Total Number Of Words Research Articles

Assessing the Writing Achievement of Young Struggling Writers

This study examined the number of writing samples needed to obtain a reliable estimate of young struggling writers’ capabilities. It further assessed if performance in one genre was reflective of performance in other genres for these children. Second- and third-grade students (81 boys, 56 girls), who were identified as struggling writers in need of special assistance by their teacher and scored at the 25th percentile or lower on a norm-referenced story-writing test, wrote four compositions: a story, personal narrative, opinion essay, and informative text. Applying generalizability theory (G-theory), students’ scores on three writing measures (total number of words [TNW], vocabulary diversity, and writing quality) for the four compositions were each portioned into variance due to the following sources: students, writing tasks, and the interaction between students and writing tasks. We found that 14, 8, and 11 compositions, respectively, would be needed to obtain a reliable estimate of these students’ writing capabilities in terms of TNW, vocabulary diversity, and writing quality. Furthermore, how well these students wrote in one genre provided a weak prediction of how well they wrote in other genres.

Scaling laws and fluctuations in the statistics of word frequencies

In this paper, we combine statistical analysis of written texts and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. The average vocabulary of an ensemble of fixed-length texts is known to scale sublinearly with the total number of words (Heaps’ law). Analyzing the fluctuations around this average in three large databases (Google-ngram, English Wikipedia, and a collection of scientific articles), we find that the standard deviation scales linearly with the average (Taylorʼs law), in contrast to the prediction of decaying fluctuations obtained using simple sampling arguments. We explain both scaling laws (Heaps’ and Taylor) by modeling the usage of words using a Poisson process with a fat-tailed distribution of word frequencies (Zipfʼs law) and topic-dependent frequencies of individual words (as in topic models). Considering topical variations lead to quenched averages, turn the vocabulary size a non-self-averaging quantity, and explain the empirical observations. For the numerous practical applications relying on estimations of vocabulary size, our results show that uncertainties remain large even for long texts. We show how to account for these uncertainties in measurements of lexical richness of texts with different lengths.

Detecting Differences in Communication During Two Types of Patient Handovers

Patient handovers are a critical point in the patient care process. Software to identify differences in communication content and strategies across different types of patient handovers could be helpful in customizing physician training programs. To determine whether there were differences, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software was used. The primary measure was the LIWC output score, which is the frequency of mention of words in a construct category divided by the total number of words in the handover transcript. Two types of constructs were investigated: 1) content, which included name/age, care plan, prognosis, and family, and 2) strategy, which included questioning and collaborative cross-checks. We hypothesized that the Emergency Department (ED) to hospital transfer compared to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) sign-outs would have more discussion of family and less of the patient’s prognosis, as well as more collaborative cross-checks. A two-tailed t-test was used to detect differences. One hypothesis was confirmed, that there was less discussion of prognosis in the ED as compared to the ICU handover. Unexpected findings were less discussion of the care plan and more questioning in the ED as compared to the ICU handover. Findings confirm that both communication content and strategies are different for the two types of patient handovers and that an automated analysis approach can detect differences across a set of handover transcripts.

G01 Verbal Learning, Recall And Recognition In Huntington's Disease

Background The course of change in verbal learning and recall performance in mild to moderate symptomatic Huntington’s disease (HD) patients is not entirely clear from the literature with most longitudinal studies generally showing no change. Aims The present study investigated mild to moderate HD patient’s verbal learning, recall and recognition over a five year period. Methods Twenty patients with mild to moderate HD were followed up annually using the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (HVLT). At baseline the mean age of the patients was 47.2 years (SD=10.321), their total mean UHDRS motor score was 25.85 (SD=14.98). Results It was found that patient’s total number of words immediately recalled on the HVLT learning trials significantly deteriorated over the five year study period, with patients recalling significantly less words at years 4 and 5 than when tested at baseline. More detailed analysis of serial position effects showed that although patients still demonstrated the expected U-shaped curve with preserved primacy and recency effects, poorer immediate recall was due to poorer recall for items in the middle serial positions. Delayed recall also deteriorated significantly at years 4 and 5, and the normal U-shaped serial position curve was no longer preserved. Recognition performance, however, was maintained over the 5 year period. Conclusions This pattern of results show how immediate and delayed recall (but not recognition) of verbal learning deteriorates slowly in mild to moderate HD patients, and that this can be measured by the HVLT over a period of at least 4 years.

