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This study examined the effectiveness of interactive activities at facilitating EFL students’ production of English relative clauses. Thirty-seven EFL learners in Chile carried out interactive activities designed to elicit relative clauses. Pre- and posttests were used to examine whether carrying out the activities facilitated the students’ production of relative clauses. All interactions were audio-recorded and the transcripts were analyzed to determine how accurately and fluently the students produced relative clauses before, during, and after the practice activities. Whereas accuracy was defined as errors involving relative clause formation, fluency was operationalized in terms of the number of pauses, false starts, and self-corrections that occurred within relative clauses. The results showed that the students produced significantly more accurate relative clauses on the posttest; however, their production of dysfluencies remained unchanged. Implications for the use of interactive activities are discussed.

This paper investigates the speech act of refusal taking as a case study British responses to a salesperson’s offer through the study of recordings of 109 conversations between the salesperson and a potential British customer. The data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with the aim of finding the most frequent responses that denote refusal by the English native speakers. Most of the expressions used to reflect the British people’s annoyance with the use of cold calls, the majority being brief phrases of refusal. In addition to the recorded calls, two questionnaires were conducted in Britain to shed light on the frequent expressions used on the phone in response to the salesperson. It is interesting here to catalog the range of strategies used by individuals, most of the time verbal, to avoid talking to the salesperson. These strategies seem to exist on a continuum of directness-indirectness. Firstly to perform an act of refusal efficient enough to end the call. Secondly to make the balance between the impacts of refusal per se and the keeping up with the social convention of mutual cooperation presented in the theory of politeness.

The issue of phrasal verb learning has caused much discussion and attracted vigorous investigation. Inspired by the theory of conceptual metaphor, a pedagogical experiment was conducted to investigate whether an approach focussing on sense extension of particle out in terms of conceptual metaphors can enhance the learning of phrasal verbs containing out. One control group was instructed with general reading materials embedded with various phrasal verbs, and two experimental groups with self-constructed lessons, in which six sense types of out were identified and corresponding phrasal verbs were selected, and in addition, an L1 lexical item was employed to illustrate the mechanism of metaphorical extension for one experimental group. The result showed that learners receiving a cognitive inspired approach to instruction achieved significantly better learning outcomes than those receiving the traditional approach, not only on taught items but also on untaught items. However, the use of L1 lexical items to illustrate sense extension was not as effective as expected in boosting the learning of out-phrasal verbs . It was concluded by discussing the benefit of the proposed approach to phrasal verb instruction and, more importantly, the need of teaching materials providing more profound understanding of phrasal verbs so as to facilitate phrasal verb learning.

The current study examined the occurrence and benefits of linguistic alignment in two modalities, face-to-face (FTF) and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), focusing on stranded prepositions in relative clauses. It further examined how learner characteristics (i.e., working memory, language proficiency, previous knowledge of the target structure) mediate the effects of linguistic alignment. Ninety-four Korean students were assigned to one of the following groups: FTF alignment, SCMC alignment, FTF control, and SCMC control. The alignment experimental groups completed two alignment sessions, finished three stranded preposition tests, and carried out a running span test and cloze test over three weeks. Results indicated not only that linguistic alignment occurred in both FTF and SCMC modes but also that alignment was facilitated significantly more in the SCMC than FTF interactions. Furthermore, the findings suggest immediate and delayed learning effects in both modalities, and that learners’ prior knowledge of the target structure was significantly associated with the occurrence of alignment.

Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children’s picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which picture book text may systematically differ from typical child-directed speech. The analyses show that picture books contain more rare and complex sentence types, including passive sentences and sentences containing relative clauses, than does child-directed speech. These differences in the patterns of language contained in picture books and typical child-directed speech suggest that one important means by which picture book reading may come to be associated with improved language outcomes is by providing children with types of complex language that might be otherwise rare in their input.

Research investigating incidental vocabulary learning through listening to songs has primarily relied on participant’s self-report surveys on listening behaviors and its relationship with their vocabulary knowledge (Kuppens, 2010). Only one experimental study has investigated vocabulary learning gains from listening to songs (Medina, 1993). From the results, the researcher concluded that learning does occur from listening to songs. However, the learning gains were not provided. The present study investigated incidental learning of three vocabulary knowledge dimensions (spoken-form recognition, form-meaning connection, and collocation recognition) through listening to two songs. The effects of repeated listening to a single song (one, three, or five times) and the relationship between frequency of exposure to the targeted vocabulary items and learning gains were also explored. The results indicated that (a) listening to songs contributed to vocabulary learning, (b) repeated listening had a positive effect on vocabulary gains, and (c) frequency of exposure positively affected learning gains.

While a wealth of research is available on the frequent multi-word units in academic genres, studies that exclusively link lexical sequences to the rhetorical moves in research articles (RAs) are fairly limited. This study involved compiling a corpus of 8,500 RA abstracts sampled from five disciplines of economics, law, political sciences, psychology, and sociology in social and behavioural sciences. Three to nine-word ngrams were generated using AntConc 3.4.4, which is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit. All the ngrams were studied in their contexts through concordance analysis and classified based on the rhetorical moves in which they occurred using the move structure taxonomy suggested by Hatzitheodorou (2014). Eventually, ngrams were processed at multiple levels and synthesized into 84 move-marker structures. This study offers insights into the linguistic realizations of moves in RA abstracts and introduces the concept of move-marker structures. In so doing, the potentials of positionally variable move-marker structures in improving English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners’ phraseological competence are suggested.

