Serbian Speakers Research Articles

Acquired dyslexia in Serbian speakers with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

This study examined patterns of acquired dyslexia in Serbian aphasic speakers, comparing profiles of groups with Broca’s versus Wernicke’s aphasia. The study also looked at the relationship of reading and auditory comprehension and between reading comprehension and reading aloud in these groups. Participants were 20 people with Broca’s and 20 with Wernicke’s aphasia. They were asked to read aloud and to understand written material from the Serbian adaptation of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. A Serbian Word Reading Aloud Test was also used. The people with Broca’s aphasia achieved better results in reading aloud and in reading comprehension than those with Wernicke’s aphasia. Those with Wernicke’s aphasia showed significantly more semantic errors than those with Broca’s aphasia who had significantly more morphological and phonological errors. From the data we inferred that lesion sites accorded with previous work on networks associated with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia and with a posterior-anterior axis for reading processes centred on (left) parietal-temporal-frontal lobes.

A Contrastive Analysis of High/Closed Vowels Produced by Native Speakers of British English and Serbian

This paper presents the results of a contrastive analysis of high (closed) vowels of English /iː, ɪ, uː, ʊ/ and Serbian /i, u/ produced by 20 native speakers, adolescents (14 – 15 years old) from South East England (Ramsgate) and North Serbia (Ruma). Both groups of participants read the lists of words containing both long and short vowels of the two languages. The acoustic analysis (Praat, Boersma & Weeninik) involved measuring the values of the first three formants (F1, F2, F3), as well as the duration of the stressed vowels, which were then statistically analysed and the mean values were calculated for both groups of participants (SPSS 20.00). The results indicate that Serbian vowels tend to be more open than English vowels (the values of F1 are higher). However, English vowels are more centralised than Serbian vowels and the difference between the Serbian vowels /i/ and /u/ is reflected in their F2 values - /i/ is considerably more centralised than /u/, while in English both vowels are realised with similar F2 values – both tend to be centralised. With regard to the duration, the results reveal that Serbian vowels are longer than English vowels both in short and in long stressed syllables – primarily in short ones, where the difference is up to 52,19 ms.

Gender agreement of neuter nouns with formant -ica in the Serbian language speakers

This paper explores gender agreement of neuter nouns with formant -ica referring to persons of male sex. We used a two-part questionnaire in the research. The first part aimed to test the usage of two types of gender agreement, while the second one assessed how natural the sentence constructions were after these types of agreement occurred. The questionnaire comprised a list of eighteen neuter nouns with formant -ica divided into three classes. In the first part, participants were tasked to fill in the blanks and complete forty-four sentences, while in the second, they were asked to assess how natural 136 sentences sounded on a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 7. Analyses were based both on participants and stimuli (F1xF2) for each questionnaire part separately and the data was statistically processed in SPSS. The results obtained from 156 monolingual speakers of Serbian show that agreement is significantly more frequent in feminine forms, which is why speakers assess it better. Furthermore, they show that the presence of an additional masculine determiner does not increase the frequency of agreement in masculine forms or conduce to better assessment. The results also highlight the relevance of classifying these noun groups based on the criterion of presence/absence of an alternative morphological reference medium for persons of male sex who possess traits expressed by these nouns.

Salz, eine Brezel und der Weg zum Bahnhof. Strategien des Bittens in Varietäten des Deutschen und im Serbischen

This paper examines the verbal strategies used by speakers of German in Germany and Switzerland and speakers of Serbian in Serbia in order to voice a request. The participants in the study were asked what they would say in the following three situations: Asking for the way to the railway station in a strange city, asking their younger brother to pass the salt at the family dinner table, and buying a pretzel at the local bakery. Subsequently, the use of downtoners like 'please' or special particles was analysed, as well as the frequency of non-indicative verbal modes (subjunctive or conditional), the occurrence an equivalent of excuse me at the beginning of the request, and the use of greetings and address forms. The results show surprising differences between the three groups.

