English Words Research Articles

On Ambiguity in the Arabic Language: Scrutinizing Translation Issues through Machine Translation from English and French into Arabic

Ambiguity in some syntactic structures of the same language has always posed problems to the human translator and to machine translation. These problems become more complex for the Machine Translation of genetically unrelated languages such as Arabic, English and French. Arabic Lexical ambiguity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) also poses problems when the semantic fields of Arabic words differ from those of English for instance. This often occurs when two or more words from Arabic equate to a single word in English. Semantic gaps between the two languages are also a source of ambiguity in Natural Language Processing. We shall deal with some cases of ambiguity in machine translation from Arabic to English and French and vice versa. The questions addressed in this paper relate to segmentation, determination / non-determination, coordination and the issue of the word as a meaningful and functional unit. Some aspects of the segmentation of constituents into grammatical categories and their comparison with structures of Arabic English and French are addressed in this paper.

Second Language Arabic Knowledge Useful for Learning Hebrew Vocabulary

Arabic and Hebrew belong to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and thus, they are semantically and phonetically similar in many lexical aspects. This study examined the benefits of Malaysian university students having prior knowledge of Arabic while learning Hebrew. A two-page questionnaire was administered to two groups of 30 and 40 students at advanced and fundamental Arabic proficiency levels, respectively. Page 1 contained a checklist with Yes/No columns about 30 Hebrew words to examine the participants’ prior knowledge. If participants answered yes, they were asked to write the meaning of the word in English or Malay. They then answered multiple-choice questions about the 30 Hebrew words on Page 2. Arabic counterparts were not shown on the questionnaire to prevent cuing the participants. The first group of participants, 30 Malaysian students with advanced Arabic proficiency, learned an average of 23.07 Hebrew words. The vocabulary items most correctly identified by Group 1 were ‘olam “world” (30 correct answers), katavti “I wrote” (28), mavet “death” (28), melekh “king” (27), moakh “brain” (27), shabat “Saturday” (27), shen “tooth” (27), shamayim “sky” (26), shana “year” (26), ahavti “I loved” (26), and ozen “ear” (26). The second group, 40 Malaysian students with basic Arabic knowledge, acquired 12.83 words on average. The scores of the two groups differed with statistical significance at the 5% level (p < 0.001, df = 68, t = 14.26). From these results, it appears that Arabic lexical knowledge significantly facilitates Malaysian students’ acquisition of Hebrew vocabulary.

THE CONCEPT OF PROPITIATION IN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST

The English word “propitiation” (Greek hilastērion) is not in common theological use today. Modern theology has generally become uneasy with it. The aversion to it is because the idea is associated with the sense of appeasing an angry deity brought in from pagan use and practice. This has resulted in the removal of the traditional translation “propitiation” with many modern English Bible translations preferring “expiation,” or “atoning sacrifice,” or some other general phrase. Thus, for example, while the New King James Version of Romans 3:25 is translated, “whom God set forth as a propitiation,” and the English Standard Version, “whom God put forward as a propitiation,” other modern translations are different. The New International Version is rather, “sacrifice of atonement;” Revised Standard Version has “an expiation by his blood;” Common English Bible, “place of sacrifice;” The Bible in Basic English, “the sign of his mercy.” This article insists that we must not just reject the use of the word propitiation simply because it was wrongly understood in pagan quarters. It conveys something vital when we come to consider what God has done for us in Christ. Until recently, many understood by this word that the death of Christ has effected the removal of the wrath of God and made us the recipients of his mercy. The cross brought satisfaction to violated justice.