Researchers and language teachers have become increasingly aware of the importance of multi-word items in developing fluency and sounding native-like in English. Nevertheless, understanding and usi...

Treebank is one of the important and useful resources in natural language processing represented in two different annotated schemas: phrase and dependency structures. There are many works that convert a phrase structure into a dependency structure and vice versa. Most of them are based that exploit the handcrafted head percolation table and argument table in predefined deterministic ways. In this article, we propose a method to convert a dependency structure into a phrase structure by enriching a trainable model of former hybrid strategy approach. By adding a classifier to the algorithm and using postprocessing modification, the quality of conversion is increased. We evaluate our method in two different languages, English and Persian, and then analyze the errors. The results of our experiments show a 46.01% reduction of error rate in English and 76.50% for Persian compared to our baseline. We build a new phrase structure treebank by converting 10,000 sentences of Persian dependency treebank into corresponding phrase structures and correcting them manually.

We test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners’ difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the L2. In six comprehension experiments, we found that intermediate L2 speakers did not show increased difficulty compared to native speakers in integrating multiple sources of information (syntactic, discourse, pragmatic) to resolve ambiguous pronouns in intrasentential anaphora and cataphora conditions. However, we also found that when two referents with equal prominence are introduced using a conjoined noun phrase in the preceding context, the learner’s performance is significantly different than the performance of the native speakers, both in intrasentential and intersentential anaphora. We suggest that L2 speakers may encounter difficulties evaluating the salience of the antecedents during pronoun resolution.

Perceptive verbs have important function, especially in Cognitive Linguistics perspective, because these verbs are directly related to real experience. Cognitive linguistics focuses on the study of the relationship between language, mind, and socio-physical experience. Thus, this paper discusses how the lexical-semantic characteristics particularly the dynamicity or aktionsarten of the verb look. The verb look itself consists of agentive and perceptive verb class. The dynamicity of agentive and the perceptive verb look were analyzed using the distributional method combined with several techniques. Most of the verb look constructions appear as phrasal verbs. At least, there are 17 phrasal verbs with look as the root and the constructions consist of at least 20 different meanings. The dynamicity test is also applicated for the phrasal verbs. The results of the research show unique lexical characteristics of the perceptive verb look and it influences the meaning as well as the construction of the verb. The relationship between lexical characteristic with its construction shows the schema of cognition processing language.

Research suggests that certain characteristics of survey items may impact participants’ responses. In this study we investigated the impact of several of these characteristics: vague wording, quest...

An elicited production study investigated subject-aux inversion in 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 control groups, typically-developing 5-year-old children and 3-year-old children matched by mean length of utterance. The experimental findings showed that children with specific language impairment produced subject-aux inversion in yes/no questions significantly less often than either of the control groups. However, the fact that lack of inversion is reflected in the input led to the proposal that children with specific language impairment choose the most economical grammatical option. For main clause wh-questions, children with SLI carried out subject-aux inversion at a rate that was not significantly different from the control groups. This finding suggests that these children have access to hierarchical phrase structure representations for questions and the relevant movement operations. In embedded wh-questions, where subject-aux inversion is not permitted, children with SLI implemented SAI more frequently than the control groups. Our interpretation of this finding is that once children with SLI acquire the subject-aux inversion rule, that they are slower to learn that embedded clauses present an exception to the rule.

It is not uncommon to see lists of semantically equivalent phrases in pedagogical materials. However, empirical investigations of the effect of synonymous phrase learning on vocabulary development are rarely attempted. The current study promotes computer-assisted synonymous phrase learning by introducing PREFER, a corpus-based paraphrasing system. The organized information including synonymous phrases, Chinese translations, usage patterns, and example sentences would help EFL learners develop vocabulary knowledge in terms of form, meaning, and use. The performances of 49 EFL first-year college students were evaluated using a 15-set multi-select test. The results showed that students consulting PREFER made greater progress than those consulting existing online tools. The improvements of the less proficient students were especially significant, which was to be expected. More importantly, the analyses of learners' errors indicated that their learning difficulties primarily resulted from the lack of attention to word form and the function words (i.e., word form and use) while learning vocabulary.

The study of language acquisition has a long and contentious history: researchers disagree on what drives this process, the relevant data, and the interesting questions. Here, I outline the Starting Big approach to language learning, which emphasizes the role of multiword units in language, and of coarse-to-fine processes in learning. I outline core predictions and supporting evidence. In short, the approach argues that multiword units are integral building blocks in language; that such units can facilitate mastery of semantically opaque relations between words; and that adults rely on them less than children, which can explain (some of) their difficulty in learning a second language. The Starting Big approach is a theory of how children learn language, how language is represented, and how to explain differences between first and second language learning. I discuss the learning and processing models at the heart of the approach and their cross-linguistic implications.

