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Sample records for vn compounds noun-noun

  1. Unpacking Noun-Noun Compounds

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Smith, Viktor; Barratt, Daniel; Zlatev, Jordan

    2014-01-01

    In two complementary experiments we took an integrated approach to a set of tightly interwoven, yet rarely combined questions concerning the spontaneous interpretation of novel (unfamiliar) noun-noun compounds (NNCs) when encountered in isolation, and possible (re)interpretations of novel as well...... concerning the relations between semantics and pragmatics, as well as system and usage, and psycholinguistic issues concerning the processing of NNCs. New insights and methodological tools are also provided for supporting future best practices in the field of food naming and labelling...

  2. Grammatical-gender effects in noun-noun compound production: Evidence from German.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lorenz, Antje; Mädebach, Andreas; Jescheniak, Jörg D

    2018-05-01

    We examined how noun-noun compounds and their syntactic properties are lexically stored and processed in speech production. Using gender-marked determiner primes ( der masc , die fem , das neut [the]) in a picture naming task, we tested for specific effects from determiners congruent with either the modifier or the head of the compound target (e.g., Tee masc kanne fem [teapot]) to examine whether the constituents are processed independently at the syntactic level. Experiment 1 assessed effects of auditory gender-marked determiner primes in bare noun picture naming, and Experiment 2 assessed effects of visual gender-marked determiner primes in determiner-noun picture naming. Three prime conditions were implemented: (a) head-congruent determiner (e.g., die fem ), (b) modifier-congruent determiner (e.g., der masc ), and (c) incongruent determiner (e.g., das neuter ). We observed a facilitation effect of head congruency but no effect of modifier congruency. In Experiment 3, participants produced novel noun-noun compounds in response to two pictures, demanding independent processing of head and modifier at the syntactic level. Now, head and modifier congruency effects were obtained, demonstrating the general sensitivity of our task. Our data support the notion of a single-lemma representation of lexically stored compound nouns in the German production lexicon.

  3. Translation of Japanese Noun Compounds at Super-Function Based MT System

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhao, Xin; Ren, Fuji; Kuroiwa, Shingo

    Noun compounds are frequently encountered construction in nature language processing (NLP), consisting of a sequence of two or more nouns which functions syntactically as one noun. The translation of noun compounds has become a major issue in Machine Translation (MT) due to their frequency of occurrence and high productivity. In our previous studies on Super-Function Based Machine Translation (SFBMT), we have found that noun compounds are very frequently used and difficult to be translated correctly, the overgeneration of noun compounds can be dangerous as it may introduce ambiguity in the translation. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in handling Japanese noun compounds in an SFBMT system, we present a shallow method for translating noun compounds by using a word level translation dictionary and target language monolingual corpus.

  4. Count Nouns - Mass Nouns, Neat Nouns - Mess Nouns

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    Fred Landman

    2010-12-01

    Full Text Available In this paper I propose and formalize a theory of the mass-count distinction in which the denotations of count nouns are built from non-overlapping generators, while the denotations of mass nouns are built from overlapping generators. Counting is counting of generators, and it will follow that counting is only correct on count denotations. I will show that the theory allows two kinds of mass nouns: mess mass nouns with denotations built from overlapping minimal generators, and neat mass nouns with denotations built from overlapping generators, where the overlap is not located in the minimal generators. Prototypical mass nouns like meat and mud are of the first kind. I will argue that mass nouns like furniture and kitchenware are of the second type. I will discuss several phenomena—all involving one way or the other explicitly or implicitly individual classifiers like stuks in Dutch—that show that both distinctions mass/count and mess/neat are linguistically robust. I will show in particular that nouns like kitchenware pattern in various ways like count nouns, and not like mess mass nouns, and that these ways naturally involve the neat structure of their denotation. I will also show that they are real mass nouns: they can involve measures in the way mess mass nouns can and count nouns cannot. I will discuss grinding interpretations of count nouns, here rebaptized fission interpretations, and argue that these interpretations differ in crucial ways from the interpretations of lexical mass nouns. The paper will end with a foundational problem raised by fission interpretations, and in the course of this, atomless interpretation domains will re-enter the scene through the back door.ReferencesBarner, D. & Snedeker, J. 2005. ‘Quantity judgements and individuation: evidence that mass nouns count’. Cognition 97: 41–66.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.06.009PMid:16139586Bunt, H. 1985. Mass Terms and Model Theoretic Semantics. Cambridge

  5. Rule-based Approach on Extraction of Malay Compound Nouns in Standard Malay Document

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    Abu Bakar, Zamri; Kamal Ismail, Normaly; Rawi, Mohd Izani Mohamed

    2017-08-01

    Malay compound noun is defined as a form of words that exists when two or more words are combined into a single syntax and it gives a specific meaning. Compound noun acts as one unit and it is spelled separately unless an established compound noun is written closely from two words. The basic characteristics of compound noun can be seen in the Malay sentences which are the frequency of that word in the text itself. Thus, this extraction of compound nouns is significant for the following research which is text summarization, grammar checker, sentiments analysis, machine translation and word categorization. There are many research efforts that have been proposed in extracting Malay compound noun using linguistic approaches. Most of the existing methods were done on the extraction of bi-gram noun+noun compound. However, the result still produces some problems as to give a better result. This paper explores a linguistic method for extracting compound Noun from stand Malay corpus. A standard dataset are used to provide a common platform for evaluating research on the recognition of compound Nouns in Malay sentences. Therefore, an improvement for the effectiveness of the compound noun extraction is needed because the result can be compromised. Thus, this study proposed a modification of linguistic approach in order to enhance the extraction of compound nouns processing. Several pre-processing steps are involved including normalization, tokenization and tagging. The first step that uses the linguistic approach in this study is Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. Finally, we describe several rules-based and modify the rules to get the most relevant relation between the first word and the second word in order to assist us in solving of the problems. The effectiveness of the relations used in our study can be measured using recall, precision and F1-score techniques. The comparison of the baseline values is very essential because it can provide whether there has been an improvement

  6. Noun Countability; Count Nouns and Non-count Nouns, What are the Syntactic Differences Between them?

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    Azhar A. Alkazwini

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available Words that function as the subjects of verbs, objects of verbs or prepositions and which can have a plural form and possessive ending are known as nouns. They are described as referring to persons, places, things, states, or qualities and might also be used as an attributive modifier. In this paper, classes and subclasses of nouns shall be presented, then, noun countability branching into count and non-count nous shall be discussed. A number of present examples illustrating differences between count and non-count nouns and this includes determiner-head-co-occurrence restrictions of number, subject-verb agreement, in addition to some exceptions to this agreement rule shall be discussed. Also, the lexically inherent number in nouns and how inherently plural nouns are classified in terms of (+/- count are illustrated. This research will discuss partitive construction of count and non-count nouns, nouns as attributive modifier and, finally, conclude with the fact that there are syntactic difference between count and non-count in the English Language.

  7. Are French -ité Suffixed Nouns Property Nouns?

    OpenAIRE

    Koehl, Aurore

    2008-01-01

    International audience; The aim of this paper is to analyse French deadjectival –ité nouns construction (AitéN), from a lexematic point of view. –ité nouns are the most frequent deadjectival nouns stored in French dictionaries. Most of the time, these nouns are analysed as denoting properties. The present analysis will show that it is not always the case. We propose here a study conducted on 499 AitéN coined on denominal adjectives. We will make use of both syntactic and semantic adjectival p...

  8. OVERGENERALIZATION IN SINGULAR/PLURAL NOUNS AND SUFFIXED NOUNS OF IELTS COURSE STUDENTS

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    Gharizi Matiini

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available This study aims to investigate the morphological overgeneralization of IELTS students. It focuses on the singular/plural nouns and suffixed nouns that are overgeneralized by those students. Three students are chosen as the participants of the study by collecting their writing exercises. Three writing texts are gathered taken from several weeks and materials. The writings are analyzed by sorting the nouns they produced and categorizing them according to the singular/plural nouns and suffixed nouns. The results reveal that the students over extended the rules of singular/plural nouns and suffixed nouns. However, recovery occurs very varied in both singular/plural nouns and suffixed nouns. They tend to be better in mentioning singular/plural nouns, yet they are being selective and careful in writing suffixed nouns. In conclusion, even though the language learners can mark their overgeneralization, it is still difficult for them to recover their errors. It is recommended here that longitudinal study that has more time to examine students recovery from overgeneralization can be conducted for the further study to give more detail evidence in students’ overgeneralizations. Keywords: overgeneralization, singular/plural nouns, suffixed nouns

  9. NOUN CLASSIFICATION IN ESAHIE

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The present work deals with noun classification in Esahie (Kwa, Niger ... phonological information influences the noun (form) class system of Esahie. ... between noun classes and (grammatical) Gender is interrogated (in the light of ..... the (A) argument6 precedes the verb and the (P) argument7 follows the verb in a simple.

  10. Noun combination in interlanguage typology effects in complex determiner phrases

    CERN Document Server

    Bongartz, Christiane

    2002-01-01

    This study examines effects of L1 typology on the interlanguage of L2 learners of English. Czech learners use phrasal constructs (the song about love) significantly more often than Chinese learners, who prefer noun+noun compounds (the love song). Determiner properties and the process of noun incorporation systematically relate both options.

  11. On flexible and rigid nouns

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    2008-01-01

    Studies in Language 32-3 (2008), 727-752. Special issue: Parts of Speech: Descriptive tools, theoretical constructs Jan Rijkhoff - On flexible and rigid nouns This article argues that in addition to the flexible lexical categories in Hengeveld’s classification of parts-of-speech systems (Contentive......, Non-Verb, Modifier), there are also flexible word classes within the rigid lexical category Noun (Set Noun, Sort Noun, General Noun). Members of flexible word classes are characterized by their vague semantics, which in the case of nouns means that values for the semantic features Shape...... and Homogeneity are either left undetermined or they are specified in such a way that they do not quite match the properties of the kind of entity denoted by the flexible item in the external world. I will then argue that flexible word classes constitute a proper category (i.e. they are not the result of a merger...

  12. On flexible and rigid nouns

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    2010-01-01

    classes. Finally this article wants to claim that the distinction between rigid and flexible noun categories (a) adds a new dimension to current classifications of parts of speech systems, (b) correlates with certain grammatical phenomena (e.g. so-called number discord), and (c) helps to explain the parts......This article argues that in addition to the major flexible lexical categories in Hengeveld’s classification of parts of speech systems (Contentive, Non-Verb, Modifier), there are also flexible word classes within the rigid lexical category Noun (Set Noun, Sort Noun, General Noun). Members...... by the flexible item in the external world. I will then argue that flexible word classes constitute a proper category (i.e. they are not the result of a merger of some rigid word classes) in that members of flexible word categories display the same properties regarding category membership as members of rigid word...

  13. THE COMMON AND PROPER NOUNS BETWEEN ALBANIAN AND ENGLISH

    OpenAIRE

    Shkelqim Millaku

    2017-01-01

    The noun in Albanian language classified as common and proper. The common nouns in turn divide into countable and uncountable. Collective nouns and substance nouns are subclasses of the other classes. The structure of noun formation between Albanian and English on the general aspect of morphology and syntax still didn’t study in the way of comparative, contrast and generative. Those fields are our object of study. In Albanian and English we find some concepts of studies for noun for exam...