Exploring auditory recognition: Native Japanese listeners' perception of frequent and infrequent English words in noise with varied phonological neighborhood densities

Native Japanese listeners identified English words embedded in noise (SNR + 6dB) produced by native American English and Japanese speakers. The identical word list used in our previous study (Nozawa and Wayland 2023) was employed. Listeners responded by typing the words they heard. The findings revealed no discernible impacts of phonological neighborhood density, possibly due to the small vocabulary size limiting competition from other words. However, frequent words exhibited greater precision in recognition compared to infrequent words. Despite the introduction of noise, the overall accuracy of responses did not experience a substantial impact. Nevertheless, specific words like “class” and “club,” initially nearly perfect in accuracy without noise, dropped to 0% accuracy. Most errors included phoneme substitution rather than phoneme addition or deletion, and in / CVC/ words, the onset consonant was identified substantially better than the vowel and the coda consonant. Initial consonant clusters, such as /br/, / kl/, and /pl/, were frequently perceived as /l/ or /r/, leading to the initial stops or fricatives being missed. Errors encompassed the substitution of phonemes with others that are not typically perceptually assimilated into the same native language (L1) categories, which would not be revealed through predefined multiple-choice identification or discrimination tasks.

Bilingualism Influences How Articulation Enhances Verbal Encoding.

Learning information may benefit from movement: Items that are spoken aloud are more accurately remembered than items that are silently read (the production effect). Candidate mechanisms for this phenomenon suggest that speaking may enrich or improve the feature content of memory traces, yet research suggests that prior language skill also plays a role. Recent work showed a larger production effect in bilinguals for words in their second language (L2) compared to their first language (L1), potentially suggesting that bilinguals engage different or additional linguistic features when speaking L2 compared to L1 words. The current study examined whether the increased L2 production effect reduces for L2 and L1 pseudowords, which may similarly engage mainly phonological features. German (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals first read (out loud or silently) and subsequently recognized German or English words or pseudowords following German or English phonology. The production effect increased for L2 compared to L1 items and for words compared to pseudowords. Modest evidence suggested L2-L1 similarity in production effect scores for pseudowords, but different L2-L1 scores for words. Integrating feature models of memory with models of bilingual language production, we propose that speaking an L2 may engage more extensive and diverse linguistic features than an L1.

Vowel Epenthesis in the Pronunciation of English Consonant Clusters by Kuwaiti EFL Learners

This study investigated pronunciation errors made by Kuwaiti Arabic (KA) learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in their production of English consonant clusters. The participants consisted of 25 Kuwaiti EFL learners who were asked to read English words embedded in short sentences. Target words constituted initial, medial, and final-consonant clusters. Data were transcribed by the researchers in addition to three phoneticians for reliability and were further verified through Praat software. Results indicated that pronunciation errors made by these learners of English were restricted to initial and medial consonant clusters that violated the syllable structure requirements of their native dialect. When a conflict occurred between the syllable structure of their first language (L1) and that of the English language, the participants adopted two phonological repair strategies to resolve the conflict: vowel epenthesis and re-syllabification. These phonological repair strategies appeared to be a process of phonological rule transfer from the L1 to the second language (L2) and served to bring the underlying forms of the English words into conformity with restrictions on possible surface syllable structures of the Kuwaiti dialect. These findings highlight the need to develop materials and reading exercises in the classroom to raise students’ awareness of the differences between the syllable structure of their L1 and that of English and its role in successful communication.

Audio-visual Stroop matching task with first- and second-language color words and color associates

AbstractIn the audio-visual Stroop matching task, participants compare one Stroop stimulus dimension (e.g., the color of a written word) to a second stimulus (e.g., a spoken word) and indicate whether these two stimuli match or mismatch. Slower responses on certain trials can be due to conflict which occurs between color representations (semantic conflict) or due to conflict between responses evoked by task comparisons (response conflict). The contribution of these conflicts has been investigated with color word distracters. This is the first study which explores how two types of first- and second-language words affect audio-visual matching. Native French speakers performed a bilingual Stroop matching task with intermixed French (L1) and English (L2) color words (Experiment 1) and color associates (Experiment 2) presented in congruent and incongruent colors simultaneously with spoken French color words. Participants were instructed to indicate whether the spoken word “matches” or “mismatches” the font color, while ignoring written word meaning. Interestingly, the results were similar for the critical “mismatch” trials for both French and English words. The responses were the fastest on trials in which task comparisons activate fewer response alternatives, supporting the assumption of the response conflict account.

