Utterance Of Sentence Research Articles

Designing a Leveled Conversational Teachable Agent for English Language Learners

Given the considerable importance of the English language as a common method of global communication, supporting and engaging learning environments for studying English as a second language are essential. In this study, we propose an interactive agent that considers differences in learners’ skill levels to help motivate learners and support independent study. The proposed agent is an AI chatbot that can vary the complexity of its natural language interactions as learners’ skills improve and engage in unstructured conversations with users. We first collected a dataset of English conversations among children and then acquired data on learners’ utterances of words and sentences using an interactive interface for skill evaluation. Based on these datasets, we generated a set of personalized conversational agents by using algorithms to evaluate speakers’ pronunciation and sentences. Finally, an expert in English language learning evaluated the interactive system to ensure that it could support learners with different levels of proficiency and that the application may be expected to help motivate students to learn. The results showed that the interactive teachable agent could help motivate students who may not otherwise be interested in learning by using a more personalized approach tailored to their skill level.

Integration of visual context in early and late bilingual language processing: evidence from eye-tracking.

Previous research on the processing of language embedded in a rich visual context has revealed the strong effect that a recently viewed action event has on language comprehension. It has been shown that listeners are more likely to view the target object of a recently performed event than look at the target object of a plausible future event during sentence utterance, regardless of the tense cue. In the current visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we tested the strength of the recently observed visual context with a group of English monolingual and two groups of English-French early and late bilingual speakers. By comparing these different groups, we examined whether bilingual speakers, as a consequence of greater cognitive flexibility when integrating visual context and language information, show early anticipatory eye-movements toward the target object. We further asked whether early and late bilinguals show differences in their processing. The findings of the three eye-tracking experiments revealed an overall preference for the recently seen event. However, as a result of the early provision of tense cue, this preference was quickly diminished in all three groups. Moreover, the bilingual groups showed an earlier decrease in reliance on the recently seen event compared to monolingual speakers and the early bilinguals showed anticipatory eye-movements toward the plausible future event target. Furthermore, a post-experimental memory test revealed that the bilingual groups recalled the future events marginally better than the recent events, whereas the reverse was found in the monolingual groups.

머신러닝 분류기를 사용한 만성콩팥병 자동 진단 및 중증도 예측 연구*

This paper proposes an optimal methodology for automatically diagnosing and predicting the severity of the chronic kidney disease (CKD) using patients’ utterances. In patients with CKD, the voice changes due to the weakening of respiratory and laryngeal muscles and vocal fold edema. Previous studies have phonetically analyzed the voices of patients with CKD, but no studies have been conducted to classify the voices of patients. In this paper, the utterances of patients with CKD were classified using the variety of utterance types (sustained vowel, sentence, general sentence), the feature sets [handcrafted features, extended Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (eGeMAPS), CNN extracted features], and the classifiers (SVM, XGBoost). Total of 1,523 utterances which are 3 hours, 26 minutes, and 25 seconds long, are used. F1-score of 0.93 for automatically diagnosing a disease, 0.89 for a 3-classes problem, and 0.84 for a 5-classes problem were achieved. The highest performance was obtained when the combination of general sentence utterances, handcrafted feature set, and XGBoost was used. The result suggests that a general sentence utterance that can reflect all speakers’ speech characteristics and an appropriate feature set extracted from there are adequate for the automatic classification of CKD patients’ utterances.

Principles of presupposition in development

This paper brings a developmental perspective to the discussion of a longstanding issue surrounding the proper characterization of presuppositions. On an influential view (Stalnaker in Synthese 22(1–2):272–289, 1970; Stalnaker, in Milton, Unger (eds) Semantics and philosophy, New York University Press, New York, 1974; Karttunen in Theor Linguist 1:181–194, 1974), formal presuppositions reflect admittance conditions: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes p is admitted by a conversational context c only if p is common ground in c. The theory distinguishes two modes of satisfying this formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of an uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, the theory has been criticized (among other things) on methodological grounds (see e.g. Gazdar in Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form, Academic Press, New York, 1979): the availability of accommodation makes it difficult to empirically examine the notion of presupposition as admittance conditions because a central tenet—pragmatic infelicity results whenever c does not entail p—may be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of language users. In this paper, we argue that child language presents an opportunity to avoid this intrinsic difficulty. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance. Furthermore and more tellingly, we also find that even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children fail to accommodate presuppositions in an adult-like manner. This pattern of behavior, we argue, is expected under the admittance theory: in a population where the interference from accommodation is reduced, the impact of failing to satisfy the formal admittance conditions becomes directly observable.

Assessor Relative Conativism

AbstractAccording to conventionalist or conativist views about personal-identity, utterances of personal-identity sentences express propositions that are, in part, made true by the conative attitudes of relevant persons-stages. In this paper I introduce assessor relative conativism: the view that a personal-identity proposition can be true when evaluated at one person-stage's context and false when evaluated at another person-stage's context, because person-stages have different patterns of conative attitudes. I present several reasons to embrace assessor relative conativism over its more familiar realizer relative cousin.