The ability to comprehend phrases is an essential integrative property of the brain. Here we evaluate the neural processes that enable the transition from single word processing to a minimal compositional scheme. Previous research has reported conflicting timing effects of composition, and disagreement persists with respect to inferior frontal and posterior temporal contributions. To address these issues, 19 patients (10 male, 19 female) implanted with penetrating depth or surface subdural intracranial electrodes heard auditory recordings of adjective-noun, pseudoword-noun and adjective-pseudoword phrases and judged whether the phrase matched a picture. Stimulus-dependent alterations in broadband gamma activity, low frequency power and phase-locking values across the language-dominant left hemisphere were derived. This revealed a mosaic located in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), in which closely neighboring cortical sites displayed exclusive sensitivity to either lexicality or phrase structure, but not both. Distinct timings were found for effects of phrase composition (210–300 ms) and pseudoword processing (approximately 300–700 ms), and these were localized to neighboring electrodes in pSTS. The pars triangularis and temporal pole encode anticipation of composition in broadband low frequencies, and both regions exhibit greater functional connectivity with pSTS during phrase composition. Our results suggest that the pSTS is a highly specialized region comprised of sparsely interwoven heterogeneous constituents that encodes both lower and higher level linguistic features. This hub in pSTS for minimal phrase processing may form the neural basis for the human-specific computational capacity for forming hierarchically organized linguistic structures.SignificanceLinguists have claimed that the integration of multiple words into a phrase demands a computational procedure distinct from single word processing. Here, we provide intracranial recordings from a large patient cohort, with high spatiotemporal resolution, to track the cortical dynamics of phrase composition. Epileptic patients volunteered to participate in a task in which they listened to phrases (“red boat”), word-pseudoword or pseudoword-word pairs (e.g., “red fulg”). At the onset of the second word in phrases, greater broadband high gamma activity was found in posterior superior temporal sulcus in electrodes that exclusively indexed phrasal meaning, and not lexical meaning. These results provide direct, high-resolution signatures of minimal phrase composition in humans, a potentially species-specific computational capacity.

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners’ rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of nominalization and hedging in scientific papers, with the intention of deepening Chinese EFL learners’ understanding of the reasons for their possible co-occurrence. After a corpus-assisted statistical analysis of sixty abstracts selected from leading scientific journals written by native English speakers, it’s been found that there is indeed a tendency for nominalization and hedge to co-occur both at the textual-level and clause-level. Besides, a tentative analysis is conducted to explain the pattern of their co-occurrence. It has been observed that the number of nominalized expressions in clauses is inversely correlated with the probability degree of hedging, and the position of nominalization in the clause (theme or rheme) influences the generalization level of hedging. The research results could shed light on the pedagogic approach in improving Chinese EFL learners’ academic writing by making evident that the elusive Grammatical Metaphor competence could be enhanced by deepening the understanding of the inter-relationship between seemingly different in-congruent expressions like nominalization and hedges.

During comprehension, the meaning extracted from serial language input can be described by hierarchical phrase structure. Whether our brains explicitly encode hierarchical structure during processing is, however, debated. In this study we recorded Magnetoencephalography (MEG) during reading of structurally ambiguous sentences to probe neural activity for representations of underlying phrase structure. 10 human subjects were presented with simple sentences, each containing a prepositional phrase that was ambiguous with respect to its attachment site. Disambiguation was possible based on semantic information. We applied multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) to the MEG data using linear classifiers as well as representational similarity analysis to probe various effects of phrase structure building on the neural signal. Using MVPA techniques we successfully decoded both syntactic (part-of-speech) as well as semantic information from the brain signal. Importantly, however, we did not find any patterns in the neural signal that differentiate between different hierarchical structures. Nor did we find neural traces of syntactic or semantic reactivation following disambiguating sentence material. These null findings suggest that subjects may not have processed the sentences with respect to their underlying phrase structure. We discuss methodological limits of our analysis as well as cognitive theories of “shallow processing”, i.e. in how far rich semantic information can prevent thorough syntactic analysis during processing.

This paper aims at utilizing paralinguistic information usually hidden in speech signals, such as pitch, short pause and sarcasm, to disambiguate user intention not easily distinguishable from speech recognition and natural language understanding results provided by a state-of-the-art spoken dialog system (SDS). We propose two methods to address the ambiguities in understanding name entities and sentence structures based on relevant speech cues and nuances. We also propose an approach to capturing sarcasm in speech and generating sarcasm-sensitive responses using an end-to-end neural network. An SDS prototype that directly feeds signal information into the understanding and response generation components has also been developed to support the three proposed applications. We have achieved encouraging experimental results in this initial study, demonstrating the potential of this new research direction.

This article reports on the results of action research conducted in a university ESP classroom in Oman. The impetus for this research was the practitioner’s dissatisfaction with the current practice of introducing the grammatical concept of the English passive and its subsequent results. Framed within the sociocultural theory of cognitive development, this paper investigates the effectiveness of concept-based instruction (CBI). As a pedagogical approach, CBI targets a learner’s internalization of the concept of a language constituent that assists the learner with the meaning making abilities of sentences where the English passive is used. Twenty-two university students enrolled in an ESP course participated in the study. The data was collected through the teacher’s observations, students’ artifacts, and students’ feedback on the effectiveness of CBI. Data analysis reveals the effectiveness of CBI in heightening learner awareness of the concept of a language constituent, developing learner knowledge of the English passive, and improving their meaning-making abilities at the phrasal and sentential levels.

Hierarchical sentence structure plays a role in word-by-word human sentence comprehension, but it remains unclear how best to characterize this structure and unknown how exactly it would be recognized in a step-by-step process model. With a view towards sharpening this picture, we model the time course of hemodynamic activity within the brain during an extended episode of naturalistic language comprehension using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). CCG has well-defined incremental parsing algorithms, surface compositional semantics, and can explain long-range dependencies as well as complicated cases of coordination. We find that CCG-derived predictors improve a regression model of fMRI time course in six language-relevant brain regions, over and above predictors derived from context-free phrase structure. Adding a special Revealing operator to CCG parsing, one designed to handle right-adjunction, improves the fit in three of these regions. This evidence for CCG from neuroimaging bolsters the more general case for mildly context-sensitive grammars in the cognitive science of language.

