Action Words Research Articles

Enhancing mathematical proof skills in teacher education through etymology-based learning approaches

This study aims to enhance students' understanding of mathematical proof through the etymology-based learning method. The research employs a descriptive approach to observe and analyze students' mathematical proof patterns in various contexts. Data were collected from 30 students enrolled in a master's degree program in mathematics education who demonstrated varying abilities in mathematical proof. The findings indicate that using action words or phrases during instruction can support students' ability to differentiate relevant terms and avoid misinterpretation of context. Furthermore, comparative understanding of source and target problems improves students' mathematical proof patterns in broader learning contexts. The implications of this study highlight the importance of integrating language-based and formal approaches in mathematics teaching to enhance students' mathematical proof abilities holistically.

Embodied cognition comes of age: A processing advantage for action words is modulated by aging and the task.

Processing action words (e.g., fork, throw) engages neurocognitive motor representations, consistent with embodied cognition principles. Despite age-related neurocognitive changes that could affect action words, and a rapidly aging population, the impact of healthy aging on action-word processing is poorly understood. Previous research suggests that in lexical tasks demanding semantic access, such as picture naming, higher motor-relatedness can enhance performance (e.g., fork vs. pier)-particularly in older adults, perhaps due to the age-related relative sparing of motor-semantic circuitry, which can support action words. However, motor-relatedness was recently found to affect performance in younger but not older adults in lexical decision. We hypothesized this was due to decreased semantic access in this task, especially in older adults. Here we tested effects of motor-relatedness on 2,174 words in younger and older adults not only in lexical decision but also in reading aloud, in which semantic access is minimal. Mixed-effects regression, controlling for phonological, lexical, and semantic variables, yielded results consistent with our predictions. In lexical decision, younger adults were faster and more accurate at words with higher-motor relatedness, whereas older adults showed no motor-relatedness effects. In reading aloud, neither age group showed such effects. Multiple sensitivity analyses demonstrated that the patterns were robust. Altogether, whereas previous research indicates that in lexical tasks demanding semantic access, higher motor-relatedness can enhance performance, especially in older adults, evidence now suggests that such effects are attenuated with decreased semantic access, which in turn depends on the task as well as aging itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Examining #StopAsianHate discourse on Twitter using framing and thematic analyses: Focusing on motivational framing with express behaviour upon the 2021 Atlanta shootings

AbstractIn separate events on March 16, 2021, an armed man walked into a spa and a massage parlour in Atlanta and shot eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descendant. Within the first week of the Atlanta shootings, more than 400,000 tweets with the hashtag #StopAsianHate emerged in response to the violence. To highlight the importance of this issue, this current study analyses 5,146 English tweets with #StopAsianHate using social movement framing. Analysis of tweets using Thematic analysis shows that proponents of the AAPI community used diagnostic framing to situate the incident in the context of systematic racial discrimination against AAPI, used prognostic framing to suggest “what” to do to resolve the problem, and used motivational framing to share action words to encourage others and to encouraging political engagements. Findings also show that other than the social movement framing, actors expressed many emotions to show their support and gave immediate reactions in response to significant events as they occurred in relation to the hate crimes. Future studies should examine whether these findings are unique to AAPI members, online social movements, or the topic of racial hate crime.

Enhancing code summarization with action word prediction

Code summarization refers to automatically generating concise description in natural language from a code snippet. Good code summaries could effectively facilitate program comprehension and software maintenance. In recent years, various learning-based code summarization techniques have achieved impressive performance. Most of these models treat code summarization as an end-to-end model and directly generate the summaries, which ignores the fact that action words are crucial to code summaries. An essential characteristic of code summaries is the concentration of action word distribution. For instance, in the Funcom dataset, the top forty most-common action words account for 72% of all samples. To incorporate this valuable prior domain knowledge into code summarization models, we develop a method for assisting code summarization through an additional action word prediction module, where an action predictor is employed to predict the primary action in the code summary, which is then used as a prompt to enhance the performance of the summary generation model. Our approach can be conveniently integrated into the existing models. We evaluate our approach on two Java datasets and a C/C++ dataset. The results show that our approach can efficiently improve the performance of the code summarization models. Furthermore, our action word prediction module can enhance the performance of a large pre-trained language model by prompting it with the predicted action words. This work suggests that a precise action word prediction model can significantly improve the performance of code summarization through the proposed action word guidance mechanism.

