Unknown Language Research Articles

The influence of linguistic and cognitive background on word stress processing in an unknown language

The influence of linguistic and cognitive background on word stress processing in an unknown language

Identifying gaps in healthcare: a qualitative study of Ukrainian refugee experiences in the German system, uncovering differences, information and support needs

BackgroundThe 5.8 million Ukrainian refugees arriving in European countries must navigate varying healthcare systems and different and often unknown languages in their respective host countries. To date, there has been little exploration of the experiences, perceived differences, information and support needs of these refugees regarding the use of healthcare in Germany.MethodsWe conducted ten qualitative interviews with Ukrainian refugees living in Germany from February to May 2023, using Ukrainian, English and German language. The transcribed interviews were analysed using the qualitative content analysis method according to Kuckartz and Rädiker with the MAXQDA software.ResultsIn general, participants consistently had a positive experience of the German healthcare system, particularly regarding the quality of treatments and insurance. Differences have been reported in the structure of the healthcare systems. The Ukrainian healthcare system is divided into private and state sectors, with no mandatory insurance and frequent out-of-pocket payments. Pathways differ and tend to focus more on clinics and private doctors. General practitioners, often working in less well-equipped offices, have only recently gained prominence due to healthcare system reforms. Initiating contact with doctors is often easier, with much shorter waiting times compared to Germany. Interviewees often found the prescription requirements for many medications in Germany to be unusual. However, the mentioned differences in healthcare result in unmet information needs among the refugees, especially related to communication, navigating the healthcare system, health insurance, waiting times and medication access. These needs were often addressed through personal internet research and informal (social media) networks because of lacking official information provided during or after their arrival.ConclusionsDespite the positive experiences of Ukrainian refugees in the German healthcare system, differences in the systems and language barriers led to barriers using healthcare and information needs among refugees. The dissemination of information regarding characteristics of the German health care system is crucial for successful integration but is currently lacking.Trial RegistrationGerman Clinical Trials Register: DRKS00030942, date of registration: 29.12.2022.

Foreign Language Anxiety: A Review on Definition, Causes, Effects and Implication to Foreign Language Teaching

Foreign language proficiency is now required for international collaboration and communication in the age of globalization. To interact with others in communication, commerce, scholarly discourse, and education, people must overcome linguistic and cultural boundaries. Foreign languages are still relevant in the age of globalization. However, when people study and utilize foreign languages, they frequently experience foreign language anxiety. In the fields of psychology and education, discussion of foreign language anxiety is essential. The paper studies the concept of foreign language anxiety, its causes, its effects, and its implications for teaching and learning foreign languages through a review of the literature. As a result of the particularities of the language learning process, foreign language anxiety is characterized as a distinct and complicated structure of self-perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors associated with classroom language acquisition. Three variables connected to academic performance—concern over assessments, communication anxiety, and worry linked to an unknown foreign language test—are the root causes of foreign language anxiety. Academic, cognitive, and social effects are the three basic categories into which the effects of foreign language anxiety may be divided. Teachers need to place more emphasis on formative assessment and feedback than summative evaluation at the end of the term in order to lessen students' anxiety about making errors. As a result, it is advised that foreign language teachers encourage student engagement in class activities and create an environment that promotes and supports students' foreign language learning in order to lessen language anxiety.

Hebbian learning can explain rhythmic neural entrainment to statistical regularities.

