Semantic Categories Research Articles

직장어린이집 교실에서 일어나는 위험한 놀이에 관한 유아반 교사의 경험 연구

Objectives This study aimed to understand the experiences of early childhood teachers about risk play in the classroom, and in particular, paid attention to the complex effects of the physical and social characteristics of the workplace child care center.
 Methods The investigator selected six early childhood teachers that were concerned about risky play in the classroom at workplace child care centers. They were interviewed with visual methodology in 24 sessions about 22 weeks, analyzed through four stages: transcription, abbreviation by subject, semantic categorization, semantic conceptualization.
 Results First, teachers used the predicted degree of injury, the possibility of learning, the existence of prior consultation, existence of rules as criteria for acceptability, and divided the experience into risk-taking challenging play and risky behavior. Based on this, risk-taking challenging play is to use risky materials attributes or utilization of materials in this way, but challenging the limitations of the body or environment was considered risky behavior. Second, teachers expressed difficulties due to fear for injuries and external negative perception, violation of classroom management rules. They had experiences uncertainty where physical safety is not guaranteed, deviating from the purpose of education, freewheelingness against the static order, collisionality against manners for others. Third, despite, the teachers were having new moves such as encouraging challenges to risky play, change the meaning of infants' free bodies in the classroom, think about conflicts and boundaries in space, and cooperate with parents and faculty. In addition, Teachers demanded manpower, communicate and understand about risks and safety, time to think about classrooms and risky play, opportunities to share cases and educate.
 Conclusions Teachers had a movement to understand child-risk-space as an integral element, away from rigid boundaries inside and outside the classroom and the restrictive meaning of risk and education. Therefore, it suggests educational subjects become collaborators of risky play and create a self-sustaining meaning.

Frequent native language use supports phonemic and semantic verbal fluency in L1 and L2: An extended analysis of verbal fluency task performance in an L1 language attrition population

Purpose: Verbal fluency (VF) tasks are an efficient tool for exploring lexical retrieval. Attriters generally produce fewer words in semantic categories than monolinguals, but the processes underlying attriters’ lexical retrieval remain unclear. Phonemic tasks are scarcely applied in language attrition studies. We aim to identify processes underlying attriters’ phonemic verbal fluency (PVF) and semantic verbal fluency (SVF) performance by extending the analysis beyond total scores in the first (L1) and second (L2) language. Design: We modeled total scores and temporal aspects of task performance in L1 and L2 for the attriters, with L1 use and length of residence (LoR) as predictors. We analyzed the number and types of errors between languages and compared L1 task performance with a matched monolingual group. Data and analysis: Attriters’ ( N = 38) phonemic and semantic task performance in L1 (Finnish) and L2 (English) were modeled, and results were contrasted to a matched monolingual control group ( N = 50). Findings: Attriters demonstrated strong proficiency in L1 and similar lexical retrieval processes in L1 and L2 after 20 years of immersive L2 exposure. Frequent L1 use supported overall performance but slowed performance down in both languages. Compared with monolinguals, attriters show a disadvantage in SVF, but not due to slower initiation. Instead, attriters rely more on rapid L1 retrieval than monolinguals. Originality: Prior research on VF tasks in language attrition populations has mainly focused on SVF total scores in L1. Our investigation explores underlying mechanisms of L1 and L2 task performance in PVF and SVF within a language attrition population and contrasts L1 performance to a matched monolingual group performance. Implications: This study demonstrates the importance of investigating L2 alongside L1 in language attrition studies for a holistic approach to language processing strategies. Our findings enhance understanding of the processes underlying VF task performance, emphasizing the significance of VF task early-stage performance.

The Size of Clausal Complements

Drawing mainly—but not exclusively—on data from Germanic, this article compares syntactic, morphological, and semantic approaches to size differences of complement clauses. Focusing on two phenomena that have been related to clause size reduction and truncation—Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) and restructuring—it is shown that their distribution is radically different and that clause size cannot be the main factor regulating both of these phenomena. This article provides a solution to this conflicting state of affairs and lays out an approach that builds on a fine-grained CP structure, including both syntactic and semantic categories, a reduced structure for infinitives, and a syntax–meaning mapping that predicts different minimal clause sizes for different semantic types of complements. Based on the distribution of ECM in Germanic, a tentative ECM hierarchy is suggested that follows implicational containment relations of an expanded CP.