Distinguishing Semantic Preference Of Hurry And Rush Via Collocational Patterns: A Corpus-Based Study

Verbs are the action words that describe what the subject is doing. Many verbs are synonymous, namely, they could convey very similar meanings, such as the verbs hurry and rush, which roughly convey ‘speeded actions’. This paper presents a corpus linguistic study of the semantic preferences of hurry and rush in terms of the nouns that co-occur (i.e., collocate) with them. The noun collocations data, and their degree of association with the verbs, were extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English focusing on collocates appearing within a two-words window to the right (i.e., after) and to the left of (i.e., before) hurry and rush. These collocates were further analyzed semantically for (i) their semantic fields using the Concepticon catalogue (List et al. 2023) and (ii) their broader noun types (Wren 2021). Overall, we found that hurry and rush exhibit distinct collocational patterns and semantic preferences, particularly in terms of the preferred semantic fields (e.g., KINSHIP, RELIGION AND BELIEF, EMOTION AND VALUE are semantic fields preferred for the left-side collocates of hurry while rush is associated with THE BODY and SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RELATIONS). This study shows that synonymous verbs can have distinct semantic patterns.

Metacognitive verbs do not show a cross-language gap: An investigation of metacognitive and concrete verbs in bilingual children

Purpose: Previous research on bilingual vocabulary has focussed largely on words for imaginable objects and actions (e.g., ‘apple’, ‘write’), but did not consider abstract words. We looked for a disproportion across two languages (a cross-language gap) in bilingual children’s knowledge of concrete verbs (e.g., ‘jump’, ‘drink’) and metacognitive verbs (e.g., ‘think’, ‘know’). We also investigated the effects of language exposure and age on bilinguals’ knowledge of both concrete and metacognitive verbs. Methodology: Thirty-nine Polish–English children aged 4;0–7;7 living in the United Kingdom performed vocabulary tasks in both languages: subtasks from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs) measuring concrete verbs comprehension and production, and metacognitive vocabulary task (METVOC) measuring metacognitive verbs comprehension. Information on children’s cumulative exposure (CE) to each language was collected via parental reports. The amount of metacognitive talk children received in Polish was obtained from parental oral semi-structured narratives. Data and Analysis: Mixed-effects regression models were fitted separately for each task. Findings: A cross-language gap was observed for comprehension of concrete verbs, but metacognitive verbs did not show a cross-language gap. In production of concrete verbs, the English scores showed a steeper increase over age than the Polish scores. CE affected only production of concrete verbs. Correlational analyses showed children’s knowledge of metacognitive verbs in Polish (but not in English) was related to parental metacognitive talk in Polish. Originality: To date, few studies on bilingual children focused on words beyond those referring to imaginable objects and actions, and no study has explored both concrete and metacognitive vocabulary knowledge in bilinguals. Implications: A cross-language gap was observed for bilinguals’ concrete verbs, but metacognitive verbs showed a carry-over effect across languages. The two categories of verbs were also related to different types of linguistic input. While CE affected production of concrete verbs, parental metacognitive talk supported children’s knowledge of metacognitive verbs, but only in the language it was provided in.

Words (in)action: the orchestration of participation in planning through Statements of Community Involvement in England

Drawing on empirical material this article examines the political work enacted through the seemingly mundane procedures and texts that shape planning practice and community participation, yet which reflect the exercise of different forms of power. Through application of Foucauldian power theory, the article shows how the design and the specificities of inscription of Statements of Community Involvement (SCIs) reflect institutional resistance to mandated participation, such that the promise of participation inputs are held contingent. This assessment highlights how local authorities rarely commit to participatory activity beyond statutorily defined requirements and how such texts structure community relations on this basis.