La construcción de las identidades lingüísticas: el caso de la variedad andaluza del español y las modalidades meridionales del serbio

La construcción de las identidades lingüísticas:el caso de la variedad andaluza del español y lasmodalidades meridionales del serbio

Neke karakteristike tipične kuće prema izvornim govornicima engleskog i srpskog jezika

The paper reports findings from one of the two differently-designed surveys conducted among groups of both native speakers of English and native speakers of Serbian with a common general objective to obtain a picture of better candidates for a role of the whole (to be analyzed into its constituent elements) in the contrastive study on the lexical field a house and its parts in English and Serbian. The specific objective of the survey presented here, however, was to build up the target picture with some of the features of the ideal example of the house category, such as the shape of the house, the key materials its principal structural elements (foundations, walls, a roof) are made of, the number of residential units in the house and the type of the household that occupies it, the number of the house levels, the minimum of its interior spatial components and their functions, the types of systemic parts in the house, the status and position of the house relative to surround­ing buildings, etc. Also, taking into consideration that the demographic profiles of the survey participants reflected various cultural backgrounds (which significantly influence the formation of mental images of a typical sample of the category), the survey aimed to compare the similarities and differences between the 'English' and the 'Serbian' typical house, that is the features assigned to a typical house by most of the surveyed representa­tives of Anglo-American and by those of Serbian culture. Judging exclusively by the features observed and the results obtained, the study concludes that the 'English' and the 'Serbian' typical house look very similar in many aspect and that the two different cultures are not as distant as they may seem.

Characteristics of written syntax in ten-year-old fourth-graders

The main purpose of this study is to present an inventory of different types of syntactic constructions found in written discourse of ten-year-old fourth graders, that is, to examine the existing variations in text syntactic structures which were produced by fourth graders. Written text corpus was collected from 88 fourth graders from Belgrade. In three different sessions, students composed three texts in three different genres: narrative, expository, and argumentative. Thematic and genre versatility enriched the corpus and created favourable conditions for elicitation of different types of syntactic constructions. Different quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts from the database were taken into account and analysed: the mean length of text measured by the number of words, the number of utterances, and the mean length of utterance measured by the number of words and clauses, as well as the presence of various types of syntactic constructions (kernel, simple, compound, complex and complex-compound sentences). The frequency of appearance of each of these was then established. The results provide an insight into the average length of texts and sentences produced by the fourth-grade primary school pupils, as well as into the means used to produce them (the kind of sentences they form). The results are much more valuable because they are concerned with examining the syntax in children who are native speakers of Serbian. They also show that in ten-year-olds? texts all the analysed types of sentence structure may appear, but the use frequency varies. Besides providing an inventory of syntactic attainments in written production of ten-year-old children, the research presented a new insight into their syntactic competence.

10.5937/specedreh13-5220 = Validation of aphasia screening test for Serbian speakers

This paper presents the results of testing the psychometric properties and clinical significance of Serbian aphasia screening test. The sample consisted of 36 adult patients with speech and language impairment caused by the damage of the left hemisphere, representing clinical (experimental) group. Participants in the clinical group were divided into two groups according to the time of testing: the first group consisted of 21 patients with acute brain damage; the second group consisted of 16 patients with the chronic form of aphasia. Out of the total number of participants in clinical groups, 20 participants were diagnosed with one of the classic types of aphasia, using Boston diagnostic aphasia examination battery, while 16 patients had symptoms that did not correspond to any known aphasic syndrome. The control group consisted of 36 healthy participants. All participants, both in clinical and control group, were subjected to testing with Screening test for aphasia (STA). The results showed that STA represents a valid measuring instrument for detecting language impairment in persons with brain damage. The validity of the test was observed in acute and chronic phase of aphasia. Additionally, it was observed that the test is valid for monitoring the recovery of language abilities. It was concluded that STA has a good potential for measuring language impairment that must be examined in a larger sample for the purpose of test standardization.

Лексика у језику блогова условљена англицизацијом

The paper discusses the influence of the English language on Serbian in the language of blogs. The corpus is analyzed on the lexical level, with particular reference to the scope of adaptation of the English words and the use of the slang elements from English. Speaking about the adaptation of the English words in the language of Serbian blogs, we can state that they are adapted in four different ways. The English lexemes are unmodified, misspelled, reflected in the Serbian lexemes and properly transcribed with addition of Serbian lexical and grammatical affixes. Furthermore, English words, which are frequently used in everyday conversation, particularly among young people, have become part of Serbian slang. Such unsystematic linguistic situation cannot undermine the standard Serbian language norm but it shows the low level of Serbian speakers’ linguistic and cultural awareness.