The Effect of Pitch Accent on the Perception of English Lexical Stress: Evidence from English and Mandarin Chinese Listeners

The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented word fragment (e.g., AR- in the word archive) was presented at the end of a carrier sentence for identification. The results of the experiment revealed differences in the cue weighting of English lexical stress perception between native and non-native listeners. For native English listeners, vowel quality was a more prominent cue than f0, while native Mandarin Chinese listeners employed both vowel quality and f0 in a comparable fashion. These results suggested that (a) vowel reduction is superior to f0 in signaling initial stress in the words and (b) f0 facilitates the recognition of word initial stress, which is modulated by first language.

Speech adaptation in conversation: Effects of segment cue-weighting strategy for non-native speakers

Research has investigated how speakers make phonetic adaptations by adjusting their speech sounds to either converge to or diverge from their interlocutor’s. Less is known about the dynamic adaptive strategies non-native speakers use to improve intelligibility when interacting with native speakers, particularly how their strategies change over the course of spontaneous conversations. The current study examines phonetic adaptations in English words contrasting tense and lax vowels (e.g., sheep-ship) in unscripted conversations between non-native Japanese English and native English speakers during an engaging computer game task. Japanese speakers have previously been found to rely on temporal cues (vowel length) for tensity distinctions due to their L1 cue-weighting strategy rather than spectral cues (vowel quality) that are predominantly used in English. Acoustic analyses are conducted to examine changes in non-native vowel productions before, during and after the conversation task. We predict that, in an attempt to overcome miscommunication, non-native speakers may initially lengthen the tense vowels to distinguish them from their lax counterparts. As the conversation progresses, non-native speakers may adapt to a more native-like cue-weighting pattern by shifting to spectral distinctions. Results are discussed in terms of adaptations to cue-weighting strategies for intelligibility gains by interlocutors of different linguistic backgrounds.

Using the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Approach to Teach Elementary Fourth Grade Mathematics: An Action Research

<p>行政院通過雙語國家政策後，許多縣市選擇CLIL為主要雙語教學模式，本研究透過教學行動研究反思與修正的歷程，建構可行的數學CLIL教學模式。研究者設計角度及三角形兩個幾何單元的教學，於110年10月6日至28日在國小四年級實施，蒐集室觀察紀錄、訪談、文件資料、省思札記、中、英語單元成就測驗等資料，進行綜合分析。本研究主要發現如下：1. CLIL的學習情境可視學生需求提供中文輔助，課堂融入70%的英語，並採異質分組促進同儕溝通互動。2. 課程設計可依學科內容設計不同難度的操作活動與統整型的素養任務。3. 教學實施可調整數學教科書活動安排，將相同數學概念整併，規劃符合CLIL內容和語言循環的教學活動。4. 學習評量在課堂中著重英語聽和說形成性評量，課堂最後回到中文數學課本習題檢核數學概念。5. 全班學生數學表現穩定，未因CLIL教學影響學習成效，但部分學生會受到英語單字、句型閱讀能力影響數學答題表現。</p> <p> </p><p>After the Executive Yuan passed “Bilingual Nation 2030”, many county(city) governments chose CLIL as the primary bilingual teaching model. This study constructed the practicable CLIL mathematics teaching model through the process of reflection and revision of the teaching action research. I designed two geometry units in angles and triangles, which were implemented in the fourth grade of elementary school from October 6 to 28, 110. I collected classroom observations, interviews, documents, personal journals and achievement tests in Chinese and English for comprehensive analysis. The following findings are presented: 1. CLIL learning contexts can provide Chinese according to students’ needs, integrate 70% of English into the classroom, and arrange heterogeneous groupings to promote peer communication and interaction. 2. Curriculum design can arrange hands-on activities and integrated literacy assignments with different levels of difficulty according to the subject content. 3. Teaching implementation can adjust the arrangement of mathematics textbook activities, integrate the same mathematical concepts, and plan by the CLIL content and language cycle. 4. Learning assessment focuses on English listening and speaking formative assessment in the classroom, and finally returns to the Chinese mathematics textbook exercises to check mathematical concepts. 5. All students’ performance in mathematics was stable and not affected by the CLIL instruction, but some students’ performance in mathematics was affected by their ability to read English words and sentences.</p> <p> </p>

