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Some argue that emotions represent so-called core relational themes. A core relational theme describes a relation between a particular event and an organism’s well-being. For instance, the core relational theme of anger is ‘a demeaning offense against me and mine’. I argue that a core relational theme is a summary or generalization of a more complex mental content. Defenders of the Simple Core Relational Theme View reject the idea that emotional content is complex. Instead, they argue that the content of emotion simply consists of a core relational theme. I argue that this view commits the linguistic fallacy: it confuses a theory of emotion categorization with a theory of emotional content.

In this paper we explore the influences of normal ageing and verb transitivity on sentence production. The underlying aim is to provide a foundation for further research on sentence production in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We used a computer-based written sentence production task, designed to elicit intransitive, monotransitive and ditransitive sentences. Data was collected using keystroke logging, a technique to capture the entire typing process. Data of ninety healthy elderly was analysed focusing on the following writing process variables: time on task, production time and pause times. Results show that age influences time on task, pause time before sentences and within words. Verb transitivity influences time on task, production time and pause time between words. For pause time before sentences and between words, an interaction effect between age and verb transitivity was found as well. These results indicate that a follow-up study with AD patients should not attribute a slowdown in one of these variables to the disease in its entirety but should instead be compared with the slowdown in age-matched healthy peers.

BACKGROUND: Early indicators of who will remain in – or leave – treatment for substance use disorder (SUD) can drive targeted interventions to support long-term recovery. OBJECTIVES: To conduct a comprehensive study of linguistic markers of SUD treatment outcomes, the current study integrated features produced by machine learning models known to have social-psychology relevance. METHODS: We extracted and analyzed linguistic features from participants’ Facebook posts (N = 206, 39.32% female; 55,415 postings) over the two years before they entered a SUD treatment program. Exploratory features produced by both Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and the features from theoretical domains of religiosity, affect, and temporal orientation via established AI-based linguistic models were utilized. RESULTS: Patients who stayed in the SUD treatment for over 90 days used more words associated with religion, positive emotions, family, affiliations, and the present, and used more first-person singular pronouns (Cohen’s d values: [−0.39, −0.57]). Patients who discontinued their treatment before 90 days discussed more diverse topics, focused on the past, and used more articles (Cohen’s d values: [0.44, 0.57]). All ps < .05 with Benjamini-Hochberg False Discovery Rate correction. CONCLUSIONS: We confirmed the literature on protective and risk social-psychological factors linking to SUD treatment in language analysis, showing that Facebook language before treatment entry could be used to identify the markers of SUD treatment outcomes. This reflects the importance of taking these linguistic features and markers into consideration when designing and recommending SUD treatment plans.

Drawing on language expectancy theory, we predict that linguistic errors in ICO white papers negatively impact investors’ willingness to financially contribute to ICO projects. We manually annotate a sample of 546 ICO white papers according to 13 different error subcategories related to spelling and grammar. The error-annotated data are subsequently submitted to regression analyses which confirm that linguistic errors discourage potential investments in ICOs. Specifically, our analyses reveal the presence of ‘high penalty’ vs. ‘low penalty’ errors which result in higher vs. lower financial investment losses for the ICOs. The negative impact of language errors is stronger when ICO white papers are (1) written in native English-speaking countries and (2) from countries without cryptocurrency regulation. Results from an experiment confirm that this relationship is not driven by the entrepreneur- or investor-specific characteristics. Overall, we highlight that the reader identifies linguistic errors as a major ‘red flag’ that ultimately affects financial decision-making.

In recent decades, English taught programmes have rapidly increased in number throughout Europe and East Asia as universities aim to internationalise their curriculum, which has given rise to an increase in English-medium instruction (EMI). This study aims to compare the teaching experiences at three EMI programmes in The Netherlands, China, and Japan in response to calls for more comparative research on the pedagogical issues associated with teaching through English in non-Anglophone contexts. Interviews were conducted with 19 teachers in managerial and classroom-facing roles, working within comparable undergraduate English-taught business degree programmes across the three contexts. Data were thematically analysed for convergent and divergent experiences. Findings indicated similarity between the Chinese and Japanese contexts compared to the Netherlands, highlighting greater concerns surrounding student proficiency, teacher competence, and the overall impact of EMI on educational quality. Unique solutions were uncovered to inform better content and language integration in EMI practices.

This experiment examined how two language features-linguistic agency and assignment of causality-of online support-seekers' messages regarding depression influenced viewers' perceived stigma and features of their support messages. Participants (N = 254) read and responded to an online support-seeking post about depression. Our results revealed that personal stigma toward a depressed individual was lower when the individual disclosed a biological cause for the depression and assigned agency to depression than agency to human. Additionally, when agency was assigned to depression with a biological rather than non-biological cause, more positive emotion words were utilized in participants' response posts. Cognitive process words were used more often in response to messages with non-biological causality than biological causality.

