Active Voice Sentences Research Articles

E-C Translation Strategies for Long and Complex Sentences in Evidence-based Medicine Texts

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the translation strategies for long complex sentences (LCS) found in Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) texts. The study identifies four main approaches to translating such sentences in English-to-Chinese (E-C) EBM translation. Firstly, relative words can either be omitted or replaced with antecedents or pronouns. Secondly, parallel structures can be preserved in the translated sentence or rendered as compound-complex sentences in Chinese. Thirdly, nominalization structures can be transformed into equivalent clauses in Chinese. Finally, passive voice structures can be translated as passive voice sentences in Chinese or transformed into active voice sentences. The authors hope that these translation strategies will serve as valuable references for other translators.

Incremental sentence processing is guided by a preference for agents: EEG evidence from Basque

ABSTRACTComprehenders across languages tend to interpret role-ambiguous arguments as the subject or the agent of a sentence during parsing. However, the evidence for such a subject/agent preference rests on the comprehension of transitive, active-voice sentences where agents/subjects canonically precede patients/objects. The evidence is thus potentially confounded by the canonical order of arguments. Transitive sentence stimuli additionally conflate the semantic agent role and the syntactic subject function. We resolve these two confounds in an experiment on the comprehension of intransitive sentences in Basque. When exposed to sentence-initial role-ambiguous arguments, comprehenders preferentially interpreted these as agents and had to revise their interpretation when the verb disambiguated to patient-initial readings. The revision was reflected in an N400 component in ERPs and a decrease in power in the alpha and lower beta bands. This finding suggests that sentence processing is guided by a top-down heuristic to interpret ambiguous arguments as agents, independently of word order and independently of transitivity.

Textual entailment classification using syntactic structures and semantic relations

In this paper, we propose a method exploiting syntactic structure, semantic relations and word embeddings for recognizing textual entailment. The sentence pairs are analyzed using their syntactic structure and categorization of sentences in active voice, sentences in passive voice and sentences holding copular relations. The main syntactic relations such as subject, verb and object are extracted and lemmatized using a lemmatization algorithm based on parts-of-speech. The subject-to-subject, verb-to-verb and object-to-object similarity is identified using enhanced Wordnet semantic relations. Further similarity is analyzed using modifier relation, number relation, nominal modifier relation, compound relation, conjunction relation and negative relation. The experimental evaluation of the method on Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset shows that the accuracy of the method is 1.4% more when compared to the state-of-the-art zero shot domain adaptation methods.

Human Orthopaedic Articles Convey Information Differently than Veterinary Orthopaedic Articles: A Prospective, Cross-Sectional Analysis

AbstractThe objective of this analysis was to compare the length and number of active voice sentences in human orthopaedic articles to veterinary orthopaedic articles. The goal is to provide authors and reviewers with objective, evidence-based guidelines to critically evaluate those two aspects of style of veterinary manuscripts during the writing phase of research and the review process. We used word counts and the percent of active voice sentences of the introduction sections and discussion sections in 15 randomly chosen veterinary orthopaedic clinical trial articles and 15 randomly chosen human orthopaedic clinical trial articles. Veterinary introduction sections were on average 193 words longer than human introduction sections (p = 0.001). Veterinary discussion sections were on average 370 words longer than human discussion sections. Veterinary introduction sections had on average 14.4 percent fewer active voice sentences than human introduction sections (p = 0.003). Veterinary discussion sections had on average 8.3 percent fewer active voice sentences than human discussion sections. Our conclusion is that human articles are written in a different style from veterinary clinical trial articles, which could be written with fewer words and more active sentences.