It is reported that grammatical information is useful for machine translation (MT) task. However, the annotation of grammatical information requires the highly human resources. Furthermore, it is not trivial to adapt grammatical information to MT since grammatical annotation usually adapts tokenization standards which might not be suitable to capture the relation of two languages, and the use of sub-word tokenization, e.g., Byte-Pair-Encoding, to alleviate out-of-vocabulary problem might not be compatible with those annotations. In this work, we propose two methods to explicitly incorporate grammatical information without supervising annotation; first, latent phrase structure is induced in an unsupervised fashion from a multi-head attention mechanism; second, the induced phrase structures in encoder and decoder are synchronized so that they are compatible with each other using constraints during training. We demonstrate that our approach produces better performance and explainability in two tasks, translation and alignment tasks without extra resources. Although we could not obtain the high quality phrase structure in constituency parsing when evaluated monolingually, we find that the induced phrase structures enhance the explainability of translation through the synchronization constraint.

Siromoney et al. introduced a parallel/sequential generative model called Tabled Matrix Grammars (TMGs) by generalising phrase structure matrix grammars generating abstract families of languages (AFLs). James et al. introduced Parallel Contextual Array Insertion Deletion P Systems (PCAIDPSs) to generate two-dimensional array languages using insertion and deletion operations through parallel contextual mappings. In this paper, we compare the generative powers of PCAIDPSs and TMGs. We prove that the family of languages generated by PCAIDPS with two membranes properly includes the family of languages generated by Tabled Context-sensitive Matrix Grammars (TCSMGs).

WOS:000641203100008 TARAMAWOS TARAMASCOPUS This experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest design, compared the effects of focused direct written corrective feedback and additional writing practice on L2 learners’ written syntactic complexity. The participants were 60 Iranian elementary EFL learners, whose L2 proficiency as well as L2 writing syntactic complexity and accuracy were controlled by administering the Oxford Quick Placement Test and a paragraph writing test. They were assigned to two groups: Focused direct corrective feedback (FDCF) and additional writing practice without feedback (No CF). The investigation included five sessions and lasted for three weeks. Every session, each participant wrote a paragraph of descriptive type in class. The experimental group received FDCF, while the control (i.e. No CF) group was provided only with additional writing practice. Lu's (2010) web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer was utilized to calculate the five indices of syntactic complexity measures, including mean length of clause (MLC), mean length of sentence (MLS), mean length of T-unit (MLT), clauses per sentence (C/S), and verb phrases per T-unit (VP/T). The MANOVA test revealed no statistically significant difference between the two groups

This paper deliberates on the process of building the first constituency-to-dependency conversion tool of Turkish. The starting point of this work is a previous study in which 10,000 phrase structure trees were manually transformed into Turkish from the original PennTreebank corpus. Within the scope of this project, these Turkish phrase structure trees were automatically converted into UD-style dependency structures, using both a rule-based algorithm and a machine learning algorithm specific to the requirements of the Turkish language. The results of both algorithms were compared and the machine learning approach proved to be more accurate than the rule-based algorithm. The output was revised by a team of linguists. The refined versions were taken as gold standard annotations for the evaluation of the algorithms. In addition to its contribution to the UD Project with a large dataset of 10,000 Turkish dependency trees, this project also fulfills the important gap of a Turkish conversion tool, enabling the quick compilation of dependency corpora which can be used for the training of better dependency parsers.

Information-theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this expectation-based view is not limited to syntactic information alone. The present study combines structural and non-structural information in unified models of word-by-word sentence processing difficulty. Using probabilistic minimalist grammars (Stabler, 1997), we extend expectation-based models to include frequency information about noun phrase animacy. Entropy reductions derived from these grammars faithfully reflect the asymmetry between subject and object relatives (Staub, 2010; Staub, Dillon, & Clifton, 2017), as well as the effect of animacy on the measured difficulty profile (Lowder & Gordon, 2012; Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002). Visualizing probability distributions on the remaining alternatives at particular parser states allows us to explore new, linguistically plausible interpretations for the observed processing asymmetries, including the way that expectations about the relativized argument influence the processing of particular types of relative clauses (Wagers & Pendleton, 2016).