Stories and words online regional dialect corpus collection

Online data collection allows for access to diverse populations. In the current study, we used online recruitment and data collection methods to obtain a corpus of read short stories, real English words, and nonwords from adult talkers representing three authentic regional dialects of American English and one novel accent. The authentic dialects are New England, Northern, and Southern American English and are each represented by 8–10 talkers, ranging in age from 22 to 75 years old. The novel accent was produced by five Spanish-English bilinguals with training in linguistics, who were asked to produce Spanish /o/ in an otherwise English segmental context. The four target varieties each contain one vowel pair of interest, in which the vowels within the pair are relatively more ambiguous than in the other varieties. Each talker produced one familiar short story (e.g., Goldilocks and the Three Bears) with 40 tokens of each vowel within the target pair for their dialect, as well as a set of real words and nonwords that represent both the target vowel pair for their dialect and the other three vowel pairs for comparison across dialects. All corpus materials are available to the scholarly community.

Limits of short-term perceptual training for enhancing Seoul-Korean listeners’ use of English lexical stress in spoken word recognition

This study investigates whether short-term perceptual training can enhance Seoul-Korean listeners’ use of English lexical stress in spoken word recognition. Unlike English, Seoul Korean does not have lexical stress (or lexical pitch accents/tones). Seoul-Korean speakers at a high-intermediate English proficiency completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment adapted from Connell et al. (2018) (pre-/post-test). The experiment tested whether pitch in the target stimulus (accented versus unaccented first syllable) and vowel quality in the lexical competitor (reduced versus full first vowel) modulated fixations to the target word (e.g., PARrot; ARson) over the competitor word (e.g., paRADE or PARish; arCHIVE or ARcade). In the training (eight 30-min sessions over eight days), participants heard English lexical-stress minimal pairs uttered by four talkers (high variability) or one talker (low variability), categorized them as noun (first-syllable stress) or verb (second-syllable stress), and received accuracy feedback. The results showed that neither training increased target-over-competitor fixation proportions. Crucially, the same training had been found to improve Seoul- Korean listeners’ recall of English words differing in lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2022) and their weighting of acoustic cues to English lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2023). These results suggest that short-term perceptual training has a limited effect on target-over-competitor word activation.

Exploring intellectualisation of South African indigenous languages for academic purposes

Language represents an individual’s identity in many respects. It is a natural ability of any average person that they use to express thoughts and ideas, investigate their traditions and experiences, and better their community and the laws that govern it. The ability to choose the official language was acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution acknowledges that indigenous languages are a commodity which has not been fully used. By studying the difficulties of intellectualising indigenous languages in modern South Africa, this research aims to promote the usage and enhance the prestige of indigenous languages. The challenge in basic education in South Africa is that South African indigenous languages are not prioritised. Moreover, there appears to be a disconnection between language policy and implementation.Contribution: A document analysis was undertaken to review literature on the possibility of intellectualising South African indigenous languages by considering various theories and methods of terminology development, including interborrowing within South African indigenous languages and adaptation of some English and Afrikaans words as already entrenched languages in education.

How country of origin and stimuli language influence visual word recognition in bilingual children

Aims and objectives: We used mouse tracking to determine how country of origin and stimuli language influence visual word recognition in bilingual children. Methodology: Children attending bilingual schools in Spain and the USA completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real English words (e.g., true), and pseudohomophones following Spanish (e.g., tru) and English (e.g., troo) orthographical rules. Data and analysis: Bilingual children from both countries performed worse when responding to English pseudohomophones (within-language interference) than Spanish pseudohomophones (between-language interference). Findings/conclusions: The children from the USA outperformed the children from Spain in almost every measure. Interestingly, their mouse trajectories followed a different pattern. Originality: When responding to pseudohomophones, children from the USA showed a pronounced initial deviation toward the incorrect response (likely due to a strong activation of the phonology of the real English word) followed by a very effective corrective movement (likely due to an orthographic verification mechanism). Significance: Mouse tracking provides novel insights regarding language activation in bilingual readers.