  14. Noun complement clauses as referential modifiers

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    Carlos de Cuba

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available A number of recent analyses propose that so-called noun complement clauses should be analyzed as a type of relative clause. In this paper, I present a number of complications for any analysis that equates noun complement clauses to relative clauses, and conclude that this type of analysis is on the wrong track. I present cross-linguistic evidence showing that the syntactic behavior of noun complement clauses does not pattern with relative clauses. Patterns of complementizer choice and complementizer drop as well as patterns involving main clause phenomena and extraction differ in the two constructions, which I argue is unexpected under a relative clause analysis that involves operator movement. Instead I present an alternative analysis in which I propose that the referentiality of a noun complement clause is linked to its syntactic behavior. Following recent work, I claim that referential clauses have a syntactically truncated left-periphery, and this truncation can account for the lack of main clause phenomena in noun complement clauses. I argue that the truncation analysis is also able to accommodate complementizer data patterns more easily than relative clause analyses that appeal to operator movement.

  15. Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production

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    Vigliocco, G.; Lauer, M.; Damian, M.F.; Levelt, W.J.M.

    2002-01-01

    Three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of phrases in Dutch. Bilingual participants were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an adjective + noun phrase in Dutch including the translation of the noun. In 2 experiments, the authors blocked

  16. Nouns in apposition : Portuguese data

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    Graça Rio-Torto

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available The nature of N1N2 constructions, or nouns in apposition, is controversial: depending on the theoretical framework, they can be considered as compounds or as syntactic constructions. Indeed, nouns in apposition function as a hybrid category, in a double way: (i the same lexical structure in apposition is viewed either as a coordinative construction, as a subordinative or as an attributive construction. (ii N2 functions as a modifier or as an attributive item of N1; in Portuguese, when plural is syntactically mandatory, N1 (the head is systematically pluralized; N2 either rejects inflection or behaves as a predicator, allowing inflectional marks. We claim that Romance NN behave as a specific type of compounds. This assumption is grounded on their behaviour by contrast with phrasal properties. Portuguese compounds are characterized by a narrow relationship between internal structure, headness and inflectional patterns. In Portuguese, by default, the head of compound is inflected. NN related by an attributive semantic link are nowadays particularly unstable and problematic regarding inflection. Inflectional variation — widely attested — helps in determining the status of NN in apposition: as two inflectional patterns are available, we must verify if they correspond to two different constructions or to one structure with two readings. The analysis addressed is supported by empirical data of contemporary Portuguese language extracted from Brazilian and European databases, and requires the theoretical articulation of a double predicative class of N2 (holistic and partitive with inflectional fluctuation of attributive N2 in the second situation: performing a continuum, double inflection is close to holistic predication and single inflection (of N1 is close to partitive predication; systematic double inflection is close to coordination and inflectional oscillation is close to attribution. The predicative power of nouns in apposition supports their

  17. Layers of root nouns in Germanic

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hansen, Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard

    2017-01-01

    The root-noun declension became productive in early Germanic, containing (I) inherited root nouns, (IIa) original substrate or loan words, and transitions from other declensions in (IIb) Proto-Germanic and (III) North Germanic. As ablaut was abolished, the inherited type would display ablaut grades...

  18. Investigating differences between proper and common nouns using novel word learning

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    Anastasiya Romanova

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available Empirical studies have shown higher rates of tip-of-the-tongue states for proper nouns, in comparison to common nouns, in non-brain-damaged speakers (e.g., Valentine & Moore, 1995, and higher retrieval failure rates for proper nouns relative to common nouns in people with aphasia (e.g., Semenza, 2009. Some authors suggest the source of these differences lies in logical properties (e.g., Semenza, 2009. That is, common nouns refer to a category of beings or objects that share certain semantic properties, while proper nouns designate specific individual beings or objects with unique features. Other authors attribute the distinction in processing to a number of statistical properties that differ across common and proper nouns (Kay, Hanley, & Miles, 2001. The aims of the present study were: 1 to dissociate the effects of logical and statistical properties by using novel words with equal statistical properties; 2 to determine whether people with aphasia show disproportionate impairments in learning proper nouns relative to common nouns, compared to aged-matched subjects. Methods We tested young (n=16 and elderly (n=14 adult non-brain-damaged participants and people with aphasia (n=2. Items-to-be-learnt were given as representatives of an unknown species (n=10 in the common noun condition, or as individual creatures (n=10 in the proper noun condition. The experiment consisted of 5 sessions. Each session included a learning phase and a test phase with naming and word-picture verification tasks. Results and Discussion Preliminary analysis showed learning of both common and proper nouns for both younger (F(4=140.68, p<.01 and elderly (F(4=34.87, p<.01 non-brain-damaged participants, with learning being significantly better for the younger group (F(4=6.5, p<.01. Contrary to expectations, performance on proper nouns was better than that for common nouns for both young and elderly subjects (F(1=6.47, p=.02 and F(1=9.75, p<.01, respectively, possibly due to

  19. Learning to categorize verbs and nouns : studies on Dutch

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    Erkelens, M.A.

    2009-01-01

    Verbs and nouns are elementary notions in linguistics, so the question how children learn to categorize verbs and nouns in their first language is an intriguing one. Children not only have to learn to identify verbs and nouns as belonging to different categories based on perception, they also have

  20. Problem of the Classification of Quantitative Noun in the German Language

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    Elvira L. Shubina

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available This work is dedicated to the semantic classification of quantitative noun on the basis of a structural study (Nquant + (Adj +N (ein Glas frisches Wasser, since this model reveals the greatest variety of grammatical formulation. These word combinations can form by the genitive government eine Tasse starken Kaffees by the grammatical agreement ein Eimer kaltes Wasser, or by the adjunction mit einem Korb reife Apfel. The suggested classification of the noun performing the function of the first components is based on the form of the noun acting as the first component. Types of the first components fall into three groups: 1. The nouns, which specify quantitative characteristics of objects and substances. Two subgroups are also distingshed: word combinations with a noun in a singular form Nquant1a as the second component and word combinations with a noun in a plural form as the second component Nquant1b; 2. The nouns defining a group of living beings and objects Nquant2; 3. The nouns which formation is grounded on quantitative nouns Nquant3. Normative recommendations on the choice of subordinate connection type should be connected at least at the present stage of existence of German literary language, exactly with the semantics of the nouns which are the first components in these word combinations. The article illustrates that all types of constructions (organizes whether on the basis of government, agreement and or adjunction are connected with the completely specific semantic characteristics of the name, i.e., these nouns belong to one of three groups of noun - first components.

  1. Noun-Verb Ambiguity in Chronic Undifferentiated Schizophrenia

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    Goldfarb, Robert; Bekker, Natalie

    2009-01-01

    This study investigated noun-verb retrieval patterns of 30 adults with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia and 67 typical adults, to determine if schizophrenia affected nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) differently from verbs (associated with frontal lobe function). Stimuli were homophonic homographic homonyms, balanced according…

  2. Explaining word order in the noun phrase

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    1990-01-01

    This article argues that word order in the noun phrase is largely determined by three iconic principles of constituent ordering. The patterns that these principles predict for simple noun phrases are tested against data from various existing samples. It appears that the predicted patterns are all...

  3. Iceberg Semantics For Count Nouns And Mass Nouns: Classifiers, measures and portions

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    Fred Landman

    2016-12-01

    It is the analysis of complex NPs and their mass-count properties that is the focus of the second part of this paper. There I develop an analysis of English and Dutch pseudo- partitives, in particular, measure phrases like three liters of wine and classifier phrases like three glasses of wine. We will study measure interpretations and classifier interpretations of measures and classifiers, and different types of classifier interpretations: container interpretations, contents interpretations, and - indeed - portion interpretations. Rothstein 2011 argues that classifier interpretations (including portion interpretations of pseudo partitives pattern with count nouns, but that measure interpretations pattern with mass nouns. I will show that this distinction follows from the very basic architecture of Iceberg semantics.

  4. An Analysis of Noun Definition in Cantonese

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    To, Carol Kit Sum; Stokes, Stephanie; Man, Yonnie; T'Sou, Benjamin

    2013-01-01

    This study investigated the noun definitions given by Cantonese speakers at different ages. Definitional responses on six concrete nouns from 1075 children aged 4;10 to 12;01 and 15 adults were analyzed with reference to the semantic content and the syntactic form. Results showed that conventional definitions produced by Cantonese adult speakers…

  5. Old Romanian pluralized mass and abstract nouns

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    Gabriela Pană Dindelegan

    2017-09-01

    Full Text Available The analysis of a rich old Romanian corpus shows that the ‘pluralization’ of mass and abstract nouns is extremely frequent in old Romanian. The semantic effects of pluralization are similar for mass and abstract nouns, consisting in the creation of denotative and/or connotative semantic variants. Of the plural endings, –uri is specialized for the pluralization of mass nouns in Daco-Romanian. The evolution of the ending –uri illustrates the specific process by which a grammatical (plural morpheme is converted into a lexical morpheme (the so-called ‘lexical plurals’. ‘Lexical plurals’ have isolated occurrences in other Romance languages, but they have not reached the spread and regularity they display in Romanian.

  6. The Treatment of Borrowed Nouns in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele and Isichazamazwi SezoMculo

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    Eventhough Ndlovu

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract: This article focuses on the lemmatisation of vowel-commencing borrowed nouns and the allo-cation of borrowed nouns to noun class prefixes in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele, the first monolingual general-purpose Ndebele dictionary, and Isichazamazwi SezoMculo, the first specialised Ndebele dictionary of musical terms. It adopts a comparative approach, also highlighting the controversies surrounding the status of the initial vowel of the prefix or the pre-prefix in Ndebele and other Nguni languages. It further looks at the challenges and limitations of lemmatising the noun using either the initial vowel of the prefix or the initial letter of the noun stem. It is found that there are some inconsistencies in the lemmatisation of vowel-com-mencing borrowed nouns and the allocation of borrowed nouns to noun class prefixes in the two dictionar-ies. These inconsistencies impact negatively on the standardisation and treatment of borrowed nouns.

  7. Noun morphophonemics and noun class restructuring: The case of ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The article seeks to address the plural forms of class 11/10 nouns in Meru dialects. These are Bantu dialects spoken in the eastern province of Kenya. The dialects build the plural forms in this class in various ways. Sometimes the entire word is treated as a root and in other cases the word is considered to have two parts: a ...