Contains fulltext : 225307.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Neural oscillations track linguistic information during speech comprehension (e.g., Ding et al., 2016; Keitel et al., 2018), and are known to be modulated by acoustic landmarks and speech intelligibility (e.g., Doelling et al., 2014; Zoefel & VanRullen, 2015). However, studies investigating linguistic tracking have either relied on non-naturalistic isochronous stimuli or failed to fully control for prosody. Therefore, it is still unclear whether low frequency activity tracks linguistic structure during natural speech, where linguistic structure does not follow such a palpable temporal pattern. Here, we measured electroencephalography (EEG) and manipulated the presence of semantic and syntactic information apart from the timescale of their occurrence, while carefully controlling for the acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information in the signal. EEG was recorded while 29 adult native speakers (22 women, 7 men) listened to naturally-spoken Dutch sentences, jabberwocky controls with morphemes and sentential prosody, word lists with lexical content but no phrase structure, and backwards acoustically-matched controls. Mutual information (MI) analysis revealed sensitivity to linguistic content: MI was highest for sentences at the phrasal (0.8-1.1 Hz) and lexical timescale (1.9-2.8 Hz), suggesting that the delta-band is modulated by lexically-driven combinatorial processing beyond prosody, and that linguistic content (i.e., structure and meaning) organizes neural oscillations beyond the timescale and rhythmicity of the stimulus. This pattern is consistent with neurophysiologically inspired models of language comprehension (Martin, 2016, 2020; Martin & Doumas, 2017) where oscillations encode endogenously generated linguistic content over and above exogenous or stimulus-driven timing and rhythm information. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Biological systems like the brain encode their environment not only by reacting in a series of stimulus-driven responses, but by combining stimulus-driven information with endogenous, internally-generated, inferential knowledge and meaning. Understanding language from speech is the human benchmark for this. Much research focusses on the purely stimulus-driven response, but here, we focus on the goal of language behavior: conveying structure and meaning. To that end, we use naturalistic stimuli that contrast acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information to show that, during spoken language comprehension, oscillatory modulations reflect computations related to inferring structure and meaning from the acoustic signal. Our experiment provides the first evidence to date that compositional structure and meaning organize the oscillatory response, above and beyond prosodic and lexical controls. 9 p.

Purpose Spontaneous speech tasks are critically important for characterizing spoken language production deficits in aphasia and for assessing the impact of therapy. The utility of such tasks arises from the complex interaction of linguistic demands (word retrieval, sentence formulation, articulation). However, this complexity also makes spontaneous speech hugely variable and difficult to assess. The current study aimed to simplify the problem by identifying latent factors underlying performance in spontaneous speech in aphasia. The ecological validity of the factors was examined by examining how well the factor structures corresponded to traditionally defined aphasia subtypes. Method A factor analysis was conducted on 17 microlinguistic measures of narratives from 274 individuals with aphasia in AphasiaBank. The resulting factor scores were compared across aphasia subtypes. Supervised (linear discriminant analysis) and unsupervised (latent profile analysis) classification techniques were then conducted on the factor scores and the solutions compared to traditional aphasia subtypes. Results Six factors were identified. Two reflected aspects of fluency, one at the phrase level (Phrase Building) and one at the narrative level (Narrative Productivity). Two other factors reflected the accuracy of productions, one at the word level (Semantic Anomaly) and one at the utterance level (Grammatical Error). The other two factors reflected the complexity of sentence structures (Grammatical Complexity) and the use of repair behaviors (Repair), respectively. Linear discriminant analyses showed that only about two thirds of speakers were classified correctly and that misclassifications were similar to disagreements between clinical diagnoses. The most accurately diagnosed syndromes were the largest groups—Broca's and anomic aphasia. The latent profile analysis also generated profiles similar to Broca's and anomic aphasia but separated some subtypes according to severity. Conclusions The factor solution and the classification analyses reflected broad patterns of spontaneous speech performance in a large and representative sample of individuals with aphasia. However, such data-driven approaches present a simplified picture of aphasia patterns, much as traditional syndrome categories do. To ensure ecological validity, a hybrid approach is recommended, balancing population-level analyses with examination of performance at the level of theoretically specified subgroups or individuals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13232354

This corpus-based study aims to identify the interactional and interactive metadiscourse markers in terms of frequency in the abstract and discussion sections of research articles on linguistics, written in English by native, Egyptian, and Saudi researchers. To attain this aim, 60 research articles have been randomly compiled and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively via AntConc.3.2.4 depending on Hyland’s (2005) classification of metadiscourse markers (MM). Taking the abstracts and discussions written by the natives as a benchmark, this study poses the following essential question: How close and far is the amount of the interactional and interactive resources in Egyptian and Saudi abstracts and discussions to and from the native level? The results showed that except for hedges, evidential markers, and endophorics, the usage of attitudes, code glosses, engagement markers, self-mentions and transitions in the E-abstracts (i.e. written by Egyptian researchers) was much far from the native level. But in S-abstracts (i.e. abstracts written by Saudi researchers), only two close points to the native level have been recorded: transitions and engagements. In the E-discussion sections, unlike code glosses and frame markers, attitudes, boosters, endophorics, hedges, and self-mentions were reported very close to the N-level. In the S-discussion sections, boosters, code glosses, emphatic, engagement, frame markers, and transitions have recorded far rates from the N-level; whereas only attitudes and hedges were much close to the native normal level.

It is broadly acknowledged that collocation is a crucial aspect of lexical knowledge. A well-developed collocational knowledge is necessary to transfer receptive word knowledge into productive use. The aim of the present study was to investigate comparatively the effect of two glossing conditions (textual and audio) and skewed input on lexical collocation of intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 137 L1 Persian EFL students were given Oxford Placement Test (OPT), out of whom 80 were selected and assigned to four 20-participant groups: Textual Glossing Group (TGG), Audio Glossing Group (AGG), Skewed Input Group (SIG), henceforth as experimental groups, and Teacher Existing Method Group (TEMG), as control group. A piloted lexical collocation test, created by familiarity-rating checklist, was administered as a pretest and posttest to the participants to collect data. A delayed posttest was administered after a 2-week interval to assess the delayed effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable of lexical collocation. Collocations were presented in textual glossing, audio glossing, skewed, and L1 glossed conditions during ten instructional sessions. The data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and post hoc test for both immediate and delayed posttests. The results showed that the different gloss conditions and skewed input technique had significantly different effects on learners’ L2 lexical collocation gain. It was revealed that textual glossing and skewing techniques resulted in greater improvement in lexical collocation. Some pedagogical implications were represented for language teachers, learners, and testers.