School children with low birth weight inserted in system of Embu's education: construction of sentences.

To characterize the construction of sentences in schoolchildren born with low weight. We selected 413 students from Embu das Artes (SP), Brazil. Application of Recreating Speech Acts of Test of Language Competence sub-test. We analyzed the number of words and the holistic score. Age group of 6-10 years old, female/male, with low birth weight (<2,500 g) in Study Group (SG; n=238), and birth weight above or equal to 2,500 g composing the Control Group (CG; n=175). Children with anomalies were excluded. The both groups' responses were considered as well as the association of the responses with variables birth weight, gender, age of child and maternal age and education, through Student's t-test, χ2test and linear regression. The SG scored less on the total number of words and had worst performance in items that involved prepositions with a sense of temporality and place, with adverb functions. There was no difference between groups regarding the holistic score. It was found positive impact of the variables birth weight (p=0.002), age of child, age of mother and maternal education on standard test scores in both groups. The SG had fewer words compared to CG. The higher the birth weight, the higher the score test pattern. It was evident the age-related changes in morpho-syntactic skills addressed in the study, and protection factors mother's schooling and age had a positive impact on language performance.

The effect of a shared visual context during the presentation of elicitation stimuli on the narratives of young children with and without language impairment

This study aims to ascertain whether a shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment influences the narratives produced by the children. Participants were 20 typically developing (TD) children and 10 children with language impairment (LI), aged 6 to 8 years. They were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with two different presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro- and macrostructure. Microstructural variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (total number of different words, number of internal state terms). Macrostructural variables included cohesion measures (number of complete, incomplete and error ties) and story structure scores measured by the Afrikaans translation (Klop, Visser and Oosthuizen 2012a) of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives© (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012). Both presentation methods elicited narratives of similar quality in terms of the micro- and macrostructural variables in all the groups. A shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment therefore did not influence the narratives produced by children with LI and TD children.

The effect of two different visual presentation modalities on the narratives of mainstream grade 3 children

This study investigated whether a dynamic visual presentation method (a soundless animated video presentation) would elicit better narratives than a static visual presentation method (a wordless picture book). Twenty mainstream grade 3 children were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with one of the visual presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro- and macrostructure variables. Microstructure variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (number of different words). Macrostructure variables included episodic structure in terms of goal-attempt-outcome (GAO) sequences. Both visual presentation modalities elicited narratives of similar quantity and quality in terms of the micro- and macrostructure variables that were investigated. Animation of picture stimuli did not elicit better narratives than static picture stimuli.

Text Length, Vocabulary Size and Text Coverage Constancy

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between vocabulary size, text length and text coverage in the English language, i.e. the ratio between the number of words of a text or a collection of texts covered by a set of vocabulary, and the total number of words of the text or a collection of texts. The results reveal that, on average, for texts between 50 and 1,000,000 words in length, text coverage by the same set of vocabulary is not significantly affected by text length; in addition, the relationship between text coverage and vocabulary size can be captured by the re-parametrized mathematical models of Altmann, Tuldava and Köhler and Martináková-Rendeková.