  8. Noun and verb processing in aphasia: Behavioural profiles and neural correlates

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    Reem S.W. Alyahya

    Full Text Available The behavioural and neural processes underpinning different word classes, particularly nouns and verbs, have been a long-standing area of interest in psycholinguistic, neuropsychology and aphasiology research. This topic has theoretical implications concerning the organisation of the language system, as well as clinical consequences related to the management of patients with language deficits. Research findings, however, have diverged widely, which might, in part, reflect methodological differences, particularly related to controlling the psycholinguistic variations between nouns and verbs. The first aim of this study, therefore, was to develop a set of neuropsychological tests that assessed single-word production and comprehension with a matched set of nouns and verbs. Secondly, the behavioural profiles and neural correlates of noun and verb processing were explored, based on these novel tests, in a relatively large cohort of 48 patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia. A data-driven approach, principal component analysis (PCA, was also used to determine how noun and verb production and comprehension were related to the patients' underlying fundamental language domains. The results revealed no performance differences between noun and verb production and comprehension once matched on multiple psycholinguistic features including, most critically, imageability. Interestingly, the noun-verb differences found in previous studies were replicated in this study once un-matched materials were used. Lesion-symptom mapping revealed overlapping neural correlates of noun and verb processing along left temporal and parietal regions. These findings support the view that the neural representation of noun and verb processing at single-word level are jointly-supported by distributed cortical regions. The PCA generated five fundamental language and cognitive components of aphasia: phonological production, phonological recognition, semantics, fluency, and

  9. Verb-Noun Collocation Proficiency and Academic Years

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    Fatemeh Ebrahimi-Bazzaz

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available Generally vocabulary and collocations in particular have significant roles in language proficiency. A collocation includes two words that are frequently joined concurrently in the memory of native speakers. There have been many linguistic studies trying to define, to describe, and to categorise English collocations. It contains grammatical collocations and lexical collocations which include nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverb. In the context of a foreign language environment such as Iran, collocational proficiency can be useful because it helps the students improve their language proficiency. This paper investigates the possible relationship between verb-noun collocation proficiency among students from one academic year to the next. To reach this goal, a test of verb-noun collocations was administered to Iranian learners. The participants in the study were 212 Iranian students in an Iranian university. They were selected from the second term of freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. The students’ age ranged from 18 to 35.The results of ANOVA showed there was variability in the verb-noun collocations proficiency within each academic year and between the four academic years. The results of a post hoc multiple comparison tests demonstrated that the means are significantly different between the first year and the third and fourth years, and between the third and the fourth academic year; however, students require at least two years to show significant development in verb-noun collocation proficiency. These findings provided a vital implication that lexical collocations are learnt and developed through four academic years of university, but requires at least two years showing significant development in the language proficiency.

  10. Shell Nouns as Cohesive Devices in Published and ESL Student Writing

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    Aktas, Rahime Nur; Cortes, Viviana

    2008-01-01

    This paper analyzes the use of a special type of unspecific noun, called "shell nouns" [Hunston, S., & Francis, G. (1999). "Pattern grammar". Amsterdam: Benjamins; Schmid, H. (2000). "English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition". Berlin: Walter de Gruyter], which are frequently used as cohesive devices, in the written…

  11. Categorical Structure among Shared Features in Networks of Early-Learned Nouns

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    Hills, Thomas T.; Maouene, Mounir; Maouene, Josita; Sheya, Adam; Smith, Linda

    2009-01-01

    The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…

  12. Broohm: Noun Classification in Esahie | Broohm | Ghana Journal of ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Tano, Kwa, Niger-Congo). It contends that, though the noun class system of Esahie per se is morpho-syntactically vestigial, hence differing from other African languages (e.g. most Bantu languages) where noun classes can be assimilated with ...

  13. Exploring Noun Bias in Filipino-English Bilingual Children

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    Lucas, Rochelle Irene G.; Bernardo, Allan B. I.

    2008-01-01

    Researchers have suggested that there is a noun bias in children's early vocabularies brought about by features of adults' child-directed utterances, which may vary across languages (E. V. Bates et al., 1994; D. Gentner, 1982). In the present study, the authors explored noun bias in 60 Filipino-English bilingual children whose 2 languages differed…

  14. Verb-Noun Collocations in Written Discourse of Iranian EFL Learners

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    Fatemeh Ebrahimi-Bazzaz

    2015-07-01

    Full Text Available When native speakers of English write, they employ both grammatical rules and collocations. Collocations are words that are present in the memory of native speakers as ready-made prefabricated chunks. Non-native speakers who wish to acquire native-like fluency should give appropriate attention to collocations in writing in order not to produce sentences that native speakers may consider odd. The present study tries to explore the use of verb-noun collocations in written discourse of English as foreign language (EFL among Iranian EFL learners from one academic year to the next in Iran. To measure the use of verb-noun collocations in written discourse, there was a 60-minute task of writing story  based on a series of six pictures whereby for each picture, three verb-noun collocations were measured, and nouns were provided to limit the choice of collocations. The results of the statistical analysis of ANOVA for the research question indicated that there was a significant difference in the use of lexical verb-noun collocations in written discourse both between and within the four academic years. The results of a post hoc multiple comparison tests confirmed that the means are significantly different between the first year and the third and fourth years, between the second and the fourth, and between the third and the fourth academic year which indicate substantial development in verb-noun collocation proficiency.  The vital implication is that the learners could use verb-noun collocations in productive skill of writing.

  15. Analysis of the Word-Initial Segment with Reference to Lemmatising Zulu Nasal Nouns

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    M.H. Mpungose

    2012-09-01

    Full Text Available

    The process of lemmatising nasal nouns in the Zulu lexicon is problematic. The traditional method is to lemmatise a Zulu lexical noun by etymological noun-stem. This practice creates difficulties in harmonising lexical nouns with their syntactic application. Most authors and dictionary-makers are inconsistent in identifying the word-initial segment which determines the letter of the alphabet under which the lexical noun should be included. Consequently, dictionary users do not find Zulu dictionaries user-friendly. This article therefore proposes the principle of "a noun without initial vowel" as a method for lemmatising Zulu nasal nouns. It concludes that it is not necessary to delve into the derivational history of a lexical noun, but rather to focus on the product of the operation of morphophonological rules. The article also suggests the need to identify the distinctiveness of the segments of a syllable and to acknowledge that identical forms of a segment do occur at different segmental positions (initial, medial and final. Finally it is argued that the Zulu nasal noun class prefix is constructed according to an open syllable pattern defined by a general CV-formula based on a VCV noun prefix open syllable pattern.

    Keywords: adjoined letter; compound; composite; consonant; element; etymological; evolutionary; homorganic; initial; intravowel; lemma; lemmatise; lexical; morphophonological; nasal; noun class prefix; segment; syllable; vowel

     

    Die proses van lemmatisering van nasale naamwoorde in die Zoeloeleksikon is problematies. Die tradisionele metode is om leksikale selfstandige naamwoorde in Zoeloe volgens die etimologiese naamwoordstam te lemmatiseer. Hierdie gebruik veroorsaak moeilikhede by die harmonisering van leksikale selfstandige naamwoorde met hul sintaktiese toepassing. Die meeste outeurs en leksikograwe is inkonsekwent in die identifisering van die woordinisiële segment wat die letter van die alfabet bepaal

  16. A Common Mechanism in Verb and Noun Naming Deficits in Alzheimer's Patients

    Science.gov (United States)

    Almor, Amit; Aronoff, Justin M.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.; Gonnerman, Laura M.; Kempler, Daniel; Hintiryan, Houri; Hayes, UnJa L.; Arunachalam, Sudha; Andersen, Elaine S.

    2009-01-01

    We tested the ability of Alzheimer's patients and elderly controls to name living and non-living nouns, and manner and instrument verbs. Patients' error patterns and relative performance with different categories showed evidence of graceful degradation for both nouns and verbs, with particular domain-specific impairments for living nouns and…

  17. Morpho-semantic properties of Serbian nouns: Animacy and gender pairs

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    Radanović Jelena

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available In this study we investigated whether and how the cognitive system uses morphological markedness of animacy and gender pairs. In the Serbian language masculine nouns are marked for animacy (i.e., genitive-accusative syncretism, while for feminine nouns the animacy distinction is purely semantic. Thus, in Experiment 1 we used this natural, linguistic differentiation to test whether morphological markedness of animacy influences lexical processing. In the same experiment, we tested whether the cognitive system is sensitive to the fact that some animate nouns have a sibling in the other gender (e.g., dečak /”boy”/ - devojčica /”girl”/, while others do not have it (e.g., vojnik /”soldier”/ or žirafa /”giraffe”/. We labeled this indicator sibling presence. The analysis did not confirm the effect of animacy, neither between nor within genders. However, animate nouns with a sibling were processed faster than those without a sibling. Since the majority of sibling nouns are morphologically related (like konobar /”waiter”/ - konobarica /”waitress”/, while the rest are not (e.g., petao /”rooster”/ - kokoška /”hen”/, in Experiment 2 we tested whether morphological relatedness contributed to the effect of sibling presence. Results showed that this is not the case: morphologically related and unrelated masculine-feminine pairs of nouns (siblings were processed equally fast. Furthermore, an interaction between the target’s frequency and the frequency of its sibling was observed: nouns with a more frequent sibling benefited more from their own frequency than those with a less frequent sibling. We argue that sibling support is realized through semantic, not morphological relations. Taken together, our findings suggest that morphological markedness is not used in lexical processing, which is in line with an amorphous approach to lexical processing.

  18. Comparison of single-word and adjective-noun phrase production using event-related brain potentials

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Lange, Violaine Michel

    2015-01-01

    stimuli varying in complexity -black and white line drawings, coloured line drawings, and arrays of drawings-in participants producing single nouns. Whilst naming latencies were similar for single noun production between visual stimuli conditions, ERPs differed between drawing arrays and single drawings...... in a time-window extending beyond early visual analysis. In a second experiment, different participants were asked to produce either single noun or adjective-noun dual-word phrases to black-and-white and coloured line drawings, respectively. Adjective-noun phrase production (2W) resulted in naming latencies...

  19. Emotional noun processing: an ERP study with rapid serial visual presentation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yi, Shengnan; He, Weiqi; Zhan, Lei; Qi, Zhengyang; Zhu, Chuanlin; Luo, Wenbo; Li, Hong

    2015-01-01

    Reading is an important part of our daily life, and rapid responses to emotional words have received a great deal of research interest. Our study employed rapid serial visual presentation to detect the time course of emotional noun processing using event-related potentials. We performed a dual-task experiment, where subjects were required to judge whether a given number was odd or even, and the category into which each emotional noun fit. In terms of P1, we found that there was no negativity bias for emotional nouns. However, emotional nouns elicited larger amplitudes in the N170 component in the left hemisphere than did neutral nouns. This finding indicated that in later processing stages, emotional words can be discriminated from neutral words. Furthermore, positive, negative, and neutral words were different from each other in the late positive complex, indicating that in the third stage, even different emotions can be discerned. Thus, our results indicate that in a three-stage model the latter two stages are more stable and universal.

  20. Emotional noun processing: an ERP study with rapid serial visual presentation.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Shengnan Yi

    Full Text Available Reading is an important part of our daily life, and rapid responses to emotional words have received a great deal of research interest. Our study employed rapid serial visual presentation to detect the time course of emotional noun processing using event-related potentials. We performed a dual-task experiment, where subjects were required to judge whether a given number was odd or even, and the category into which each emotional noun fit. In terms of P1, we found that there was no negativity bias for emotional nouns. However, emotional nouns elicited larger amplitudes in the N170 component in the left hemisphere than did neutral nouns. This finding indicated that in later processing stages, emotional words can be discriminated from neutral words. Furthermore, positive, negative, and neutral words were different from each other in the late positive complex, indicating that in the third stage, even different emotions can be discerned. Thus, our results indicate that in a three-stage model the latter two stages are more stable and universal.

  1. Heavy noun phrase constructions in the Afrikaans novel 'n Ander ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Heavy noun phrase constructions in the Afrikaans novel 'n Ander Land: a cognitive account of a stylistic feature. Luna Beard. Abstract. This article focusses on one grammatical construction, namely heavy noun phrase (NP) constructions in Afrikaans, and more specifically on those instances encountered in the Afrikaans ...

