Sentence Context Research Articles

ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN UNDERSTANDING ENGLISH VIDEO (A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY)

At this time the use of English has become part of modern human communication habits. Almost all existing linguistic aspects also often switch in English as a variation of language use. Even so, the use and understanding of good and correct English is still very necessary to be taught to students so that they have a good understanding of the use of English. One way to practice English comprehension is through the use of English videos. Videos in English provide opportunities for students to understand more broadly how the language is used in everyday life. However, in fact there are still many students who still have difficulty understanding the meaning and use of English sentences when watching English videos. Therefore this study examines students' perceptions of difficulties in understanding the meaning and use of English when watching English videos. The research method used is qualitative through a descriptive approach. The informants in this study consisted of several students who attended English classes by watching English videos. Data obtained through learning observation and interviews. Data were analyzed through data reduction, data display, and conclusions. The results of the study showed that students experienced various difficulties when understanding words or sentences from the English videos they watched, such as the use of foreign vocabulary that they had not encountered before, fast dialogue which made it difficult for students to digest the intent of the video conversation, students experienced obstacles in constructing meaning. and descriptions of scenes making it difficult to understand the context of sentences, lack of understanding of students in connecting vocabulary into an ambiguous sentence, and limitations of students in exploring the storyline of the video shown. To overcome this difficulty problem, English teachers need to provide appropriate teaching solutions so that students can better understand the meaning of English video dialogue so that they can build skills in constructing good and correct student sentence patterns.

ТҮРКОЛОГДОР АЖЫРАТКЫЧ БАЙЛАМТАЛАР, АЛАРДЫН СТРУКТУРАСЫ, СЕМАНТИКАСЫ ЖАНА КОЛДОНУЛУШУ ТУУРАЛУУ

The article aims to make a comparative-typological analysis of disjunctive conjunctions of the modern Kyrgyz language and their corresponding equivalents in a number of Turkic languages. For this purpose, scientific works in the field of auxiliary parts of speech by such leading Turkologists as Kononov A.N., Shcherbak A.M., Zeynalov F.R, Shukurov A.J., Sultanbaeva H.V., Molgazharov K.K. and others were thoroughly studied and analyzed. Thus, the article provides a comparative analysis of disjunctive conjunctions of the modern Kyrgyz language with similar conjunctions in some Turkic languages. As a result, phonetic features of disjunctive conjunctions, frequency of their use, their semantics in the sentence, in general their similarities and differences are revealed according to their area of distribution. Besides, the peculiarities of using disjunctive conjunctions of Kyrgyz language in different contexts of sentences, as well as terminological inconsistency and their reasons are described in detail. For example, it can be noted that in the modern Kyrgyz language among the conjuctions analyzed in the article, je (in Russian: ili (or)) is the most actively used in the phonetic form. In addition, it is determined that this conjunction is mainly used to connect similar parts of a sentence, as well as to connect simple sentences in the system of complex sentences. The article also notes that Kyrgyz dialectologists in their works with the use of relevant examples have scientifically substantiated that the southern dialect of the Kyrgyz language uses a variety of phonetic form of this conjunction that is not characteristic for the standard language.

DIRECTIONAL MOTION VERB CONSTRUCTION IN MADURESE LANGUAGE: A STUDY OF LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY

Semantically, the construction of directional motion verbs has two significant points: manner of motion, which refers to the way the motion is performed, and path, which conveys the directional meaning. In the context of verbal construction with directional motion, the path component can be constructed through directional verbs or prepositional phrases as markers of the goal. Based on these patterns, Talmy (1975) and Slobin (2006) classified languages into three frameworks: verb-framed languages, satellite-framed languages, and equipollent-framed languages. This research aims to describe the construction of direct motion verb in Madurese language and critically analyze the position of Madurese as an Austronesian language based on the classification proposed by Talmy and Slobin. Using a descriptive-qualitative approach, this study collects primary data from native Madurese speakers, and the secondary data from article journal related to Madurese language as comparison. In conclusion, Madurese language can be categorized as a verb-framed language overall. Based on the analysis, there are several directional verbs in Madurese that can simultaneously carry meanings consistent with prepositional phrases, although in other sentence contexts, they may exhibit different semantic and syntactic patterns. Furthermore, Madurese tends to fall into the verb-framed language category as it lacks a resultative-adjective pattern, and its directional verbs are not main verbs but rather open-class adjuncts.