Television Advertisements as a Window on Culture for Teaching English as a Second Language

This research examined the viability of using television commercials as supplementary material for teaching English as a second language and how advertising could make lessons culturally relevant, up-to-date and low cost. Connecting language and culture in the classroom can aid non- native speakers in understanding implied and literal meanings. Cultural concepts depicted in a selection from 2,000 television advertisements were measured. Then, relative merits of using TV commercials as teaching tools were evaluated on eight different language populations. Television advertisements were cited as an aid to English language education in speakers of Spanish, Serbian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Cebuano, and Chuukese.

A comparative cross-linguistic study of vocal tract shaping in sibilant fricatives in English, Serbian and Mandarin using real-time magnetic resonance imaging

An articulatory study of sibilant fricatives is described, with the goal of describing variability in lingual articulation across languages. Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) data were collected from three speakers each of English and Mandarin and two speakers of Serbian and reconstructed at a rate of 22.4 frames per second. Parallel acoustic data were also collected and subsequently denoised. Subjects spoke the segments /s/ and /S/ in symmetrical vowel contexts (e.g., “pa sap” for English and “asa” for Mandarin). Articulation was analyzed using a semi-polar grid overlaid on the image plane and midsagittal distance functions were obtained by measuring cross distances at ~0.5 cm intervals from the glottis to the lips. Analysis shows that place of articulation for /s/ is more anterior compared to /S/ across languages. Apical articulation is observed for /s/ across languages, while /S/ is produced laminally in English and apically in Serbian and Mandarin. Patterns of tongue shaping variability differ, as well, across languages. For instance, higher standard deviation is observed anterior to the place of articulation for /S/ in Mandarin, compared to Serbian and English. [Work supported by NIH.]

Animacy and competition in relative clause production: A cross-linguistic investigation

This work investigates production preferences in different languages. Specifically, it examines how animacy, competition processes, and language-specific constraints shape speakers’ choices of structure. English, Spanish and Serbian speakers were presented with depicted events in which either an animate or inanimate entity was acted upon by an agent. Questions about the affected participant in these events prompted the production of relative clauses identifying these entities (e.g., the bag the woman is punching). Results indicated that in English, animacy plays a strong role in determining the choice of passive structures. In contrast, it plays a less prominent role in Spanish and Serbian structure choices, where more active structures were produced to varying degrees. Critically, the semantic similarity between the agent and the patient of the event correlated with the omission of the agent in all languages, indicating that competition resulted in the agent’s inhibition. Similarity also correlated with different functional choices in Spanish. The results suggest that similarity-based competition may influence various stages of production planning but its manifestations are constrained by language-specific grammatical options. Implications for models of sentence production and the relationship between production and comprehension are discussed.

Semantička organizacija delova kuće prema srpskim i američkim ispitanicima

This paper compares the survey data obtained from native speakers of Serbian in Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia, and native speakers of (American) English in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The objective of the survey was twofold: (1) to provide insights into the internal structure of the house parts category, and (2) to determine what types of entities are generally classified into this category. The internal category structure was measured by the frequency and order with which the category members were named by the subjects in response to the category name. The study shows that the category is generally considered to include not only parts of the building itself, but also a large variety of household items it may contain, as well as surface/spatial entities found on a property area outside it. However, segmental parts of the building, seen either in terms of spaces or in terms of the structural elements that define those spaces, are regarded by both Serbian and American subjects as the best examples of the category.

