays written as two or more words (1–n mapping) or vice-versa (n–1 mapping), shows that the overall percentage of split and joined word tokens is 5.7%, with JPo 1578 having the highest percentage, and TPo 1595 the lowest, less than half of that of JPo 1578. Of these, the vast majority is for cases where a word is now split. The most predominant among the bound words are non-syllable prepositions v ‘in(to)’, k ‘to’, and z ‘with’, followed by negative proclitic ne ‘not’, enclitic particle li ‘whether, if’ and in rare instances conditional particle bi, reflexive particle se, na ‘on’, ob ‘at, by’, pri ‘at, beside’ and za ‘for, behind’ (the absolute numbers of specific clitics partially correlate with the prevalence of bound variants in comparison with the freestanding variants of those clitics, with the most frequent being predominantly bound while the least frequent are predominantly freestanding). Individual instances of two accented words written together can be attributed to German influence (figino_drevo, der Pfeigenbaum ‘fig tree’).The cases where one modernised word correlates to two original words are, with the exception of superlative adjective/adverb prefix naj-/nar- ‘the most’ that is orthographically bound with its root in about 25% of instances, sporadic or can be identified as errors in the original books. Of interest are also cases when beginnings of words that are homonymous with non- or one syllable prepositions are separated from the remainder of the word with an apostrophe (eg. s’_nameinja ‘signs’, s’_derſhati ‘to endure’, do_bruta ‘goodness’, sa_doſti ‘enough’). The normalisation also enables the identification of the orthographical variants of the most commonly bound clitics, i. e. non-syllable prepositions k, z and v. K and its allomorph /h/ have 5 attested spelling variants, of which one is limited to hosts starting with a v-. For z with a voiced allomorph /z/ and voiceless allomorph /s/ three variant spellings were discovered that only partially correspond with a voiceless/voiced distinction of the initial sound of the host word, and the cases of merging with the host that begins with s-/z- were identified. Additional positional spellings probably represent other allomorphs: for palatalized /ž/ in front of a palatal n and , >ſo/so> for syllabified /za/, /zo/. The preposition v shows the highest degree of orthographical variation of all analysed words as it has 10 different spellings: general bound and and freestanding ; , and in front of a vowel; and attested only in front of a v-, as well as and merged with the initial v- of the host.The analysis of spelling variation in non-syllable prepositions showed that even a relatively limited hand-corrected annotated sample enabled identification of majority of spelling variants identified in previous works, while with the use of noSketch Engine tool further information about their relative frequency and distribution was obtained. As the hand-corrected corpus is expanded such research will yield even more relevant information for the study of the 16th century Slovene literary language that will significantly supplement existing findings (based on traditionally collected examples) with the help of a large amount of statistically relevant data.

Determining a Zulu core vocabulary for children who use augmentative and alternative communication

Vocabulary selection is an important aspect to consider when designing augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems for children who have not yet developed conventional literacy skills. AAC team members have used core vocabulary lists (representing words most commonly and frequently used by speakers of a natural language) as a resource to assist in this process. To date, there are no core vocabulary lists for Zulu. Therefore, the aim of this study was to identify the vocabulary most frequently and commonly used by Zulu-speaking preschool children, in order to inform vocabulary selection for peers who use AAC. Communication samples from 6 Zulu-speaking participants without disabilities were collected during regular preschool activities. Analyses were conducted both by orthographic words and by morphological analysis of formatives. Due to the linguistic and orthographic structure of Zulu, an analysis by formatives was found to be more useful to determine a core vocabulary. The number of different formatives used, frequency of use, and commonality of use among the participants were identified. A total of 213 core formatives were identified; core formatives related to language structure were used more frequently than those that related to lexical content. The characteristics of this Zulu core vocabulary were consistent with those of core vocabularies established in other languages. Implications for the design of Zulu AAC systems are discussed.

Visual Attention, Orthographic Word Recognition, and Executive Functioning in Children With ADHD, Dyslexia, or ADHD + Dyslexia

Objective: The current study examined the differences in visual selective attention, orthographic word recognition, and executive functioning. Method: One hundred and forty Ecuadorian children in third and fifth grades of elementary school (8-10 years old) participated in the study—35 with only dyslexia (DD), 35 with the combined type of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD-C), 35 with disorders (DD + ADHD-C), and 35 typical development children (TD). Results: The Ecuadorian children with DD and/or ADHD-C in this age range usually have difficulties in visual selective attention, and also in orthographic word recognition. The executive functioning results showed that such functioning was worse in the ADHD-C groups (with or without DD), but not in the DD group, supporting the dissociation between DD and ADHD-C in executive functioning in this population. Conclusion: The DD + ADHD-C comorbidity produces worse deficits compared to DD, but not compared to ADHD-C, supporting the idea that there are common factors in DD and ADHD-C.