  2. Nouns referring to tools and natural objects differentially modulate the motor system.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gough, Patricia M; Riggio, Lucia; Chersi, Fabian; Sato, Marc; Fogassi, Leonardo; Buccino, Giovanni

    2012-01-01

    While increasing evidence points to a critical role for the motor system in language processing, the focus of previous work has been on the linguistic category of verbs. Here we tested whether nouns are effective in modulating the motor system and further whether different kinds of nouns - those referring to artifacts or natural items, and items that are graspable or ungraspable - would differentially modulate the system. A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) study was carried out to compare modulation of the motor system when subjects read nouns referring to objects which are Artificial or Natural and which are Graspable or Ungraspable. TMS was applied to the primary motor cortex representation of the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle of the right hand at 150 ms after noun presentation. Analyses of Motor Evoked Potentials (MEPs) revealed that across the duration of the task, nouns referring to graspable artifacts (tools) were associated with significantly greater MEP areas. Analyses of the initial presentation of items revealed a main effect of graspability. The findings are in line with an embodied view of nouns, with MEP measures modulated according to whether nouns referred to natural objects or artifacts (tools), confirming tools as a special class of items in motor terms. Additionally our data support a difference for graspable versus non graspable objects, an effect which for natural objects is restricted to initial presentation of items. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  3. Designing a noun guesser for part of speech tagging in Northern ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    AFRICAN JOURNALS ONLINE (AJOL) · Journals · Advanced Search · USING ... used to recognize nouns that are not contained in the noun lexicon of the system. ... Our implementation is a symbolic, voting-based process: together, all tests ...

  4. Nouns and verbs in the vocabulary acquisition of Italian children.

    Science.gov (United States)

    D'Odorico, Laura; Fasolo, Mirco

    2007-11-01

    The vocabulary development of 24 Italian children aged between 1;4 and 1;6 at the beginning of the study was longitudinally monitored on a monthly basis using the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory drawn up by their mothers. This study analyzes data from children for whom two sampling stages were available; the first corresponding to a vocabulary size as close as possible to 200 words (mean 217, range 167-281), the second to a vocabulary size ranging from 400 to 650 words (mean 518, range 416-648). The children's vocabulary composition was analyzed by calculating, for each sampling stage, the percentage of common nouns, verbs and closed-class words. The increase in percentage points of the various lexical items between the first and second sampling stages was also analyzed. Data confirmed the predominance of nouns over verbs and closed-class words at both sampling stages, while verbs and closed-class words showed a higher percentage increase than nouns. The results provide evidence that children who reached the first sampling point at an earlier age had a higher percentage of nouns than children who reached the same stage at an older age. However, in the passage from the first to the second sampling point no relationship emerged between a style of acquisition based on the acquisition of nouns and an increase in the rate of vocabulary growth.

  5. Recently learned foreign abstract and concrete nouns are represented in distinct cortical networks similar to the native language.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mayer, Katja M; Macedonia, Manuela; von Kriegstein, Katharina

    2017-09-01

    In the native language, abstract and concrete nouns are represented in distinct areas of the cerebral cortex. Currently, it is unknown whether this is also the case for abstract and concrete nouns of a foreign language. Here, we taught adult native speakers of German 45 abstract and 45 concrete nouns of a foreign language. After learning the nouns for 5 days, participants performed a vocabulary translation task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Translating abstract nouns in contrast to concrete nouns elicited responses in regions that are also responsive to abstract nouns in the native language: the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left middle and superior temporal gyri. Concrete nouns elicited larger responses in the angular gyri bilaterally and the left parahippocampal gyrus than abstract nouns. The cluster in the left angular gyrus showed psychophysiological interaction (PPI) with the left lingual gyrus. The left parahippocampal gyrus showed PPI with the posterior cingulate cortex. Similar regions have been previously found for concrete nouns in the native language. The results reveal similarities in the cortical representation of foreign language nouns with the representation of native language nouns that already occur after 5 days of vocabulary learning. Furthermore, we showed that verbal and enriched learning methods were equally suitable to teach foreign abstract and concrete nouns. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4398-4412, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  6. Noun and verb differences in picture naming: past studies and new evidence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mätzig, Simone; Druks, Judit; Masterson, Jackie; Vigliocco, Gabriella

    2009-06-01

    We re-examine the double dissociation view of noun-verb differences by critically reviewing past lesion studies reporting selective noun or verb deficits in picture naming, and reporting the results of a new picture naming study carried out with aphasic patients and comparison participants. Since there are theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that verb processing is more demanding than noun processing, in the review we distinguished between cases that presented with large and small differences between nouns and verbs. We argued that the latter cases may be accounted for in terms of greater difficulty in processing verbs than nouns. For the cases reporting large differences between nouns and verbs we assessed consistency in lesion localization and consistency in diagnostic classification. More variability both in terms of diagnostic category and lesion sites was found among the verb impaired than the noun impaired patients. In the experimental study, nine aphasic patients and nine age matched neurologically unimpaired individuals carried out a picture naming study that used a large set of materials matched for age of acquisition and in addition to accuracy measures, latencies were also recorded. Despite the patients' variable language deficits, diagnostic category and the matched materials, all patients performed faster and more accurately in naming the object than the action pictures. The comparison participants performed similarly. We also carried out a qualitative analysis of the errors patients made and showed that different types of errors were made in response to object and action pictures. We concluded that action naming places more and different demands on the language processor than object naming. The conclusions of the literature review and the results of the experimental study are discussed in relation to claims previous studies have made on the basis of the double dissociation found between nouns and verbs. We argue that these claims are only

  7. High-frequency collocations of nouns in research articles across eight disciplines

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Matthew Peacock

    2012-04-01

    Full Text Available This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the distribution of the high-frequency collocates of abstract nouns in 320 research articles across eight disciplines: Chemistry, Computer Science, Materials Science, Neuroscience, Economics, Language and Linguistics, Management, and Psychology. Disciplinary variation was also examined – very little previous research seems to have investigated this. The corpus was analysed using WordSmith Tools. The 16 highest-frequency nouns across all eight disciplines were identified, followed by the highest-frequency collocates for each noun. Five disciplines showed over 50% variance from the overall results. Conclusions are that the differing patterns revealed are disciplinary norms and represent standard terminology within the disciplines arising from the topics discussed, research methods, and content of discussions. It is also concluded that the collocations are an important part of the meanings and functions of the nouns, and that this evidence of sharp discipline differences underlines the importance of discipline-specific collocation research.

  8. A three-dimensional approach to the gender/sex of nouns in Biblical Hebrew

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    J. H. Kroeze

    1994-05-01

    Full Text Available The phenomenon of the gender/sex of nouns is normally handled two-dimensionally. Two levels are distinguished: (grammatical gender and sex. Gender refers to the morphological and syntactic features of the noun, sex to the extralingual reality. This use of the term gender rests on the assumption that the morphological and syntactic features o f a noun are normally consistent. This assumption is tested and the results show that a three-dimensional approach would he better. In the relevant literature, there are indications of such a three-dimensional differentiation, where gender is used to indicate only the syntactic features of a noun. In this article it is proposed that morphological gender, syntactic gender and semantic gender (sex should be distinguished consistently. A list of 23 different combinations were found among nouns occurring most frequently. These combinations are illustrated with examples. Morphological, syntactic and semantic statistics are also given which illustrate the unique characteristics of the three levels.

  9. Dissociable intrinsic functional networks support noun-object and verb-action processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yang, Huichao; Lin, Qixiang; Han, Zaizhu; Li, Hongyu; Song, Luping; Chen, Lingjuan; He, Yong; Bi, Yanchao

    2017-12-01

    The processing mechanism of verbs-actions and nouns-objects is a central topic of language research, with robust evidence for behavioral dissociation. The neural basis for these two major word and/or conceptual classes, however, remains controversial. Two experiments were conducted to study this question from the network perspective. Experiment 1 found that nodes of the same class, obtained through task-evoked brain imaging meta-analyses, were more strongly connected with each other than nodes of different classes during resting-state, forming segregated network modules. Experiment 2 examined the behavioral relevance of these intrinsic networks using data from 88 brain-damaged patients, finding that across patients the relative strength of functional connectivity of the two networks significantly correlated with the noun-object vs. verb-action relative behavioral performances. In summary, we found that verbs-actions and nouns-objects are supported by separable intrinsic functional networks and that the integrity of such networks accounts for the relative noun-object- and verb-action-selective deficits. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  10. An analysis of Pitch Patterns of English Adjective + Noun Pharases in Model Reading and Some Educational Implications

    OpenAIRE

    Iwai, Mie; Yamada, Jun

    2009-01-01

    A basic English accent rule for a noun phrase consisting of an adjective and a noun is that the head,o r noun,is accented unless the adjective is contrastively focused in the context. A question of interest for Japanese learners of English is to what extent this basic principle is observed in model reading to which the learners may be exposed in their English classrooms. This study measured F0 values of adjectives and nouns in noun phrases which appeared in model English reading on commercial...

  11. Descriptive and discourse-referential modifiers in a layered model of the noun phrase

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    2008-01-01

    This article argues that adnominal modifiers in a layered model of the noun phrase can be divided into two major subcategories: descriptive modifiers and discourse-referential modifiers. Whereas descriptive modifiers can be subdivided into classifying, qualifying, quantifying and localizing...... modifiers (section 2), discourse-referential modifiers in the noun phrase are concerned with the status of entities as referents in the world of discourse (section 3). I will pay particular attention to three issues: (i) formal reflections of the layered, semantic structure of the noun phrase (section 4...

  12. Viewing photos and reading nouns of natural graspable objects similarly modulate motor responses

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    Barbara FM Marino

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available It is well known that the observation of graspable objects recruits the same motor representations involved in their actual manipulation. Recent evidence suggests that the presentation of nouns referring to graspable objects may exert similar effects. So far, however, it is not clear to what extent the modulation of the motor system during object observation overlaps with that related to noun processing. To address this issue, 2 behavioral experiments were carried out using a go-no go paradigm. Healthy participants were presented with photos and nouns of graspable and non-graspable natural objects. Also scrambled images and pseudowords obtained from the original stimuli were used. At a go-signal onset (150 ms after stimulus presentation participants had to press a key when the stimulus referred to a real object, using their right (Experiment 1 or left (Experiment 2 hand, and refrain from responding when a scrambled image or a pseudoword was presented. Slower responses were found for both photos and nouns of graspable objects as compared to non-graspable objects, independent of the responding hand. These findings suggest that processing seen graspable objects and written nouns referring to graspable objects similarly modulates the motor system.

  13. Concreteness and relational effects on recall of adjective-noun pairs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Paivio, A; Khan, M; Begg, I

    2000-09-01

    Extending previous research on the problem, we studied the effects of concreteness and relatedness of adjective-noun pairs on free recall, cued recall, and memory integration. Two experiments varied the attributes in paired associates lists or sentences. Consistent with predictions from dual coding theory and prior results with noun-noun pairs, both experiments showed that the effects of concreteness were strong and independent of relatedness in free recall and cued recall. The generally positive effects of relatedness were absent in the case of free recall of sentences. The two attributes also had independent (additive) effects on integrative memory as measured by conditionalized free recall of pairs. Integration as measured by the increment from free to cued recall occurred consistently only when pairs were high in both concreteness and relatedness. Explanations focused on dual coding and relational-distinctiveness processing theories as well as task variables that affect integration measures.