한국 중학생의 영어 읽기 발화에서 문장유형에 따른 유창성 등급과 초분절 요소의 관계*

This study aims to help Korean English learners to learn English pronunciation by revealing which suprasegmentals affect the implementation of English sentences closer to native English speakers when they read English sentences. To this end, Korean middle school English learners were selected as subjects and research data were gathered through sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamative), as well as syllables. Speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration, F0 range, and rhythm among suprasegmentals were used for analysis of these English sentence utterances. Mean analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were performed. The results showed that speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration, and F0 range affected the evaluation of fluency levels. In the regression analysis between all suprasegmentals and fluency levels, the suprasegmentals that most affected fluency levels were speech rate and F0 range. Rhythm had no meaningful relation with fluency levels. Therefore, when teaching English pronunciation, it is necessary to teach students to increase their speech rate and F0 range. In addition, students should be trained to reduce both the number and the duration of pauses during utterance to improve their fluency. It is noteworthy that of the four sentence types, exclamative sentences were produced with faster speech rate, fewer pauses, shorter pause duration, and higher rhythm values.

Le abilità di comprensione del testo in soggetti afasici adulti

Experiences of daily interactions with Italian aphasic subjects with unimpaired comprehension abilities according to standardized aphasia tests raise doubts about their actual and complete understanding of what has been said. The available standardized aphasia tests assess only the comprehension of phonemes and of isolated words and sentences, while no tools specifically developed for aphasics exist for the assessment of multiple sentence utterances and for interactions comparable to everyday real interactions. A more precise assessment of comprehension abilities would be necessary, in order to allow clinicians involved in the treatment of aphasia to develop treatment strategies aimed at improving actual comprehension in everyday interactions, as well as to make predictions and give indications for social and work reintegration after treatment. This paper presents the results of a research developed from the cooperation of clinicians (neurologist, physiatrists, speech therapist) and linguists aimed at collecting data on text and discourse comprehension abilities in 28 Italian aphasic adults with left-hemisphere brain damage presenting good performances in standardized comprehension subtests and 28 comparable non-aphasic adults.

The Root of the Third Dogma of Empiricism: Davidson vs. Quine on Factualism

Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. The early Quine, as well as the later Quine, believe that the indeterminacy of translation casts serious doubt on the existence of facts of the matter about correct translation between languages. In this paper, I will argue that Quine cannot be the target of Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism, and that Davidson’s argument is in conflict, among others, with his endorsement of the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. I will show how this conflict results in a radical departure from Quine with respect to the matter of factualism about fine-grained meanings.

Deep Learning-Based Speech Emotion Recognition Using Multi-Level Fusion of Concurrent Features

The detection and classification of emotional states in speech involves the analysis of audio signals and text transcriptions. There are complex relationships between the extracted features at different time intervals which ought to be analyzed to infer the emotions in speech. These relationships can be represented as spatial, temporal and semantic tendency features. In addition to emotional features that exist in each modality, the text modality consists of semantic and grammatical tendencies in the uttered sentences. Spatial and temporal features have been extracted sequentially in deep learning-based models using convolutional neural networks (CNN) followed by recurrent neural networks (RNN) which may not only be weak at the detection of the separate spatial-temporal feature representations but also the semantic tendencies in speech. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based model named concurrent spatial-temporal and grammatical (CoSTGA) model that concurrently learns spatial, temporal and semantic representations in the local feature learning block (LFLB) which are fused as a latent vector to form an input to the global feature learning block (GFLB). We also investigate the performance of multi-level feature fusion compared to single-level fusion using the multi-level transformer encoder model (MLTED) that we also propose in this paper. The proposed CoSTGA model uses multi-level fusion first at the LFLB level where similar features (spatial or temporal) are separately extracted from a modality and secondly at the GFLB level where the spatial-temporal features are fused with the semantic tendency features. The proposed CoSTGA model uses a combination of dilated causal convolutions (DCC), bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), transformer encoders (TE), multi-head and self-attention mechanisms. Acoustic and lexical features were extracted from the interactive emotional dyadic motion capture (IEMOCAP) dataset. The proposed model achieves 75.50% and 75.82% of weighted and unweighted accuracy, 75.32% and 75.57% of recall and F1 score respectively. These results imply that concurrently learned spatial-temporal features with semantic tendencies learned in a multi-level approach improve the model’s effectiveness and robustness.