A method for assisting the accident consequence prediction and cause investigation in petrochemical industries based on natural language processing technology

Risk analysis for production processes in the petrochemical industry is an important procedure for consequence prediction and investigation of accidents. The analyzer must grasp the correlations between the possible causes and consequences. From the potential cause and effect found in risk analysis reports, complete clarification should be obtained. Therefore, this study presents a method for assisting accident consequence prediction and investigation in the petrochemical industry based on risk analysis reports using natural language processing technology. First, a hazard and operability (HAZOP) historical data table is established by filling over 7200 HAZOP analysis data points. Both the causes and consequences in the table are classified into 20 categories each using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models. The LDA clustering results are assigned classification for the cause and consequence topics to the cause and consequences of the HAZOP analysis data. Based on part-of-speech (POS) tagging, all the words in each cause and consequence record are divided into subject and action words. Next, the word combinations of subject and action words with a higher occurrence are considered the key phrases for describing and representing the corresponding cause and consequence topic classifications. The Apriori algorithm is used to determine the frequent item sets, acquire the association rules, and calculate the association degree to obtain the sort order; it can highlight general trends in relational cause and consequence topics. According to the results, the most likely cause of the consequence and the most likely consequence that the cause may lead to are identified. Finally, a visual interface is developed to present the data for the consequence prediction and cause investigation of accidents. The results reveal that the quantity and quality of historic data are important factors that may influence the results. This method can contribute to predicting the accident evolution trend of an abnormal situation, taking preventive measures in advance, improving the accuracy of early warning, and supporting emergency response measures.

Identity Construction in Company Persuasive Discourse

Constructing an identity is an important part of a company or business. This study aims to analyze information hierarchy text and reveal discourse cognition in constructing corporate identity. Both of these concepts are used to see and reveal the agent’s wishes and communications made in showing identity. The research data was obtained by documenting persuasive discourse on the nestlé and aqua-Danone websites in Indonesia. Research results direct our minds that there are two types of hierarchies built by the company: hierarchy text based on general truth and hierarchy text based on product identity. Cognition built-in discourse is generally the same. It is built through concrete language to show efforts to save the environment. The language tools used are mental imagery words, action words, and concrete language. From these two studies, it can be seen that corporate identity can be shown directly and indirectly and the target to be built is to save the environment.

Motor imagery training to improve language processing: What are the arguments?

Studies showed that motor expertise was found to induce improvement in language processing. Grounded and situated approaches attributed this effect to an underlying automatic simulation of the motor experience elicited by action words, similar to motor imagery (MI), and suggest shared representations of action conceptualization. Interestingly, recent results also suggest that the mental simulation of action by MI training induces motor-system modifications and improves motor performance. Consequently, we hypothesize that, since MI training can induce motor-system modifications, it could be used to reinforce the functional connections between motor and language system, and could thus lead to improved language performance. Here, we explore these potential interactions by reviewing recent fundamental and clinical literature in the action-language and MI domains. We suggested that exploiting the link between action language and MI could open new avenues for complementary language improvement programs. We summarize the current literature to evaluate the rationale behind this novel training and to explore the mechanisms underlying MI and its impact on language performance.

Analysis of Assessment Design in English Language Curriculum 2006 Of Pakistan: A Qualitative Study

Assessment is an essential component of the curriculum. The curriculum is a policy document that guides assessment mechanisms before, during, and after instruction. The curriculum envisioned assessment in standards, benchmarks, and students' learning outcomes (SLOs) by providing action words. assessment is an integral part of the learning process. Language skill development depends on the quality of assessment design and practice during and after instruction. This research study critically analyzes the language skills assessment design intended in Pakistan's language curriculum, 2006. The study aimed to explore the assessment design intended in standards, benchmarks, and students’ learning outcomes SLOs, in the language curriculum of Pakistan 2006 of secondary classes. The study's objective was to investigate the language assessment scheme of LNC, 2006, as well as understand the extent of the assess ment design of the national curriculum, 2006. It is also aimed at to what extent this design supports language assessment and responds to language assessment theories. The document analysis model of "Bowen (2009)" was adopted for this study. The study findings show that the assessment design intended in LNC, 2006 of Pakistan could be more supportive in developing language skills. The level of action verbs used for standards, benchmarks, and SLOs, is very low, almost from Bloom's Taxonomy first three-stage of the cognitive domain. Listening and speaking skills are almost neglected in assessment design. The findings of this study will inform policy developers and curriculum workers to improve the language assessment design. Additionally, the results will guide teachers in understanding language assessment design and implementation accordingly.

