Simple Syntactic Structure Research Articles

A dependency distance approach to the syntactic complexity variation in the connected speech of Alzheimer’s disease

Previous research on the syntax complexity variation in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease primarily focuses on isolated language features like sentence length or syntactic structure, with limited exploration of their connection to memory and cognitive deficits. This study investigated the syntactic complexity variation in AD by associating working memory load with fine-grained syntactic features adopting a dependency distance approach. The findings include: (1) AD patients had shorter mean dependency distances (MDD) and more head-final dependencies compared to the HC group; (2) The patients still produced their speech under the DDM tendency but exhibited a stronger preference for simple syntactic structures; (3) Sentences produced by AD patients were statistically shorter than the HC group, and the patients exhibited greater difficulty handling syntactic structures as sentence length increases; (4) The patients could employ different syntactic structures but perform worse in extending them, particularly in nominal groups and hypotactic constructions; (5) The patients showed stronger reliance on sentence-initial adjuncts and inverted constructions. These findings suggest that syntactic impairments in AD exhibit a potential hierarchical decline along the continuum of syntactic complexity, with working memory deficits being a critical factor.

A survey of text summarization: Techniques, evaluation and challenges

This paper explores the complex field of text summarization in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with particular attention to the development and importance of semantic understanding. Text summarization is a crucial component of natural language processing (NLP), which helps to translate large amounts of textual data into clear and understandable representations. As the story progresses, it demonstrates the dynamic transition from simple syntactic structures to sophisticated models with semantic comprehension. In order to effectively summarize, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic concerns become crucial, highlighting the necessity of capturing not only grammar but also the context and underlying meaning. It examines the wide range of summarization models, from conventional extractive techniques to state-of-the-art tools like pre-trained models. Applications are found in many different fields, demonstrating how versatile summarizing techniques are. Semantic drift and domain-specific knowledge remain obstacles, despite progress. In the future, the study predicts developments like artificial intelligence integration and transfer learning, which motivates academics to investigate these prospects for advancement. The approach, which is based on the PRISMA framework, emphasizes a methodical and open literature review. The work attempts to further natural language processing (NLP) and text summarization by combining various research findings and suggesting future research directions in this dynamic subject.

Analysis of a poetry slam text from an interdisciplinary perspective

The article presents the poetry slam genre and its role in the development of modern literature. The poetry slam contribution consists of two parts and lasts a total of around 6 minutes. In the small introduction, the following main text is framed according to the situation. Using the multimodal, rhetorical-linguistic analysis, it was found that many components contribute to the success of the slam text. In addition to the verbal content, this includes non- and paraverbal aspects, emotions and attitudes. The I-parallel sentences, simple syntactic structures, foreign-language phrases and repetitions express the emotions on the textual level. In addition to the first-person narrator, there are also voices from other protagonists. The audience gives their direct feedback such as laughter, applause and screams off screen. The central themes of the poetry slam contribution, prejudices and the question of guilt, are examined from different perspectives. Furthermore, the comment column is also analyzed. In addition, a methodical and didactic handling of this text is sugg

A Research And Comparative Review Of Urdu And Gujri Language And Literature

There is a deep connection between Urdu and Gujri literature. This linguistic relationship is as deep and close as the relationship between these two languages ​​is not with any other language. As a rule, the depth and commonality of the linguistic relationship between Gujri and Urdu is strikingly similar. Their simple syntactic structures, adverbs, sources, adverbial structures, prefixes, letters, idioms, words, similes, gestures, time words, personal pronouns, basic numbers, descriptive idioms, proverbs, proverbs, storage words. , techniques and closures, structure of sentences, tone and traditions, allusions and signs, and ways of thinking and feeling are common in both languages. Apart from this, the genres of speech, poetry and prose are also common. This paper represents a research and comparative review of Urdu and Gujri language and Literature.

LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF TRANSLATING SLOGANS OF AUTOMOBILE COMPANIES WITH THE HELP OF FREE SOFTWARE PRODUCTS

The article analyzes lexical and grammatical features of translating advertising slogans of automobile companies with the help of freely available translation programs, including some of the most popular in Ukraine – Google Translate and Pereklad.online.ua. It defines the universal characteristics for this kind of lexical material and methods of their vocabulary and grammar constructions and translation services for English both by free software, and professional translators. It is established that the slogan is a short advertising message that expresses the basic idea of the company, goods, services – as much as possible combines informative, expressive and aesthetic functions. When translating advertising slogans, the translator must take into account: the purpose of the text, the character of the consumer, the linguistic qualities of the original text, the cultural and individual abilities of the language in the cultural aspect of the consumer and many other factors. The translation of an advertising slogan into Ukrainian must be carried out in order to preserve the relative equality of the content, semantic, stylistic, functional and communicative information contained in the original and in the translation. Translating a slogan is a complicated process, and misinterpretation of the slogan's content or ignorance of the author's ideas may distort the content of the information. Today's realities require attention to translating advertising texts, also in terms of their psychological impact on the mass audience. Promotional texts must contain clear factual information; they must be comprehensible and therefore clearly understood. It should be noted that machine translation systems still play only a supporting role and can only satisfactorily translate simple syntactic and lexical structures including advertising slogans.

Language statistical learning responds to reinforcement learning principles rooted in the striatum.

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to extract regularities from the environment. In the domain of language, this ability is fundamental in the learning of words and structural rules. In lack of reliable online measures, statistical word and rule learning have been primarily investigated using offline (post-familiarization) tests, which gives limited insights into the dynamics of SL and its neural basis. Here, we capitalize on a novel task that tracks the online SL of simple syntactic structures combined with computational modeling to show that online SL responds to reinforcement learning principles rooted in striatal function. Specifically, we demonstrate-on 2 different cohorts-that a temporal difference model, which relies on prediction errors, accounts for participants' online learning behavior. We then show that the trial-by-trial development of predictions through learning strongly correlates with activity in both ventral and dorsal striatum. Our results thus provide a detailed mechanistic account of language-related SL and an explanation for the oft-cited implication of the striatum in SL tasks. This work, therefore, bridges the long-standing gap between language learning and reinforcement learning phenomena.

Językowy kształt poradnika gospodarskiego pomieszczonego w „Nowych Wiadomosciach Ekonomicznych i Uczonych" (1758–1761)

The article analyses the structural, pragmatic, cognitive and stylistic aspects of a handbook entitled Introduction to governance, featured in the first Polish popular-scientific journal – “Nowe Wiadomości Ekonomiczne i Uczone” published in Warsaw in 1758–1761 by Wawrzyniec Mitzler de Kolof. It has been demonstrated that the text under analysis, which can be classified as a utility text, shows conspicuous elements of two styles – ordinary (unsophisticated vocabulary; simple syntactic structures; proverbs) and scholarly (pronounced text segmentation, perspective of the author setting himself aside from the recipient; economic terminology; defining new or more difficult concepts; references to foreign (Latin and/or German) counterparts of Polish names of plants).

SMALL-FORMAT “NEWS FLOW” MEDIATEXTS IN THE FOCUS OF LINGUISTICS: GENRE AND LANGUAGE PECULIARITIES

Today the media sphere is one of the most active functional areas of the modern Russian language, and it demonstrates the major current trends of modern Russian speech in the most vivid way. This is what conditions the study of small-format texts of the “news flow”, which belong to the basic and most widespread media texts. These texts are characterized by a stable structure and certain genre and linguistic features, the description of which is the purpose of the study. News stories of news agencies, captions, news tickers and other text materials of T.V. news programs were chosen as sources of material. It is small-format news media texts that represent media speech “in its pure form”. The volume of such texts varies from a single utterance to texts of an average volume, consisting of 4-6 paragraphs (up to 5000 characters). The nature of the genre determines the placement of information in these texts according to the “inverted pyramid” principle, well-known in journalistic practice, as well as the prevalence of the informative component, semantic density, syntactic minimalism in such texts. The article considers the main common feature of small-format news media texts - linguistic asceticism, consisting in “anti-creativity”, “neutrality” of speech, absence of distinct metaphorical and evaluative linguistic means, in simple syntactic structures. The most striking linguistic features of these texts, which singles them out in a separate group, include a large number of abbreviations, borrowings, structures that indicate the source of the news information. Small-format news media texts have significant linguodidactic potential. A stable structure and fairly rigid regulation of the language give grounds for their more active use as didactic material in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) and Russian as a non-native language (RNL).