The COVID-19 pandemic and changing meanings of flatten the curve

Abstract This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the meanings of the phrase flatten the curve before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from two corpora, the iWeb Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus, it focuses on semantic frames (Fillmore, 1985) and frame metonymy (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2014). The investigation reveals that the construal of the phrase after the outbreak of COVID-19 requires the invocation of both bell curve and pandemic frames; that is, without the pandemic frame, the phrase would remain in the domain of statistics and refer to a change in a graph. The data are sorted into four semantic categories based on the context in which they appear (epidemiological/non-epidemiological) and on the effect they pursue regarding the flattening-the-curve scenario (rigorous/non-rigorous). The phrase’s polysemy is explained by the part of the process for effect of the process metonymy. The flatter curve, as a salient part of a scenario, serves to refer to one of the scenario’s effects. The analysis also observes a correlation between the real-world experience of the pandemic and the actual frequency of flatten the curve in that the ratio of each semantic category reflects the contemporaneous real-world significance of reducing the rate of increase of new infections.

Soreness Reminds Me of Grief: Patients With Chronic Pain Show Less Differentiated Representations of Emotional Feelings and Bodily States

People experience similarities between emotional feelings and bodily states on a daily basis, but both the magnitude and pervasiveness of this experiential similarity vary across individuals. Inspired by previous findings that chronic pain (CP) is characterized by strengthened pain-affect coupling and reduced interoceptive accuracy, we conducted 2 cross-sectional studies to examine whether patients with CP would exhibit less differentiated perception and mental representation of emotional feelings and bodily states. In study 1 (N = 500), patients with CP and healthy controls (HCs) completed a self-report questionnaire that asked explicitly about the perceived similarity between 5 basic emotion categories and a series of bodily states. In study 2 (N = 73), a specially designed false memory test was administered to examine whether patients with CP would have reduced differentiation of concepts of negative emotion and somatic distress. We found that patients with CP perceived greater and more pervasive similarities between emotional feelings and bodily states, as indicated by higher questionnaire scores and denser, less specialized bipartite emotion-body networks, both associated with lower subjective interoceptive accuracy. Furthermore, patients with CP formed false memories of negative emotion words (eg, grief) more readily than HCs after memorizing somatic distress words (eg, soreness), as if they represented negative emotion and somatic distress as a single, enmeshed semantic category. Our findings extend previous literature by demonstrating reduced discrimination between emotional and bodily experiences in CP that is not restricted to pain-related emotional and sensory experiences and may be related to a fundamentally less differentiated interoception. PerspectivesThis study shows that patients with chronic pain have a profoundly less differentiated perception and implicit conceptualization of emotional feelings and bodily states, which appears to be associated with altered interoception. These findings may provide new perspectives on why they often experience a stronger pain-affect coupling.

Contribution and functional connectivity between cerebrum and cerebellum on sub-lexical and lexical-semantic processing of verbs.

Language comprehension involves both sub-lexical (e.g., phonological) and lexical-semantic processing. We conducted a task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the processing of verbs in these two domains. Additionally, we examined the representation of concrete-motor and abstract-non-motor concepts by including two semantic categories of verbs: motor and mental. The findings indicate that sub-lexical processing during the reading of pseudo-verbs primarily involves the left dorsal stream of the perisylvian network, while lexical-semantic representation during the reading of verbs predominantly engages the ventral stream. According to the embodied or grounded cognition approach, modality-specific mechanisms (such as sensory-motor systems) and the well-established multimodal left perisylvian network contribute to the semantic representation of both concrete and abstract verbs. Our study identified the visual system as a preferential modality-specific system for abstract-mental verbs, which exhibited functional connectivity with the right crus I/lobule VI of the cerebellum. Taken together, these results confirm the dissociation between sub-lexical and lexical-semantic processing and provide neurobiological evidence of functional coupling between specific visual modality regions and the right cerebellum, forming a network that supports the semantic representation of abstract concepts. Further, the results shed light on the underlying mechanisms of semantic processing and contribute to our understanding of how the brain processes abstract concepts.