  14. Nicht-referentielle Nominalphrasen (Non-Referential Noun Phrases)

    Science.gov (United States)

    Leys, Odo

    1973-01-01

    Appeared as Working Report No. 21 of the Linguistic Institute of the University of Cologne; critical observations on S. Kuno's Some Properties of Non-Refential Noun Phrases,'' in Studies in General and Oriental Linguistics, 1970. (RS)

  15. Onondaga Noun Incorporation: Some Notes on the Interdependence of Syntax and Semantics

    Science.gov (United States)

    Woodbury, Hanni

    1975-01-01

    In Onondaga and all northern Iroquoian languages, nouns can be incorporated into verbs. The function of this is semantic as well as syntactic. It is semantic in that the sense of an incorporated noun will be narrower than its unincorporated counterpart regardless of modifiers. Incorporation changes the transformational structure of the sentence.…

  16. Order in the noun phrase of the languages of Europe

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    1998-01-01

    The current investigation of the word order characteristics of the constituents of the noun phrase (NP) differs from other typological investigations of the issue in two major respects. First of all, it does not take for granted the existence of NPs or of the various NP-internal categories...... that it also has noun phrases: it may use a string of appositives rather than a proper, integral NP. The existence of NPs and the presence of various NP-internal categories is not an issue that has received considerable attention in typological word order studies. Yet how can we hope to establish the cross...... in a representative sample of European languages (Appendix 1), we first need to devote some attention to such basic questions as: Do all European languages have nouns? Do all European languages have proper NPs? Which NP-internal modifiers are attested in the European languages, and which are absent? These issues...

  17. Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ferguson, Brock; Graf, Eileen; Waxman, Sandra R

    2014-04-01

    Fluent speakers' representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These "selectional restrictions" of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recruit their nascent verb lexicon to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as the verbs' subjects. We compared infants' interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., the dax) in two conditions: one in which dax is presented as the subject of animate-selecting construction (e.g., The dax is crying), and the other in which dax is the subject of an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). Results indicate that by 19months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  18. Subsequent to suppression: Downstream comprehension consequences of noun/verb ambiguity in natural reading

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stites, Mallory C.; Federmeier, Kara D.

    2015-01-01

    We used eye-tracking to investigate the downstream processing consequences of encountering noun/verb (NV) homographs (i.e., park) in semantically neutral but syntactically constraining contexts. Target words were followed by a prepositional phrase containing a noun that was plausible for only one meaning of the homograph. Replicating previous work, we found increased first fixation durations on NV homographs compared to unambiguous words, which persisted into the next sentence region. At the downstream noun, we found plausibility effects following ambiguous words that were correlated with the size of a reader's first fixation effect, suggesting that this effect reflects the recruitment of processing resources necessary to suppress the homograph's context-inappropriate meaning. Using these same stimuli, Lee and Federmeier (2012) found a sustained frontal negativity to the NV homographs, and, on the downstream noun, found a plausibility effect that was also positively correlated with the size of a reader's ambiguity effect. Together, these findings suggest that when only syntactic constraints are available, meaning selection recruits inhibitory mechanisms that can be measured in both first fixation slowdown and ERP ambiguity effects. PMID:25961358

  19. Simultaneous Processing of Noun Cue and to-be-Produced Verb in Verb Generation Task: Electromagnetic Evidence

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Anna V. Butorina

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available A long-standing but implicit assumption is that words strongly associated with a presented cue are automatically activated in the memory through rapid spread of activation within brain semantic networks. The current study was aimed to provide direct evidence of such rapid access to words’ semantic representations and to investigate its neural sources using magnetoencephalography (MEG and distributed source localization technique. Thirty-three neurotypical subjects underwent the MEG recording during verb generation task, which was to produce verbs related to the presented noun cues. Brain responses evoked by the noun cues were examined while manipulating the strength of association between the noun and the potential verb responses. The strong vs. weak noun-verb association led to a greater noun-related neural response at 250–400 ms after cue onset, and faster verb production. The cortical sources of the differential response were localized in left temporal pole, previously implicated in semantic access, and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC, thought to subserve controlled semantic retrieval. The strength of the left VLPFC’s response to the nouns with strong verb associates was positively correlated to the speed of verbs production. Our findings empirically validate the theoretical expectation that in case of a strongly connected noun-verb pair, successful access to target verb representation may occur already at the stage of lexico-semantic analysis of the presented noun. Moreover, the MEG results suggest that contrary to the previous conclusion derived from fMRI studies left VLPFC supports selection of the target verb representations, even if they were retrieved from semantic memory rapidly and effortlessly. The discordance between MEG and fMRI findings in verb generation task may stem from different modes of neural activation captured by phase-locked activity in MEG and slow changes of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD signal

  20. Distributional structure in language: contributions to noun-verb difficulty differences in infant word recognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Willits, Jon A; Seidenberg, Mark S; Saffran, Jenny R

    2014-09-01

    What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easier to recognize than verbs in fluent speech. However, there are situations in which distributional statistics provide similar support for verbs. The statistics for verbs that occur with the English morpheme -ing, for example, should facilitate verb recognition. In two experiments with 7.5- and 9.5-month-old infants, we tested the importance of distributional statistics for word recognition by varying the frequency of the contextual frames in which verbs occur. The results support the conclusion that distributional statistics are utilized by infant language learners and contribute to noun-verb differences in word recognition. Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V.

  1. EEG source reconstruction evidence for the noun-verb neural dissociation along semantic dimensions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhao, Bin; Dang, Jianwu; Zhang, Gaoyan

    2017-09-17

    One of the long-standing issues in neurolinguistic research is about the neural basis of word representation, concerning whether grammatical classification or semantic difference causes the neural dissociation of brain activity patterns when processing different word categories, especially nouns and verbs. To disentangle this puzzle, four orthogonalized word categories in Chinese: unambiguous nouns (UN), unambiguous verbs (UV), ambiguous words with noun-biased semantics (AN), and ambiguous words with verb-biased semantics (AV) were adopted in an auditory task for recording electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from 128 electrodes on the scalps of twenty-two subjects. With the advanced current density reconstruction (CDR) algorithm and the constraint of standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography, the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of word processing were explored with the results that in multiple time periods including P1 (60-90ms), N1 (100-140ms), P200 (150-250ms) and N400 (350-450ms), noun-verb dissociation over the parietal-occipital and frontal-central cortices appeared not only between the UN-UV grammatical classes but also between the grammatically identical but semantically different AN-AV pairs. The apparent semantic dissociation within one grammatical class strongly suggests that the semantic difference rather than grammatical classification could be interpreted as the origin of the noun-verb neural dissociation. Our results also revealed that semantic dissociation occurs from an early stage and repeats in multiple phases, thus supporting a functionally hierarchical word processing mechanism. Copyright © 2017 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  2. Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nicolas, Ramona Kunene; Ahmed, Saaliha

    2016-07-28

    This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG) developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (2012). The PiNG tool includes four subtests, one each for subnoun comprehension (NC), noun production (NP), predicate comprehension (PC), and predicate production (PP). Children are shown these lexical items and then asked to show comprehension and produce certain lexical items. After adaptation into the South African context, the adapted version of PiNG was used to directly assess the lexical development of isiZulu with the three main objectives to (1) test the efficiency of the adaptation of a vocabulary tool to measure isiZulu comprehension and production development, (2) test previous findings done in many cross-linguistic comparisons that have found that both comprehension and production performance increase with age for a lesser-studied language, and (3) present our findings around the comprehension and production of the linguistic categories of nouns and predicates. An analysis of the results reported in this study show an age effect throughout the entire sample. Across all the age groups, the comprehension of the noun and predicate subtests was better performed than the production of noun and predicate subtests. With regard to lexical items, the responses of children showed an influence of various factors, including the late acquisition of items, possible problems with stimuli presented to them, and the possible input received by the children from their home environment.

  3. Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ramona Kunene Nicolas

    2016-07-01

    Full Text Available This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (2012. The PiNG tool includes four subtests, one each for subnoun comprehension (NC, noun production (NP, predicate comprehension (PC, and predicate production (PP. Children are shown these lexical items and then asked to show comprehension and produce certain lexical items. After adaptation into the South African context, the adapted version of PiNG was used to directly assess the lexical development of isiZulu with the three main objectives to (1 test the efficiency of the adaptation of a vocabulary tool to measure isiZulu comprehension and production development, (2 test previous findings done in many cross-linguistic comparisons that have found that both comprehension and production performance increase with age for a lesser-studied language, and (3 present our findings around the comprehension and production of the linguistic categories of nouns and predicates. An analysis of the results reported in this study show an age effect throughout the entire sample. Across all the age groups, the comprehension of the noun and predicate subtests was better performed than the production of noun and predicate subtests. With regard to lexical items, the responses of children showed an influence of various factors, including the late acquisition of items, possible problems with stimuli presented to them, and the possible input received by the children from their home environment.

  4. The Intonation of Noun Phrase Subjects and Clause- Modifying ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    FIRST LADY

    Oladipupo, Rotimi O. - Centre for Foundation Education, Bells University of. Technology ... native Englishes, especially at the level of phonology, this study investigates ... Keywords: Intonation tunes, Nigerian English, Noun Phrase Subjects,.

  5. Acquisition of noun derivation in Estonian and Russian L1

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Reili Argus

    2018-04-01

    Full Text Available Acquisition of derivation is not a well-studied area in first language research and a comparative approach to the acquisition of derivation in different languages doesn’t exist. There is no information on how a child acquires derivation in a language with a rich and regular system of derivational patterns, or in a language where derivation is productive, but the system of derivational patterns is opaque. According to general ideas of complexity in a language, the child should start to use simplex stems first and, only after that, complex ones, that is, complexity should increase in the course of acquisition. Our paper is intended to address these issues, based on longitudinal child data from typologically different languages, Estonian and Russian. The results revealed significant differences in the acquisition of noun derivation in the two languages under observation. The system of noun derivation is acquired at a faster pace in Russian, while Estonian children have far fewer noun derivatives in their speech and they use different derivation suffixes with less regularity. Even so, the so-called building block model may be applied for both languages only partially.

  6. Merger of noun classes 3 and 1: A case study with bilingual isiXhosa ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Class reduction (the loss of a noun class) in Southern Bantu languages is an acknowledged but under-researched phenomenon. A recent study of isiXhosa concords suggests an incipient merger of noun classes 11 and 5, but no research to date has examined other possible concord mergers or concord flux in the ...

  7. Lemmatisation of Vowel Commencing Borrowed Nouns and the ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Riette Ruthven

    its noun class prefixes, the presence of the initial vowel or pre-prefix, or the augment, as ..... Grammatical information has to be as accurate as the defini- ... achieve a semantic ordering of entries gives the impression that language con- sists of ...

  8. Switching Between Noun and Verb Agreement Rules Comes at a Cost: Cross-Sectional and Interventional Studies in a Developmental Sample

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Van Reybroeck Marie

    2014-11-01

    Full Text Available This study clarifies the impact of switching context between noun and verb number agreement rules in written language production. In Experiment 1, children from grade 3 to 6 were asked to fill in sentences with nouns and verbs in either a switching condition (noun followed by verb or a repeating condition (noun followed by noun. The results showed that third- and fourth-grade children produced more erroneous agreements in the switching condition than in the repeating condition, showing that switching between rules comes at a cost, whereas fifth- and sixth-grade participants’ performance was not affected by the switching context. Based on these findings, Experiment 2 aimed to assess whether a switching treatment offers a greater opportunity to improve the acquisition of grammatical agreement production, as compared to a simple treatment. Teachers from grade 3 gave either a switching treatment (mixed noun and verb exercises or a simple treatment (noun exercises followed by verb exercises. The results show that children learned better from the switching treatment than from the simple treatment. These findings highlight the cost of switching between noun and verb agreement rules during the acquisition of grammatical number agreement and also how grammatical spelling acquisition can be improved at school.