Pronunciation patterns and characteristics of Post-nasal Tensification in Mongolian Korean learners

This study aims to provide basic data and educational suggestions for Mongolian Korean learners to teach the pronunciation of post-nasal tensification. For this purpose, an experiment was conducted on the pronunciation of post-nasal tensification for intermediate and advanced Mongolian learners, and the pattern and characteristics of tensification were investigated. As a result of the study, tensification rate of sentence utterance was higher than that of word utterance, and there was no difference in proficiency level. In word utterance, there was a significant difference between intermediate and advanced learners. The pattern of tensification in verbs and nouns was different. There was no significant difference between the conjugation of ‘an-’ and ‘al-’. The length of the syllable or the frequency of word use did not affect the pronunciation of the tensification. The error rate was higher when the preceding element was a double consonant than when it was a single consonant. It was found that the error rate of the trailing element was higher when it was a connective ending than when it was an auxiliary verb.

Can a Question Be a Lie? An Empirical Investigation

In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed false presupposition the speaker intends to convey. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the utterances as misleading or as deceiving. The judgements contrast with judgements participants give about cases of misleading or deceptive behaviour, and they pattern with judgements participants make about declarative lies. Finally, the possibility of lying with non-declaratives is not confined to questions: ordinary speakers also judge utterances of imperative, exclamative and optative sentences carrying believed-false presuppositions to be lies.

The role of visual cues in detecting irony

We present four studies that aimed at investigating the contribution of purely visual cues for the detection of irony. In Study 1-3, we presented, without any preceding context, remarks (criticisms and compliments) uttered with sincere and with ironic intent, in three modalities: in the V modality participants could read the comment and see speakers’ facial expressions and bodily movements; in the A modality they could only hear the audio tracks of the uttered sentences; in the VA modality, both visual and auditory information were present. We found that purely visual cues were sufficient to discriminate the ironic intent of the speakers. In Study 4 we presented comments in the V modality, without showing the content of the remark: Accuracy in the detection of sarcasm dropped. We discuss that irony in Study 1-3 might have been recognized indirectly, by comparing the polarity of the remark with the polarity of the actors’ attitude, and we interpret Study 4 data as casting some doubts on the idea that there exist visual cues that specifically convey the speaker’s ironic intent.

A (contingent) content–parthood analysis of indirect speech reports

This article presents a semantic analysis of indirect speech reports. The analysis aims to explain a combination of two phenomena. First, there are true utterances of sentences of the form α said that φ which are used to report an utterance u of a sentence wherein φ's content is not u's content. This implies that in uttering a single sentence, one can say several things. Second, when the complements of these reports (and indeed, these reports themselves) are placed in conjunctions, the conjunctions are typically infelicitous. I argue that this combination of phenomena can be explained if speech reports report (perhaps contingent) parts of the contents of the sentences reported.

PRESUPPOSITION IN JOE BIDEN’S INAUGURATION SPEECH

This study aims to find the types of presupposition used by Joe Biden in his inauguration speech. The meanings of the utterances are based on the context of the speech used theory of context proposed by Huang (2014). This study used a qualitative descriptive method because the researcher describes presupposition and meaning in speech. The data is taken from BBC News. The results of this study found 32 utterances that indicated presupposition. These utterances were classified into nine types of presupposition were used by Joe Biden in his inauguration speech. They are thirteen utterances of definite description, three utterances of factive predicates, two utterances of aspectual of state predicates, three utterances of iteratives, one utterance of implicative predicates, three utterances of quantifiers, one utterance of temporal clause, three utterances of cleft sentences, and three utterances of counterfactual conditional presupposition. The study did the analysis based on two types of context they are linguistic context and non-linguistic context. Besides, the study found that the utterances of Joe Biden in his inauguration speech have implied meanings that were not conveyed directly.

An Analysis of Sentence-Like Utterances of IELTS Mock Speaking Test Scripts

The present study examines non-Malaysian candidates’ performance in an IELTS mock speaking test with regards to their use of different types of sentence structure utterances. Audio recorded data was obtained from eight students of three different levels of proficiency, namely; foundation, intermediate and advanced, in which thereafter an analysis was carried out using Radford (1990; 1997) sentence types. A semi-structured interview was also employed to gauge the candidates’ opinions on answering the test questions as well the interlocutor’s views on the candidates’ performance. The test was conducted by an IELTS trained interlocutor. It was found that most candidates were able to understand the questions, their responses were mainly simple sentence utterances indicated by many disjointed and choppy ideas. The semi-structured interview answers show that most candidates’ high level of nervousness and anxiety caused them not to be able to speak fluently, and as a result, their ideas were expressed in simple sentence structures that lacked logical coordination. It is hoped that the findings of the present study would help the current IETLS course module developers to integrate lessons on the different types of sentence structures in training test candidates to express complete and complex structured responses.