AUDITORY PERCEPTION OF SERBIAN AND ENGLISH VOICELESS STOPS BY SERBIAN SPEAKERS AND INTERFERENCE

The aim of the paper is twofold: firstly, to examine the relevance of CVformant transitions and bursts in the auditory perception of Serbian word-initial /p t k/ and English[ph th kh] by the speakers of Serbian; and secondly, to explore the relation between native languageexperience of listeners and their perceptual abilities in other languages. The subjects were ten nativespeakers of Serbian (five males and five females) and the corpus consisted of Serbian-Englishpairs of words, illustrating the aforementioned sets of stops before Serbian /í/ (long-rising accent)vs. English /i:/ and Serbian /ȍ/ (short-falling accent) vs. English /ɒ/. Despite the differences in theperceptual salience of the transitions and bursts between the languages in question, the results ofthe research point to the strong tendency of Serbian speakers to rely on the acoustic cues relevantin Serbian (L1) in the auditory perception of English (L2) voiceless stops.

Voice Onset Time in Serbian and Serbian English

In this paper, the acoustic facts of Voice Onset Time (VOT) are exemplified by looking at two virtually different languages in terms of recognizing VOT as a distinctive phonological parameter. Selected tokens of Serbian and Serbian English are recorded in carrier sentences and analysed acoustically, as spoken by four proficient Serbian speakers of EFL. The results show that, although Serbian does not recognize VOT as a parameter creating phonological distinctions, advanced non-native speakers of English are capable of learning how to relate the oral and laryngeal gestures in order to produce more native-like pronunciations of English voiceless stops in the phonetic contexts where English /p t k/ are expected to have a long lag. Special attention is drawn to CV sequences whose VOT values deviate in the two languages, as well as to those where VOTs are similar, which can be used to raise the awareness of this phonetic phenomenon in a Serbian EFL learner.

Rules Versus Statistics: Insights From a Highly Inflected Language

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages.

Efekat implicitne kauzalnosti kod dece i odraslih

Prvi cilj ovog rada je ispitati fenomen implicitne kauzalnosti kod dece i odraslih. Drugi cilj je ispitati značaj teorije uma, uzrasta i maternjeg jezika za javljanje efekta implicitne kauzalnosti. U ispitivanju je učestvovalo ukupno 212 ispitanika, od toga 128 ispitanika predškolskog uzrasta i 84 odrasla ispitanika srpskog i mađarskog maternjeg jezika. Lista stimulusa je obuhvatala glagole koji opisuju akciju i glagole koji opisuju stanje, ukupno18 glagola. Svi glagoli su se odnosili na interpersonalne relacije. Glagoli su prikazani u vidu proste interakcije: 'osoba A glagol osobu B'. Zadatak ispitanika je bio da pripišu kauzalnu odgovornost jednom od dva člana interakcije. Značaj teorije mišljenja, uzrasta i maternjeg jezika za javljanje efekta implicitne kauzalnosti ispitan je multivarijatnom analize varijanse za ponovljena merenja. Varijabla Uzrast (F(3,204)= 7.289; p< .01; Eta2= .097) ostvaruje statistički značajne efekte, dok je varijabla Maternji jezik u statistički značajnoj interakciji sa varijablom Uzrast (F(3,204)= 14.607; p< .001; Eta2= .087). Rezultati pokazuju da se trend odgovaranja odraslih ispitanika razlikuje od načina na koji ispitanici predškolskog uzrasta pripisuju kauzalnost jednom ili drugom članu interakcije, međutim kod dece su uočljivi različiti obrazci odgovaranja i s obzirom na prisustvo teorije uma. Ispitanici predškolskog uzrasta sa teorijom mišljenja pokazuju trend odgovaranja koji je sličan načinu pripisivanja kauzalnosti kod odraslih. Na osnovu nalaza može se zaključiti da razvoj sposobnosti razumevanja i tumačenja implicitnih informacija koje su deo verbalne komunikacije zahteva izvesne sposobnosti razumevanja mentalnih stanja. Tek kada razvije teoriju uma, dete je sposobno da odgovornost za doživljaje i postupke pripiše jednom ili drugom članu interakcije.

Form–meaning connections in the acquisition of English articles

This paper examines the acquisition of English articles by native speakers of Serbian, a language which has no article system. Data from a translation task, performed by four proficiency groups are presented to demonstrate that, contrary to previous research, learners do not associate articles with either ‘hearer knowledge’ or ‘specificity of referent’ (Huebner 1983, Master 1990, Tarone and Parish 1989, Thomas 1989). Rather, they establish non-target form–meaning connections, where ‘the’ is associated with a discrete referent, and ‘a(n)’ with the individuation of non-discrete referents.