The article deals with teaching Russian intonation of declarative sentences to foreign students. The emphasis is placed on the way teaching materials are presented. In particular, the variable rows for intonation patterns in declarative sentences have been developed, as well as the teaching of syntagmatic segmentation and intonation patterns in complex utterances. This method of working with foreigners is efficient for teaching foreign students the Russian declarative intonation which manifests in verbal communication and reading.

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye-tracking experiments we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 , while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children, however online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate a SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children’s interpretation of ORCs, while online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data.Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal shortterm memory and working memory were not predictive of children’s accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.

The balletto unfolds on a uniquely small scale: many balletti can be performed in less than a minute. The genre’s brevity supports a number of perceptual benefits that train listeners to attend to tonal dynamics at multiple scales. The shortest balletti lie at the perceptual limit for entraining hypermeter and within the boundary for remembering tonic. Dynamic attending theory posits that periodic cadences correspond with peaks of attention, facilitating comparison of distant harmonic events. The balletto’s repeat structure fosters a deeper knowledge of tonal and formal procedures, and repetition directs attention to larger groupings. Together, these principles enabled listeners to identify important harmonic events, compare them across broad time spans, and associate them with specific formal units. Furthermore, a comparison of Italian, English, and German balletti reveals important regional differences in tonal and harmonic norms, illustrating how English composers, especially Thomas Morley, maximally leveraged the genre’s profound perceptual benefits.

In 3 ERP experiments, we investigated how experienced L2 speakers process natural and correct syntactic input that deviates from their own, sometimes incorrect, syntactic representations. Our previous study (Lemhofer, Schriefers, & Indefrey, 2014) had shown that L2 speakers do engage in native-like syntactic processing of gender agreement but base this processing on their own idiosyncratic (and sometimes incorrect) grammars. However, as in other standard ERP studies, but different from realistic L2 input, the materials in that study contained a large proportion of incorrect sentences. In the present study, German speakers of Dutch read exclusively objectively correct Dutch sentences that did or did not contain subjective determiner "errors" (e.g., de boot "the boat," which conflicts with the intuition of many German speakers that the correct phrase should be het boot). During reading for comprehension (Experiment 1), no syntax-related ERP responses for subjectively incorrect compared to correct phrases were observed. The same was true even when participants explicitly attended to and learned from the determiners in the sentences (Experiment 2). Only when participants judged the correctness of determiners in each sentence (Experiment 3) did a clear P600 appear. These results suggest that the full and native-like use of subjective grammars, as reflected in the P600 to subjective violations, occurs only when speakers have reason to mistrust the grammaticality of the input, either because of the nature of the task (grammaticality judgments) or because of the salient presence of incorrect sentences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn gender agreement better when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two core predictions of this proposal: (1) that children also benefit from initial exposure to multiword units, and (2) that their learning patterns reflect a greater reliance on multiword units compared to adults. We test both predictions using an artificial-language. As predicted, both children and adults benefit from early exposure to multiword units. In addition, when exposed to unsegmented input – adults show better learning of nouns compared to article-noun pairings, but children do not, a pattern consistent with adults’ predicted tendency to focus less on multiword units.

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation...

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the s-genitive (e.g. the boy’s shirt) and the of-genitive (e.g. the shirt of the boy) are allowed in principle to denote possession, the s-genitive is the native option when the possessor is human and the possessum is nonhuman. In standard syntactic analyses, the s-genitive is held to be more complex than the of-genitive, since it involves raising the possessor in the determiner phrase (DP). Egyptian Arabic is also known for its genitive alternation; it uses the synthetic genitive (the construct state), and the analytic genitive (the free state) that both overlap partially or significantly with the of-genitive. The results of an elicited production task showed that the intermediate group tended to produce the of-genitives in contexts in which the s-genitives were the target construction. The advanced group, on the other hand, produced the more complex s-genitives. These findings suggest that the surface overlap involved between the of-genitives and the corresponding genitive constructions in Egyptian Arabic conspired to trigger this crosslinguistic transfer. Also, resorting to the overlapping of-genitive option can be viewed as a strategy to avoid the more complex s-genitive option. The results of the advanced group imply that the acquisition of English genitive alternation undergoes two developmental stages. In the first, learners favor the less complex and overlapping of-genitives. In the second, they acquire the syntactic derivation in the s-genitives that raises the possessor in the DP.