  9. Nouns, verbs, objects, actions, and abstractions: local fMRI activity indexes semantics, not lexical categories.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Moseley, Rachel L; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

    2014-05-01

    Noun/verb dissociations in the literature defy interpretation due to the confound between lexical category and semantic meaning; nouns and verbs typically describe concrete objects and actions. Abstract words, pertaining to neither, are a critical test case: dissociations along lexical-grammatical lines would support models purporting lexical category as the principle governing brain organisation, whilst semantic models predict dissociation between concrete words but not abstract items. During fMRI scanning, participants read orthogonalised word categories of nouns and verbs, with or without concrete, sensorimotor meaning. Analysis of inferior frontal/insula, precentral and central areas revealed an interaction between lexical class and semantic factors with clear category differences between concrete nouns and verbs but not abstract ones. Though the brain stores the combinatorial and lexical-grammatical properties of words, our data show that topographical differences in brain activation, especially in the motor system and inferior frontal cortex, are driven by semantics and not by lexical class. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  10. Danish children's acquisition of noun plurals: the role of methodology

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Kjærbæk, Laila; Basbøll, Hans

    In an earlier study we investigated the development of noun plurals in Danish children aged 0-10 years using a multi method research approach comparing five different data types: 1) lexical data; 2) reported data; 3) naturalistic spontaneous child language input and output; 4) semi-naturalistic/s......In an earlier study we investigated the development of noun plurals in Danish children aged 0-10 years using a multi method research approach comparing five different data types: 1) lexical data; 2) reported data; 3) naturalistic spontaneous child language input and output; 4) semi...... the experimental data and we therefore predict a lower percentage of incorrectly produced PL forms in the semi-naturalistic/semi-experimental than in the experimental data. 3) In the experimental data the children are to produce the PL form of nouns given by the investigator. We expect children to produce a large...... amount of sg. instead of PL forms, either as a repetition of the sg. form given by the investigator or as a PL error form irreguralizing the “Ø” PL marker (pure zero, e.g. sg. mus ‘mouse’ – PL mus ‘mice’). 4) The experimental data is based on a fixed number of specific pre-selected items and we therefore...

  11. Processing graspable object images and their nouns is impaired in Parkinson's disease patients.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Buccino, Giovanni; Dalla Volta, Riccardo; Arabia, Gennarina; Morelli, Maurizio; Chiriaco, Carmelina; Lupo, Angela; Silipo, Franco; Quattrone, Aldo

    2018-03-01

    According to embodiment, the recruitment of the motor system is necessary to process language material expressing a motor content. Coherently, an impairment of the motor system should affect the capacity to process language items with a motor content. The aim of the present study was to assess the capacity to process graspable objects and their nouns in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and healthy controls. Participants saw photos and nouns depicting graspable and non-graspable objects. Scrambled images and pseudo-words served as control stimuli. At 150 msec after stimulus presentation, they had to respond when the stimulus referred to a real object, and refrain from responding when it was meaningless (go-no go paradigm). In the control group, participants gave slower motor responses for stimuli (both photos and nouns) related to graspable objects as compared to non-graspable ones. This in keeping with data obtained in a previous study with young healthy participants. In the PD group, motor responses were similar for both graspable and non-graspable items. Moreover, error number was significantly greater than in controls. These findings support the notion that when the motor circuits are lesioned, like in PD, patients do not show the typical modulation of motor responses and have troubles in processing graspable objects and their nouns. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

  12. Differential Impairment of Noun and Verb Consequent to LH Lesions in Persian Aphasic Patients

    OpenAIRE

    Dr. Reza Nilipour; Rabeeh Ariaei; Dr. Hassan Ashayeri

    2003-01-01

    The major focus of this research is on the differential disruption of language abilities subsequent to brain damages as they relate to site and size of lesion, especially left hemisphere lesions which disrupt the production and processing of "Nouns" vs. "Verbs" as two functionally different lexical categories. Several clinical as well as experimental studies reported on different language have shown that nouns and verbs can be independently disrupted due to brain damage. A prevalent impairmen...

  13. National open university of Nigeria (noun) students' perception of ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    This paper studied the perception and challenges of students of open and distance learning (ODL) mode. ODL is a welcome development in Nigeria educational system. Participants in this study were 500 NOUN students that were randomly selected from Abuja study center. A well structured and validated questionnaire ...

  14. Exploring Atypical Verb+Noun Combinations in Learner Technical Writing

    Science.gov (United States)

    Luzon Marco, Maria Jose

    2011-01-01

    Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and…

  15. Why Are Verbs so Hard to Remember? Effects of Semantic Context on Memory for Verbs and Nouns

    Science.gov (United States)

    Earles, Julie L.; Kersten, Alan W.

    2017-01-01

    Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously seen verb,…

  16. The Contrastive Study of Igbo and English Denominal Nouns ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The teaching of nominalization has not been all smooth for an Igbo second language learner of English language. That is why this study is set to contrast English and Igbo Denominal nouns. The objective is to find out the similarities and differences between the nominalization process in Igbo and that of the English ...

  17. Nouns cut slices: Effects of linguistic forms on intergroup bias

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Graf, Sylvie; Bilewicz, M.; Finell, E.; Geschke, D.

    2013-01-01

    Roč. 32, č. 1 (2013), s. 46-61 ISSN 0261-927X R&D Projects: GA ČR GA13-25656S Institutional support: RVO:68081740 Keywords : nouns * adjectives * intergroup bias * intergroup attitudes Subject RIV: AN - Psychology Impact factor: 0.872, year: 2013

  18. Symbolic Play and Novel Noun Learning in Deaf and Hearing Children: Longitudinal Effects of Access to Sound on Early Precursors of Language

    Science.gov (United States)

    Quittner, Alexandra L.; Cejas, Ivette; Wang, Nae-Yuh; Niparko, John K.; Barker, David H.

    2016-01-01

    In the largest, longitudinal study of young, deaf children before and three years after cochlear implantation, we compared symbolic play and novel noun learning to age-matched hearing peers. Participants were 180 children from six cochlear implant centers and 96 hearing children. Symbolic play was measured during five minutes of videotaped, structured solitary play. Play was coded as "symbolic" if the child used substitution (e.g., a wooden block as a bed). Novel noun learning was measured in 10 trials using a novel object and a distractor. Cochlear implant vs. normal hearing children were delayed in their use of symbolic play, however, those implanted before vs. after age two performed significantly better. Children with cochlear implants were also delayed in novel noun learning (median delay 1.54 years), with minimal evidence of catch-up growth. Quality of parent-child interactions was positively related to performance on the novel noun learning, but not symbolic play task. Early implantation was beneficial for both achievement of symbolic play and novel noun learning. Further, maternal sensitivity and linguistic stimulation by parents positively affected noun learning skills, although children with cochlear implants still lagged in comparison to hearing peers. PMID:27228032

  19. Symbolic Play and Novel Noun Learning in Deaf and Hearing Children: Longitudinal Effects of Access to Sound on Early Precursors of Language.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Quittner, Alexandra L; Cejas, Ivette; Wang, Nae-Yuh; Niparko, John K; Barker, David H

    2016-01-01

    In the largest, longitudinal study of young, deaf children before and three years after cochlear implantation, we compared symbolic play and novel noun learning to age-matched hearing peers. Participants were 180 children from six cochlear implant centers and 96 hearing children. Symbolic play was measured during five minutes of videotaped, structured solitary play. Play was coded as "symbolic" if the child used substitution (e.g., a wooden block as a bed). Novel noun learning was measured in 10 trials using a novel object and a distractor. Cochlear implant vs. normal hearing children were delayed in their use of symbolic play, however, those implanted before vs. after age two performed significantly better. Children with cochlear implants were also delayed in novel noun learning (median delay 1.54 years), with minimal evidence of catch-up growth. Quality of parent-child interactions was positively related to performance on the novel noun learning, but not symbolic play task. Early implantation was beneficial for both achievement of symbolic play and novel noun learning. Further, maternal sensitivity and linguistic stimulation by parents positively affected noun learning skills, although children with cochlear implants still lagged in comparison to hearing peers.

  20. Usage-Based Account of the Acquisition of Liaison: Evidence from Sensitivity to the Singular/Plural Orientation of Nouns

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dugua, Celine; Spinelli, Elsa; Chevrot, Jean-Pierre; Fayol, Michel

    2009-01-01

    This study investigates whether children's production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g., "arbre" "tree"), whereas others are found more often in the singular (e.g., "arc-en-ciel" "rainbow"). In the input, children…

  1. The Role of Sustained Attention in the Production of Conjoined Noun Phrases: An Individual Differences Study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jongman, Suzanne R; Meyer, Antje S; Roelofs, Ardi

    2015-01-01

    It has previously been shown that language production, performed simultaneously with a nonlinguistic task, involves sustained attention. Sustained attention concerns the ability to maintain alertness over time. Here, we aimed to replicate the previous finding by showing that individuals call upon sustained attention when they plan single noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot") and perform a manual arrow categorization task. In addition, we investigated whether speakers also recruit sustained attention when they produce conjoined noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot and the bucket") describing two pictures, that is, when both the first and second task are linguistic. We found that sustained attention correlated with the proportion of abnormally slow phrase-production responses. Individuals with poor sustained attention displayed a greater number of very slow responses than individuals with better sustained attention. Importantly, this relationship was obtained both for the production of single phrases while performing a nonlinguistic manual task, and the production of noun phrase conjunctions in referring to two spatially separated objects. Inhibition and updating abilities were also measured. These scores did not correlate with our measure of sustained attention, suggesting that sustained attention and executive control are distinct. Overall, the results suggest that planning conjoined noun phrases involves sustained attention, and that language production happens less automatically than has often been assumed.

  2. ABSTRACT NOUNS IN THE SPEECH OF THE EMGLISHMEN (BASED ON FICTION WORKS AND BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Natalia Veniaminovna Khokhlova

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available The research aimed at studying the use of abstract nouns in the Englishmen’s speech from the standpoint of sociolinguistics. The article introduces a new, sociolinguistic, approach to research of abstract nouns; it is also the first time they are studied in a language corpus. The first stage of the research was based on fiction literary works: abstract nouns were extracted of analysis from the statements of the characters belonging to the opposite social classes. Later, these data was compared with the results of the original corpus research based on the British national corpus: sentences with nouns were selected out of the conversational subcorpus of BNC and were further sorted into abstract, concrete and words denoting people. Then, their frequency and vocabulary was studied with regards to speakers’ age, gender and social standing. The results revealed that abstract words are used more often that concrete ones regardless of the speaker’s social characteristics, however, the size and content of vocabulary is different (it is generally more substantial in the speech of women and representatives of higher social classes. The results of this research can be used in elaborating a course of the English language or in teaching general linguistics, sociolinguistics and country studies. 

  3. Stereotype or grammar? The representation of gender when two-year-old and three-year-old French-speaking toddlers listen to role nouns.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lévy, Arik; Gygax, Pascal; Gabriel, Ute; Zesiger, Pascal

    2016-11-01

    Using a preferential looking paradigm, the current study examined the role that grammatical gender plays when preschool French-speaking toddlers process role nouns in the masculine form (e.g., chanteurs masculine 'singers'). While being auditorily prompted with "Look at the 'a role noun'!", two- and three-year-olds were presented with two pictures of two characters ('boy-boy' versus 'girl-boy') with attributes of the given role noun (e.g., singers with microphone and music notes). All role nouns were presented in the masculine plural form, which, despite its use to refer to mixed-gender groups, can be interpreted as referring to men. We expected toddlers to be biased by stereotypes, yet when non-stereotypical role nouns were presented, toddlers were not influenced by grammatical gender, but by their own sex (even more so for three-year-old toddlers). The absence of sensitivity to grammatical cues for either age group is discussed in terms of the developmental awareness of grammatical gender.

