Word Order Errors Research Articles

Error patterns and revisions in the graphic symbol utterances of 3- and 4-year-old children who need augmentative and alternative communication

The purpose of this study was to explore the errors and revisions (i.e., repairs) that 3- and 4-year-old children who require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) make as they construct 2–3-word utterances using graphic symbols. The current study involves supplemental analyses from a previously published manuscript. Various types of errors and revisions for four different semantic-syntactic structures—agent-action-object, entity-attribute, entity-locative, and possessor-entity—were analysed to explore patterns and differences across utterance types. Results indicated that the majority of errors were made during the baseline phase, and that error types varied depending on the utterance type. For example, inversions were common for agent-action-object utterances, but omissions were common for entity-attribute utterances. When the participants revised their utterances, the resulting messages were more accurate the majority of the time, regardless of utterance type. Past research has highlighted frequent word order errors within graphic symbol messages, but the current results indicate that error types are dependent upon utterance type. A more refined approach, then, is required to better our understanding of how children approach the task of learning to produce graphic symbol utterances.

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON INTERFERENCE ERRORS FROM MALAY LANGUAGE TRASNFER TO MANDARIN LEXICON LEARNING

Language transfer is one of the main factors affecting foreign language learner from learning a target language well. In Malaysia, the number of non-Chinese students learning Mandarin is increasing. However, differences in their language and cultures could impose more difficulties to the non-Chinese students when learning the language. The present study explored the interference errors from Malay language to Mandarin learning of non-Chinese students in terms of lexicon. To this end, learner corpus containing collection of the students’ compositions, dialogues and examination scripts was compiled and analyzed in the study. Four types of lexicon interference errors were focused on, namely (1) improper usage of words (2) word orders error (3) improper usage of collocation and (4) improper usage of culture images. The findings reveal the highest interference error occurs in improper usages of words followed by word order errors, improper usages of collocation and improper usages of culture images. The finding calls for a more effective teaching to be incorporated to raise the students’ awareness on the negative transfer of their native language into Mandarin lexicon learning.Article DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2019.43.16751688 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Language Interference of Bimanese to the Indonesian Language: A Case Study of Community in Kampung Muhajirin, Bima

<p>This research is initiated by the error use of Indonesian language by the community living in Kampung Muhajirin, Bima due to interference phenomenon. The errors occur in various linguistic aspects. This study aims to determine the interference forms of Bimanese language to the Indonesian language based on the characteristics differences between Bimanese and Indonesian language. One of the most distinct characteristics of both languages is that Bimanese is a vocalist language, while the Indonesian language is not a vocalist. The data were collected by observation and recording technique. The researchers observed the linguistic phenomenon in Kampung Muhajirin and recorded by a tape recorder. Finally, the data were analyzed and transcribed in orthographic writing. The finding showed that the interference of Bimanese language to the Indonesian language occurs on the aspects of phonological, lexical, and grammatical. Phonological interference causes the vowel sound disappeared at the end of the word. Lexical interference causes mixed code. Grammatical interference causes word order error.</p>

Is language interference (when it occurs) agradedor anall-or-noneeffect? Evidence from bilingual reported speech production

Do cross-lingual interactions occur even with structures of different word order in different languages of bilinguals? Or could the latter provide immunity to interference of the contrasting characteristics of the other language? To answer this question, we examined the reported speech production (utterances reporting what just happened; e.g.,Holly asked what Eric ate) of two groups of proficient, unbalanced bilinguals with varying similarity between their native (L1-Spanish/L1-Dutch) and second language (L2-English). The results showed that both groups of bilinguals produced word order errors when formulating indirectWhat-questions in L2, regardless of how similar the L1 was to the L2 in that respect. Our findings suggest that in the case of reported speech production in the examined bilingual groups, cross-linguistic syntactic differences by themselves suffice to induce language interference, and that the degree of similarity between the L1 and the L2 does not seem to modulate the magnitude of this effect.

Robust processing of the Dutch verb phrase

Abstract The Dutch verb phrase (VP) is notorious for its syntactic intricacies. There are three main reasons why it is difficult to robustly handle its complexity in a processing model. First of all, a single VP can contain multiple modal auxiliaries (‘modal stacking’). Second, perfect auxiliaries can not only take a past participle as their argument but also a modal auxiliary in the infinitive form. Finally, there are various word orders in which the verb forms can appear. The first part of this paper presents a fully operational precision processing model of the Dutch VP in Fluid Construction Grammar. The model shows that the aforementioned challenges can be overcome by carefully managing the hierarchical relations between the elements of the VP. The second part introduces a robust comprehension method, which can process VPs containing morphological and word order errors. This method allows in many cases to recover the intended meaning of an erroneous VP, as well as to correct its form, using a strategy that exploits the deep semantic analyses and the bidirectional nature of the model.