Visual statistical learning and orthographic awareness in Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia

This study examined the role of visual statistical learning in reading and writing and its relationship to orthographic awareness in Hong Kong Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia. Thirty-five 7- to 8-year-old children with developmental dyslexia and 37 chronologically age-matched controls were tested on visual statistical learning, orthographic awareness, nonverbal cognitive ability, Chinese word reading, and word dictation tasks. Visual statistical learning was assessed using a triplet learning paradigm that required children to detect the temporal order of visual stimuli. Orthographic awareness was measured with a novel character invention task that required children to create pseudocharacters using untaught stroke patterns according to the rules of Chinese character orthography. Children with dyslexia performed significantly worse than their age-matched controls on both the visual statistical learning and orthographic awareness tasks. Furthermore, visual statistical learning was significantly associated with orthographic awareness and word reading. These findings suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia are impaired in visual statistical learning and that such deficits may be related to disrupted orthographic learning abilities, thereby contributing to their reading difficulties.

Too harts, won sole: Using dysgraphia treatment to address homophone representation

ABSTRACT Previous spoken homophone treatment in aphasia found generalization to untreated homophones and interpreted this as evidence for shared phonological word form representations. Previous written treatment of non-homophones has attributed generalization to orthographic neighbours of treated items to feedback from graphemes to similarly spelled orthographic word forms. This feedback mechanism offers an alternative explanation for generalization found in treatment of spoken homophones. The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanism underpinning generalization (if any) from treatment of written homophones. To investigate this question a participant with acquired dysgraphia and impaired access to orthographic output representations undertook written spelling treatment. Generalization to untreated items with varying degrees of orthographic overlap was investigated. Three experimental sets included homographs (e.g., bank-bank), heterographs (e.g., sail-sale), and direct orthographic neighbours (e.g., bath-path). Treatment improved written picture naming of treated items. Generalization was limited to direct neighbours. Further investigation of generalization found that items with a greater number of close neighbours in the treated set showed greater generalization. This suggests that feedback from graphemes to orthographic word forms is the driving force of generalization. The lack of homograph generalization suggests homographs do not share a representation in the orthographic lexicon.

Prediction of orthographic information during listening comprehension: A printed-word visual world study.

Two visual world eye-tracking experiments examined the role of orthographic information in the visual context in pre-activation of orthographic and phonological information using Japanese. Participants heard sentences that contained a predictable target word and viewed a display showing four words in a logogram, kanji (Experiment 1) or in a phonogram, hiragana (Experiment 2). The four words included either the target word (e.g., /sakana/; fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/; horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/; cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/; book), together with three distractor words. The orthographic competitor was orthographically or phonologically dissimilar to the target in hiragana. In Experiment 1, target and orthographic competitor words attracted more fixations than unrelated words before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that participants pre-activated orthographic form of the target word. In Experiment 2, target and phonological competitor words attracted more predictive fixations than unrelated words, but orthographic competitor words did not, suggesting a critical role of the visual context. This pre-activation pattern does not fit with the pattern of lexical activation in auditory word recognition, where orthography and phonology interact. However, it is compatible with the pattern of lexical activation in spoken word production, where orthographic information is not automatically activated, in line with production-based prediction accounts.

Early Brain Sensitivity to Word Frequency and Lexicality During Reading Aloud and Implicit Reading.

The present study investigated the influence of lexical word properties on the early stages of visual word processing (<250 ms) and how the dynamics of lexical access interact with task-driven top-down processes. We compared the brain’s electrical response (event-related potentials, ERPs) of 39 proficient adult readers for the effects of word frequency and word lexicality during an explicit reading task versus a visual immediate-repetition detection task where no linguistic intention is required. In general, we observed that left-lateralized processes linked to perceptual expertise for reading are task independent. Moreover, there was no hint of a word frequency effect in early ERPs, while there was a lexicality effect which was modulated by task demands: during implicit reading, we observed larger N1 negativity in the ERP to real words compared to pseudowords, but in contrast, this modulation by stimulus type was absent for the explicit reading aloud task (where words yielded the same activation as pseudowords). Thus, data indicate that the brain’s response to lexical properties of a word is open to influences from top-down processes according to the representations that are relevant for the task, and this occurs from the earliest stages of visual recognition (within ~200 ms). We conjectured that the loci of these early top-down influences identified for implicit reading are probably restricted to lower levels of processing (such as whole word orthography) rather than the process of lexical access itself.

Reading Shakespeare Sonnets: Combining Quantitative Narrative Analysis and Predictive Modeling -an Eye Tracking Study.

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (1, 2), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning-based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials(3).