The relations of proper character introduction to narrative quality and listening comprehension for young children from high poverty schools

The present study explored the types and frequency of literate language features in children’s narratives, and the relation of literate language and proper character introduction to children’s oral language skills in a sample of 184 prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade students from high-poverty schools. Using hierarchical regression, the results showed that literate language features were not predictive of listening comprehension or narrative quality outcomes. In contrast, children’s skill in properly introducing characters significantly accounted for variance in all outcome measures (narrative comprehension, narrative quality, and listening comprehension) above and beyond the control variables (age, total number of words, and mean length of utterance) and literate language features (adverbs, conjunctions, mental and linguistic verbs, and elaborated noun phrases). These results indicate that the child’s retell and language comprehension skills may develop concurrently with proper character introduction.

The impact of additional CLIL exposure on oral english production

This study aims at testing the effectiveness of additional CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) exposure on the oral production of secondary school learners of English as a Foreign Language. CLIL learners, who had received a 30% increase in exposure by means of using English as a vehicular language, were compared to mainstream English students in a story-telling task. Analyses indicated that CLIL learners’ productions were holistically perceived to exhibit better fluency, lexis and grammar while no differences were found as regards content and pronunciation. Besides, although Non-CLIL learners’ productions were larger in quantity and longer in time, CLIL learners produced denser and more fluent narrations, as attested by their higher number of different words over total number of words, of words over turn, and of utterances over turn. Additionally, CLIL learners resorted to their first language to a lesser extent and demanded fewer vocabulary clarifications. Our findings thus go along with previous research which has revealed advantages of additional CLIL exposure on oral English production.

Male-Female Discourse Difference in Terms of Lexical Density

The development of gender roles often begins as early as infancy. Being at the centre, gender manifests itself in any subtle and trivial aspect of our social life. From the time we are very small, it is ever present in any aspect of our life, in conversation, humor, conflict and so on. The overwhelming studies on the differences between men/women speech style represents the significance of the issue. The present study is an attempt to investigate whether the speaker's gender (being a male/female) contributes to the lexical density of their discourse. In other words, whether the lexical density of discourse is sensitive to the gender of the speaker? It is a data-driven, empirical study based on the transcribed recorded talk-in interactions between men and women. Text Content Analysis Tool (TCAT) was used to measure the lexical density of male/female speaker's discourse and to count the total number of words used by male/female speakers. The results of Chi-square test show that there is not a statistically significance difference between the lexical density of men and women discourse (p >0.157). However, there is a negative relationship between the lexical density of discourse and discourse length. In other words, the more word counts (689 words) the lower lexical density (0.33.67%) and vice versa the less word used by the speaker (31) the higher lexical density of the discourse (90.32%).

Türkçe ve İngilizce ilk okuma kitaplarının sözcük türü ve kavram ulamlarına göre karşılaştırılması

In this study, frequencies of nouns, verbs and adjectives in both Turkish and Englishreaders which are published for native speakers are compared, and it is investigated if there is a difference in nouns between Turkish and English readers in terms ofsemantic fields. Thus three different readers in Turkish and four different readers inEnglish are analysed in order to reach the same total number of words in both languages. MAC Numbers is used as a software programme to categorise the words.At the end of the analysis, it is found that nouns are the most frequently used wordcategories in Turkish readers whereas verbs are the most frequently used word categories in English readers. Moreover, it is found out that adjectives are the least frequently used category in both Turkish and English readers. When semantic concepts of the nouns are investigated, it is illustrated that just five out of sixteen totalconcepts are different in both languages. However, the diversity of the nouns in anyconcept in English is more than in Turkish. As a result of this data, it can beassumed that the difference in thought system also has an influence on the frequency of word categories in a language

The Speech Generating Device (SGD) Mentoring Program: Supporting the Development of People Learning to Use an SGD

Mentoring in speech generating device (SGD) use by adults who use an SGD proficiently offers the potential to improve the device usage of people learning an SGD. The aim of the present study was to examine the impact of SGD mentoring on the mentees’ SGD usage. Three mentors, aged 23, 31, and 54 years, and 3 mentees, aged 13, 14, and 32 years, participated. A nonconcurrent multiple baseline across participants design was used to assess the outcomes. Mentee conversation samples were analyzed for the number of total words, the number of different words, and the number of bound morphemes produced in mentoring sessions. Improvements were made in these measures across the mentees following commencement of mentoring sessions with a trained SGD mentor. These results provide preliminary evidence of SGD mentoring success.