The submissive silence of others: Examining definitions of shared decision making

ObjectiveOur aim was to use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the most widely cited definitions of shared decision making so that we can evaluate how language is used to position participants. Based on our conceptual understanding, we presumed that shared decision making involves acts of communication where processes are collaborative. MethodsWe used a CDA lens to closely examine the phrases, semantics, syntax, implied functions, and the social actions proposed in SDM definition texts. We conducted a systematic search guided by the PRISMA guidelines, to identify the most widely cited definitions of SDM. ResultsA total of 72 studies met our inclusion criteria. While SDM is not consistently defined, it was striking to find that clinicians are constructed as active whereas patients were viewed to be passive participants. The definitions construct SDM to be a gift that the clinician has the power to offer, and the relationship in the definitions appears asymmetric, in which only one party seems to speak. ConclusionsThe SDM definitions examined convey a process characterized by a clinician who speaks, while a patient mostly listens, and is invited to contribute. An alternative definition might be constructed through references to joint activity via sentences in active voice. Practice implicationsClinicians may be influenced by definitions of SDM that reinforce the positionality of active speaker versus passive recipient. Clearer definitions that address the constructs of power and roles may help support the implementation of SDM.

Principles for Writing about Quantitative Research.

Principles for Writing about Quantitative Research.

The Humble Sentence

The Humble Sentence

Nurse Author: Who Me? Yes, You!

Potential nurse authors may find writing a challenge, including managing the publication process from getting started through submission to revision of the work and its acceptance. This special article presents strategies to help inexperienced writers develop and hone skills for journal publication. Tips discussed here that may lead to manuscript acceptance include selecting a topic of interest, using motivational self-talk approaches and structuring time to write, choosing coauthors, targeting a journal for submission, writing strong sentences in active voice, developing a structured abstract, using correct citation and reference formats, understanding reviews and resubmitting the manuscript, and keeping momentum to produce continued writing results. Practical writing hints are also suggested for inexperienced writers. These strategies can help guide nurse writers in planning, navigating the system, and finding success as a published author.

Stylistic features of case reports as a genre of medical discourse

BackgroundThe present paper discusses the lexical and grammatical peculiarities of English language medical case reports, taking into account their communicative purposes and intentions.MethodsThe objective of the research is to clarify the principal mechanisms of producing an effective English language medical case report and thus to provide recommendations and guidelines for medical professionals who will deal with this genre. The analysis of medical case reports will largely focus on the most significant linguistic peculiarities, such as the use of active and passive voice, the choice of particular verb tenses, and pronouns. The selected medical case reports will be considered using methods of lexico-grammatical analysis, quantitative examination, and contextual, structural, narrative, and stylistic analyses.ResultsThe research revealed a range of important stylistic features of medical case reports which markedly distinguish them from other genres of medical scientific writing: educational and instructive intentions, conciseness and brevity, direct and personal tone, and material presented in a narrative style. The present research has shown that the communicative strategies of the analyzed discourse, mentioned immediately above, are effectively implemented by means of specific lexical units and grammatical structures: the dominance of active voice sentences, past simple tense, personal pronouns, and modal verbs. The research has also detected the occasional use of the present perfect, present simple, and future simple tenses and passive voice which also serve particular communicative purposes of medical case reports.ConclusionsMedical case reports possess a range of unique characteristics which differ from those of research articles and other scientific genres within the framework of written medical discourse. It is to be emphasized that it is highly important for medical professionals to master the major stylistic principles and communicative intentions of medical case report as a genre in order to share their findings with fellow researchers from all over the world. Hence, in the process of training future medical researchers, the analysis of the basic mechanisms of writing a medical case report should be an integral part of the curricula in English for Specific Purposes at universities.

Summing up the Sentences in Active Voice without Passive Counterparts

Some active English sentences can express passive implicature and they have no passive counterparts. In what cases can’t they convert into passive voice (or have no passive counterparts)? The paper will make a study on the problem from four various cases of active sentences without passive counterparts. By analyzing the four cases, the author draws a conclusion that the variety in English voice shows the tendency of the linguistic phenomenon of active voice taking the place of passivisation.

How Do People Construct Logical Form During Language Comprehension?