Formulaic language is notoriously difficult for second language learners of French to master (Edmonds, 2014; Forsberg, 2010). Yet, no study has examined formulaic language in French textbooks despite the fact that in many contexts, textbooks represent a significant proportion of the input that learners receive. The current study addresses this gap. Using a distributional approach (as used in Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004), four-word lexical bundles were extracted from an oral corpus of French. The average number of lexical bundles in oral corpus utterances was compared to the average number of bundles in a corpus of A1-B1 level textbook dialogues. An independent samples t test showed that the average number of lexical bundles per 100,000 words was significantly higher in texts from the oral corpus than the textbook corpus. The average number of stance and referential lexical bundles was also revealed to be higher in the oral corpus. Implications for textbook design are discussed, such as increasing the amount of formulaic language in A2 level textbooks and incorporating more authentic language into textbooks., La maîtrise du langage formulaïque constitue un défi majeur pour les apprenants du français langue seconde (Edmonds, 2014 ; Forsberg, 2010). Néanmoins, aucune étude n’a examiné le langage formulaïque dans les manuels de français langue seconde, malgré le fait qu’ils représentent une proportion importante de l’input que les apprenants reçoivent. La présente étude vise à combler cette lacune. Nous avons utilisé une approche distributionnelle (comme ont utilisé Biber, Conrad et Cortes, 2004) pour extraire des groupes lexicaux de quatre mots à partir d’un corpus oral de français. Nous avons ensuite comparé le nombre moyen de groupes lexicaux dans les énoncés oraux et dans les dialogues dans les manuels A1-B1. Le nombre moyen de groupes lexicaux pour 100 000 mots était plus élevé dans le corpus oral comparé au corpus de manuels et un test t pour échantillons indépendants a révélé que cette différence était significative. Le corpus oral contenait aussi une plus grande proportion de groupes lexicaux de types positionnel et référentiel. Nous traitons des implications que cela engendre pour la conception de manuels, notamment l’augmentation du langage formulaïque au niveau A2 et l’incorporation du langage authentique à tous les niveaux.

There are numerous studies demonstrating facilitated processing of cognates relative to noncognates for bilinguals, providing evidence that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective. We tested whether cross-language activation affects comprehension of larger units of meaning, focusing specifically on comprehension of anaphoric references. Highly proficient, Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences either in English (Experiment 1) or Spanish (Experiment 2) while their eye movements were recorded. Sentences consisted of an initial clause with 2 nouns that were either cognates or noncognates, and a later clause with an anaphor that either referred to the first or second noun. In the English experiment, cognate status facilitated selection of the sentence's foundational noun, reflected by shorter reading times for cognate nouns in the first position. Processing of pronouns was facilitated when they referred to cognates, reflected by higher skipping rates and shorter reading times. Final selection of cognate referents was also facilitated, reflected by total reading shorter total reading times, but only when the pronoun referred to the first noun. In the Spanish experiment, total reading times for cognate nouns were shorter, irrespective of their order of mention, reflecting a general cognate facilitation effect that was not affected by which noun was selected as the foundational structure. Spillover fixations from anaphors referring to cognates were shorter than noncognates, but only when they were the second-mentioned noun, suggesting that cognate status affected coreferencing for the more recently encountered noun. Implications for theories of cross-language activation and anaphoric reference are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigates the comparative effect of teaching collocations through practicing them in literary and non-literary contents. The participants were composed of 30 EFL students selected from a cohort of 52 intermediate students in an English language institute in Sanandaj City, Iran. They were selected based on their scores on the Preliminary English Test (PET) and a collocation test, developed and piloted in advance. The selected participants were randomly divided into two experimental groups. Collocations were taught through literary content in one group; the others were instructed via non-literary content. At the end of the period of treatment with both groups, a collocation test was administered to both groups as a posttest. The analysis of collected data, using One-way ANCOVA and Descriptive Statistics, reveals that teaching the new collocations through literary contents proved significantly more effective than teaching them through non-literary contents. Resumen Este estudio investiga el efecto comparativo de la enseñanza de colocaciones por medio de su práctica con contenidos literarios y no literarios. Los participantes fueron 30 estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera (EFL) seleccionados de una cohorte de 52 estudiantes de nivel intermedio en un instituto de inglés en la ciudad de Sanandaj (Irán). Estos participantes se seleccionaron con base en sus puntajes de un test preliminar de inglés (PET) y otro de colocaciones, los cuales fueron desarrollados y piloteados por adelantado. Los participantes seleccionados fueron divididos al azar en dos grupos. A un grupo se le enseñó con contenido literario y al otro con contenido no literario. Al final del periodo de enseñanza con ambos grupos, el test de colocaciones se administró en ambos grupos. El análisis de datos, realizado por medio de One-way ANCOVA y estadística descriptiva, muestra que la enseñanza de nuevas colocaciones con contenidos literarios es significativamente más efectiva que su enseñanza con contenidos no literarios.

X' theory was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar.1 It enabled important insights to be made into the phrase structure of human language, but it had a number of weaknesses, and has been essentially replaced in Chomskyan generativism by Bare Phrase Structure (BPS), which assumes fewer theoretical primitives than X0 theory, and also avoids several of the latter’s weaknesses. However, Bare Phrase Structure has not been widely adopted outside the Minimalist Program (MP), rather, X0 theory remains widespread. In this paper, we develop a new, fully formalized approach to phrase structure which incorporates insights and advances from BPS, but does not require the Minimalist-specific assumptions that come with BPS. We formulate our proposal within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), providing an empirically and theoretically superior model for phrase structure compared with standard versions of X0 theory current in LFG.

Purpose The study was designed primarily to determine if the use of hearing aids (HAs) in individuals with hearing impairment in China would affect their speechreading performance. Method Sixty-seven young adults with hearing impairment with HAs and 78 young adults with hearing impairment without HAs completed newly developed Chinese speechreading tests targeting 3 linguistic levels (i.e., words, phrases, and sentences). Results Groups with HAs were more accurate at speechreading than groups without HA across the 3 linguistic levels. For both groups, speechreading accuracy was higher for phrases than words and sentences, and speechreading speed was slower for sentences than words and phrases. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between years of HA use and the accuracy of speechreading performance; longer HA use was associated with more accurate speechreading. Conclusions Young HA users in China have enhanced speechreading performance over their peers with hearing impairment who are not HA users. This result argues against the perceptual dependence hypothesis that suggests greater dependence on visual information leads to improvement in visual speech perception.