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Chronic lexical anomia after left hemisphere (LH) stroke improves under personalized phonological treatment (PT). Cortical linking between language and hand motor areas (hand_M1) questioned whether PT-related improvement relies on the unlesioned hemisphere (UH) plasticity when LH is dysfunctional. Our 70-yo-woman case study showed that 10 sessions of excitatory stimulation of UH_hand-M1 combined with PT hastened oral picture naming improvement as compared to sham+PT and changes were maintained together with changes of untrained items andcorticomotor excitability increase. This supports a role of stimulation-induced plasticity of UH_hand M1 in language recovery, at least in the improvement of lexical anomia in chronic stroke.

We report a Japanese-speaking patient who showed acquired phonological dyslexia only in Kanji; difficulty in reading two-character Kanji nonwords despite her ability to read Kana nonwords, Kana words, and two-character Kanji inconsistent-atypical words; and inability to repeat reversal nonwords. We investigated the mechanism of nonword reading impairment using the dual-route cascaded model, it was likely that the reading deficit of Kanji nonwords with multiple pronunciations resulted from the dysfunction of the character-to-sound conversion rule system. The patient's reading performance on the dissociation of Kana and Kanji was considered to reflect the difference in the consistency of orthography-to-phonology mapping.

Translation proper is rarely the sole activity of professional translators, who regularly function also as revisers and/or post-editors. Various models of and studies into translation competence (TC), translation revision competence (TRC) and post-editing competence (PEC) exist. However, a fundamental question remains unanswered: how similar – or different – are TC, TRC and PEC? Before this question can be answered, a methodological issue must be addressed: how do we measure TRC and PEC? Using existing literature, we propose seven instruments to measure TRC and PEC. Our aim is to determine whether the instruments are exchangeable, that is, result in similar measures of the underlying variable. We conducted a small-scale study with translation trainees, who performed L1 Dutch–L2 French TR and PE tasks. The measuring instruments generated TRC scores that were significantly different and therefore not exchangeable. In contrast, PEC scores were not always significantly different. In conclusion, with measuring instruments for TRC and PEC being generally not exchangeable, it is imperative that researchers not only report on measuring instruments thoroughly in research in general, but also use measuring instruments designed according to the same principles when they investigate differences and similarities between TRC, PEC, and even TC.

Background: Self-efficacy is a critical element of social cognitive theory and refers to a person's estimation of their ability to complete a specific task. Self-efficacy scales evaluate the effectiveness of communication skills training programs. There were not validated scales in Spanish. Aims: to cross-culturally adapt the Self-efficacy questionnaire-12 scale in communication skills in Spanish, evaluate its psychometric properties, and analyse the sample's descriptive characteristics. Design: we conducted an instrumental study to develop evaluation scales. Methods: nursing students were invited to participate (N = 387). The inclusion criteria were: (1) enrolment in first or fourth academic course year; (2) not having received specific training in communication skills; and (3) understanding written and spoken Spanish fluently. A total of 334 undergraduates participated (86.3% response rate); their mean age was 21.9 years (SD = 5.8), 83.2% were female. Results: data showed high internal consistency (0.94) and a good fit to the model. The overall instrument score correlated with the attitude towards communication skills (r = 0.20; p

Gratitude science often conflates the processes of actors recalling and sharing gratitude, as well as neglecting to study targets (benefactors receiving gratitude) and witnesses (those witnessing gratitude). We explored the roles (actors, targets, and witnesses) and processes (recalling, sharing, receiving, and witnessing) involved in gratitude exchanges. In Study 1, undergraduate students (actors; N =369) wrote letters about either gratitude or daily activities to their parents (targets; N =247), with half instructed to share their letters with their parents, and half not to share. In Study 2, adolescents (witnesses; N =267) read either gratitude, positive, or neutral letters written by hypothetical peers addressed to benefactors. Actors recalling gratitude showed improvements in state gratitude, mood, and satisfaction (partial rs =.11 to.15; Study 1); actors sharing gratitude experienced boosts in state gratitude and relationship closeness (rs =.13 to.19; Study 1); targets receiving gratitude demonstrated increases in state gratitude, indebtedness, and elevation (rs =.14 to.16; Study 1); and witnesses observing gratitude reported increased positive affect and elevation (rs =.24), but decreased state gratitude (r = −.12; Study 2). These studies provide initial evidence that different gratitude roles and processes have divergent effects.

Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets synchronically. Similarly, originating senses in diachronic semantic change have often been argued to be more concrete than extended senses. In this paper, we use a dataset of cross-linguistically attested semantic changes to empirically test the idea that asymmetries in figurative language are predicted by asymmetries in concreteness. We find only weak evidence for the role of concreteness and argue that concreteness is not a helpful notion when it comes to describing changes where both originating and extended senses are highly concrete (e.g., skin > bark, liver > lungs). Moreover, we find that word frequency data from English and other languages is a stronger predictor of these typologically common semantic changes. We discuss the implications of our findings for metaphor theory and theories of semantic change.

(1994). Observations on Theatrical Translation. Translation Review: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 14-18.

Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often have persistent cognitive-linguistic deficits that negatively influence their life. Our objective was to examine the cognitive-linguistic outcome in individuals with moderate to severe diffuse axonal injury (DAI) with a novel test battery. As fatigue is a common symptom affecting the lives of individuals with DAI, we also wanted to assess whether the self-reported fatigue was associated with cognitive-linguistic abilities.Selected cognitive-linguistic subtests of the Finnish KAT test and The Mental Fatigue Scale (MFS) were applied to 48 adults with moderate to severe DAI and 27 healthy controls. The majority of the participants with DAI were in the chronic stage. The groups were compared using ANCOVA. Linear regressions were used to analyze the association between MFS and cognitive-linguistic outcomes.The participants with DAI had significantly poorer scores than the controls in most cognitive-linguistic variables and reported significantly more fatigue. Two of the four cognitive-linguistic composite variables were associated with the degree of self-reported fatigue.Cognitive-linguistic deficits are common in individuals with moderate to severe DAI, and The Finnish KAT test is a valuable tool to detect those. Fatigue was associated with linguistic working memory and language production.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages has been a major influence on language teaching in Europe and beyond and its Companion Volume will probably have the same significance. It is important therefore that education professionals understand the underlying concepts, including the conceptualisation of the language user/learner. This article analyses the concept of learners' identities against the background of the Council of Europe's policy of social inclusion, which became significant between the dates of publication of the two documents. It demonstrates that the CEFR has a more nuanced and detailed concept of identity than the Companion Volume, and that the suggestion in the Companion Volume that teachers do not need to know the CEFR itself is problematic. The CEFR works with a concept of social and personal identity. The Companion Volume lacks such a concept, and an analysis of pluricultural competence in search of clarification of how a ‘pluricultural person' is conceptualised proves unsuccessful. The relationship between ‘pluricultural' and ‘plurilingual’ is not fully addressed in the CEFR, nor developed further in the Companion Volume. There is still a need for a rich description of the identities of learners and of the notion of pluricultural competence.

This study aimed to investigate the linguistic factors involved in stuttering among Japanese-speaking preschool children. The participants included 10 Japanese children who stutter, with a mean age of 5 years and 9 months. Speech samples comprised spontaneous conversations of the participants with their parents for about 20 minutes. We compared the percentages of the occurrence of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) at the word and sentence levels, using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The results showed no significant differences in SLDs based on syllable structure when comparing light and heavy syllables and comparing consonants and vowels in the initial position of each content word. SLDs occurred more frequently in the initial than non-initial position of words and in longer rather than shorter words. Additionally, SLDs occurred more frequently in sentences that contained more 'bunsetsu' (a kind of linguistic unit in Japanese). Our study is the first to show that both word and sentence-level factors could contribute to SLDs in preschool children who stutter in agglutinating languages, such as Japanese. This aspect is rarely reported in psycholinguistic studies based on stuttering occurrence in inflecting languages, such as English.

International audience; Breton (Brittany, France) and Lower Sorbian (Brandenburg, Germany) are two of the many endangered minority languages currently undergoing revitalization. In their cases, given that intergenerational transmission in a family setting has mostly ceased, language revitalization takes the form of educational initiatives, such as the immersion program Diwan in Brittany and the bilingual program Witaj in Brandenburg. The article argues that the differences in language ideologies and attitudes of language revitalizers, which form the often unexpressed and unaddressed ideological foundations of these programs, have led to divergences in results of revitalization of Breton and Lower Sorbian. These divergences can have significant consequences for the new speakers of these languages produced through educational programs. Brittany's Diwan schools, which construes Breton as relevant to modern identities and capable of functioning outside the educational context, can be claimed to be producing new speakers in whose lives Breton will play a considerable role. By using foreign language teaching strategies and struggling to provide a vibrant life for Lower Sorbian after school, Witaj, in turn, does keep the minority language alive, but much more as a school subject than as a viable means of communication.

This study examines how China’s LOTE (languages other than English) students perceive English and their target languages as different types of linguistic capital with different values, and how they...