Verbal working memory in schizophrenia: The role of syntax in facilitating serial recall

BackgroundDeficits in verbal working memory (VWM) have consistently been observed in schizophrenia, ranging from impairments in capacity, encoding, to irregular semantic organisation. However, syntactic deficits are less well-characterised, despite its crucial role in language construction. This study examines the role of simple syntactic structure (basis of the “sentence superiority effect”) in VWM of patients with psychotic disorders. MethodsPatients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (n=40) and healthy controls matched on age, sex and education (n=40) were administered an auditory serial recall task containing word lists with low semantic coherence and either syntactically familiar structure (noun-verb-noun sequence) or syntactically unfamiliar structure. Other neurocognitive measures, symptoms and social functioning of patients were also assessed. ResultsA 4-way analysis of variance (group×version×list type×serial position) indicated that patients had significantly worse performance overall, suggesting a generalised verbal memory impairment. In addition, a significant interaction was found for list type and Group, demonstrating that healthy controls, but not patients, had superior performance in syntactically familiar word lists. A subgroup analysis of high-performing patients revealed that the interaction was not an artefact of poor verbal memory, but a selective deficit in syntactic facilitation. ConclusionsOur findings may suggest segregated mechanisms for maintenance and computational aspects of VWM, and show that even simple syntactic structure facilitates recall of syntactically unfamiliar words lists. Additionally, schizophrenic patients show difficulty utilising syntactic information, which highlights the need to understand the neuropsychological basis of working memory and linguistic impairments in psychosis.

Result states and repetitive adverbs

This paper considers some paradoxes that arise in connection with repetitive adverbials in English. We propose a simple syntactic structure of verbal predicates along the lines of Ramchand (2008) and show how the apparent paradoxes can be resolved with that structure and some straightforward assumptions. One observation is that repetitives behave differently with verbs taking affected subjects (like read) than with verbs taking non-affected subjects (like paint). Another observation is the fact that repetitives are not uniform in their behaviour with respect to resultatives. Once again, structural assumptions, specifically, distinct structural positions of the resultatives, account for this varied behaviour.

Visual salience effects on speaker choices: Direct or indirect influences on linguistic processing?

ABSTRACTThe effect of visual salience on speakers’ choices is investigated by contrasting the effects of both visual and linguistic manipulations on picture descriptions and eye movements. Two-character pictures were used, which can be described in one of two complementary ways (e.g., a cop chasing a robber can be described either from a chasing or from a fleeing perspective), and using simple actives or other alternative syntactic structures (e.g., “a robber is being chased by a cop”). The pictures were preceded by a verb priming one of the two perspectives and/or a preview of one of the two characters. The results show that the visual manipulation affects looks to the characters regardless of which perspective had been linguistically primed, but it only affects verbal descriptions in the absence of a linguistic prime. Linguistically priming one of the perspectives, in contrast, has a reliable effect on both looks to the characters and verbal descriptions. These results suggest that visual salience does not influence linguistic choices directly.

Statistical language learning: computational, maturational, and linguistic constraints.

Our research on statistical language learning shows that infants, young children, and adults can compute, online and with remarkable speed, how consistently sounds co-occur, how frequently words occur in similar contexts, and the like, and can utilize these statistics to find candidate words in a speech stream, discover grammatical categories, and acquire simple syntactic structure in miniature languages. However, statistical learning is not merely learning the patterns presented in the input. When their input is inconsistent, children sharpen these statistics and produce a more systematic language than the one to which they are exposed. When input languages inconsistently violate tendencies that are widespread in human languages, learners shift these languages to be more aligned with language universals, and children do so much more than adults. These processes explain why children acquire language (and other patterns) more effectively than adults, and also may explain how systematic language structures emerge in communities where usages are varied and inconsistent. Most especially, they suggest that usage-based learning approaches must account for differences between adults and children in how usage properties are acquired, and must also account for substantial changes made by adult and child learners in how input usage properties are represented during learning.

Training understanding of reversible sentences: a study comparing language-impaired children with age-matched and grammar-matched controls.