On the Survival of Slovene o-Grade Deverbal Thematics in Resian.

In an article dedicated to Rado Lencek' I studied the survival of Indo-European [IE] 0grade deverbal masculine thematics in Slovene. From a reading of Pletersnik I found about 87 such nouns. Based on that list I then studied the survival of such nouns in the speech of one cultured nuclear family of Serbian speakers, i.e., the survival of fOIInal Serbo-Croatian cognates of Slovene nouns. That study produced about 68 surviving equivalents. Of course, a full and independently based study of the survival of this class in each language would be desirable. For further details of these studies, see the articles referred to. For the present, at least, they give us some idea of one parameter of comparability of two South Slavic languages. I also studied the survival of such IE formations in nouns and adjectives of Dutch, as a means of contemplating the Germanic record through one sample. 3 There I found 50 current words, of which about 33 have a reasonable chance of reflecting an IE patrimony (i.e., show probable related IE forms, though not all of the formation in question). Of these, some 17 show a matching formation elsewhere in IE, but only 6 find such an equivalent in Slavic; it must be remembered too that in Dutch we have a wider field to choose equivalents from, since the formation originally selected includes adjectives. The ratio here is thus, very crudely, Slovene-Serbian 68: Dutch-Slavic 6 (or 5, if the adjective 'red' is excluded). I now present the portion of the Slovene list for which I have succeeded in eliciting the Resian cognates. I am confident of these forms, for I have known and worked with the speaker for 12 years, and my analysis of the dialect is based on her speech. The forms are highly trustworthy, since the speaker has a remarkably clear pronunciation, an amazingly high sense of precision and accuracy, a strong critical sense and insistence, great patience, and alert discriminating observation; I know no native speaker I would rate higher. She has a very large and discerning vocabulary, a tasteful sense of style, an articulate mastery of propriety; she is a born scholar, an ornament of her language. We have here, therefore, an excellent specimen of a very small language (+ 1500 resident speakers) in a rich, sophisticated version. If we lack forms here it is not because we can call this language or idiolect impoverished. The fOIIus are all given in their OseaccolOsojane shape. I describe the phonology elsewhere, where I also introduce some corrections to Baudouin de Courtenay. I use here a relatively broad, largely IPA-based phonetic transcription, different from what I favor in other circumstances, in the interests of giving a linguistic and Slovene public an immediate impression of the sound qualities of this much misunderstood variety of language. For each noun I give a selection of declensional forms to show the alternations that establish its underlying phonology. I present the Resian forms below in the order in which their cognate forms appear in the Slovene list mentioned above; here, cognates are italicized. Entries in parentheses are indirect survivals, in that they are extant only in other derivations.

PROPERTIES OF I-BOUNDARY LENGTHENING OF VOWELS IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Phonological features which signal the right IP edge include boundary tones and pre-boundary lengthening. However, languages differ in the prominence of these features. While in English final information focus has significant F0 prominence on PWd immediately preceding I-boundary, Serbian primarily relies on durational cues to signal final information focus and, thus, the right IP edge. This research aims at analyzing the degree and scope of I-boundary lengthening in English and Serbian as well as examining whether there is a compensatory relation between F0 prominence and pre-boundary lengthening in these languages. The research is part of a larger-scale corpus study involving approximately one hour of read speech per language. Both English and Serbian speakers were professional newsreaders and the recordings were comparable in terms of articulation rate and recording quality. The acoustic analysis involved measuring the degree and scope of lengthening in trisyllabic PWds, which was done in the Praat programme (version 6.0.52). The results of the measurements were statistically analyzed. The results of the analysis primarily point to the differences in the scope of I-boundary lengthening in English and Serbian. While the scope of lengthening in Serbian affects the stressed vowel of IP-final PWd as well as all the vowels following it, English post-accented non-final unstressed vowels are skipped by this process. Accordingly, wider scope of lengthening might suggest slightly higher significance of this process in Serbian, which can further be interpreted as a compensation for low F0 prominence at the right IP edge in this language.