Relative Importance of Sustainable Development Goals by Q-Sort Evaluation

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals offer a comprehensive framework for extensive development actions. The purpose of this study is to explore the patterns of perception of the relative importance of the goals. Although the interrelations between the diversified goals provide a comprehensive approach for decision-makers, the patterns may support effective strategies in the field. The study used a voluntary online survey among 123 business students by the Q-sort ranking method. The analysis identified three characteristic patterns for the relative importance of the goals: (1) global thinkers who prioritize planet-related goals; (2) pathfinders; and (3) human-centric students who prioritize people-related goals. The preference orders suggest the goals that can best improve the acceptance of sustainability actions. Climate change and water are the most relevant calling words for environmental actions, while health, hunger, and poverty are the equivalents for social actions. Collaboration by a partnership is not considered to be among the essential items, but the position of education is encouraging. Understanding the motivations of the respondents can be used for shaping attitudes in line with the policy expectations; moreover, the factor membership can be used as a grouping factor for a broader survey. The resultant factor characteristics can be used as grouping factors for broader surveys aimed at understanding the motivations behind environmentally conscious behavior.

Gravity matters for the neural representations of action semantics.

The dynamic relationship between the neural representation of action word semantics and specific sensorimotor experience remains controversial. Here, we temporarily altered human subjects' sensorimotor experience in a 15-day head-down tilt bed rest setting, a ground-based analog of microgravity that disproportionally affects sensorimotor experiences of the lower limbs, and examined whether such effector-dependent activity deprivation specifically affected the neural processes of comprehending verbs of lower-limb actions (e.g. to kick) relative to upper-limb ones (e.g. to pinch). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we compared the multivoxel neural patterns for such action words prior to and after bed rest. We found an effector-specific (lower vs. upper limb) experience modulation in subcortical sensorimotor-related and anterior temporal regions. The neural action semantic representations in other effector-specific verb semantic regions (e.g. left lateral posterior temporal cortex) and motor execution regions were robust against such experience alterations. These effector-specific, sensorimotor-experience-sensitive and experience-independent patterns of verb neural representation highlight the multidimensional and dynamic nature of semantic neural representation, and the broad influence of microgravity (hence gravity) environment on cognition.

“Hablemos de Alzheimer”: Words Mexican Americans use to talk about Alzheimer’s disease genetic testing. Implications for precision medicine education.