Exploring English Vocabulary Learning of Vietnamese Secondary School Students with VoiceGPT Assistance

With the advent of AI chatbots, many teachers’ teaching practices of English as a foreign language have undergone many changes. Many of them have become accustomed to employing ChatGPT to assist their work, bringing many benefits and potential challenges that, to date, have yet to be fully tested in any aspect. Particularly, two notable research gaps involve how Vietnamese secondary school students use VoiceGPT, the Vietnamese version of ChatGPT, to assist them in learning new English words and how they perceive this support. The current case study aimed to address these gaps by employing a quasi-experimental design at Lam Son Secondary School in Ho Chi Minh City with the participation of ten sixth-grade students in two English-intensive classes. In this investigation, the teacher used the Presentation-Practice-Production teaching method to teach vocabulary to her students, who were randomly assigned into two groups with the same number of members in each group, and the data for analysis was collected from their writing samples and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that sixth-grade students had different ways of using VoiceGPT to help them learn English words. The participants with VoiceGPT assistance outperformed those without this A.I. support in terms of lexical performance in the writing productions on five topics surveyed. In addition, they expressed favorable attitudes toward VoiceGPT’s benefits, but some concerns were raised about login difficulties, vocabulary range, and long response time.

Flexible letter-position coding in Chinese-English L2 bilinguals: Evidence from eye movements.

Theories suggest that efficient recognition of English words depends on flexible letter-position coding, demonstrated by the fact that transposed-letter primes (e.g., JUGDE-judge) facilitate written word recognition more than substituted-letter primes (e.g., JUFBE-judge). The multiple route model predicts that reading experience should drive more flexible letter-position coding as readers transition from decoding words letter-by-letter to recognising words as wholes. This study therefore examined whether letter-position is coded flexibly in second-language English sentence reading for native Chinese speakers, and if this is influenced by English proficiency. Eye movements were measured while 54 adult native Chinese speakers read English sentences including either a real word (e.g., cheaply), a transposed-letter nonword (e.g., "chepaly"), or a substituted-letter nonword (e.g., "chegely"). Flexible letter-position coding was observed in initial and later processing stages-reading times were longer for substituted-letter than transposed-letter nonwords. In addition, reading times were longer in both initial and later processing stages for transposed-letter nonwords than real words, indicating that, despite encoding letter-position flexibly, readers processed letter-position. Although pre-registered frequentist analyses suggested that English proficiency did not predict overall reading times, Bayes Factors indicated that there was evidence for such a relationship. It is therefore likely that this proficiency analysis suffered from low power. Finally, neither frequentist nor Bayes Factor analyses suggested that English proficiency influenced the difference in reading times between different target word types, i.e., the nature of letter-position coding. Overall, these results suggest that highly proficient L2 learners code letter-position flexibly.

Binomials in English and French: ablaut, rhyme and syllable structure

Abstract Binomial expressions (e.g., hocus-pocus; dribs and drabs) are irreversible sequences of two types: reduplicative binomials (e.g., pitter-patter) and conjoined binomials (e.g., wheeling and dealing). Both types exhibit similar phonological features such as rhyme, alliteration and ablaut alternation. The present study investigates English and French speaker preferences for phonological templates in binomials. Elicitation of preferences was carried out using nonsense sequences exemplifying the templates Simple Rhyme (e.g., fiply-biply; fudette-budette), Complex Onset Rhyme (e.g., settip and slettip; ni cougui ni crougi), and Ablaut (e.g., gesky and gosky; fudette-fudotte), which were pitted against each other, e.g., gesky and gosky (Ablaut) versus gesky and glesky (Complex Onset Rhyme). Results of two experiments – the first involving nonce sequences containing disyllabic terms, the second involving nonsense items with monosyllabic constituents – reveal that English speakers prefer Simple Rhyme in items containing disyllabic constituents, and Ablaut for items containing monosyllabic terms. In contrast, French speakers prefer Ablaut in both the disyllabic term and the monosyllabic term conditions. In both experiments, Simple Rhyme is preferred to Complex Onset Rhyme. The experimental results for English align with statistical distributions of phonological templates in the Thun (1963. Reduplicative words in English: A study of formations of the types tick-tick, hurly-burly and shilly-shally. Lund: Carl Bloms) corpus of binomials. Our testing of English and French respondents further reveals that certain preferences are dissimilar across languages. Our findings lead us to propose that constraint rankings for reduplicatives in English and French under Optimality Theory should be sensitive to the number of syllables in constituent terms. In sum, the study of binomial expressions is enhanced by experimental evidence of speakers’ preferences when presented with competing sequencing patterns.

