Language Utterances Research Articles

Effects of Embedding Decontextualized Language Through Book-Sharing Delivered by Mothers and Fathers in Coparenting Environments.

Purpose This experiment investigated the effects of a book-sharing intervention implemented in coparenting homes on the conversations of preschoolers with their parents. Method A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to evaluate the effects of embedding decontextualized language utterances during book-sharing delivered by four families. A visual analysis, a two-level mixed-effects model, and a social validity evaluation were used to examine the varying effects of the program on mothers and fathers' storybook conversations. Results Embedding decontextualized language prompts in books not only increased parental decontextualized language utterances, but most parents were able to maintain use of strategies without prompts in the books. The intervention effects were consistently higher for parents than for their children. Social validity results demonstrated parental satisfaction with program delivery and content. Conclusion This study adds to the limited literature on father-child and mother-child decontextualized conversations during book-sharing and illustrates a feasible and adaptable way of promoting language experiences in the home that yield engaging decontextualized conversations in meaningful book-reading contexts. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13210799.

A survey on the animation of signing avatars: From sign representation to utterance synthesis

Signing avatars make it possible for deaf people to access information in their preferred language. However, sign language synthesis represents a challenge for the computer animation community as the motions generated must be realistic and have a precise semantic meaning. In this article, we distinguish the synthesis of isolated signs deprived of any contextual inflections from the generation of full sign language utterances. In both cases, the animation engine takes as input a representation of the synthesis objective to create the final animation. Because of their spatiotemporal characteristics, signs and utterances cannot be described by a sequential representation like phonetics in spoken languages. For this reason, linguistic and gestural studies have aimed to capture the typical and special features of signs and sign language syntax to promote different sign language representations. Those sign representations can then be used to produce an avatar animation thanks to sign synthesis techniques based on keyframes, procedural means or data-driven approaches. Novel utterances can also be generated using concatenative or articulatory techniques.This article constitutes a survey of (i) the challenges specific to sign languages avatars, (ii) the sign representations developed in order to synthesize isolated signs, (iii) the possible sign synthesis approaches, (iv) the different utterance specifications, and (v) the challenges and animation techniques for generating sign language utterances.

Echoic Communications and Pragmatic Relevance of COVID 19 Memes in Nigeria’s Social Media Space

There are greater possibilities for a language utterance to have more meanings than what is stated. It is also possible for the hearers/audience to interpret what the speaker has in mind beyond what the speaker has put out in words. These meanings derived in this form are echoic and they are arrived at by choosing meanings that contextually relevant involving the least effort. How echoic relevant definitions are achieved has been studied using different language instances. Still, none in the researchers' knowledge has investigated how the COVID 19 social media memes, as used by Nigerians, communicate deeper meanings that are contextually relevant and how the echoic interpretations reveal the users' attitude. On this basis, therefore, the present study investigated the echoic nature of COVID 19 related social media memes as used by Nigerians. The study used Sperber and Wilson (1986) relevance theory as the theoretical framework and qualitatively analyzed Ten (10) purposefully selected memes. In the end, the study found out that interpretations of memes are significantly linked with the shared cognitive background knowledge which the speaker/meme creator and the hearer/audience have. Also, memes could echo the attitude of concern, disdain and fear while also harboring deeper meanings that contextually relevant and implicit.

Knowing me, knowing you: Spontaneous use of mentalistic language for self and other in autism.

Autistic people can have difficulties in understanding non-autistic people's mental states such as beliefs, emotions and intentions. Although autistic adults may learn to overcome difficulties in understanding of explicit (overt) mental states, they may nevertheless struggle with implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states. This study explores how spontaneous language is used in order to specifically point to this implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states. In particular, our study compares the spontaneous statements that were used in descriptions of oneself and a familiar other person. Here, we found that autistic and non-autistic adults were comparable in the number of statements about physical traits they made. In contrast, non-autistic adults made more statements about mentalistic traits (about the mental including psychological traits, relationship traits and statements reflecting about these) both for the self and the other. Non-autistic and autistic adults showed no difference in the number of statements about relationships but in the number of statements about psychological traits and especially in the statements reflecting on these. Each group showed a similar pattern of kinds of statements for the self and for the other person. This suggests that autistic individuals show the same unique pattern of description in mentalistic terms for the self and another person. This study also indicates that investigating spontaneous use of language, especially for statements reflecting about mental states, enables us to look into difficulties with implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states.