NOT-AT-ISSUE CONTENT IN THE REFLEXIVE-REFERENTIAL THEORY

ABSTRACT The Reflexive-Referential Theory is a multi-content approach to utterance interpretation. Its main proponent, John Perry, assumes that utterances of sentences with singular terms express several contents, depending on how their utterers and interpreters harness information from the situations in which they are produced. However, the theory says little to nothing about implied content, like presuppositions. Here, I discuss the possibility of including presuppositions, defined in terms of the concept of not-at-issue content, in this view. I begin with a brief characterization of the Reflexive-Referential theory in what regards its theoretical motivations and main thesis, followed by a study case of presuppositional not-at-issue content associated to a specific class of singular terms, proper names. To conclude, I ponder over a few consequences of this overall project of theoretical expansion.

The Projection Problem for Predicates of Taste

Utterances of simple sentences containing taste predicates (e.g. "delicious", "fun", "frightening") typically imply that the speaker has had a particular sort of first-hand experience with the object of predication. For example, an utterance of "The carrot cake is delicious" would typically imply that the speaker had actually tasted the cake in question, and is not, for example, merely basing her judgment on the testimony of others. According to one approach, this 'acquaintance inference' is essentially an implicature, one generated by the Maxim of Quality together with a certain principle concerning the epistemology of taste (Ninan 2014). We first discuss some problems for this approach, problems that arise in connection with disjunction and generalized quantifiers. Then, after stating a conjecture concerning which operators 'obviate' the acquaintance inference and which do not, we build on Anand and Korotkova 2018 and Willer and Kennedy Forthcoming by developing a theory that treats the acquaintance requirement as a presupposition, albeit one that can be obviated by certain operators.

켑스트럼 변수와 랜덤포레스트 알고리듬을 이용한 MTD(근긴장성 발성장애) 여성화자 음성과 정상음성 분류*

This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of sustained vowel /a/ and sentence utterance produced by patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) using cepstrum-based acoustic variables. 36 women diagnosed with MTD and the same number of women with normal voice participated in the study and the data were recorded and measured by ADSV™. The results demonstrated that cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and CPP_F0 among all of the variables were statistically significantly lower than those of control group. When it comes to the GRBAS scale, overall severity (G) was most prominent, and roughness (R), breathiness (B), and strain (S) indices followed in order in the voice quality of MTD patients. As these characteristics increased, a statistically significant negative correlation was observed in CPP. We tried to classify MTD and control group using CPP and CPP_F0 variables. As a result of statistic modeling with a Random Forest machine learning algorithm, much higher classification accuracy (100% in training data and 83.3% in test data) was found in the sentence reading task, with CPP being proved to be playing a more crucial role in both vowel and sentence reading tasks.

The transitivity of de jure coreference: a case against Pinillos

De jure coreference in a discourse is typically understood as explicit coreference that speakers are required to recognize in order to count as having correctly understood the discourse. For example, in an utterance of the sentence ‘Tom went to the market because he needed soy milk’, the two underlined terms are typically coreferential in a way that appreciating their coreference is required to fully understand the utterance. Often, de jure coreference is understood as an equivalence relation, so in particular it is thought of as a transitive relation. However, Pinillos (Philos Stud 154(2):301–324, 2011) provides examples that apparently challenge the transitivity of de jure coreference (in intra-personal cases). In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, while it is (at best) inconclusive whether the relevant terms in Pinillos’s examples satisfy his third condition, it is much clearer that they fail to satisfy his first two conditions. Given that Pinillos’s conditions capture important characteristics of de jure coreference, his examples do not successfully show the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. Second, I present an alternative account of his examples, one that shows which representation the anaphoric pronoun in an example of the sort that he presents is de jure coreferential with.

Evaluative adjective sentences: A question-based analysis of projection

Two contents of evaluative adjective sentences, like Kim was smart to watch the movie, are the prejacent (that Kim watched the movie) and the generalization (that the degree to which Kim watching the movie is smart was higher than the contextual standard of smart). The prejacent is standardly analyzed as a presupposition (e.g., Norrick 1978; Barker 2002; Oshima 2009; Kertz 2010). This paper argues against such analyses of the prejacent because, among other things, they do not capture an interaction between the prejacent and the generalization that has not yet been observed for projective content: when the prejacent projects, the generalization does not, and when the prejacent does not project, the generalization does. We develop an analysis according to which the prejacent is not a lexically specified presupposition but is projective to the extent that it is not at-issue with respect to the question addressed by the utterance of the evaluative adjective sentence. In addition to capturing the interaction between the prejacent and the generalization, our question-based projection analysis extends previous such analyses (e.g., Beaver & Clark 2008; Beaver et al. 2017; Simons et al. 2017) by incorporating a novel constraint on the question addressed by an utterance: the more the interpreter takes the truth of content c to follow from the common ground a priori, the less likely the question is about c. We provide experimental evidence for the analysis and argue that it improves on that of Karttunen et al. (2014), according to which evaluative adjectives are ambiguous.