Introduction. Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems with language comprehension, and little is known about how to remediate these. We focused here on errors in interpreting sentences such as “the ball is above the cup”, where the spatial configuration depends on word order. We asked whether comprehension of such short reversible sentences could be improved by computerized training, and whether learning by children with SLI resembled that of younger, typically-developing children.Methods. We trained 28 children with SLI aged 6–11 years, 28 typically-developing children aged from 4 to 7 years who were matched to the SLI group for raw scores on a test of receptive grammar, and 20 typically-developing children who were matched to the SLI group on chronological age. A further 20 children with SLI were given pre- and post-test assessments, but did not undergo training. Those in the trained groups were given training on four days using a computer game adopting an errorless learning procedure, during which they had to select pictures to correspond to spoken sentences such as “the cup is above the drum” or “the bird is below the hat”. Half the trained children heard sentences using above/below and the other half heard sentences using before/after (with a spatial interpretation). A total of 96 sentences was presented over four sessions. Half the sentences were unique, whereas the remainder consisted of 12 repetitions of each of four sentences that became increasingly familiar as training proceeded.Results. Age-matched control children performed near ceiling (≥ 90% correct) in the first session and were excluded from the analysis. Around half the trained SLI children also performed this well. Training effects were examined in 15 SLI and 16 grammar-matched children who scored less than 90% correct on the initial training session. Overall, children’s scores improved with training. Memory span was a significant predictor of improvement, even after taking into account performance on training session 1. Unlike the grammar-matched controls, children with SLI showed greater accuracy with repeated sentences compared with unique sentences. Training did not improve children’s performance on a standardized test of receptive grammar.Discussion. Overall, these results indicate that a subset of children with SLI perform well below ceiling on reversible sentences with three key words and simple syntactic structure. For these children, weak verbal short-term memory appears to impair comprehension of spoken sentences. In contrast to the general finding that rule-learning benefits from variable input, these children seem to do best if given repeated exposure to the same nouns used with a given sentence frame. Generalisation to other sentences using the same syntactic frame may be more effective if preceded by such item-specific learning.

O uso da comunicação suplementar e/ou alternativa no trabalho com a morfossintaxe em adolescentes com Síndrome de Down

Objetivo apresentar e discutir o uso de comunicação suplementar e/ou alternativa como instrumento terapêutico no trabalho com a morfossintaxe em adolescentes com síndrome de Down. Métodos estudo piloto que acompanhou longitudinalmente (doze meses) quatro adolescentes com idade cronológica entre 13 e 15 anos e idade mental entre cinco e seis anos. Foram consideradas as avaliações inicial e final, filmadas durante 30 minutos em situação de interação livre entre participante e cuidador. As amostras de fala foram analisadas a partir do cálculo da EME, quanto morfemas e palavras, para comparação entre as avaliações. Durante a intervenção terapêutica, todos os participantes foram submetidos ao mesmo procedimento. Foi utilizado o Picture Communication Symbols (PCS), com os símbolos ordenados seguindo uma estrutura sintática simples (substantivo + verbo + complemento), ampliada gradativamente,na seguinte ordem de elementos: artigos, preposições, pronomes (pessoais, possessivos e demonstrativos) e conjunções. Cada sessão terapêutica foi registrada em protocolo específico. Foi realizado o teste de Wilcoxon e o nível de significância adotado foi de 5%. Resultados apesar de não ter sido obtida diferença estatisticamente significante, houve aumento do número de morfemas e de palavras entre as duas avaliações, representados pelos elementos trabalhados, incluindo preposições e conjunções, além de substantivos e verbos. Para pronomes pessoais foi verificada tendência à significância (p=0,068). Conclusão o sistema de comunicação adotado mostrou-se uma ferramenta apropriada ao favorecimento do emprego de estruturas frasais com o uso de elementos com função sintática, como artigos, preposições e conjunções, de difícil utilização por indivíduos com síndrome de Down.

New Sentence Recognition Materials Developed Using a Basic Non-Native English Lexicon

The objective of this project was to develop new sentence test materials drawing on a basic non-native English lexicon that could be used to test speech recognition for various listener populations. These materials have been designed to provide a test tool that is less linguistically biased, compared with materials that are currently available, for sentence recognition for non-native as well as native speakers of English. One hundred non-native speakers of English were interviewed on a range of 20 conversational topics. Over 26 hr of recorded non-native English speech were transcribed. These transcriptions were used to create a lexicon of over 4,000 unique words. The words from this lexicon were used to create the new materials based on a simple syntactic sentence structure frame. Twenty lists of 25 sentences were developed. Each sentence has 4 keywords, providing 100 keywords per list. Lists were equated for rate of occurrence of keywords in lexicon, high-frequency count (total number of affricates and fricatives), number of syllables, and distribution of syntactic structure. Listening-in-noise results for native-English-speaking, normal-hearing listeners indicated similar performance across lists. The Basic English Lexicon materials provide a large set of sentences for native and non-native English speech-recognition testing.