Developing Cooperative Learning Based E-Module to Teach Basic English Grammar of the First Semester of English Study Program Students at FKIP – UIR

Achieving learning outcome requires a set of the material that can be understood easily by the students. The material should be appropriate in the learning process. It should give the opportunity for the students to learn both in the classroom and out of the classroom. The students can learn independently by using the appropriate material. However, the material of Basic English Grammar is still quite enough to give a chance for the students to practice and learn cooperatively. This research is aimed obtain e-module of Basic English Grammar, so that it can be used as a source of learning for first semester students of English Study Program of FKIP-UIR. The research method used in this study is R & D (Research and development) of Borg and Gall. The participant of this research is 30 students from first semester who learn Basic English Grammar. In this research, the researcher tried to find out students’ need because it is the first step to do in this research design. So, the data was obtained by writing test.The findings suggest that the participants made 386 errors in writing their paragraph. There are 45 errors (11.66%) of the agreement of singular and plural, 106 errors (27.46%) of the using of verb tense, 51 errors (13.21%) of the finite verb, 25 errors (2.48%) of the non-finite verb, 28 errors (7.25%) of the pronoun, 20 errors (5.18%) in using the preposition, 9 errors (2.33%) of the context of usage, 55 errors (14.25%) of the context of meaning, 22 errors (5.70%) of the word choice and 25 errors (6.48%) of word order. To sum up, the most frequent grammatical errors made by the students are errors in writing verb tense. Based on this finding, the researcher will design e-module of Basic English Grammar.

Analysis of the Grammatical Errors in Chinese Undergraduate Students’ Online English Writing

Learners’ language data present an interesting phenomenon that can be used to explain the processes that learners go through in the continuum of learning a second or foreign language. The aim of this study was to examine the grammatical errors in the English writing of the Chinese undergraduate students. The sample was drawn from the second-year students studying Communication in Shandong Normal University. All the second-year students studying Communication were asked to write one composition online from which a random sample of 90 scripts was selected. The study was based on the following objectives: (a) to identify and categorize the most common types of grammatical errors in the second-year undergraduate students’ English writing; (b) to find out the frequency of these errors; (c) to infer, with the help of available literature on error analysis, the possible causes of these errors; (d) to extract from the available literature on error analysis pedagogic strategies to reduce these errors. The Interlanguage Theory (Selinker, 1972) guides the interpretation and description of the phenomenon observed in the study data. Using the “Let the Error Determine the Categories” approach the errors in the following grammatical categories were identified: Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Preposition, Adjective, Adverb, Complementation, Word order, Concord, Negation and Clause Link. The identified errors were then described using the Error Analysis Method (Corder, 1974). The errors were determined through a consideration of the deviations of the students’ grammar from the norms of the target language (English) as described for example in Quirk et al. (1985). The data analysis showed that Verb Phrase related errors were the most frequent and the word order errors were least frequent. On the basis of the available literature on error analysis, the study discusses some causes of the errors observed and identifies some pedagogic strategies that can be used to alleviate these errors. After considering various causes, it was evident that overgeneralization was the main cause of the grammatical errors found in the English writing of these second-year undergraduate students.

The Acquisition of the English Relative Pronoun 'Who' by EFL Arab Learners: A Translation Perspective

This paper aims to study Arab students’ use of English relative pronoun ‘who’ via translating statements from their mother tongue (Arabic) into the target language (English). Thirty Saudi adult students, aged 18-20 years old, were asked to translate 20 relative clauses from Arabic into English. The results revealed that the students encountered various problematic areas in the use of relative pronoun 'who', viz. use of personal and possessive relative pronoun, position of relative pronoun, presence of resumptive pronouns in Arabic, absence of duality and plurality of relative pronoun “who”, and use of relative pronouns with prepositional verbs. Such problematic areas were manifested in various errors of omission, addition, selection, word order, and avoidance. The results also showed that the average of the students’ errors in “avoidance, omission, and selection” were significantly higher than (30 %. 25%. and 24% respectively) the average for ‘addition’ and ‘word order’. These errors could be attributed to language transfer, overgeneralization, and ignorance of rules restriction, which were possibly grounded in the lack of exposure to the TL rules and insufficient practice of grammatical activities. Pedagogical implications of this study suggest that instructors should make a good use of the recommendations of contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and Error Analysis (EA). Namely, the students should be made aware of the areas of similarities and differences between English and Arabic practically rather than theoretically. The study stresses the limitations of the findings and directs outlines for future research.