The development of using function word "zài" to learn novel verbs in young Mandarin speakers.

The present research examined whether Mandarin-speaking children could use function words to learn novel verbs and recognize verbs in a new sentential context. In Experiment 1, 3- to 6-year-old children were taught two novel verbs supported by the verb marker "zài." The 5- and 6-year-old children successfully used the function word "zài" to learn novel verbs, but the 3- and 4-year-olds failed to interpret the novel words as verbs. In Experiment 2 and 3, the children had to recognize the newly learned verbs in new sentences containing a different function word (a different verb-biased marker "le" or a non-verb-biased marker "shì"). Results showed that the 5-year-old children could recognize the newly learned verbs with another verb-biased marker "le," but only the 6-year-old children could recognize the newly learned verbs with the non-verb-biased marker "shì." The study verified that Mandarin-speaking children could use the function word "zài" to determine a novel word as a verb and revealed that such an ability appeared between the ages of 4 and 5 years. In addition, the ability to extend a newly learned verb across different morphosyntactic markers is developed in 5- to 6-year-olds.

Effect of contextual diversity on word recognition in different semantic contexts.

Efficient word recognition is important to facilitate reading comprehension. Two important factors influence word recognition-word frequency (WF) and contextual diversity (CD)-but studies have not reached consistent conclusions on their role. Based on previous studies, the present study strictly controlled the anticipation of sentence context on target words. In the context of the semantic incongruence of Chinese sentences-that is, when the context is equivalent and low in anticipation of the target noun-CD effects were found on late processing indicators of the eye movement data of parafoveal words, and the CD feature of parafoveal words led to a significant parafoveal-on-foveal effect. However, none of these results were found in the semantically reasonable (semantic congruence) context. The results suggested that high CD words are better at adapting to unexposed or learned contexts, which was not the case for high WF words.

Verum in Xhosa and Zulu (Nguni)

Abstract In this paper we investigate how verum is realized in Xhosa and Zulu, two Southern Bantu languages belonging to the Nguni group. The data for our study were collected through interviews with native speakers who were prompted to produce sentences in discourse contexts that typically license utterances with verum. We found that the main grammatical strategy for the expression of verum in Xhosa and Zulu involves the removal of phrasal constituents from the focus domain (the VP). This leaves the verb as the sole remaining focus host, and allows auxiliary features of the verb, such as polarity, to be marked as focus. Consequently, we analyse verum in Xhosa and Zulu as polarity focus, which is expressed indirectly, via the backgrounding of potentially focusable phrasal material. We also examined the prosodic properties of verum utterances in Xhosa. Based on findings from previous studies on Nguni intonation, we expected to observe lengthening of the penultimate vowels of phrase-final verbs and utterance-final words in our data. However, contrary to expectation, we did not find evidence of penultimate vowel lengthening in Xhosa sentences with verum, a (preliminary) result which suggests that the expression of verum may have an effect on prosody in Nguni languages.

Putting language switching in context: Effects of sentence context and interlocutors on bilingual switching.