  4. Prosodic Disambiguation of Noun/Verb Homophones in Child-Directed Speech

    Science.gov (United States)

    Conwell, Erin

    2017-01-01

    One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

  5. Collocations of High Frequency Noun Keywords in Prescribed Science Textbooks

    Science.gov (United States)

    Menon, Sujatha; Mukundan, Jayakaran

    2012-01-01

    This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based…

  6. Differential Impairment of Noun and Verb Consequent to LH Lesions in Persian Aphasic Patients

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dr. Reza Nilipour

    2003-08-01

    Full Text Available The major focus of this research is on the differential disruption of language abilities subsequent to brain damages as they relate to site and size of lesion, especially left hemisphere lesions which disrupt the production and processing of "Nouns" vs. "Verbs" as two functionally different lexical categories. Several clinical as well as experimental studies reported on different language have shown that nouns and verbs can be independently disrupted due to brain damage. A prevalent impairment in naming actions (Producing verbs is reported in non-fluent aphasic patients, with lesions involving left frontal lobe, whereas a selective in naming objects (Producing nouns has been observed in amnesic patients, with lesions involving the temporal lobe and the temporal lobe and the posterior association aresas. This research is a theoretical and fundamental based on descriptive and analytical method. The aphasic data in this research were obtained by assessing each patient's aphasic symptoms using a standard Persian aphasia test (Paradis, Nilipoure, Paribakht, 1989 as well as post-test analysis of each patient' connected descriptive speech. The subjects were selected form among aphasics who referred to speech therapy centers in Tehran during a pe5iod of one year since autumn 1999. The subjects selected in the study were a homogenous group with left hemisphere lesions due to CVA. They were educated adult right handed. Speakers of Persian without any risk factor such as nicotine, alcohol or any addiction and diabetes with no gross depression or anxiety problems or face and oral paralysis and hemiaopsia. The subjects in this study comprised to adults ranging between 33 and 76 years of age. The results indicated that there are significant correlation between: 1 The production of nouns and left hemisphere lesion. 2 The production of verbs and left hemisphere lesion. 3 Brain lesion and language deficits. 4 The site of lesion and language abilities

  7. Adaptation of Proper Nouns in Czech-American Periodicals at the End of the 19th Century

    OpenAIRE

    Burdová, Kateřina

    2016-01-01

    The bachelor's thesis focuses on the process of adaptation of proper nouns in chosen periodicals of the end of the 19th century that were published in the USA by Czech immigrants. Based on the analysis of periodicals collected from the Library of the Naprstek Museum of Prague there originated a list of proper nouns that has been studied from various points of view, namely the phonetics and phonology, morphology including the word-class competition (Cedar Rapidský - Cedar Rapids), translatedan...

  8. Towards the study of color naming in Portuguese: structure and meaning of constructed nouns and adjectives

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Margarita Correia

    2013-08-01

    Full Text Available Color naming is a central study subject in Lexicology, although its systematic morphological description in Portuguese is still lacking. In this study we describe the morphological and semantic aspects of complex nouns and adjectives constructed on the basis of the basic color terms from the Portuguese language. We focus on a description of the internal structure of these complex words, as well as on aspects concerning the productivity of the morphological processes, and attempt to associate those aspects with the referential capacities of the studied words. Lexicographical data were used, collected from the Vocabulário Ortográfico do Português, and the theoretical framework of this research is SILEX’s constructional model of Morphology. We verified that suffixation is the most productive process, followed by composition. Prefixation is rather unproductive. There are differences in the way that derived nouns and adjectives, on the one hand, and compounds, on the other, may name color tones and degrees of saturation. Derived words give rise to the naming of tones in a very imprecise manner, while compounds are much more effective and precise in the way they may name them, and composition is the most efficient resource available to denote degrees of brightness.

  9. How Do Children Ascribe Gender to Nouns? A Study of Spanish-Speaking Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Anderson, Raquel T.; Lockowitz, Alison

    2009-01-01

    The purpose of this investigation was to identify how Spanish-speaking preschool children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) use the various cues available for ascribing a noun's inherent gender in the language. Via an invented word task, four types of cues were isolated and presented to each child: (1) two types of noun-internal…

  10. Tracking the time course of multi-word noun phrase production with ERPs or on when (and why) cat is faster than the big cat.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bürki, Audrey; Laganaro, Marina

    2014-01-01

    Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the production of bare nouns, from picture onset to articulation. Behavioral results revealed longer naming latencies for French noun phrases with determiners and pre-nominal adjectives (D-A-N, the big cat) than for noun phrases with a determiner (D-N, the cat), or bare nouns (N, cat). The spatio-temporal analysis of the ERPs revealed differences in the duration of stable global electrophysiological patterns as a function of utterance format in two time windows, from ~190 to 300 ms after picture onset, and from ~530 ms after picture onset to 100 ms before articulation. These findings can be accommodated in the following model. During grammatical encoding (here from ~190 to 300 ms), the noun and adjective lemmas are accessed in parallel, followed by the selection of the gender-agreeing determiner. Phonological encoding (after ~530 ms) operates sequentially. As a consequence, the phonological encoding process is longer for longer utterances. In addition, when determiners are repeated across trials, their phonological encoding can be anticipated or primed, resulting in a shortened encoding process.

  11. Tracking the time course of multi-word noun phrase production with ERPs or on when (and why cat is faster than the big cat

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Audrey eBürki

    2014-07-01

    Full Text Available Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the production of bare nouns, from picture onset to articulation. Behavioral results revealed longer naming latencies for French noun phrases with determiners and pre-nominal adjectives (D-A-N, the big cat than for noun phrases with a determiner (D-N, the cat or bare nouns (N, cat. The spatio-temporal analysis of the ERPs revealed differences in the duration of stable global electrophysiological patterns as a function of utterance format in two time windows, from ~190 ms to 300 ms after picture onset, and from ~530 ms after picture onset to 100 ms before articulation. These findings can be accommodated in the following model. During grammatical encoding (here from ~190 ms to 300 ms, the noun and adjective lemmas are accessed in parallel, followed by the selection of the gender-agreeing determiner. Phonological encoding (after ~530 ms operates sequentially. As a consequence, the phonological encoding process is longer for longer utterances. In addition, when determiners are repeated across trials, their phonological encoding can be anticipated or primed, resulting in a shortened encoding process.

  12. Machine translation of noun phrases from English to Igala using the ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Due to the structural differences between English and Igala, noun phrases coupled with the non- availability of large amount of parallel aligned corpus for English and Igala language, the rule based technology was adopted to develop the model. The model was implemented using VB.net programming language as front ...

  13. The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Savičiūtė, Eglė; Ambridge, Ben; Pine, Julian M

    2018-05-01

    Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun. Second, the error patterns were not compatible with the systematic substitution of target forms by either (a) the most frequent form of that noun or (b) a single morphosyntactic default form, as might be predicted by naive versions of a constructivist and generativist account, respectively. Rather, most errors reflected near-miss substitutions of singular for plural, masculine for feminine, or nominative/accusative for a less frequent case. Together, these findings provide support for an input-based approach to morphological acquisition, but are not adequately explained by any single account in its current form.

  14. Children's grammatical categories of verb and noun: a comparative look at children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normal language (NL).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Skipp, Amy; Windfuhr, Kirsten L; Conti-Ramsden, Gina

    2002-01-01

    The study investigated the development of grammatical categories (noun and verb) in young language learners. Twenty-eight children with specific language impairment (SLI) with a mean language age of 35 months and 28 children with normal language (NL) with a mean language age of 34 months were exposed to four novel verbs and four novel nouns during 10 experimental child-directed play sessions. The lexical items were modelled with four experimentally controlled argument structures. Both groups of children showed little productivity with syntactic marking of arguments in the novel verb conditions. Thus, both groups of children mostly followed the surface structure of the model presented to them, regardless of the argument they were trying to express. Therefore, there was little evidence of verb-general processes. In contrast, both groups used nouns in semantic roles that had not been modelled for them. Importantly, however, children with SLI still appeared to be more input dependent than NL children. This suggests that children with NL were working with a robust noun schema, whereas children with SLI were not. Taken together, the findings suggest that neither group of children had a grammatical category of verb, but demonstrated a general knowledge of the grammatical category of noun. These findings are discussed in relation to current theories of normal and impaired language development.

  15. THE GENDER OF COUNTABLE AND UNCOUNTABLE NOUNS

    OpenAIRE

    Shkelqim Millaku; Xhevahire Topanica

    2016-01-01

    In Albanian and English we have three kinds of gender: masculine, feminine and neuter. In Albanian language we have this concept for gender: “Gjinia është një nga kategoritë gramatikore më karakteristikë për emrat në gjuhën shqipe. Nga natyra e saj, ajo dallohet nga kategoritë e tjera të emrit, nga numri, rasa dhe nga kategoritë e shquarsisë dhe të pashquarsisë, sepse i kundërvihet mashkullore-femërore dhe asnjanëse...”[1], it’s same and with English: “a grouping of nouns and pronouns into c...

  16. Problems in the acquisition of Noun Class 11 among Xhosa children ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    While there has been research on the partial or complete merger of Noun Classes 5 and 11 in a number of Bantu languages, no study has focused specifically on the acquisition of Cl. 11 by Xhosa-speaking children. In this paper we test our hypothesis that Xhosa-speaking children in both urban and rural areas no longer, ...

  17. An analysis of the status of the secondary noun prefixes in Ndebele ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The article probes into the nature of secondary noun class prefixes in the morphology of some Nguni languages and Ndebele in particular. The secondary prefixes are known as commentary prefixes mainly because they carry overtones of sarcasm, criticism and caricature among other elements, through loading an implied ...

  18. Semantic markup of nouns and adjectives for the Electronic corpus of texts in Tuvan language

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Bajlak Ch. Oorzhak

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available The article examines the progress of semantic markup of the Electronic corpus of texts in Tuvan language (ECTTL, which is another stage of adding Tuvan texts to the database and marking up the corpus. ECTTL is a collaborative project by researchers from Tuvan State University (Research and Education Center of Turkic Studies and Department of Information Technologies. Semantic markup of Tuvan lexis will come as a search engine and reference system which will help users find text snippets containing words with desired meanings in ECTTL. The first stage of this process is setting up databases of basic lexemes of Tuvan language. All meaningful lexemes were classified into the following semantic groups: humans, animals, objects, natural objects and phenomena, and abstract concepts. All Tuvan object nouns, as well as both descriptive and relative adjectives, were assigned to one of these lexico-semantic classes. Each class, sub-class and descriptor is tagged in Tuvan, Russian and English; these tags, in turn, will help automatize searching. The databases of meaningful lexemes of Tuvan language will also outline their lexical combinations. The automatized system will contain information on semantic combinations of adjectives with nouns, adverbs with verbs, nouns with verbs, as well as on the combinations which are semantically incompatible.

  19. Early Acquisition of Gender Agreement in the Spanish Noun Phrase: Starting Small

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mariscal, Sonia

    2009-01-01

    Nativist and constructivist accounts differ in their characterization of children's knowledge of grammatical categories. In this paper we present research on the process of acquisition of a particular grammatical system, gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase, in children under three years of age. The design of the longitudinal study employed…

  20. Vantage Theory and the Use of English Demonstrative Determiners with Proper Nouns

    Science.gov (United States)

    Riddle, Elizabeth M.