An empirically supported approach to increase one’s happiness (or well-being) is to engage in brief, self-directed positive activities in daily life. However, such positive activities may fail to b...

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers’ use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers’ sensitivit...

Although calls for responding to migration-related diversity in education are not novel, few studies have examined linguistic and affective outcomes of diversity-sensitive approaches for vocabulary...

Vocal Traditions is a series in the Voice and Speech Review that highlights both historically important and contemporary voice teachers and schools of thought in the world of vocal pedagogy. This e...

Entering into an image is a familiar yet undefined term. In this art-based, heuristic enquiry into how we enter into images as place, the author considers what meaning the concept of place has in a...

Previous studies have shown that dependency distance and its probability distribution can be applied as syntactic indicators of English as interlanguage. However, the universal application of these...

Grammatical information, embedded at the word level, makes the acquisition of morphologically rich languages quite complex as well as the language exercise generation process for teachers. This stu...

How can words shape meaning? Shared labels highlight commonalities between concepts whereas contrasting labels make differences apparent. To address such findings, we propose a deep learning accoun...

This paper illuminates how the psychoanalytic work of Winnicott and Wittgenstein's philosophy on language complement each other in elucidating a "psychoanalytic language game". The paper takes a close look at the grammar and linguistic mechanisms which underlie psychoanalytic work. Wittgenstein's linguistic turn from positivism is discussed; his ideas like 'family resemblance', 'aspect seeing' and 'language games' are examined in order to shed light on the paradoxical communication at play in Winnicott's potential space. The paper looks at the potentiality central to therapeutic work, arguing that it accords with what Wittgenstein calls the grammatical optative mode, as Freud already indicated in his theory of dreaming.

Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia are similar in many ways. Both were colonised by English-speaking British settlers, and English is a national language in each country. In recent years, both countries have become destinations for immigrants speaking languages other than English and international fee-paying students. Both have a chequered history of maintaining the languages of the tangata whenua (people of the land) or aboriginal people. However, their histories and educational systems diverge on educational programmes and practices supporting citizens and newcomers from non-English heritage cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The linguistic and cultural histories of these two countries have shaped educational policies and practices that, in turn, have impacted how teachers are prepared to teach in linguistically and culturally heterogeneous classrooms. This paper reviews approaches found to support emergent bilingual learners, and those that research suggests are culturally sustaining. It then compares educational documents from Australia and NZ against principles drawn from this literature. It asks whether supporting the needs of emergent bilingual learners in mainstream classes in these countries emerges as a cultural or linguistic issue.

Semantic relationships between the predicators and referring expressions in real or unreal universes of discourse designate deep semantic cases that serve conceptually and functionally central role...

Implementing translanguaging in language education requires a rich understanding of learners’ complex meaning-making practices. Enactments of translanguaging simply as an acknowledgement of learners’ home languages and translation practices reflects a confusion between the concept of translanguaging and translation and a lack of understanding of the complexities involved within these two practices for language learning. This study explores how a university lecturer and a graduate student enact translation and translanguaging in a collaborative dialogue to solve a linguistic problem. Based on a thematic analysis of their text-message interaction and evidence from stimulated recalls, we demonstrate how practices of translation and translanguaging are different and yet intertwined as affordances for learning. We also consider the diverse linguistic, emotional, social, and historical resources that both interlocutors leverage to facilitate a collaborative learning space. We conclude by highlighting the importance of a multilingual pedagogical design that goes beyond visibility and audibility of multiple languages.

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood bilingualism. However, a joint impact of these properties has not been so far assessed in bilingual children. Here, we compared the impact of AoA, imageability, and frequency on accuracy and response times in picture naming and picture recognition tasks in monolingual and bilingual children. We used Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks to test 45 monolingual children (aged 4 to 7 years) and 45 migrant bilingual children in their L1 (Polish). Word AoA, imageability, and frequency independently affected the accuracy and response times in both picture naming and picture recognition tasks. Crucially, bilingual children were more sensitive to word characteristics than their monolingual peers: Bilingual children’s accuracy was particularly low for words of high AoA (in the picture recognition task) and for words of low frequency (in the picture naming task). Also, the increase in response times for low-imageable and low-frequent words was particularly salient in bilingual children. The results suggest a new area of interest for further studies: the question of whether bilinguals and monolinguals show different sensitivity to psycholinguistic factors, and if so, does that sensitivity change with age or language exposure?

During language comprehension, comprehenders build conceptual models of linguistic content. Despite their fundamental nature, relatively little is known about how plural expressions are realised in...

Bave has argued that act-type theories of propositions entail unwanted ambiguity of sentences such as ‘Donald loves Joan’. King has argued that act-type theories of propositions entail an unwanted ...