How do people interpret ambiguous sentences containing more than one quantifier, such as Every kid climbed a tree? We report four sentence-picture matching experiments that used priming to investigate whether comprehenders construct logical-form representations during processing. Experiment 1 investigated priming in active-voice sentences containing transitive verbs and found priming effects of quantifier-scope relations. Experiment 2 demonstrated priming effects when prime sentences were in the passive voice (e.g., A tree was climbed by every kid) and target sentences were in the active voice. Experiment 3 used prime sentences containing existentially quantified agents and universally quantified patients (e.g., A kid climbed every tree) and found no priming effects. Experiment 4 showed no priming effects when prime sentences contained plural nouns but no quantifiers (e.g., Kids like to climb trees), thus calling into question a visual-priming account of our priming effects. Our findings suggest that people construct logical-form representations, and they do so after constructing meaning-based representations involving quantifiers and thematic-role information.

Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers.

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice sentences. Following 10 story sessions, children's production and comprehension of passives were assessed. Intervention type affected performance--children who heard stories with passive sentences produced more passive constructions (and with fewer mistakes) and showed higher comprehension scores than children who heard stories with active sentences. Theoretical implications of these results for the understanding of the nature of syntactic skills and practical implications for the development of preschool materials are discussed.

The Informed Consent Form: Document Development and Evaluation

The informed consent process can be viewed as a sales presentation, with the consent form serving as the written advertisement for the drug research. So viewed, drug companies can use basic document design, layout and typography principles from advertising, as well as strategies from the “plain English” movement both to improve recruiting strategies and enhance participant understanding.This article evaluated 12 consent forms for investigational drug studies submitted to a Minnesota hospital institutional review board. Consent form text characteristics were compared to recommendations from the National Cancer Institute. Computer analyses judged the consent forms as difficult to read at a grade 13 to 14 reading level; forms included too many uncommon words, too many words per sentence, and too few active voice sentences, giving a “poor” overall style rating. The 12 forms did not always meet good principles of document design in terms of typeface, paragraph justification, and words per line. Several strateg...

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Grammatical Morphology in Spanish- and English-Speaking Agrammatic Patients

To account for cross-linguistic differences in agrammatism, Bates and her colleagues have employed the Competition Model, proposing that the cue validity and cue costs of a grammatical morpheme in a particular language will directly affect how agrammatism is manifested. Using Goodglass et al.'s (1993) Morphosyntax Battery in English and a translated version in Spanish, we analyzed the use of equivalent grammatical structures in production and comprehension by agrammatic speakers of the two languages. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that the relative order of difficulty in both production and comprehension of various grammatical morphemes was the same for both Spanish- and English-speaking agrammatic patients, with two exceptions: (1) the Spanish-speaking agrammatics were relatively better at producing subject-verb agreement, and (2) the Spanish speakers were significantly worse at comprehending both active and passive voice sentences. The Competition Model can explain the performance differences regarding subject-verb agreement and comprehension of active voice sentences, but it cannot account for the differences seen in comprehending passive voice sentences.

Comprehension of reversible sentences in "agrammatism": a meta-analysis.

The functional source(s) of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible active and passive sentences was investigated in a meta-analysis of published sentence/picture matching data from patients with agrammatic production. The analysis revealed approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns of performance on active and passive voice sentences relative to what would be expected by chance: both structures comprehended better than chance; both structures comprehended no better than chance; active voice sentences comprehended better than chance, while passive voice sentences were comprehended at levels no better than (or worse than) chance. These results are in conflict with explanations of aphasic sentence comprehension failure in which a single pattern of relative performance on active and passive voice structures is asserted to be characteristic of the comprehension of all agrammatic speakers. They also highlight the difficulty of identifying any single causal factor to account for sentence comprehension failure in patients with "agrammatic" sentence production. Results are interpreted with regard to the role of data from aphasic patients in the testing of hypotheses about the organization of normal language processes.

Sentence comprehension strategies in specifically language impaired children.