A corpus-based look at short turns in university classroom interaction

AbstractThe aim of the present study is to explore the lexical content of short turns in university classroom discourse. Corpus-based techniques were applied to identify a large number of turns to analyze their lexical content in over two hundred university class sessions. The findings show that, although students take sixty per cent of the turns in our university classrooms, they use only twenty per cent of the total number of words. Consequently, students would produce short turns most of the times while teachers would engage in longer stretches of talk. The results also indicate that short turns generally mark intensive interactional sequences. More specifically, a closer look at the lexical items in these short turns and the functions they serve clearly show that while teachers offer support, elicit further elaboration or prompt reformulation, students mostly indicate agreement, understanding and involvement with these short turns. Considering the turn as a unit of analysis and its characteristic features such as turn-length and lexical variation, the findings of the lexical analysis of short turns suggest that participant roles can be well-defined in the classroom context.

The Narrative Language Performance of Three Types of At-Risk First-Grade Readers

This study investigated the narrative language performance of 3 types of readers who had been identified as being at risk through code-based response-to-intervention (RTI) procedures. In a retrospective group comparison, 32 at-risk 1st-grade readers were identified: children who resolved without intervention (early resolvers, n = 11), children who met criterion following 4 weeks of intervention (good responders, n = 8), and children who failed to meet criterion following 4 weeks of intervention (poor responders, n = 13). A narrative retell and a norm-referenced language test were obtained before intervention. There were no significant differences between the 3 learner types on the language test. However, the narratives of the good responders were significantly higher than the narratives of the other 2 groups on total number of words, number of different words, and number of communication units. The narratives of early resolvers and good responders differed significantly on the productivity index, number of coordinating conjunctions, and number of episodic elements. There were no other significant differences. Types of learners distinguished by a code-based RTI model showed differences in their narrative language. First graders who responded well to code-based reading intervention retold stories that contained more language and better story grammar than first graders who did not respond well to intervention. These results indicate the need to evaluate narrative language performance within RTI, especially for early resolvers.

The Use of Glossing in Modern Original Scientific Writing in Arabic

This study investigates the use of glossing in translated and original scientific texts in Arabic and the factors that motivate this use, given existing knowledge and linguistic gaps between Arabic and English. The form of glossing investigated is the insertion of foreign terms next to their target text counterparts. The study draws on a corpus of 10 translated and 15 original research articles taken from three publications. Statistical analysis of the occurrence of glossing was conducted, taking into consideration variables such as the types of glossed expressions, the ratios of glossed expressions to the total number of words in each text and the recurrence of the same gloss in each text. Results show that glosses of source language scientific terms are used frequently in translated and original texts in the corpus, although the ratios are smaller in original texts than in translated texts. Historical, educational, linguistic and practical factors that could explain such usage in original writings are discussed.

Does colour affect the quality or quantity of children’s stories elicited by pictures?

The current study investigated the effect of colour vs. black-and-white pictures on the stories children told using the pictures as stimuli. Participants were 22 preschool children aged 4—6 (M = 59.98, SD = 7.52) attending day-care centres in a Western Canadian city. Two story sets of five pictures each, depicting stories with similar structure, were used as stimuli. Two versions of each story were made, one in colour and one in black and white. Each child was presented with one of the stories in colour and the other in black and white; versions and stories were counterbalanced across children. Stories were analysed for differences in content using story grammar, in amount using total number of words used in telling the story, and in vocabulary variety using number of different words used. Children were also asked which of the two stories they had preferred and why they preferred that story. Results indicated that stories children told did not differ on any of the variables; children told stories that were similar in content, length, and word variety regardless of whether the pictures used to elicit stories were in colour or black and white. When asked which story they preferred, roughly equal numbers of children expressed a preference for each version; when asked why that story was preferred, only four children ascribed it to colour, while the majority of children gave content-related reasons for their preference. We conclude that colour or lack thereof in picture stimuli does not appear to affect stories told by preschool children who are typically developing.