In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how predictive syllables (or other items) are of one another. Syllables within the same word predict each other better than syllables straddling word boundaries. But does statistical learning lead to memories of the underlying words-or just to pairwise associations among syllables? Electrophysiological results provide the strongest evidence for the memory view. Electrophysiological responses can be time-locked to statistical word boundaries (e.g., N400s) and show rhythmic activity with a periodicity of word durations. Here, I reproduce such results with a simple Hebbian network. When exposed to statistically structured syllable sequences (and when the underlying words are not excessively long), the network activation is rhythmic with the periodicity of a word duration and activation maxima on word-final syllables. This is because word-final syllables receive more excitation from earlier syllables with which they are associated than less predictable syllables that occur earlier in words. The network is also sensitive to information whose electrophysiological correlates were used to support the encoding of ordinal positions within words. Hebbian learning can thus explain rhythmic neural activity in statistical learning tasks without any memory representations of words. Learners might thus need to rely on cues beyond statistical associations to learn the words of their nativelanguage. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Statistical learning may be utilized to identify recurring units in continuous sequences (e.g., words in fluent speech) but may not generate explicit memory forwords. Exposure to statistically structured sequences leads to rhythmic activity with a period of the duration of the underlying units (e.g., words). I show that a memory-less Hebbian network model can reproduce this rhythmic neural activity as well as putative encodings of ordinal positions observed in earlier research. Direct tests are needed to establish whether statistical learning leads to declarative memories for words.

The L2/L3 initial state, initial stages and judgement tasks: The role of intercomprehension when judging unknown languages

This study problematizes the second language (L2) / third language (L3) initial state, questioning who the real initial state-learners are and whether it is the initial state that has been explored in some previous L3 studies that claim to do so. We will discuss the notion of initial stages in relation to the initial state. We argue that, depending on prior language knowledge, learners can – thanks to intercomprehension – advance rapidly from the initial state into the initial stages of interlanguage. We base these suggestions on data from a small-scale study in which 20 native speakers of Swedish assessed whether some Dutch, Finnish and Norwegian sentences were grammatical or not. The results from this study led us to a discussion of whether the leap from the initial state to the initial stages can be overcome more quickly, due to the clues from typological similarity on the lexical level that the learners are given .

<i>Du Iz Tak?</i>

This paper presents the results of the introduction to a project inspired by the éveil aux langues approach with the storytelling of the picture book Du Iz Tak? by the American/Canadian author Carson Ellis (2016). This propaedeutic activity was a multimodal input given in an unknown language to all children, namely an invented language. The aim of this study is to bring more evidence on how the development of metalinguistic awareness at a young age can help pupils meet their learning needs, especially pupils with SEN. Results show that telling a story in a invented language through the use of multimodal resources to convey meaning not only captures the attention of all pupils in the class, but leads them to observe and manipulate this language by making and developing hypotheses about languages, especially pupils with SEN.

Utilizing prior language knowledge: A study of how Thai students translate unknown languages into English

This study aimed to explore how Thai university students applied their prior language knowledge when translating a text from Spanish, an unknown language, into English. The research involved a group of 34 students, whose second language was English, and their third language was French. The assessment of translated texts included quantitative analyses, such as measuring translation accuracy and conducting means comparisons, as well as qualitative investigations via post-task interviews. The results revealed that students with an intermediate level of proficiency in French achieved significantly higher translation accuracy compared to beginners. Insights gleaned from post-task interviews indicated that participants recognized similarities across lexical, phonological, and structural aspects among English, French, and Spanish. These findings highlight the cognitive advantages of exposing students to multiple languages and offer guidance to curriculum developers in higher education institutions seeking to cultivate multilingual graduates. Keywords: English; French; language acquisition; language transfers; multilingualism; translation task.

B - 19 The Role of Neuropsychology in Characterizing an Unidentified Neurodegenerative Disorder: an Adolescent Case Study.