The lines of the head: An analysis of the headlines in a State University newspaper

Headlines are important parts of any news and newspaper. They serve as an overview of the story or article. This study aims to describe and analyze the news headlines of the past 5 issues of the school publication in one of the state universities in Region III, Philippines. Specifically, it focuses on the types of grammatical structures are used in the headline writing; patterns that the headlines observe; semantic categories of the headwords of the headlines; reasons why the headlines framed the way they appear in the newspaper; and implications of the results to future journalism training and campus paper publication. The study is a sequential explanatory type of research that used the Fairclough theory to analyze the previous issues of the newspaper. After which, the results were presented to the two (2) advisers of the newspaper who served as the participants during the interview. It was found out that the last five issues of the student publication of a university in the Philippines commonly used clausal headlines, Subject-Verb Phrase-Direct Object clausal pattern, Headword-Postmodifier phrasal headlines, and proper names for the headwords of the headlines. The participants of the study explained that the patterns were adopted for clarity, comprehensiveness, getting the reader’s attention, conciseness, and identification. Therefore, it is recommended that continuous training must be given to the student writers to be able to be abreast of other styles and techniques so that they can present news in a comprehensive, clear, concise, and attractive way.

Investigating Writer's Stance in University Academic Group Discussions

Online group discussion is a typical learning activity in academic English lessons at universities. Students exchange research ideas and evaluate each other's work. However, many non-English major undergraduates experience challenges in expressing their opinions and developing arguments during this discussion process. Stance analysis is a crucial linguistic tool for obtaining an understanding of how participants express their ideas. Using the stance framework proposed by Biber (2006), the aim of this study was to examine the main grammatical markers and relevant semantic categories found in written online group discussions. We intended to investigate the expressions of the writer's stance (such as stance adverbials, stance nouns, stance adjectives, and stance verbs) in academic group discussions by analyzing a corpus of texts from an online discussion within a university setting from a forum. A total of 34 online group discussions with a combined word count of 199,559 contributed by 187 Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students comprised the dataset. To pinpoint stance lexical items that appeared in particular grammatical frames, the frequencies and roles of stance expressions were calculated and thoroughly examined. The results demonstrated that the most widely used grammatical stance expressions in these academic discourses to convey attitudes and opinions were stance adverbials and stance verbs. By examining the linguistic resources used by non-English major students to express their perspectives and attitudes, as well as how stance is manifested in the context of academic online discussions, this study provides insights for both linguistics and education.

The role of systematicity in early referent selection.

Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects of the same semantic category (e.g., both are animals), that is, to what extent children assume meaning overlap given form overlap between two words. We tested this by first presenting children (N = 93, Mage = 22.4months) with novel word-object associations. Then, we examined the extent to which children assume that a similar sounding novel label, that is, a phonological neighbour, refers to a similar looking object, that is, a likely semantic neighbour, as opposed to a dissimilar looking object. Were children to preferentially fixate the similar-looking novel object, it would suggest that systematic word form-meaning relations aid referent selection in young children. While we did not find any evidence for such word form-meaning systematicity, we demonstrated that children showed robust learning for the trained novel word-object associations, and were able to discriminate between similar-sounding labels and also similar-looking objects. Thus, we argue that unlike iconicity which appears early in vocabulary development, we find no evidence for systematicity in early referent selection.