Adverbs in a Learner Corpus: Focusing on Predicational Adverbs

This paper examines the behavior of predicational adverbs in a learner corpus of English, focusing on an overall distributional pattern, the correlation between adverbial meaning and position, and common error types. Two types of essays (argumentative and narrative) produced by university freshmen at two proficiency levels (beginner and high-intermediate) were selected for analysis from the one-million word Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC). Notable findings from the analysis include the following: 1) The high level learner corpus, and the argumentative writings within the same level, contained more predicational adverbs, both in diversity and frequency, demonstrating the role of L2 proficiency and text type in the fluency with which the learners employed predicational adverbs. 2) Knowledge of scopal distinction began to emerge, i.e. the distinction between VP-level and S-level adverbs or between speech acts and evaluative adverbs. 3) Errors involving lexical selection were more common than word order errors, corroborating the observation in previous research that lexico-semantic learning trails behind syntactic learning. Considering both the crucial role of adverbial modification as a key to nuance in communication and the difficulty of acquiring lexical selection, it is recommended that more emphasis be given to the lexico-semantic aspects of adverbs in the L2 classroom.

Machine Translation of Public Health Materials From English to Chinese: A Feasibility Study.

BackgroundChinese is the second most common language spoken by limited English proficiency individuals in the United States, yet there are few public health materials available in Chinese. Previous studies have indicated that use of machine translation plus postediting by bilingual translators generated quality translations in a lower time and at a lower cost than human translations.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using machine translation (MT) tools (eg, Google Translate) followed by human postediting (PE) to produce quality Chinese translations of public health materials.MethodsFrom state and national public health websites, we collected 60 health promotion documents that had been translated from English to Chinese through human translation. The English version of the documents were then translated to Chinese using Google Translate. The MTs were analyzed for translation errors. A subset of the MT documents was postedited by native Chinese speakers with health backgrounds. Postediting time was measured. Postedited versions were then blindly compared against human translations by bilingual native Chinese quality raters.ResultsThe most common machine translation errors were errors of word sense (40%) and word order (22%). Posteditors corrected the MTs at a rate of approximately 41 characters per minute. Raters, blinded to the source of translation, consistently selected the human translation over the MT+PE. Initial investigation to determine the reasons for the lower quality of MT+PE indicate that poor MT quality, lack of posteditor expertise, and insufficient posteditor instructions can be barriers to producing quality Chinese translations.ConclusionsOur results revealed problems with using MT tools plus human postediting for translating public health materials from English to Chinese. Additional work is needed to improve MT and to carefully design postediting processes before the MT+PE approach can be used routinely in public health practice for a variety of language pairs.

A conjoint analysis framework for evaluating user preferences in machine translation

Despite much research on machine translation (MT) evaluation, there is surprisingly little work that directly measures users' intuitive or emotional preferences regarding different types of MT errors. However, the elicitation and modeling of user preferences is an important prerequisite for research on user adaptation and customization of MT engines. In this paper we explore the use of conjoint analysis as a formal quantitative framework to assess users' relative preferences for different types of translation errors. We apply our approach to the analysis of MT output from translating public health documents from English into Spanish. Our results indicate that word order errors are clearly the most dispreferred error type, followed by word sense, morphological, and function word errors. The conjoint analysis-based model is able to predict user preferences more accurately than a baseline model that chooses the translation with the fewest errors overall. Additionally we analyze the effect of using a crowd-sourced respondent population versus a sample of domain experts and observe that main preference effects are remarkably stable across the two samples.

DIE SPRACHMASCHINE: A MICROWORLD FOR LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTATION

Die sprachmaschine—the language machine—provides a language microworld in which students experiment with word combinations with the intent of forming German sentences. Students choose basic German words from "word bins" and submit them in sentence order to the sentence builder, which explains the process it follows in generating a completed sentence and informs the student if the word list contains incorrect word order or semantic errors. The sentence builder handles sentence patterns composed of subject or time word in first position, verb in second position, an accusative object (if required by the verb), and a prepositional phrase which completes the verb in last position. It recognizes 65 nouns, 18 verbs, 2 time words, and the 9 prepositions whose objects derive case from the verb which the prepositional phrase completes. Students may ask questions about generated sentences and about characteristics of the words stored in the program. All interaction between student and machine is in German and students are encouraged to use full sentence requests and responses to the language machine.

The Research on Reordering Rule of Chinese-Mongolian Statistical Machine Translation

There are a lot of word order errors that occur in the Chinese-Mongolian statistical machine translation system, so we proposed Chinese sentence reordering method based on the Mongolian word order. In this paper we first introduce the form and the tagset of reordering rules. We mainly introduce the reordering rules related to the verb phrase, prepositional phrase and subject-predicate phrase. Finally, we give out the experimental results. It is proved by experiment that the performance of the Chinese-Mongolian machine translation system can be improved using these reordering rules.