Determinants of Bold Signal Correlates of Processing Object-Extracted Relative Clauses

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the determinants of blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal correlates of processing relative clauses. Matched pairs of sentences that differed in their processing demands were compared. One member of the pair consisted of a syntactically simpler object- subject (OS) sentence, containing a subject-relativized clause attached to the object noun phrase. The second member of the pair consisted of a syntactically more complex subject-object (SO) sentence, containing an object-relativized clause attached to the subject noun phrase. Participants made plausibility judgments about the sentences in whole sentence visual presentation. Voxel-wise statistical activation maps showed increased BOLD signal in multiple cortical regions for complex compared to simple syntactic structures. This pattern was found for plausible sentences only and, within the set of plausible sentences, for SO sentences in which the head noun of the relative clause was animate and the subject noun of the relative clause was inanimate. These results require a re-interpretation of previous results with the same materials using positron emission tomography.

Verb Retrieval in Aphasia. 2. Relationship to Sentence Processing

Sentence comprehension and production were evaluated for 10 chronic aphasic patients who have been shown to demonstrate one of three patterns in the relative ease of retrieval of nouns and verbs. Although these patterns of noun/verb production were not entirely predictable from patients' clinical classifications, they were found here to be significantly correlated with several structural indices of sentence production and with failure to comprehend semantically reversible sentences. Noun/verb retrieval patterns were not strongly correlated with speech fluency nor with morphological characteristics of sentence production. Patients with relative impairment in the production of verbs were found to rely on high frequency, semantically empty, “light” verbs when producing sentences and to favor simple syntactic structures in which verbs do not require inflections. When forced to produce substantive verbs (in picture and scene descriptions), verb retrieval continued to undermine the production of well-formed sentences for the verb-impaired patients. In addition, two of five such patients also showed some evidence of poor realization of noun arguments for verbs they could not produce. Results are interpreted as indicating multiple contribution to patients' sentence processing impairments, one of which may be selective difficulty retrieving verbs.

Existentials and Other Locatives

A theory is proposed that unites the universal locative paradigm consisting of the predicate locative, the existential, and the 'have' predication. This is accomplished by deriving all three from a single underlying structure in which a preposition is the head of the predicate phrase. The existential and the 'have' structure, both having a derived locative subject, are differentiated from the predicate locative by the definiteness effect. 'Have' predications of various kinds, including those with 'have' copulas, are claimed to differ from existentials because their locative constituent contains a [+human] argument. Apparently disparate facts from many languages are accounted for and a general explanation is offered for the distinction between a 'have' copula and a 'be' copula.* 1. INTRODUCTION. Much of the excitement in modern syntax lies in discovering that a certain variety of surface structures is reducible to the interaction of a single underlying structure and independently established principles. In this paper I propose such a reduction, in a completely new generative analysis of locative predications. I will argue that expressions like those in 1 and 2 are all derived from a single and maximally simple abstract syntactic structure (Dstructure).'1

CONCISE DISPLAY OF INDEX ENTRIES

A computer‐aided method has been devised to display index entries in a concise tabular form. The data studied are index terms and their text modifications in the Analytical Abstracts database. The index entries are articulated subject indexes, in which terms or words are linked with prepositions and punctuation marks. The simple syntactic structures are expressed by BNF (Backus Naur form) notations, from which rules are derived to extract substantive words in accordance with the facets pertinent to analytical chemistry. LISP programs were written for word extraction and facet tabulation and tested on a personal computer. Repetitive expressions are eliminated, while no necessary information is discarded. The tabular format, clear and readable, can expedite scanning of a large number of documents. In addition, it facilitates understanding of the contents of documents, providing facets for easy assimilation.

Fundamental frequency rules for the synthesis of simple declarative English sentences.

A recent experiment by Olive and Nakatani [J. P. Olive and L. H. Nakatani, ’’Rule−synthesis of speech by word concatenation: a first step,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 55, 660−666 (1974)] has shown that when telephone numbers were rule−synthesized by splicing together numbers which were spoken in isolation, the proper adjustment of fundamental frequency was more important than adjustments of amplitude, duration, and between word coarticulation, for making these spliced numbers sound as if they were spoken naturally. This experiment also showed that in the case of telephone numbers, fundamental frequency adjustments were sufficient for providing synthesis by rule of quality comparable to the quality of natural speech which was processed by an analysis−synthesis procedure. This paper describes the next step in our research of rule synthesis: the study of a restricted set of sentences of simple syntactic structure, instead of telephone numbers. Methods for studying fundamental frequency contours of naturally spoken sentences are discussed; some fundamental frequency rules for synthesizing short English sentences are derived from these natural utterances. More specifically, only rules which are dictated by the syntax were investigated; the appropriateness of these rules was determined by incorporating them into a computerized rule−synthesis scheme. Subject Classification: 70.50.