Does the word‐writing strategy in vocabulary learning increase learning outcomes or mislead learners into overestimation?

AbstractStudies on the effectiveness of the word‐writing strategy in vocabulary learning have yielded mixed results. However, this strategy has been widespread among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). This study examines whether the word‐writing strategy is effective and whether learners overestimate its effectiveness. Sixty‐eight Japanese EFL learners acquired new English words through either a writing or a nonwriting condition. Immediately following the learning phase in each condition, the Behavioral Engagement Scale, the State Engagement Scale, and the global judgments of learning (global JOLs) were administered. A multiple‐choice test for form and a productive test for meaning were administered at the end. The results showed no significant differences between the conditions in terms of learning outcomes. However, the writing condition outperformed the nonwriting condition on two engagement measures and the global JOL for form retention. These results suggest that the word‐writing strategy has no effect on learning outcomes, but increases the sense of engagement during learning and misleads students into overestimating learning outcomes. EFL teachers should educate their students about the limits of this technique and recommend more effective learning strategies.

Acupuncture Topics on Twitter (Currently X) in English and Japanese: Co-occurrence Network Analysis.

Background With the growth of social media, there has been an increase in health-related studies utilizing data obtained from such sites and applications. Although acupuncture is used as a complementary alternative medicine worldwide, there is little research on acupuncture utilizing social media data. This study investigates the topics related to acupuncture on Twitter, currently known as X, in English and Japanese. Methods We collected tweets containing the English word "acupuncture" and its Japanese equivalent using Twitter's application programming interface from January 1, 2022to December 31, 2022. After extracting the top 50 frequently occurring words from the collected tweet texts separately for each language, we conducted a co-occurrence network analysis for those words, in order to evaluate the patterns of their occurrence. Results A total of 70,435 English tweets from 41,939 users and 188,671 Japanese tweets from 81,093 users were analyzed after excluding retweets and duplicate tweets. The co-occurrence network analysis revealed that topics related to pain, other complementary and alternative medicines, and acupuncture-related experiences were common in both languages. However, explanatory topics such as needle use, Chinese medicine, and body points were specific to English tweets, while those about beauty care were specific to Japanese tweets. Conclusion The number of tweets regarding acupuncture and the number of users who posted them were both higher in Japanese than in English. Some acupuncture topics were common in both languages, while other topics were specific to each language. The findings of this study provide valuable insights into understanding information about acupuncture on social media.

Mapping of American English vocabulary by grade levels

Abstract We describe a large-scale effort to map English-language vocabulary by U.S. school grade levels. Our motivation is to rapidly expand graded vocabulary resources for work with native English speakers in the USA, while taking into consideration school-related influences rather than relying on just the corpus-frequency approaches. We report on the initial effort of data collection, with mapping of about 22K word forms. We provide comparisons of this mapping to some other recent vocabulary mapping efforts, such as age-of-acquisition. We then describe the efforts to automatically expand this resource by using linguistically motivated variables and corpus-based methods. Our current resource maps more than 126K English word forms to US school grade levels. We also compare a subset of our L1 mapped data to English L2 vocabulary levels, as expressed on the CEFR scale, and find that there is a considerable overlap in the order of vocabulary learning in L1 and L2 English.