Patterns of evidentials use in dream narratives

The article presents a study on evidentials use in dream reports collected from online dream journals. First, I discuss the relation between the categories of stance and evidentiality. Specifically, I define evidentiality for the needs of this research as a semantic category that labels the source of information in the English language. Evidentiality encompasses perception, reportative evidentiality, and inferential judgment. The role of evidentials in rendering the dream experience is considerable due to the quasi-perceptual and specific experientiality of dreaming. Therefore, the core categories of evidentiality were singled out for this study, such as revelative, sensory and sensory-inferential, reportative, non-sensory inferential and mirative (marking unexpected information). The sample was then manually processed to count the relative frequencies of the means rendering these subcategories of evidentiality. The main findings reside in the role of revelative evidentials in marking the status of dream vs. real narrative spaces. Additionally, the classic assumption about the visuality of dreams was confirmed by the high number of visual perceptual evidentials, while audial and other perceptual mode instances are much fewer in the sample. Finally, the choice of evidential subcategories in dream reports is conditioned by the narrators’ need to account for vague recollection of dreaming experience with the preference for simpler inferential forms. In turn, the category of mirativity (i.e. labeling of unexpected information) is discussed as a prospective research avenue due to its rich potential in subtle yet informative marking of the speaker’s reaction to the information communicated or to the channel of obtaining it.

A large scale training sample database system for intelligent interpretation of remote sensing imagery

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) technologies, particularly Deep Learning (DL), have demonstrated significant potential in the interpretation of Remote Sensing (RS) imagery, covering tasks such as scene classification, object detection, land-cover/land-use classification, change detection, and multi-view stereo reconstruction. Large-scale training samples are essential for ML/DL models to achieve optimal performance. However, the current organization of training samples is ad-hoc and vendor-specific, lacking an integrated approach that can effectively manage training samples from different vendors to meet the demands of various RS AI tasks. This article proposes a solution to address these challenges by designing and implementing LuoJiaSET, a large-scale training sample database system for intelligent interpretation of RS imagery. LuoJiaSET accommodates over five million training samples, providing support for cross-dataset queries and serving as a comprehensive training data store for RS AI model training and calibration. It overcomes challenges related to label semantic categories, structural heterogeneity in label representation, and interoperable data access.

Towards a unified analysis of past and future tenses

While the literature has often highlighted the differences between the defining features of past and future tenses, little attention has been paid to the similarities that bring these linguistic forms together. Taking European Portuguese data as a point of departure, it was my goal in this paper to investigate some of the correspondences that arise between these structures. So, I will endorse the idea that, in both the past and the future domains, there are equivalent strategies to perform temporal location. Thus, tenses, such as the Pretérito Imperfeito do Indicativo (Imp) in the past or the Futuro Simples (FS) in the future, which do not display relevant temporal constraints beyond the mere location of an eventuality in an interval before or after t0, interact with and are more easily influenced by other semantic categories, namely aspect and modality. On the contrary, tenses that require more evident temporal restrictions, in particular the imposition of final or initial boundaries to the situations with which they are combined, such as the Pretérito Perfeito Simples (PPerf) or the construction ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, have in common that they are less permeable to the influence of other external factors, with temporal location being their most prominent meaning.

The time course of category-based attentional template pre-activation depends on the category framework

When searching for a target defined by a set of objects, attention can be directed toward task-relevant objects by creating a category-based attentional template (CAT). Previous studies have found that CAT can be activated before the onset of the target. However, the time course of CAT pre-activation and whether the category framework (prototypical or semantic) can modulate it remain unclear. To explore the time course of CAT pre-activation, we employed a rapid serial probe presentation paradigm (RSPP) with event-related potentials (ERPs). To investigate the effect of the category framework on the time course of CAT pre-activation, the target category was defined as the prototypical category (Experiment 1) or the semantic category (Experiment 2). The results showed that the prototype-based CAT was pre-activated 300 ms prior to the target, whereas the semantics-based CAT was pre-activated 1500 ms before the onset of the target. The difference in the time course of pre-activation between the two CAT types indicates that the category framework can modulate the time course of CAT pre-activation. Additionally, during the attentional selection phase, an overall comparison of the target revealed that a larger N2pc was elicited by the prototype-based CAT than by the semantics-based CAT, suggesting that the prototype-based CAT could capture more attention than the semantics-based CAT. The findings on the difference between the two CAT frameworks in the preparatory and attentional selection phases provide more evidence for categorical information in visual search and extend our understanding of the mechanism of categorical attentional selection.