We examined French-learning toddlers’ sensitivity to Subject-Verb agreement with conjoined subjects. In French, a conjoined NP triggers plural agreement even when made up of individual singular NPs...

This paper examines phraseology as a lexical feature from a Quranic perspective. It explores the importance of demystifying the phraseological theoretical base in order to facilitate the task of translators and second language learners and deal more efficiently with the challenging language aspects of phraseology. Despite prolific publications and the growing interest that research on phraseology generates, too many grey areas still prevail, and many questions remain unanswered. There is a degree of inconsistency and stalemate in the phraseology debate, often yielding fragmented literature and inconclusive evidence. Research on phraseology remains stuck at the level of description and prescription. Similarly, research on translation studies seldom moves beyond comparative analysis of language pairs, examining cross linguistic and cultural differences. The literature does not have a strong theoretical base and is largely anecdotal, lacking empirical data from which to draw clear-cut conclusions on the key issues of translating phraseology. This paper focuses on five selected English translations of the Quran to assess the degree of faithfulness and accuracy in rendering the Quranic phraseology into English. Findings suggested that the five selected translators of the Quran fell short of checking exegesis of the Quranic text. The findings revealed that translations of the Quranic phraseological units gave an echo at best. Results showed the literal translation method was frequently used for translating phraseology; however, this often led to inaccurate and stilted English. The findings suggest that the translation of the Quran in English is still a work in progress, and it needs to be periodically evaluated and updated to address the flaws identified by researchers from different perspectives. Findings are polarised between those who advocate as close a rendering of the Quranic text as possible and those who believe in a ‘natural style’ in the target text. This study is pertinent because it has several practical implications. Firstly, it will benefit translators of the Quran by providing fresh insights on how to deal with some of the challenges of translating Quranic phraseology. Secondly, it will provide a platform for further research on translating Quranic phraseological units and addressing the current shortcomings. This study has also expanded the extant literature on translating Quranic collocations to benefit future researchers.

This study aims at investigating the challenges that Yemeni translation students encounter when translating neologisms from English into Arabic. It also aims at comparing students' translation with outcomes of machine translation (MT). The authors follow the descriptive and comparative methods in conducting this study. To achieve the objective of the study, a test consisted of 24 items was designed to uncover such difficulties and was given to 55 translation students. The same test was applied on three translation applications for comparing the performance of students with MT. The findings show that translating neologisms accurately is hard for most of the Yemeni translation students and also for machine translation as well. It is difficult for them to understand English neologisms or to find the Arabic equivalents for English neologisms. The finding also indicates that only a few translation students can achieve accurate translation. Meanwhile, Translation applications produced poor translation and could not able to achieve accurate translation for most types of neologisms. As a result of the comparison, students produced acceptable translation better than MT. The difficulties are lexical related to the twelve types of neologisms based on Newmark classification (1988).

Voice and v is an investigation of the syntax of an understudied Western Austronesian language, Acehnese, with a particular interest in its implications for the theory of verb phrase structure under the framework of the Minimalist Program. Since Pylkkänen's seminal article, the idea that the functional projection of verb phrases involves two distinct layers—a higher one (that is, Voice) that is responsible for introducing the external thematic role and Case-licensing the internal argument, and a lower one (that is, v) that is responsible for introducing causative semantics and verbalizing the root—has been advanced in a series of works under the Minimalist Program. This book presents novel evidence for this hypothesis based on an in-depth analysis of Acehnese passive, object voice, and causative constructions. Building on the empirical observations from Acehnese, the book makes further explorations of the syntactic typology of passives and causatives, on which the Acehnese data shed light. It contributes not only to the description and analysis of an understudied language, but also to the cross-linguistic understanding of the different flavors of Voice and the architecture of verb phrase structures.

We discuss two instances in which the minimalist model of syntax offers a potential account of children's linguistic behavior: the Merge analysis of phrase structure and the analysis of pronominal structures and other long distance dependencies. In each case, we need to understand the relationship between performance mechanisms (the mechanisms for language production and comprehension) and the syntax on which these mechanisms draw.

Sonbul and Schmitt (2013) showed that exposure to second language (L2) collocations in reading texts can produce gains in explicit knowledge, but they found no evidence of gains in implicit knowledge. This study is a conceptual replication and extension of Sonbul and Schmitt's research. Sixty-two advanced English as a second language (ESL) speakers read texts containing repeated occurrences of low-frequency medical collocations in three sessions over 2 days. The incidental learning treatments included reading only (no typographic enhancement), bolding, and bolding-plus-glossing. Collocational knowledge was assessed in tests of explicit knowledge (cued recall, form recognition) and a test of implicit knowledge (primed lexical decision). Repeated exposure to bolded collocations produced greater explicit knowledge than repeated exposure to typographically unenhanced collocations. Evidence of implicit knowledge development was observed in the unenhanced (reading only) treatment but not in the remaining treatments. These results replicated Sonbul and Schmitt's findings for explicit knowledge and extended their findings for implicit knowledge. Open Practices: This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/qy2c3. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.