A CORPUS BASED TECHNIQUE FOR REPAIRING ILL-FORMED SENTENCES WITH WORD ORDER ERRORS USING CO-OCCURRENCES OF N-GRAMS

There are several reasons to expect that recognising word order errors in a text will be a difficult problem, and recognition rates reported in the literature are in fact low. Although grammatical rules constructed by computational linguists improve the performance of a grammar checker in word order diagnosis, the repairing task is still very difficult. This paper describes a method to repair any sentence with wrong word order using a statistical language model (LM). A good indicator of whether a person really knows a language is the ability to use the appropriate words in a sentence in correct word order. The "scrambled" words in a sentence produce a meaningless sentence. Most languages have a fairly fixed word order. This paper introduces a method, which is language independent, for repairing word order errors in sentences using the probabilities of most typical trigrams and bigrams extracted from a large text corpus such as the British National Corpus (BNC).

Machine Translation Errors

Errors in machine translations of English-Iraqi Arabic dialogues were analyzed using the methods developed for the Human Translation Error Rate measure (HTER). Human annotations were used to refine the Translation Error Rate (TER) annotations. The analyses were performed on approximately 100 translations into each language from four translation systems. Results include high frequencies of pronoun errors and errors involving the copula in translations to English. High frequencies of errors in subject/person inflection and closed-word classes characterized translations to Iraqi Arabic. There were similar frequencies of word order errors in both translation directions and low frequencies of polarity errors. The problems associated with many errors can be predicted from structural differences between the two languages. Also problematic is the need to insert lexemes not present in the source or vice versa. Some problems associated with deictic elements like pronouns will require knowledge of the discourse context to resolve.

Investigating the inner speech of people who stutter: Evidence for (and against) the Covert Repair Hypothesis

In their Covert Repair Hypothesis, Postma and Kolk (1993) suggest that people who stutter make greater numbers of phonological encoding errors, which are detected during the monitoring of inner speech and repaired, with stuttering-like disfluencies as a consequence. Here, we report an experiment that documents the frequency with which such errors are made. Thirty-two people who stutter (PWS) and thirty-two normally fluent controls, matched for age, gender and education, recited tonguetwisters and self-reported any errors they perceived themselves to have made. In 50% of trials the tonguetwisters were recited silently and errors reported were those detected in inner speech. Compared to controls, PWS produced significantly more word-onset and word-order errors. Crucially, this difference was found in inner as well as in overt speech. Comparison of experimenter ratings and participants’ own self-ratings of their overt speech revealed similar levels of accuracy across the two groups, ruling out a suggestion that PWS were simply more sensitive to the errors they made. However, the frequency of participants’ inner-speech errors was not correlated to their SSI4 scores, nor to two other measures of stuttering severity. Our findings support Postma and Kolk's contention that, when speech rate is held constant, PWS make, and therefore detect, more errors of phonological encoding. They do not, however, support the hypothesis that stuttering-like disfluencies in everyday speech stem from covert repairs of errors of phonological encoding.Learning outcomes: Readers will learn about three current psycholinguistic theories of stuttering, and how speech-errors elicited during tonguetwister recitation can be used to explore the controversies that exist surrounding: (a) Whether or not people who stutter are more prone to making language production errors; and (b) The extent to which stuttering-like disfluencies stem from covert repairs of language-production errors.

An Analysis on Korean Learners’ Errors of Word Order in Chinese Composition Found in the HSK Test Answers

An Analysis on Korean Learners’ Errors of Word Order in Chinese Composition Found in the HSK Test Answers

Double-tier Chinese-Mongolian machine translation based on statistical and template

To improve the accuracy of the translation of the Chinese-Mongolian language machine translation system,this paper proposed the methods that combined the phrase-based statistical machine translation and template based machine translation to automatically extract template structure.Template matching was the first step in decoding and the template structure was applied for translation,and then according to Beam Search algorithm a follow-up translation was carried out.Thus,the method can effectively resolve Word Order errors in a single statistical translation.Take a Chinese-Mongolian translation as an example,the experimental results show that this method can effectively improve translation effects.In the area of agricultural language Translation,agriculture phrase templates were added,and the translation efficiency increased by 10% than Och's phrase-based statistical machine translation methods.

SVO Word Order Errors in English-Arabic Translation

An error corpus of deviant SVO structure was collected from the translation projects of students majoring in translation. Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discoursal criteria were used to judge the deviations. Percentages of interlingual and intralingual errors, the syntactic contexts in which subjects were misplaced, the strategies used to impose SVO order, and areas of L1 inadequate competence will be reported. Implications for increasing students’ awareness of the pragmatic, discoursal and syntactic constraints in translating SVO structures will be provided.

SVO Word Order Errors in English-Arabic Translation

SVO Word Order Errors in English-Arabic Translation