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost associated with it. Sixty Bulgarian-English bilinguals named pictures in their language of choice without any context, in a sentence context, and in interaction with another (recorded) bilingual. Switching frequency was lower, and costs higher, when bilinguals switched languages with context than without context. This suggests switching costs were not an artifact of tasks without context. Furthermore, both switching frequency and costs correlated across the tasks. In addition, we examined the potential influence of sentence context and the conversation partner. Predictability in sentence context has previously been argued to reduce language competition, which in turn could influence switching. We therefore compared sentences with a predictable or unpredictable target word. As hypothesized, bilinguals were less likely to switch languages when a word was predictable in its sentence context, potentially because words in the other language were less active. The conversation partner's overall switching behaviour had little impact on a bilingual's general switching rate, showing relatively low global alignment. However, local alignment was observed as switching was influenced by the partner's switching in the immediately preceding utterance. Together, these findings show that while production tasks without context can reliably measure switching costs, studying effects of context is necessary to better capture a bilingual's language-switching behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic and syntactic processing of emojis in sentential intermediate positions.

The current study investigated the neuro mechanisms of emoji processing as sentence predicate in written context. In the hybrid textuality which is more cognitively engaging, emojis in sentential intermediate positions were designed as either congruent or incongruent to the context. The results showed that incongruent words led to a robust N400 effect, while incongruent emojis only elicited the P600 effect. It implies that semantics and syntax of words can be separated while those of emojis seem to be integrated together. That is, when the meaning of the emoji is violated to the sentential context, its grammatical role cannot be well interpreted, especially when it is used as a key grammatical component in a sentence, such as the predicate. Thus, it shows that even though the meaning of emojis can be interpreted by readers, their syntactic and semantic functions cannot be clearly separated. In comparison with word processing, the larger amplitude with emojis in the time window of 350-500ms shows more cognitive efforts in emoji semantic processing, possibly arising from the switch of modalities within the visual channel, that is, the multimodal cognitive load.

Sentence completion in progressive supranuclear palsy following transcranial direct current stimulation

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is an atypical Parkinsonian disorder which results in deterioration of motor and cognitive skills, including language disorders such as impaired word retrieval. While there is evidence of successful use of tDCS to improve word fluency in PSP, little is known about the effectiveness of brain stimulation for word retrieval in sentence context. Therefore, we investigated whether tDCS reduces sentence completion time in PSP patients. In this sham-controlled, triple-blinded crossover study, anodal tDCS (atDCS) was applied over the left Broca’s area at 2 mA for 20 min (n = 23). In contrast to patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA), also an atypical Parkinsonian disorder, and healthy elderlies, sentence completion improved in PSP patients when tDCS was applied. The improvement in word fluency reported in previous studies using other electrode positions was not replicated. By using atDCS of the left Broca’s area, we were able to demonstrate a difference between the two movement disorders. The obtained insight could be helpful to improve language therapy of these disorders.

Mental Simulations and Action Language Are Impaired in Individuals with Aphantasia.

Action reading is thought to engage motor simulations, such as those involved during the generation of mental motor images. These simulations would yield modulations in activity of motor-related cortical regions and contribute to action language comprehension. To test these ideas, we measured corticospinal excitability during action reading, and reading comprehension ability, in individuals with normal and impaired imagery (i.e., phantasia and aphantasia, respectively). Thirty-four participants (17 phantasic and 17 aphantasic) were asked to read manual action sentences. By means of TMS, we triggered motor-evoked potentials in the target right index finger. Motor-evoked potential amplitude, a marker of corticospinal excitability, increased during action reading relative to rest for phantasic individuals, but not for aphantasic individuals. This result provides neurophysiological evidence that individuals living with aphantasia present a real neurophysiological deficit in motor system engagement during action reading. Furthermore, deep-level reading comprehension ability was impaired in individuals with aphantasia, who had difficulty selecting words that best fit the context of sentences. Altogether, these findings support the idea that motor simulations, along with the activation within the motor system, contribute to action language comprehension.