13-year, 9-month-old biracial female with no prior medical history presented with a new onset neurodegenerative disorder following a bullying incident. This case highlights the role of neuropsychology in the characterization of neurodegenerative disorders in a pediatric population. Patient presented with 4-week history of progressive ataxia, nystagmus, and poor memory. Concern for anoxic brain injury from the bullying led to an MRI showing T2 hyperintensity in the bilateral cerebellar peduncles, pons, and midbrain with a "hot cross bun" sign. A deletion in the EPRS gene was found, known to cause hypomyelinating leukodystrophy 15; however, this mutation was not thought to explain her condition. She was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder, type unknown, and severe expressive language disorder. Educational evaluation (age 8) showed low average to average cognitive functioning. Current testing showed intact effort with impaired cognitive functioning and bilateral speeded fine motor dexterity. Expressive and receptive language skills were below average to impaired; speech was slowed and dysarthric. Verbal memory was impaired, but visual memory and executive functioning testing were intact. Parent ratings indicated below average to impaired adaptive functioning. Patient received therapy for the bullying trauma and exhibited no trauma symptoms at this evaluation. Despite the unclear diagnosis, this patient experienced a significant decline in motor and speech/expressive language skills due to an unidentified neurodegenerative disorder. Neuropsychological evaluation also confirmed impacts on intelligence and receptive language and ruled out trauma and psychiatric contributions. This case highlights the role of neuropsychology in multidisciplinary work-up of an unidentified neurodegenerative condition.

Developing Communication Competencies of Library Professionals Through Semiotics Theory Approach in the Contemporary Information System

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the relationship between semiotics theory and communication theory and focus on how semiotics could act as a useful tool to play a big role in the development of communication competencies of library professionals in the contemporary information system. Design/ Methodology/ Approach: The study is fundamentally analytical and qualitative in nature. The analysis of semiotic theory and communication theory is done one by one. In this paper, we use the semiotics theory approach in library services and propose an illustrative library classification list based on Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) for the development of an effective communication competency as well as improve the visual literacy skills of library professionals. Findings: After the study, we find out that the semiotic theory is a general and unrestricted model of sign whereas communication theory is also a general and unrestricted model of communication which is useful for every field of study including the LIS field. Semiotics theory and Communication theory both are very similar and Semiotics build a strong communication competency and improve the visual literacy skills of library professionals. Practical implications: This study will be helpful for library professionals to develop their competencies according to the needs of the hour. Users will be more beneficial and attracted to the library than the formal mode of communication. Those people who cannot communicate in an unknown language and are unable to articulate language can also communicate easily through the visual mode of communication with the help of semiotics. Originality: This paper is the first to combine the theories of communication and semiotics within the context of the competency development of library professionals.

Auditory dyadic interactions through the "eye" of the social brain: How visual is the posterior STS interaction region?

Human interactions contain potent social cues that meet not only the eye but also the ear. Although research has identified a region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus as being particularly sensitive to visually presented social interactions (SI-pSTS), its response to auditory interactions has not been tested. Here, we used fMRI to explore brain response to auditory interactions, with a focus on temporal regions known to be important in auditory processing and social interaction perception. In Experiment 1, monolingual participants listened to two-speaker conversations (intact or sentence-scrambled) and one-speaker narrations in both a known and an unknown language. Speaker number and conversational coherence were explored in separately localised regions-of-interest (ROI). In Experiment 2, bilingual participants were scanned to explore the role of language comprehension. Combining univariate and multivariate analyses, we found initial evidence for a heteromodal response to social interactions in SI-pSTS. Specifically, right SI-pSTS preferred auditory interactions over control stimuli and represented information about both speaker number and interactive coherence. Bilateral temporal voice areas (TVA) showed a similar, but less specific, profile. Exploratory analyses identified another auditory-interaction sensitive area in anterior STS. Indeed, direct comparison suggests modality specific tuning, with SI-pSTS preferring visual information while aSTS prefers auditory information. Altogether, these results suggest that right SI-pSTS is a heteromodal region that represents information about social interactions in both visual and auditory domains. Future work is needed to clarify the roles of TVA and aSTS in auditory interaction perception and further probe right SI-pSTS interaction-selectivity using non-semantic prosodic cues.