TUTURAN MANYAMBATI DALAM BAHASA BANJAR

This study aims to present manyambati utterances in the Banjarese language. The problem is how does the form of violations of politeness utterance manyambati in Banjar language. The purpose of this study is to describe the form of violation of politeness utterance manyambati in Banjar language. It is a qualitative study using a descriptive method. This study uses three steps of work, they are providing data, analyzing data, and presenting data. The technique used in data collection is recording and documentation. The data are taken from January 2019 to March 2019. The place and source of data are taken from people who live in Banjarmasin, Banjarbaru, and Martapura. To analyze the data this study uses the speech act theory. This study uses a descriptive and interpretative technique. The result of data analysis is presented in common words. Based on the results of data analysis, it can be concluded that the form of violations of politeness utterance manyambati in Banjar language consists of mentioning someone's physical deficiency, negative work, names of parents, and dirty objects. These four manyambati utterances have already threatened someone's dignity. The speaker has already violated the principal politeness language.

Variational model for low-resource natural language generation in spoken dialogue systems

Natural Language Generation (NLG) plays a critical role in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs), aims at converting a meaning representation into natural language utterances. Recent deep learning-based generators have shown improving results irrespective of providing sufficient annotated data. Nevertheless, how to build a generator that can effectively utilize as much of knowledge from a low-resource setting data is a crucial issue for NLG in SDSs. This paper presents a variational-based NLG framework to tackle the NLG problem of having limited annotated data in two scenarios, domain adaptation and low-resource in-domain training data. Based on this framework, we propose a novel adversarial domain adaptation NLG taclking the former issue, while the latter issue is also handled by a second proposed dual variational model. We extensively conducted the experiments on four different domains in a variety of training scenarios, in which the experimental results show that the proposed methods not only outperform previous methods when having sufficient training dataset but also show its ability to work acceptably well when there is a small amount of in-domain data or adapt quickly to a new domain with only a low-resource target domain data.

User Utterance Acquisition for Training Task-Oriented Bots: A Review of Challenges, Techniques and Opportunities

Building conversational task-oriented bots requires large and diverse sets of annotated user utterances to learn mappings between natural language utterances and user intents. Given the complexity of human language as well as the recent advances on intent recognition (especially deep-learning-based approaches), bot developers now have faced a new challenge: efficiently and effectively collecting a large number of quality (e.g., diverse and unbiased) training samples. This article studies training user utterance acquisition along several important dimensions including cost and quality. We discuss state of the art techniques, identify open issues, and inform an outlook on future research directions.

Learning to Map Frequent Phrases to Sub-Structures of Meaning Representation for Neural Semantic Parsing

Neural semantic parsers usually generate meaning representation tokens from natural language tokens via an encoder-decoder model. However, there is often a vocabulary-mismatch problem between natural language utterances and logical forms. That is, one word maps to several atomic logical tokens, which need to be handled as a whole, rather than individual logical tokens at multiple steps. In this paper, we propose that the vocabulary-mismatch problem can be effectively resolved by leveraging appropriate logical tokens. Specifically, we exploit macro actions, which are of the same granularity of words/phrases, and allow the model to learn mappings from frequent phrases to corresponding sub-structures of meaning representation. Furthermore, macro actions are compact, and therefore utilizing them can significantly reduce the search space, which brings a great benefit to weakly supervised semantic parsing. Experiments show that our method leads to substantial performance improvement on three benchmarks, in both supervised and weakly supervised settings.