Morality Tale or Attempt at Reportage? Yet Another Look at Peter von Dusburg’s Description of the Prussian Pagan Religion

The story by the Teutonic Order chronicler Peter von Dusburg about the Prussian pagan priest Criwe and his sanctuary Romowe has for centuries provoked historiographical arguments about the nature of the Baltic pagan religion and the interpretation of Medieval chronicle sources relating to the Balts. This article focuses on an interpretation of Dusburg’s text, without attempting to decide on the reality of ancient pagan religious practice. Through a ‘close reading’ approach to actual words and the contexts of sentences that are often extracted and used out of context, the article argues against either dismissing the passage as an invented moral exemplum or accepting it literally. A speculative explanation for Dusburg’s portrayal of the pagan priest Criwe as a pope is presented for consideration. Moreover, through a reminder of the often-neglected context of the Criwe passage in book III of the chronicle, this article suggests an overarching aim for Dusburg’s portrayal of the Old Prussians, which is not as the ‘avatar of evil’ often proposed in historiography, but rather as simple peoples who should be left to the Teutonic Order and not to the Franciscans favoured at that time by Grand Duke Gediminas of Lithuania. To aid readers, the article contains the whole Latin passage (rather than the extracts often quoted), and an English translation by Rasa Mažeika.

Improving sentiment classification using a RoBERTa-based hybrid model.

Several attempts have been made to enhance text-based sentiment analysis's performance. The classifiers and word embedding models have been among the most prominent attempts. This work aims to develop a hybrid deep learning approach that combines the advantages of transformer models and sequence models with the elimination of sequence models' shortcomings. In this paper, we present a hybrid model based on the transformer model and deep learning models to enhance sentiment classification process. Robustly optimized BERT (RoBERTa) was selected for the representative vectors of the input sentences and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model in conjunction with the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model was used to improve the suggested model's ability to comprehend the semantics and context of each input sentence. We tested the proposed model with two datasets with different topics. The first dataset is a Twitter review of US airlines and the second is the IMDb movie reviews dataset. We propose using word embeddings in conjunction with the SMOTE technique to overcome the challenge of imbalanced classes of the Twitter dataset. With an accuracy of 96.28% on the IMDb reviews dataset and 94.2% on the Twitter reviews dataset, the hybrid model that has been suggested outperforms the standard methods. It is clear from these results that the proposed hybrid RoBERTa-(CNN+ LSTM) method is an effective model in sentiment classification.

ASPECT ORIENTED SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF USER TEXT MESSAGES

Aspect-oriented sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in understanding users' opinions and sentiments towards specific product or service features. This study investigates intelligent algorithms for aspect-oriented tone analysis of user text messages, focusing on smartphone reviews as a case study. The study includes data collection and preprocessing, studying the methods and performance of models for aspect extraction and tone analysis. The performance of these models was compared on test datasets containing customer reviews. For aspect extraction, we combine cross-lingual syntactic analysis with topic models to improve accuracy over the combination of Russian-language syntactic analysis and topic models. In particular, the BERT transformer-based model, BER Topic, shows high performance in aspect detection due to its ability to understand the context in sentences. In the sentiment analysis task, the RuBERT-tiny model based on the BERT transformer outperforms the others, showing higher accuracy in sentiment classification in smartphone reviews. This study provides valuable insights into aspect-oriented tonality analysis, emphasizing the importance of selecting appropriate methods and approaches. The results provide researchers and practitioners with recommendations for effective aspect-oriented tonality analysis.

Base on contextual phrases with cross-correlation attention for aspect-level sentiment analysis

In recent years, sentiment analysis has emerged as a prominent area of research within the field of natural language processing. Particularly, aspect-level sentiment classification has gained significant attention for its focus on discerning and analyzing sentiment expressed towards specific aspects within sentences. Existing methods primarily rely on extracting keywords from sentence contexts to determine sentiment polarity, yielding satisfactory results. However, a notable limitation of these approaches is their inability to consider the crucial information contained within key phrases in sentences, which plays a vital role in sentiment analysis. To address this limitation, we propose a novel deformable convolutional network model designed to leverage the power of phrases for aspect-level sentiment analysis. By utilizing deformable convolutions with adaptive receptive fields, our model effectively extracts phrase representations at various contextual distances. Furthermore, a cross-correlation attention mechanism is incorporated to capture interdependencies between phrases and words in the context. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive evaluations across widely used datasets, demonstrating the promising performance of our model in enhancing sentiment classification tasks. Our model outperforms the model based on CNN, which also leverages phrase extraction, by improving accuracy by 1.71%, 2.5%, and 1.89%, respectively, on the Laptop, Restaurant, and Twitter datasets. Additionally, it surpasses the performance of the latest models.