A CNN Sound Classification Mechanism Using Data Augmentation.

Sound classification has been widely used in many fields. Unlike traditional signal-processing methods, using deep learning technology for sound classification is one of the most feasible and effective methods. However, limited by the quality of the training dataset, such as cost and resource constraints, data imbalance, and data annotation issues, the classification performance is affected. Therefore, we propose a sound classification mechanism based on convolutional neural networks and use the sound feature extraction method of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) to convert sound signals into spectrograms. Spectrograms are suitable as input for CNN models. To provide the function of data augmentation, we can increase the number of spectrograms by setting the number of triangular bandpass filters. The experimental results show that there are 50 semantic categories in the ESC-50 dataset, the types are complex, and the amount of data is insufficient, resulting in a classification accuracy of only 63%. When using the proposed data augmentation method (K = 5), the accuracy is effectively increased to 97%. Furthermore, in the UrbanSound8K dataset, the amount of data is sufficient, so the classification accuracy can reach 90%, and the classification accuracy can be slightly increased to 92% via data augmentation. However, when only 50% of the training dataset is used, along with data augmentation, the establishment of the training model can be accelerated, and the classification accuracy can reach 91%.

Am I Crossing a Border? Spatial Regionalization and Route Choice Depends on Perceived Landmark Categorization

ABSTRACT We investigated the role of semantic similarities of place names in forming larger regions. The environment´s place names allowed two alternative semantic categorizations corresponding to two equally valid regionalizations. In a priming phase, participants were biased to one or the other categorization scheme. Region perception was assessed by having participants choose between two equidistant routes crossing different numbers of region boundaries. Participants selected routes with a lower number of region crossings according to the primed categorization in 61% of all cases. The results show that perceived semantic similarity of place names affects route choice and the formation of spatial regions.

Word usage as measured by parental checklists and language samples: trends, comparisons, and implications.

Although parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young children's lexicon size, they can also be used to track children's acquisition of individual words. Word-level data can be used to identify the checklist words most and least commonly employed across groups of children. Like parent-completed vocabulary checklists, samples of spontaneous language use collected from multiple children can also generate measures of word commonality, concerned with the numbers of children producing individual words. To our knowledge, comparisons of word usage as determined by parental checklist and language sample data obtained in parallel from the same children have not been carried out. Also scarce in the empirical literature are item-level analyses of early bilingual lexicons that explore word usage across two emerging languages. The present study aimed to contribute toward bridging both gaps through the analysis of data generated by a bilingual Maltese-English adaptation of the vocabulary checklist of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI: WS) and spontaneous language samples for the same children. An additional objective was to derive implications for revising the current version of the vocabulary checklist, in preparation for its eventual standardization. For 44 Maltese children aged 12, 18, 24, and 30 months, the words reported by their main caregivers on the vocabulary checklist were identified, along with their respective semantic categories. For the same children, 20-min language samples obtained during free play with the caregiver were transcribed orthographically. Words identified through parental report and language sampling were analyzed for commonality, i.e., the number of children producing each word. Comparison of the word usage patterns obtained through both methods indicated differences in the words most commonly sampled and those most commonly reported, particularly in relation to grammatical categories. Notwithstanding these differences, positive and significant correlations emerged when considering all grammatical categories and languages across commonality levels. The commonality scores based on parental checklist data have implications for reconsidering the length and language balance of the Maltese-English adaptation of the CDI: WS vocabulary checklist. Sampled word usage patterns can contribute additional objectivity in updating the reporting instrument in preparation for its eventual standardization.