Explaining second language utterance fluency: Contribution of cognitive fluency and first language utterance fluency

AbstractGiven that utterance fluency in a second language (L2) is associated with not only L2 cognitive fluency but also utterance fluency in the first language (L1), the study examined to what extent different measures of L2 utterance fluency can be explained by L2-specific cognitive fluency and/or the corresponding L1 utterance fluency measures. Utterance fluency measures on speed, breakdown, and repair phenomena and cognitive fluency measures including speed of lexical retrieval, syntactic encoding, and articulation were collected in the L1 and the L2 from 44 Chinese learners of English. The results show that most L2 utterance fluency measures are accounted for by the combination of L2-specific cognitive fluency measures and the equivalent L1 utterance fluency measure, whereas the number of mid-clause silent pauses and corrections, and mean syllable duration are largely explained by L2-specific cognitive measures, suggesting that they reflect L2-specific knowledge and cognitive skills. In contrast, mean silent pause duration and the number of filled pauses are mainly explained by the corresponding L1 utterance fluency measures.

Gestures in EFL classroom: Their relations with complexity, accuracy, and fluency in EFL teachers’ L2 utterances

This observational study was conducted to examine the effects of Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' gestures on their second language (L2) utterances in EFL lessons. Two English lessons, one in a public senior high school and another in a private junior high school, taught by Japanese EFL teachers were video and audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. The teachers' L2 utterances were analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency to examine the following: (1) whether there is a difference between L2 utterances with and without gestures and (2) whether there is a difference in the effect of gestures according to their types. The results were as follows: (1) L2 utterances are more complex and fluent with gestures but accuracy was equal when accompanied by gestures and (2) there is a difference in the relations of some specific types of gestures to L2 utterances, with metaphoric gestures showing the highest scores in complexity and fluency and emblems the lowest. These findings suggest that teachers’ gestures play a crucial role in EFL classrooms, and therefore, should be given more consideration in L2 teacher education and training programs.

Discrepancies of Figurative Language Use Reflected Through Cross-Linguistic and Intercultural Differences in English and Albanian Language

The present paper aims at highlighting some cultural and cross-linguistic aspects of idioms causing miscommunication in language. Learning a foreign language shapes the language system of communication with its literal and figurative meanings. While the literal meaning is the direct reference of words or sentences to objects, the figurative sense is used for giving an imaginative description or a special effect. Gaining competence in language enrolls a good command of the figurative use of that language together with its frequent, spontaneous and appropriate use of idioms being an indicator of native or near native mastery of the language. When such command of a foreign language lacks then it gives rise to discrepancies in language, and idioms for the sake of truth become often subject to misconstrued utterances in a target language on the part of L2 learners. Using literal senses of words to trigger the recognition of idioms brings some potential problems. Thus, this article brings together the findings and insights of figurative aspect of English and Albanian language system and its cultural aspect to further the understanding of the phenomena of communicative failures and mismatches in language. The study seeks to analyze and present through a corpus analysis idiom occurrences of communication failure in both languages. A variety of figurative use of language is illustrated in certain contexts and situations to lighten up the usage of idiom mismatches in second language acquisition and provide the paper with rich examples as well.

Features of the translation of elliptical utterances in the spoken Japanese language

This work is devoted to the study of the translation of elliptical constructions in oral speech. The characterization of ellipsis in Japanese and creation its typology. Ellipsis as a phenomenon is a basic characteristic of every language. It is commonly found in several languages, one of which is Japanese. Ellipsis causes difficulties in learning the language, since problems might arise not with unfamiliar vocabulary presented in the text, but on the contrary with words missing in it. In addition, ellipsis is considered an important element in the culture of interpersonal communication between Japanese people, when in a speech both individual words and significant parts of the utterance can be omitted, and the listener should be able to independently recover the missing information based on the context, specific speech situation or his background knowledge. The problems of perception and translation of elliptical structures can be solved by forming a conscious idea of the ellipsis and the rules of its functioning in Japanese. This skill is one of the most important in the perception of oral and written speech in natural conditions, and the ability to independently use elliptical constructions makes speech less complicated, which allows it to sound more natural. Key words: ellipsis, elliptical constructions, linguistics, translation, oral speech.

To Know we Need to Share - Information in the Context of Interactive Acquisition of Knowledge

Abstract Natural language interface requires much more complex processing than is currently assumed. We present a general review of foundational notions of data, information and knowledge, aiming at tentatively sketching out a set of subcomponents of an integra-tive linguistic theory of man machine interaction, bearing in mind that our model will favor further research on simulation of man man interaction. Our main concern is to show that in order to acquire knowledge humans need to extract it from multiple kinds of information as distributed in the content of natural language utterances.