An eye on semantics: a study on the influence of concreteness and predictability on early fixation durations

ABSTRACT We used eye-tracking during natural reading to study how semantic control and representation mechanisms interact for the successful comprehension of sentences, by manipulating sentence context and single-word meaning. Specifically, we examined whether a word’s semantic characteristic (concreteness) affects first fixation and gaze durations (FFDs and GDs) and whether it interacts with the predictability of a word. We used a linear mixed effects model including several possible psycholinguistic covariates. We found a small but reliable main effect of concreteness and replicated a predictability effect on FFDs, but we found no interaction between the two. The results parallel previous findings of additive effects of predictability (context) and frequency (lexical level) in fixation times. Our findings suggest that the semantics of a word and the context created by the preceding words additively influence early stages of word processing in natural sentence reading.

On a seeming synonymy on the example of falsehood verbs

This article aims to identify the mechanisms determining a seeming synonymy. It is based on the observation of sentence contexts containing falsehood verbs. The first part of this article indicates the semantic differences occurring between four language units: wprowadzić [kogoś] w błąd (to mislead [someone]), oszukać [kogoś] (to deceive [someone]), zwieść [kogoś] (to delude [someone]), and okłamać [kogoś] (to lie [to someone]). It is followed by the discussion of the sentence contexts in the form of the conditional mood with various combinations of seeming synonyms. The conclusion coming from the analysis is that semantic opposiƟtions are neutralised due to specific characteristics of the syntactic context and the mechanism of “silent denial” as described by A. Bogusławski (2003, 2021). The necessary condiƟtion for neutralisation to occur is preserving the identity of the themes of the characteristics included in the contents of the verbs. Contextual synonymy will not arise if any of the predicates included in the conditional mood fails to characterise the theme in a given respect

Semantic dementia in Arabic: An assessment of Arabic word reading within sentences

Introduction Language impairments have not yet been fully explored in native Arabic speakers with semantic dementia (SD). The aim of this paper is to describe the impairments in language in two Saudi Arabians with SD and to determine if their word reading within a sentence context would result in incorrect responses. Methods Two patients with semantic dementia (one with right > left and the other with left > right temporal involvement) underwent a reading assessment in Arabic. Patients were asked to read a series of words within a sentence context in which the correct reading of the word was dependent on the context of the sentence. Thirty-four sentences were designed in which 17 Arabic homographs were used. The same homograph would occur in two separate sentences, in which the pronunciation and meaning would differ between sentences. Patients were also assessed using five other sentences that contained irregular pronouns of high frequency. Eighteen healthy controls were used as reference. Results Both patients made errors in reading the target Arabic homographs; this was more pronounced in the patient with left > right variant of SD. The patient with right > left variant of SD also suffered from prosopagnosia. Conclusion Correct reading of Arabic words within the sentence context may be impaired from semantic language impairments in semantic dementia. The role of comprehension in the correct reading of words in Arabic sentences is important.

The effect of inhibitory control and language proficiency on intra-sentential switching costs in reading comprehension