AbstractBackgroundEffective Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis and therapy will require a tailored approach to each person’s unique AD manifestation, known as AD precision medicine (PM). PM‐associated comprehensive genetic testing is currently restricted to the research domain and not readily available to minoritized Hispanics/Latinos (H/L). Successful AD precision medicine programs benefitting everyone require culturally appropriate patient outreach/education materials. We investigated the words H/L use to talk about AD genetic testing.MethodWe conducted freelisting interviews with 14 Spanish‐preferring Mexican American adults (female, 85.7%; mean age, 49.3±16.8 years, range = 19‐73; completed less than or at most a high school education, 35.7%). Participants were presented with vignettes about a H/L father of varied ages (5th‐7th decade) and degrees of cognitive impairment (no memory deficits to severe memory loss) who received genome sequencing results. During freelisting, participants were given prompts about the vignettes, and were asked to list all words that came to mind when they thought about the prompts. Responses were reviewed for semantically related words. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus agreement. Among sociodemographic data collected, familism and perceived social status were measured by the Pan‐Hispanic Familism Scale and scored (1‐strongly disagree to 5‐strongly agree, max score 25), and the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (SSS; each item: 1‐lowest to 10‐highest), respectively.ResultsHighest frequency unique word/word clusters (n = 151) for one vignette (father: age 70 with cognitive slowing, prompt: father’s reaction to his own moderate risk result) included worry (17.2%), age/aging/older (15.9%), family (12.6%), high/medium/low chance (12.6%), Alzheimer’s (10.6%), and normal/well/healthy (7.9%). High frequency of family‐related worry aligned with high familism scores (M = 23.2±2.6, range = 15‐25). Moderate frequency words of participants, 78.6% of whom perceived they held social standing in the top half of the community (SSS>5), reflected action orientation: do (6.6%), seek (1.7%), inform (1.5%), and manage (1.1%).ConclusionSpanish‐preferring Mexican Americans respond robustly to information about family. Family‐centered educational materials about AD precision medicine, including information about healthy aging versus neurodegeneration, risk magnitude categories, and action words, could have high impact. Additional research to learn words used by diverse Spanish‐preferring H/L is needed.

A Novel Framework to Detect Irrelevant Software Requirements Based on MultiPhiLDA as the Topic Model

Noise in requirements has been known to be a defect in software requirements specifications (SRS). Detecting defects at an early stage is crucial in the process of software development. Noise can be in the form of irrelevant requirements that are included within an SRS. A previous study had attempted to detect noise in SRS, in which noise was considered as an outlier. However, the resulting method only demonstrated a moderate reliability due to the overshadowing of unique actor words by unique action words in the topic–word distribution. In this study, we propose a framework to identify irrelevant requirements based on the MultiPhiLDA method. The proposed framework distinguishes the topic–word distribution of actor words and action words as two separate topic–word distributions with two multinomial probability functions. Weights are used to maintain a proportional contribution of actor and action words. We also explore the use of two outlier detection methods, namely percentile-based outlier detection (PBOD) and angle-based outlier detection (ABOD), to distinguish irrelevant requirements from relevant requirements. The experimental results show that the proposed framework was able to exhibit better performance than previous methods. Furthermore, the use of the combination of ABOD as the outlier detection method and topic coherence as the estimation approach to determine the optimal number of topics and iterations in the proposed framework outperformed the other combinations and obtained sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and G-mean values of 0.59, 0.65, 0.62, and 0.62, respectively.

Semantic Activation in Badminton Action Processing and Its Modulation by Action Duration: An ERP Study.

Action processing is crucial for sports activities. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study investigated whether semantics were activated in action processing and, if so, whether semantic activation was modulated by action duration. Badminton athletes were recruited to finish a lexical decision task following an action-semantic priming paradigm, in which short (400 ms) or long (1000 ms) action videos served as primes, and semantically congruent or incongruent action words served as targets. The ERP results showed a P300 effect, that is, larger P300 amplitudes were observed for targets primed by semantically incongruent action videos than for targets primed by semantically congruent action videos, only when the action videos were long and not when the action videos were short. Moreover, a late positive component (LPC) was only sensitive to action duration, showing that the targets primed by long action videos elicited larger LPC amplitudes compared to the targets primed by short action videos. These results suggested that semantics could be activated in action processing and that semantic activation was modulated by action duration, supporting a link between the language system and action processing.

Specific pattern of linguistic impairment in Parkinson's disease patients with subjective cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment predicts dementia.