ABSTRACTThis study investigated sentence comprehension and the use of sentence comprehension strategies by specifically language impaired children. Eleven specifically language impaired (SLI) children (aged 4;0 to 6;0), chosen according to strict criteria, were compared with eleven children matched on chronological age and eleven language controls matched on the receptive scores from the Reynell Developmental Language Scale and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale. Subjects acted out active and passive voice sentences that had either a positive or negative semantic bias or were unbiased semantically. The SLI children performed at a signficantly lower level than both the age and language control subjects. They relied more heavily on semantic cues than the language control children and all eleven consistently applied a ‘probable event strategy’. Word order responses that took the first noun to be the actor were used with equal frequency by SLI children and language controls. However, these responses were used less discriminately by the SLI children than the language controls who applied them more frequently to active voice sentences than to passives. The results suggest that the SLI children primarily based their interpretation on semantic expectations or the sequence of content words and relied little on syntactic information.

Decrements in logical reasoning performance under conditions of sleep loss and physical exercise: the factor of sentence complexity.

Baddeley's Logical Reasoning Test was used in a series of Sustained Operations (SUSOP) studies involving 100 US Marine Corps enlisted subjects, to assess the effects of sleep loss and long-term physical exercise on the ability to process complex information. The percent correct answers to the eight Logical Reasoning sentence types involving different voice (active vs passive), use of negatives, and outcome (true vs false) were analyzed over three days across three levels of exercise and rest conditions in the seven studies. A multivariate analysis of variance indicated no differences on the baseline day among the seven studies. Analyses on the baseline day and throughout the next two continuous workdays (CWs) showed consistently higher percent correct for the actively worded than for the passively worded sentences. The sleep loss over the two CWs resulted in a significant decrease in percent correct for the statements which had active wording. Sleep loss had no effect on statements with passive wording. There were no differences in comprehension between groups which had different rest conditions (no rest, 3- or 4-hr. nap, 8-hr. sleep) between the two CWs for any of the sentences; and there was no recovery from prerest to postrest. Fatigue due to exercise during either CW had no effect on comprehension for any of the sentence types. The sleep loss effects on comprehension seem due to a lessening of the attention given to those more simple sentences in active voice, whereas increased arousal may have been elicited by the more complex sentences in passive voice. The increased attention to the passive statements may have overcome the effects of sleep loss. The present study shows the usefulness of analyzing responses to the logical reasoning test by sentence complexity for indicating selective cognitive changes in the processing of information.

Children's hypotheses about the animacy of actor and object nouns

This experiment investigated whether 3 and 4 year old children show systematic preferences for animate or inanimate nouns to function as actors and objects of simple active and passive voice sentences. The children had to choose a suitable referent for a nonsense word used in a sentence. They made their selection from an array of toys, the names of which were either animate or inanimate nouns. The children were divided into two groups according to their performance on a pretest of their comprehension of passive voice sentences. Children who did not understand the passive on the pretest showed a strong preference for an animate first noun and inanimate second noun regardless of sentence voice. Children who understood the passive showed this preference only on active voice sentences. These results suggest a relationship between the child's syntactic knowledge and semantic expectations.

Effects of selected linguistic variables on apraxia of speech.

Ten adults with apraxia of speech responded to sentences of an article (pronoun) + noun + verb + article (pronoun) + noun design. Each sentence was presented and then re-presented with the noun in Noun Phrase 1 (NP1) or Noun Phrase 2 (NP2) omitted. The subjects' task was to orally produce the omitted word. Sentences were either active or passive and the omitted noun was a concrete, abstract, or nonsense word. Results revealed significantly more errors in NP1 than NP2, more errors on nonsense and abstract nouns than on concrete nouns, and more errors on passive than on active voice sentences. Linguistic bases for these findings are discussed.

THE ACQUISITION OF SENTENCE VOICE AND REVERSIBILITY

Primary grade children were tested for their ability to imitate, comprehend, and produce active and passive sentences and reversible and nonreversible sentences. The results showed that children are able to respond correctly on the imitation task before the comprehension task and to respond correctly on the comprehension task before the production task. Active-voice sentences were correctly responded to more frequently than passive-voice sentences; nonreversible sentences were correctly responded to more frequently than reversible sentences. The effect of sentence voice was found to be stronger than the effect of sentence reversibility. The actual order of dificulty of sentence types was: Nonreversible active < reversible active < nonreversible passive < reversible passive. Errors frequently involved the inversion of actor and acted-upon elements in both reversible and nonreversible sentences.