Meaning definitions through lexical (macro) functions: Old English quantity, size and rank

The aim of this article is to complete and systematize affixal meaning definitions by examining the Old English derived nominal and adjectival lexicon from a structural-functional framework. The main dictionaries of reference in this language have proven to contribute limited affixal information; besides, one and the same dictionary organizes its affixal entries quite dissimilarly both formally and content-wise. Given this background, the present work offers an insight into the derived lexicon and suggests more accurate definitions based on an approach that explains form and meaning associations in terms of lexical functions and macrofunctions. The data of analysis have been retrieved from the lexical database of Old English Nerthus, which has supplied the inventory of affixes and of affixed nouns and adjectives performing a lexical function belonging to the semantic categories quantity, size or rank, which apply whenever an entity or a property experience an increase or a decrease in quantity, quality or status respectively. Each affix is defined conforming to the different meanings it conveys, the source and target categories involved in the derivation process and the predicates that fit the rule in each case. An approach based on form and meaning associations in the definition of affixal meaning has demonstrated to have major implications not only in the field of lexicology but also of lexicography inasmuch as it permits to revise, complete and enhance dictionary entries and gain systematicity in the manner the information is rendered.

Application of the Semantic Fluency Test in the Screening of Mandarin-Chinese-Speaking Older Adults with Mild Dementia of the Alzheimer Type.

Semantic fluency tests have been widely used as a screening test for dementia of Alzheimer type. However, few studies have explored the application of semantic fluency tests in Mandarin Chinese speakers. This study aimed to explore the feasibility of using different semantic fluency test categories to distinguish between older adults without cognitive impairments and those with dementia of Alzheimer type in Taiwan. A total of 58 healthy older adults and 54 individuals with dementia of Alzheimer type were recruited. Semantic categories of "animals", "fruits", "vegetables", "birds", "means of transportations" and "musical instruments" were administered to participants. The scores from two groups of participants for each category were analyzed. Significant differences in the test scores of each category between two groups of participants were found. The results also revealed that the variables related to whether the participant had dementia, gender, age, and years of schooling significantly influenced the semantic fluency scores for each category. Among all the demographic characteristic of participants, the diagnosis of dementia was the most determining factor. Furthermore, this study proposed optimal cutoff points and calculated the AUC for various test durations (i.e., 30 s, 45 s and 60 s) and semantic categories in the semantic fluency test, which may serve as a reference that would help clinical personnel distinguish between older adults without cognitive impairments and those with dementia of Alzheimer type in Taiwan.

INTERTEXTUALITY IN MEDIA TEXTS

The article highlights one of the semantic text categories, intertextuality, with the aim of specifying precedent texts and means of their functioning in the media text. Media texts are selected in order to show how intertextuality is formed in different functional-semantic types of speech – narration, description and argumentation. Figures that introduce precedent texts can be considered as markers of intertextuality, which include the media text header complex, epigraph, quotation, allusion and visualized intertextuality.

Turn-taking in free-play interactions: A cross-sectional study from 3 to 5 years

Turn-transition timing in childhood has been examined by measuring response latency – that aggregates gap and overlap duration – in turn-transitions contingent to specific semantic categories. This contrasts with studies in infancy where the whole spectrum of temporal contingent vocalizations are examined, and gap and overlap duration is analyzed independently. We propose using the latter approach to investigate the continuities between infancy and childhood. In a cross-sectional design, we analyzed the vocalizations of 44 mother-child free-play interactions, ranging from three to five years of age. Frequency and duration were measured for gaps and overlaps, independently, and as an aggregated measure – floor-transfer offset (FTO). The effects of child's age and direction of turn-transition (child, mother) were assessed using generalized linear mixed modeling for each dependent variable (DV: FTO, gaps, overlaps). Although there was a slight increase in FTO and gap duration across ages, no significant effect of age was found for any of the DVs. There was an effect of turn-transition direction, for FTO and gap durations, but not for overlap duration. Specifically, mother-to-child turn-transitions produced significantly longer FTO and gap durations than child-to-mother turn-transitions, but had similarly timed overlaps. Results suggest that gaps and overlaps still have different developmental trajectories throughout childhood, and that overlap duration converges to adult standards, at least, by 3-years of age. Methodologically, we demonstrated the relevance of using complementary metrics (FTO, gap, overlap) to understand the developmental trajectories of turn-taking, and that examining all temporally contingent vocalizations can provide a valid and more inclusive measure of turn-transition duration in childhood.