Linguistic identity as a modulator of gaze cueing of attention

Eye-gaze stimuli can elicit orienting of attention in an observer, a phenomenon known as gaze cueing of attention. Here, we explored whether gaze cueing can be shaped by the linguistic identity of the cueing face. In two experiments, participants were first familiarized with different faces together with auditory sentences. Half of the sentences were associated with the native language of the participants (Italian) and the other half with an unknown language (Albanian and Basque, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). In a second phase, participants performed a gaze-cueing task. In a third recognition phase, the auditory sentences were presented again, and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. Results indicated that participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other language category. Results of the gaze-cueing task revealed a greater gaze-cueing effect for faces associated with the native vs. unknown language. Critically, this difference emerged only in Experiment 1, which may reflect differences in social status between the two language groups. Our findings revealed the impact of language as a social cue on the gaze-cueing effect, suggesting that social attention is sensitive to the language of our interlocutors.

A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script*

AbstractSeveral dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system have been discovered in an area stretching geographically from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to southern Afghanistan. Most inscriptions can be dated to the period from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, yet all attempts at decipherment have so far been unsuccessful. The recent discovery of previously unknown inscriptions near the Almosi gorge, Tajikistan, however, allows for a renewed attempt at decipherment. Drawing upon a catalogue of characters and a distributional analysis, we report two identical sequences in the newly found Almosi inscriptions and in the Dašt‐i Nāwur trilingual. Based on parallel texts in Bactrian, we suggest to read the name of the Kushan emperor Vema Takhtu in these sequences, accompanied by the title ‘king of kings’ and several epithets. This allows for the deduction of probable phonetic values of 15 different consonantal signs and four vocalic diacritics and the inference that the inscriptions record a previously unknown Middle Iranian language.

Description and requirements for teaching Georgian as a foreign language A1 level

   Modernity defines our life, novelty rules everything. Language, as a living system, reacts significantly to each innovation. Each generation leaves its mark in the language, sorts, replaces and assigns a special place to some combinations of words. The Common European Framework Reference (CEFR) is a guide for marking language levels. Some instruments produced within the framework of the Council of Europe played a decisive role in the so-called teaching "foreign" languages. A communicative approach has been specially developed through the promotion of methodological innovations and training programs. They have promoted a new approach to communication with these teaching methods - for easy and quick acquisition of unknown languages ​​- in a convenient way. So, by identifying the language need, they were able to accurately determine the knowledge, that is, the knowledge needed to achieve this or that level of communication threshold. Until now, the grading system has always been divided into six levels. It is possible and permissible to divide each level into two or subdivide according to the needs of the local context. Levels are defined by the "can" descriptor. This approach was described in 2001, but it was preceded by some period of work. The first specification of the "threshold level" was established for the English language in 1975 (Threshold level). In general, Great Britain has the largest and best experience in teaching English as a foreign language. Undoubtedly, it is not surprising that they started thinking about this issue from the beginning. The formation of the specificity of the English language was soon followed by French (Un Niveau Seuil, 1976). These two tools are used as the basis for reference tools of the same type that were subsequently developed for other languages. Of course, the peculiar characteristics of each language were taken into account. The CEFR is based on and integrates all these achievements and has developed a description of foreign language acquisition according to the types of competence and sub-competency. The created descriptors are general, that is, they are not adapted to a specific language. However, for textbook writers, teachers, and other professionals, the CEFR specifications may be too general because individual languages ​​are not considered. Therefore, their field of application is wide. Descriptors track the progressive mastery of each skill, which is rated on a six-level scale. It is interesting to see how these features appear in A1 level textbooks

Characterization of the Intelligibility of Vowel–Consonant–Vowel (VCV) Recordings in Five Languages for Application in Speech-in-Noise Screening in Multilingual Settings