Based on the inhibition account and activation account, inhibitory control and language proficiency play big roles on language control mechanisms underlying language switching respectively. But it is still debatable whether inhibitory control and language proficiency play roles in sentential context during bilingual language comprehension, and how and when they work if they both do. The present study examined the specific roles of language proficiency and inhibitory control on modulating intra-sentential switching costs in Chinese-English bilinguals using self-paced reading task. Results indicated that language proficiency and switching direction modulated intra-sentential switching costs significantly. Switching costs were larger when switching into L1 than into L2 for the first two code-switched words due to inhibitory effect, but more costly switching into L2 than into L1 since the third code-switched words owing to the effect of relative language proficiency. During bilingual language processing, inhibition and activation of languages shaped a dynamic interplay of complementary language control processes. Specifically, inhibitory control and language proficiency work as a dynamic continuum in language switching at sentence level. Switching into L1 requires the release of inhibition to L1, but switching into L2 asks the activation and access of L2. The interaction effects of language proficiency and inhibitory control influenced the exertion and components of inhibition. This study reconciled the independent roles of language proficiency and inhibitory control on language switching and constructed a new continuum based on language proficiency.

18 Automatically calculated lexical and sentential context features of connected speech predict cognitive impairment

Objective:Early detection is critical to the effective management of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other forms of dementia. Existing screening assessments are often costly, require substantial expertise to administer, and may be insensitive to mild changes in cognition. A promising alternative is automatically measuring features of connected speech (c.f., Ostrand & Gunstad, 2021, Journal Geriatric Psych & Neurol) to predict impairment. Here, we built on prior work examining how well speech features predicted cognitive impairment. Unique to the current work, we attempted to capture more holistic effects of cognitive impairment by examining the relevance of linguistic features that measure sentential or discourse context properties of speech, including the context in which filler words (e.g., um) occur, and the predictability of individual words within their sentence context, computed from a large computational language model (GPT-2).Participants and Methods:Participants completed the Cookie Theft picture description task, with data available in the DementiaBank corpus (Becker et al., 1994, Arch Neurol). Descriptions that contained at least 50 words (N = 214) were submitted to an automatic feature calculation pipeline written in Python to calculate various part-of-speech counts, lexical diversity metrics, and mean lexical frequency, as well as multiple metrics related to lexical surprisal (i.e., how surprising a word is given its context).Surprisal of individual words was computed using the pre-trained GPT-2 transformer language model (Radford et al., 2019, Comput. Sci.) by computing word probability given the previous 12 words. Multiple linear regression was performed using 17 linguistic features jointly as predictors, and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score as the outcome variable. Simple regressions were calculated between each feature and MMSE scores to examine the predictability of each linguistic feature on cognitive decline.Results:A multiple linear regression model containing all linguistic features plus demographic information (age, sex, education) significantly predicted MMSE scores (Adjusted R2 = 0.41, F20, 193 = 8.37, p < .001), and explained significantly more variance in MMSE scores than did demographic variables alone (F17193 = 6.85, p < .001). Individual predictors that were significantly correlated with MMSE score included: how unexpected an individual’s word choices were, given the preceding context (median surprisal: r = -0.33, p < 0.001; interquartile range: r = 0.18, p < 0.02), mean lexical frequency (r = -0.50, p < .001), and usage of definite articles (r = 0.31, p < 0.001), nouns (r = 0.26, p < .001), and empty words (r = -0.25, p < 0.001).Conclusions:Participants with lower MMSE scores, indicating greater impairment, used more frequent, yet more surprising, words, and produced more empty words and fewer definite articles and nouns. These results suggest that measures of semantic specificity and coherence of speech could be meaningful predictors of cognitive decline, and can be computed automatically from speech transcriptions. The results also provide novel evidence that computational approaches to estimating lexical predictability may have value in predicting the degree of decline, motivating future work in other speech elicitation tasks and differing clinical groups.

Explore the processing unit of L2 Chinese learners in on-line Chinese reading

The present study explored the processing units of high-proficiency second language (L2) Chinese learners in on-line reading in an eye-tracking experiment. The critical aim was to investigate how learners segment continuous characters into words without the aid of word boundary demarcations. Based on previous studies, the embedded words of 2- and 3-character incremental words were manipulated to be either plausible or implausible with the preceding verbs, while the incremental words themselves were always plausible. The results revealed an effect of the plausibility manipulation, which suggested that L2 Chinese learners activated embedded words first and integrated embedded words with previous sentence context as soon as they read them.