Entropy of Polysemantic Words for the Same Part of Speech

In this paper, a special type of polysemantic words, that is, words with multiple meanings for the same part of speech, are analyzed under the name of neutrosophic words. These words represent the most difficult cases for the disambiguation algorithms as they represent the most ambiguous natural language utterances. For approximate their meanings, we developed a semantic representation framework made by means of concepts from neutrosophic theory and entropy measure in which we incorporate sense related data. We show the advantages of the proposed framework in a sentiment classification task.

Psycholinguistic Preconditions of Gradation Functioning in the Individual World Picture

Aim of the research. To describe objective and subjective factors of language semantic interpretation of gradation thinking content (psychological and linguistic aspects in gradation semantics).
 Research methods. The article describes the foundations of distinguishing functional and semantic gradation category in the Ukrainian language which is reflected in the units of different levels. The linguistic cognitive character of the investigation is proved within these notions, as one of the principle tasks of the work is to determine mental anthropocentric and psychological factors of emerging gradation utterances in the Ukrainian language, which demonstrate the unity of linguistics and psychology, language and speech. The methodology consisted in comparing the materials of gradation in different levels, carrying out hypothetic modeling of the gradation scale on the basis of functioning gradation verbal markers, determining psychological foundations for gradation functioning in the individual picture of the world. The interaction of the objective (conceptual world of the gradated O) and the subjective (emotional and intellectual sphere of the gradator S) worlds creates the gradation fragment in a language, its orientation concerning the gradation dimension (O – object, S – subject of gradation).
 Results. The investigation of the motivation, semantic accentuation and communicators character, i.e. the inner world of the speaker and listener, text author and reader, enabled to code and decode the information given in the text. For decoding we identified the gradation units and explicated them on the sentence (text) level, distinguished pragmatic structures with redundant information. Thus the problem of certain stereotypes as the norm of environment perception, deviations from the norm was partially solved and the possibilities of reconstructing the quality characteristics of the language world picture were expanded.
 Conclusion. The choice of the verbal implementation for gradation category is carried out by the author of the communication act, it is subordinated to particular psychological regularities, which are general for human language but mentally individual concerning the communicator personality and individual language picture of the world.

GF + MMT = GLF – From Language to Semantics through LF

These days, vast amounts of knowledge are available online, most of it in written form. Search engines help us access this knowledge, but aggregating, relating and reasoning with it is still a predominantly human effort. One of the key challenges for automated reasoning based on natural-language texts is the need to extract meaning (semantics) from texts. Natural language understanding (NLU) systems describe the conversion from a set of natural language utterances to terms in a particular logic. Tools for the co-development of grammar and target logic are currently largely missing. We will describe the Grammatical Logical Framework (GLF), a combination of two existing frameworks, in which large parts of a symbolic, rule-based NLU system can be developed and implemented: the Grammatical Framework (GF) and MMT. GF is a tool for syntactic analysis, generation, and translation with complex natural language grammars and MMT can be used to specify logical systems and to represent knowledge in them. Combining these tools is possible, because they are based on compatible logical frameworks: Martin-L\"of type theory and LF. The flexibility of logical frameworks is needed, as NLU research has not settled on a particular target logic for meaning representation. Instead, new logics are developed all the time to handle various language phenomena. GLF allows users to develop the logic and the language parsing components in parallel, and to connect them for experimentation with the entire pipeline.