The purpose of this study is to characterize the intelligibility of a corpus of Vowel–Consonant–Vowel (VCV) stimuli recorded in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese) in order to identify a subset of stimuli for screening individuals of unknown language during speech-in-noise tests. The intelligibility of VCV stimuli was estimated by combining the psychometric functions derived from the Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) measure with those derived from listening tests. To compensate for the potential increase in speech recognition effort in non-native listeners, stimuli were selected based on three criteria: (i) higher intelligibility; (ii) lower variability of intelligibility; and (iii) shallower psychometric function. The observed intelligibility estimates show that the three criteria for application in multilingual settings were fulfilled by the set of VCVs in English (average intelligibility from 1% to 8% higher; SRT from 4.01 to 2.04 dB SNR lower; average variability up to four times lower; slope from 0.35 to 0.68%/dB SNR lower). Further research is needed to characterize the intelligibility of these stimuli in a large sample of non-native listeners with varying degrees of hearing loss and to determine the possible effects of hearing loss and native language on VCV recognition.

Speech-in-speech perception: The role of F0, rate, and rhythm

Speech perception typically takes place against a background of other speech or noise. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of segregating speech streams within a competing speech signal, examining whether cues such as pitch that typically denote a difference in talker behave in the same way as cues such as speaking rate that typically do not denote the presence of a new talker. Native English speakers listened to English target speech within English two-talker babble of a similar or different pitch and/or a similar or different speaking rate to identify whether mismatched properties between target speech and masker babble improve speech segregation. Additionally, Dutch and French masker babble was tested to identify whether an unknown language masker improves speech segregation capacity and whether the rhythm patterns of the unknown language modulate the improvement. Individual differences in selective attention were also measured to determine whether they can predict speech segregation ability. This study aims to increase the understanding of speech perception in a more ecologically valid context and to identify whether there is a link between a cue’s potential to denote a new speaker and its ability to aid in speech segregation during competing speech perception.

The Khakas-Altaian Mythonym Ker and the Proto-Yenissean Word for ‘Mammoth’. 2

The article continues the research on the names of mammoth or other mammoth-like monsters as characteristic elements of the mythological onomasticon of some Siberian traditions (Turkic, Yenissean, Tungusic). In the first part of the article, the author identified a reconstructed Proto-Yenissean form *čer / *ťèkə́r ‘mammoth (giant horned fish)’ > Ket 1tēľ ~ Yug 1čel ~ Pumpokol *kher (> Altaic, Khakass, Teleut ker, kär ‘a monster, especially a giant fish’) as a possible origin of these names. In this part, the author proposes a pre-Yenissean (Sino-Caucasian) etymology for it: *c̣HírV[ʁ]V (> North-Caucasian *c̣irVχV ‘caterpillar, snail; line’ ~ Sino-Tibetan *čaŋ ‘lizard’ ~ (?) Burushaski hargin ‘dragon, a monster that a snake turns into.’ It is assumed that the image of the mammoth-fish (as opposed to a more widely known and probably more ancient image of mammoth-bull) was formed in the Proto-Yenissean tradition after the speakers of the Yenissean proto-language migrated from the southern ancestral homeland to Siberia. It is based on ideas about the transformation of a snake, fish or similar chthonic animal into a giant dragon-like creature that existed among the Sino-Caucasian ancestors of the Yenisseans spread in the Pamir-Hindukush region, and was known to the ancient Chinese. The formation of the image of the mammoth-fish among the Yenisseans was also influenced by the Iranian motif of the “a belt dissecting a tree.” The Yenissean image of the mammoth-fish reached Siberia, particularly, it was borrowed into the shamanic tradition of the Evenks, which is evidenced by the possible etymology of the Evenki selī ‘mammoth’ (including mammoth-horned fish) from the reconstructed form of the unknown Yenissean language *seĺ (< *čer / *ťèkə́r).