Volubility as a mediator in the associations between conversational language measures and child temperament

Despite support for the use of conversational language measures, concerns remain regarding the extent to which they may be confounded with aspects of child temperament, extraversion in particular. This study of 161 twins from the Western Reserve Reading Project (WRRP) examined the associations between children's conversational language use and three key aspects of child temperament: Surgency (i.e., introversion/extraversion), Effortful Control (i.e., attention and task persistence) and Negative Affectivity (e.g., fear, anger, sadness). Child biological sex was considered as a possible moderating factor. Correlational analyses were conducted between aspects of temperament during early school-age years (i.e., 7-8 years), as measured by the Children's Behavior Questionnaire-Short Form (CBQ), and six different measures of children's conversational language use: total number of complete and intelligible utterances (TCICU), number of total words (NTW), mean length of utterance (MLU), total number of conjunctions (TNC), number of different words (NDW) and measure D (i.e., a measure of lexical diversity). Values for NTW, TNC and NDW were derived both on the entire sample and on the first 100 C-units. Correlations between language and temperament were compared between girls and boys using the Fisher r-to-z transformation to examine the significance of potential moderating effects. Children's reported variability in Effortful Control did not correlate significantly with any of the child language measures. In contrast, children's Negative Affectivity and Surgency tended to demonstrate positive, albeit modest, correlations with those conversational language measures that were derived from the sample as a whole, rather than from a standardized number of utterances. MLU, as well as measures of NDW and NTW derived from standardized sample lengths of 100 C-units, did not correlate with any measure of child temperament. TNC demonstrated an unexpected negative correlation with child Surgency when it was derived from a standardized number of C-units, but not when derived from the entire sample length. Child biological sex did not moderate the significant associations between language and temperament measures. Overall, measures that control for volubility did not correlate significantly with child temperament; however, measures that reflected volubility tended to correlate weakly with some aspects of temperament, particularly Surgency. Results provide a degree of discriminant evidence for the validity of MLU and measures of type (i.e., NDW) and token use (i.e., NTW) when derived from a standardized number of utterances.

Enhancing Phonological Patterns of Young Children With Highly Unintelligible Speech

Enhancing Phonological Patterns of Young Children With Highly Unintelligible Speech

Zur hierarchischen Organisation des mentalen Lexikons bei Kindern mit spezifischer Sprachentwicklungsstörung

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Organisation und Ausdifferenzierung des Nomen- und Verblexikons in der Spontansprache bei sprachentwicklungsgestörten und sprachunauffälligen Kindern in 2 Altersstufen. Teilnehmer waren jeweils 5 Kinder mit spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörungen (SSES) im Alter von 4 bzw. 9 Jahren. Ihnen gegenüber standen 2 Kontrollgruppen mit jeweils 5 gleichaltrigen sprachunauffälligen Kindern. Aufnahmen von Spielsituationen wurden transkribiert und verschiedene Variablen bestimmt (z. B. Anzahl unterschiedlicher und insgesamt geäußerter Wörter, Äußerungsanzahl, Äußerungslänge). Zur Bewertung der Organisation des Lexikons wurde ein Klassifikationssystem entwickelt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass SSES-Kinder im Vorschulalter über eine unzureichende Organisation ihres mentalen Lexikons verfügen: Das Nomenlexikon enthält kaum Begriffe über- und unterhalb der Basisebene, im Verblexikon sind nur wenige spezifische Verbkategorien vertreten. Kinder ohne Sprachauffälligkeiten haben bereits mit ca. 4 Jahren einen Stand der semantischen Organisation erreicht, der sich bis zum Alter von ca. 9 Jahren nicht mehr wesentlich ändert. SSES-Kinder vollziehen diese Entwicklung verspätet.