Parkinson's disease patients with subjective cognitive decline (PD-SCD) and mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) have an increased risk of dementia (PDD). Thus, the identification of early cognitive changes that can be useful predictors of PDD is a highly relevant challenge. Posterior cortically based functions, including linguistic processes, have been associated with PDD. However, investigations that have focused on linguistic functions in PD-MCI are scarce and none of them include PD-SCD patients. Our aim was to study language performance in PD-SCD and PD-MCI. Moreover, language subcomponents were considered as predictors of PDD. Forty-six PD patients and twenty controls were evaluated with a neuropsychological protocol. Patients were classified as PD-SCD and PD-MCI. Language production and comprehension was assessed. Follow-up assessment was conducted to a mean of 7.5 years after the baseline. PD-MCI patients showed a poor performance in naming (actions and nouns), action generation, anaphora resolution and sentence comprehension (with and without center-embedded relative clause). PD-SCD showed a poor performance in action naming and action generation. Deficit in action naming was an independent risk factor for PDD during the follow-up. Moreover, the combination of deficit in action words and sentence comprehension without a center-embedded relative clause was associated with a greater risk. The results are of relevance because they suggest that a specific pattern of linguistic dysfunctions, that can be present even in the early stages of the disease, can predict future dementia, reinforcing the importance of advancing in the knowledge of linguistic dysfunctions in predementia stages of PD.

What we talk about when we talk about EEMs: using text mining and topic modeling to understand building energy efficiency measures (1836-RP)

Energy Efficiency Measures (EEMs) play a central role throughout the building energy efficiency industry, and lists of EEMs therefore exist in a variety of resources. However, each of these use different conventions for describing and organizing measures, which presents a major challenge for aggregating information across these resources. The goal of this study is to discover trends in how existing resources describe and organize EEMs using topic modeling and other text mining methods. A unique dataset of 3,490 EEMs from 16 different documents was compiled and analyzed using frequency analysis, part of speech tagging, and topic modeling. The results showed three major trends. First, a typical EEM contains six words and is phrased in verb-noun format, although these characteristics varied widely. Second, there are words and bigrams commonly used across many EEMs, and these include action words, specific building components, broader building systems, and descriptor terms. Third, there are thematic similarities between the EEM lists, which in some cases highlight the ways in which these lists are derived from one another. These findings provide insight into the nature of EEMs and can be used as the basis for developing a standardized system for organizing and describing EEMs.

HD-tDCS of primary and higher-order motor cortex affects action word processing.

The contribution of action-perception systems of the brain to lexical semantics remains controversial. Here, we used high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) in healthy adults to examine the role of primary (left hand motor area; HMA) and higher-order (left anterior inferior parietal lobe; aIPL) action areas in action-related word processing (action verbs and manipulable nouns) compared to non-action-related control words (non-action verbs and non-manipulable nouns). We investigated stimulation-related effects at three levels of semantic processing: subliminal, implicit, and explicit. Broadly, we found that stimulation of HMA and aIPL resulted in relative facilitation of action-related language processing compared to non-action. HMA stimulation facilitated action verb processing in subliminal and implicit task contexts, suggesting that HMA helps represent action verbs even in semantically shallow tasks. HMA stimulation also facilitated manipulable noun comprehension in an explicit semantic task, suggesting that HMA contributes to manipulable noun comprehension when semantic demands are high. aIPL stimulation facilitated both manipulable noun and action verb processing during an implicit task. We suggest that both HMA and aIPL play a functional role in action semantics. HMA plays a general role in the semantics of actions and manipulable objects, while aIPL is important only when visuo-motor coordination is required for the action.

Brain correlates of action word memory revealed by fMRI.

Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g. arm-/leg-related action words). Additionally, motor movements of the hands/feet can have a causal effect on memory maintenance of action words, suggesting that the involvement of motor systems extends to working memory. This study examined brain correlates of verbal memory load for action-related words using event-related fMRI. Seventeen participants saw either four identical or four different words from the same category (arm-/leg-related action words) then performed a nonmatching-to-sample task. Results show that verbal memory maintenance in the high-load condition produced greater activation in left premotor and supplementary motor cortex, along with posterior-parietal areas, indicating that verbal memory circuits for action-related words include the cortical action system. Somatotopic memory load effects of arm- and leg-related words were observed, but only at more anterior cortical regions than was found in earlier studies employing passive reading tasks. These findings support a neurocomputational model of distributed action-perception circuits (APCs), according to which language understanding is manifest as full ignition of APCs, whereas working memory is realized as reverberant activity receding to multimodal prefrontal and lateral temporal areas.