The Role of Images in the Teaching and Learning of English: Practices, Issues, and Possibilities

Audio-visual aids have been one of the most influential sources, especially, in teaching and learning an unknown language. The use of images found in textbooks has great implications for teaching and learning the English language to non-natives. The current study aimed to explore the use of images in textbooks to teach the English language in primary schools in a Pakistani urban setting. The researchers, following the norms of qualitative research, used class observations and interviews as the tools for data collection. The findings of the study reiterated that the use of pictures in language teaching is quite helpful; however, the teachers under observation, often, did not make use of pictures found in the textbooks to teach the English language. The teachers can make their lectures and classroom activities more lively, interesting, and fruitful by employing the pictures found in the textbooks they use to teach the English language.

Memory for nonadjacent dependencies in the first year of life and its relation to sleep

Grammar learning requires memory for dependencies between nonadjacent elements in speech. Immediate learning of nonadjacent dependencies has been observed in very young infants, but their memory of such dependencies has remained unexplored. Here we used event-related potentials to investigate whether 6- to 8-month-olds retain nonadjacent dependencies and if sleep after learning affects this memory. Infants were familiarised with two rule-based morphosyntactic dependencies, presented in sentences of an unknown language. Brain responses after a retention period reveal memory of the nonadjacent dependencies, independent of whether infants napped or stayed awake. Napping, however, altered a specific processing stage, suggesting that memory evolves during sleep. Infants with high left frontal spindle activity show an additional brain response indicating memory of individual speech phrases. Results imply that infants as young as 6 months are equipped with memory mechanisms relevant to grammar learning. They also suggest that during sleep, consolidation of highly specific information can co-occur with changes in the nature of generalised memory.

The Categorization of L3 Vowels Near First Exposure by Spanish-English Bilinguals

The present study examined the predictions the Perceptual Assimilation Model in the context of naïve bilingual speakers while also considering whether the predictions of third language (L3) models of morphosyntax could be extended to L3 phonology. In particular, it was asked whether several groups of Spanish-English bilinguals (constituting a fully combined design) would categorize sounds in two unknown languages, French and German, using their first language (L1) categories, second language (L2) categories, or a combination of both. 199 participants took part in the study, who made up 4 total groups: L1 English–L2 Spanish (n = 55), L1 Spanish–L2 English (n = 59), English monolingual (n = 59) and Spanish monolingual (n = 29). The participants completed a vowel categorization task, where they were asked to match four vowel sounds in French and German to their existing English and Spanish categories. The results of a series of Bayesian Multinomial regression models suggested that bilinguals categorize L3 vowels using both L1 and L2 categories according to the acoustics of the input. There was no evidence of a clear bias for either the L1 or L2 when an L3 vowel exists in both the L1 and L2. Additionally, the bilingual English participants differed from English monolinguals in the their categorization of new language sounds. These results have implications for both the PAM-L2 and L3 models, by showing that the language learners are not solely guided by their native language, and have access to both L1 and L2 categories when accounting for novel language sounds.

The time-course of linguistic interference during native and non-native speech-in-speech listening

Recognizing speech in a noisy background is harder when the background is time-forward than for time-reversed speech, a masker direction effect, and harder when the masker is in a known rather than an unknown language, indicating linguistic interference. We examined the masker direction effect when the masker was a known vs unknown language and calculated performance over 50 trials to assess differential masker adaptation. In experiment 1, native English listeners transcribing English sentences showed a larger masker direction effect with English than Mandarin maskers. In experiment 2, Mandarin non-native speakers of English transcribing Mandarin sentences showed a mirror pattern. Both experiments thus support the target-masker linguistic similarity hypothesis, where interference is maximal when target and masker languages are the same. In experiment 3, Mandarin non-native speakers of English transcribing English sentences showed comparable results for English and Mandarin maskers. Non-native listening is therefore consistent with the known-language interference hypothesis, where interference is maximal when the masker language is known to the listener, whether or not it matches the target language. A trial-by-trial analysis showed that the masker direction effect increased over time during native listening but not during non-native listening. The results indicate different target-to-masker streaming strategies during native and non-native speech-in-speech listening.