Constructing a Children-Friendly Language within In-Family Interaction Context

This paper proposes a construction of a children-friendly language within in-family interaction context. The term children-friendly here refers to the building of their language with character, i.e. a language elaboration by involving language use as a matter of probabilities. The elaboration of the children-friendly language is seen from the aspects of power and solidarity from the parents to the children and considers politeness for superiors (distant language) and camaraderie for close people (close language). The close Indonesian language and the distant Indonesian language in this construction employ different topics and particularly-elaborated utterances which are formality-based, directness-based, and meaning-based. Formality-based utterances are elaborated into informal and formal utterances, directness-based into direct and indirect utterances, and meaning-based utterances into literal and non-literal utterances. Different topics in this children-friendly language construction are also thoroughy differentiated into safe and common topics and personal and private topics. Examples of safe and common topics are family, work, and sports. Examples of personal and private topics are religion, status of marriage, and salary. Safe and common topics are not dangerous, and personal and private topics are touchy and dangerous. The former topics are involved in distant language, while the latter topics are elaborated for close language. The proportion of the close Indonesian language and the distant Indonesian language to be introduced to and learned by children is carefully set and given accounts, i.e. bigger portion on close language than that on distant language. Close language utterances as well as the topics are formulated in such a way that children should get verbally close to their parents, siblings, relatives, and close communities. Meanwhile, distant language utterances as well as the topics are also formulated in such a way that children should respect superiors or even strangers they meet for the first time. This paper advocates the theories on face , politeness strategies , respect and solidarity, and politeness and camaraderie , with elaborate types of hearer in the aspects of power and solidarity. This paper is empirically trying to encourage early stage of politeness for children, hence preparing them to have a basis for developing their character language and for their early learning to create harmony in their interpersonal and social encounters.

A Survey on Temporal Reasoning for Temporal Information Extraction from Text

Time is deeply woven into how people perceive, and communicate about the world. Almost unconsciously, we provide our language utterances with temporal cues, like verb tenses, and we can hardly produce sentences without such cues. Extracting temporal cues from text, and constructing a global temporal view about the order of described events is a major challenge of automatic natural language understanding. Temporal reasoning, the process of combining different temporal cues into a coherent temporal view, plays a central role in temporal information extraction. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the research from the past decades on temporal reasoning for automatic temporal information extraction from text, providing a case study on how combining symbolic reasoning with machine learning-based information extraction systems can improve performance. It gives a clear overview of the used methodologies for temporal reasoning, and explains how temporal reasoning can be, and has been successfully integrated into temporal information extraction systems. Based on the distillation of existing work, this survey also suggests currently unexplored research areas. We argue that the level of temporal reasoning that current systems use is still incomplete for the full task of temporal information extraction, and that a deeper understanding of how the various types of temporal information can be integrated into temporal reasoning is required to drive future research in this area.

INTERFERENSI BAHASA BATAK MANDAILING DALAM TUTURAN BERBAHASA INDONESIA PADA ACARA PARPUNGUAN MASYARAKAT MANDAILING KOTA JAMBI

This research is aimed at describing the types of Batak Mandailing language interference towards Indonesian language in the event Parpunguan masyarakat Mandailing Kota Jambi society. This research is qualitative descriptive. The data is taken from the utterances of Indonesian language which comprises Batak Mandailing language interference. The data is collected by using listening and tapping technique, observation, and speaking. The result of data analysis shows that there are grammatical interferences in the event parpunguan in Kota Jambi, namely; there are 8 utterances in the form of morpheme, there 6 utterances in the form of words, there are 28 utterances in the form phrase, there are 9 utterances in the form of clause, and there are 3 utterances in the form of sentence from those 54 data. The result of this research is being recommended to the expert of language, Badan Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa Provinsi Jambi, and head of custom to increase a kind of socialization in using Indonesian language to society correctly; Moreover, to the society who live in Kota Jambi especially Bataknese Mandailing to pay more attention to the use of Indonesian language correctly. Keywords: Batak Mandailing Language Interference, Indonesian Language, Parpunguan

Hippotherapy and the Communicative Abilities of Children With Down Syndrome: A Preliminary Study

Hippotherapy uses the horse’s movement to enhance motor coordination, sensory integration, communication, and emotional stability in people with different disabilities. There is a need for evidence that proves increased efficiency in language use. In this study, we analyze the effect of hippotherapy on the communicative abilities of children with Down syndrome. Nine children between 4 and 7 years of age participated in two types of therapies: traditional language therapy and hippotherapy. Results showed effects of hippotherapy on language production and utterance length. Comprehension was enhanced by all therapy techniques. This preliminary study based on systematic evidence illustrates the effects of hippotherapy on communicative abilities.