    2010-01-01

    This article discusses some apparently paradoxical behavior of the English demonstratives "this/these" and "that/those" as determiners of proper nouns and as metaphorical signals of epistemic and affective stance within the proximal-distal opposition. It is argued that the apparent paradoxes are actually cases of shifting perspectives or points of…

  1. A proposal of methodology for automatic indexation using noun phrases

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Renato Rocha Souza

    2006-07-01

    Full Text Available It can be noticed that the indexing and representation strategies nowadays seems to be near the exhaustion, and it is worth to investigate new approaches to the indexing and information retrieving systems. Among these, a branch tries to consider the intrinsic semantics of the textual documents using noun phrases as descriptors instead of single keywords. We present in this article a methodology that was developed in the scope of a doctorate research.

  2. Les oasis de l'Oued Noun : dégradation du milieu naturel et perspectives de développement

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    EL MAHJOUB CHMOURK

    2011-08-01

    Full Text Available The oases of Oued Noun: degradation of the natural environment and perspectives of development. An oasis is considered as a vital space and a fundamental natural resource in the Oued Noun area. Irrigation water scarcity, desertification, terminal illnesses of different civilizations, space division and tininess of farms are all natural and economic constraints providing the oasis area from growing and developing. Officials have to be aware of those constraints and they need to urgently recommend solutions in the process of updating the local territory and in its potentialities valorisation.

  3. Use of nouns and verbs in the oral narrative of individuals with hearing impairment and normal hearing between 5 and 11 years of age

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Erica Endo Amemiya

    Full Text Available CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE: Nouns and verbs indicate actions in oral communication. However, hearing impairment can compromise the acquisition of oral language to such an extent that appropriate use of these can be challenging. The objective of this study was to compare the use of nouns and verbs in the oral narrative of hearing-impaired and hearing children. DESIGN AND SETTING: Analytical cross-sectional study at the Department of Speech-Language and Hearing Sciences, Universidade Federal de São Paulo. METHODS: Twenty-one children with moderate to profound bilateral neurosensory hearing impairment and twenty-one with normal hearing (controls were matched according to sex, school year and school type. A board showing pictures was presented to each child, to elicit a narrative and measure their performance in producing nouns and verbs. RESULTS: Twenty-two (52.4% of the subjects were males. The mean age was 8 years (standard deviation, SD = 1.5. Comparing averages between the groups of boys and girls, we did not find any significant difference in their use of nouns, but among verbs, there was a significant difference regarding use of the imperative (P = 0.041: more frequent among boys (mean = 2.91. There was no significant difference in the use of nouns and verbs between deaf children and hearers, in relation to school type. Regarding use of the indicative, there was a nearly significant trend (P = 0.058. CONCLUSION: Among oralized hearing-impaired children who underwent speech therapy, their performance regarding verbs and noun use was similar to that of their hearing counterparts.

  4. Translating Proper Nouns: A Case Study on English Translation of Hafez's Lyrics

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shirinzadeh, Seyed Alireza; Mahadi, Tengku Sepora Tengku

    2014-01-01

    Proper nouns are regarded so simple that they might be taken for granted in translation explorations. Some may believe that they should not be translated in transmitting source texts to target texts. But, it is not the case; if one looks at present translations, he will notice that different strategies might be applied for translating proper…

  5. How are 'Barack Obama' and 'President Elect' differentially stored in the brain? An ERP investigation on the processing of proper and common noun pairs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Proverbio, Alice Mado; Mariani, Serena; Zani, Alberto; Adorni, Roberta

    2009-09-23

    One of the most debated issues in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether distinct semantic domains are differentially represented in the brain. Clinical studies described several anomic dissociations with no clear neuroanatomical correlate. Neuroimaging studies have shown that memory retrieval is more demanding for proper than common nouns in that the former are purely arbitrary referential expressions. In this study a semantic relatedness paradigm was devised to investigate neural processing of proper and common nouns. 780 words (arranged in pairs of Italian nouns/adjectives and the first/last names of well known persons) were presented. Half pairs were semantically related ("Woody Allen" or "social security"), while the others were not ("Sigmund Parodi" or "judicial cream"). All items were balanced for length, frequency, familiarity and semantic relatedness. Participants were to decide about the semantic relatedness of the two items in a pair. RTs and N400 data suggest that the task was more demanding for common nouns. The LORETA neural generators for the related-unrelated contrast (for proper names) included the left fusiform gyrus, right medial temporal gyrus, limbic and parahippocampal regions, inferior parietal and inferior frontal areas, which are thought to be involved in the conjoined processing a familiar face with the relevant episodic information. Person name was more emotional and sensory vivid than common noun semantic access. When memory retrieval is not required, proper name access (conspecifics knowledge) is not more demanding. The neural generators of N400 to unrelated items (unknown persons and things) did not differ as a function of lexical class, thus suggesting that proper and common nouns are not treated differently as belonging to different grammatical classes.

  6. Does Lexical Stress Influence 17-Month-Olds' Mapping of Verbs and Nouns?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Campbell, Jennifer; Mihalicz, Patrick; Thiessen, Erik; Curtin, Suzanne

    2018-01-01

    English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong)…

  7. The production and processing of determiner-noun agreement in child L2 Dutch

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Blom, E.; Vasić, N.

    2011-01-01

    Recent research has shown that children who learn Dutch as their second language (L2) have difficulties with Dutch grammatical gender. This study shows that six to nine year old L2 Dutch children whose first language (L1) is Turkish noticed incorrect gender agreement between determiner and noun only

  8. ZHE: [Noun] Undefined--An Interview with Performers Antonia Kemi Coker and Tonderai Munyevu

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shaskan, Victoria

    2013-01-01

    In February 2012, London-based theatre company Collective Artistes previewed "ZHE: [noun] Undefined," a new play created by director Chuck Mike and performers Tonderai Munyevu and Antonia Kemi Coker. The play follows the true life stories of the two performers, both British Africans, living at the intersections of culture, nationality, gender and…

  9. A Scandinavian Island in a Slavonic Linguistic Environment. The Dialect of Gammalsvenskby: Nouns (Paper 2

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alexander E. Mankov

    2014-08-01

    Full Text Available This paper continues the series of publications on the morphology of the dialect of Staroshvedskoye (Sw. Gammalsvenskby, which is the only surviving Scandinavian dialect in the territory of the former Soviet Union. The village of Staroshvedskoye is located in the Kherson region, Ukraine. Its Swedish dialect historically belongs to the group of Swedish dialects of Estonia and goes back to the dialect of the island of Dagö (Hiiumaa. The dialect of Gammalsvenskby is of interest to slavists as an example of a language island in the Slavonic environment. From around the 1950s, the main spoken language of all village residents, including dialect speakers, has been surzhik. Due to the complete lack of studies of the present-day dialect and because of the severe endangerment in which the dialect is currently situated, the most urgent task is to collect, classify, and publish the factual material. This paper introduces comprehensive material on nouns in the conservative variety of the present-day dialect. It lists all masculine nouns of types 1b, c, d, and e together with their cognates from Estonian Swedish dialects; comments on the history of the forms are given as well. The sources for the material presented here are interviews with speakers of the conservative variety of the dialect recorded by the author during fieldwork in the village from 2004 to 2013. We plan to publish nouns of other types in later articles.

  10. The Noun Phrase in Functional Discourse Grammar

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    reintroduce Dik’s idea of Dynamic Term Construction and extend the current ontology of entities. The result would be a more cogent treatment of scope and NP syntax, which does not force the theory to abandon any of its fundamental methodological principles. Evelien Keizer (University of Amsterdam...... can account for NP-internal agreement phenomena, including speech errors, as attested in a large corpus of spoken German. Daniel García Velasco (University of Oviedo) examines the so-called Complex Noun Phrase Constraint within the context of FDG. The existence of restrictions on the displacement......, with regard to both form and content. Daniel García Velasco also wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Dept. of Anglogermanic and French Studies and the Research Vice-Rectorate of the University of Oviedo....

  11. Inflection of modern Icelandic nouns, adjectives and adverbs

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    Janez Orešnik

    1976-12-01

    Full Text Available The present paper is a list of Modern Icelandic nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, analysed into their respective stems and endings; the declension of the suffixed definite article is also included. Under each item it is stated which rules, if any, apply in the derivation of its grammatical forms. The following items of the list should be consulted for new phonological rules: (3, (11, (12, and (133. A grammatical innovation has been implemented in the list, namely the so-called REPLACING ENDINGS. These are not added after the last segment of the stem, as endings usually are, but replace the last segment(s of the stem. More is said on replacing endings in the Introduction.

  12. A developmental analysis of generic nouns in Southern Peruvian Quechua.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mannheim, Bruce; Gelman, Susan A; Escalante, Carmen; Huayhua, Margarita; Puma, Rosalía

    2010-01-01

    Generic noun phrases (e.g., "Cats like to drink milk") are a primary means by which adults express generalizations to children, yet they pose a challenging induction puzzle for learners. Although prior research has established that English speakers understand and produce generic noun phrases by preschool age, little is known regarding the cross-cultural generality of generic acquisition. Southern Peruvian Quechua provides a valuable comparison because, unlike English, it is a highly inflected language in which generics are marked by the absence rather than the presence of any linguistic markers. Moreover, Quechua is spoken in a cultural context that differs markedly from the highly educated, middle-class contexts within which earlier research on generics was conducted. We presented participants from 5 age groups (3-6, 7-9, 10-12, 14-35, and 36-90 years of age) with two tasks that examined the ability to distinguish generic from non-generic utterances. In Study 1, even the youngest children understood generics as applying broadly to a category (like "all") and distinct from indefinite reference ("some"). However, there was a developmental lag before children understood that generics, unlike "all", can include exceptions. Study 2 revealed that generic interpretations are more frequent for utterances that (a) lack specifying markers and (b) are animate. Altogether, generic interpretations are found among the youngest participants, and may be a default mode of quantification. These data demonstrate the cross-cultural importance of generic information in linguistic expression.

  13. Difference between Written and Spoken Czech: The Case of Verbal Nouns Denoting an Action

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Kolářová, V.; Kolář, Jan; Mikulová, M.

    2017-01-01

    Roč. 107, č. 1 (2017), s. 19-38 ISSN 0032-6585 Institutional support: RVO:67985840 Keywords : written Czech * spoken Czech * verbal nouns Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Pure mathematics https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pralin.2017.107.issue-1/pralin-2017-0002/pralin-2017-0002.xml

  14. Difference between Written and Spoken Czech: The Case of Verbal Nouns Denoting an Action

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Kolářová, V.; Kolář, Jan; Mikulová, M.

    2017-01-01

    Roč. 107, č. 1 (2017), s. 19-38 ISSN 0032-6585 Institutional support: RVO:67985840 Keywords : written Czech * spoken Czech * verbal nouns Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Pure mathematics https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pralin.2017.107.issue-1/pralin-2017-0002/pralin-2017-0002. xml

  15. A Study on Noun Suffixes: Accounting for the Vernacularisation of English in Late Medieval Medical Texts

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    Begoña Crespo

    2012-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper seeks to contribute to the study of the vernacularisation process in late Middle English by measuring up to what an extent concrete and abstract noun suffixes (in line with Dalton-Puffer 1996 attach to either Germanic or Romance bases in the medical texts extracted from the MEMT (Middle English Medical Texts corpus. The findings obtained have been further described according to text type or genre and to target audience/readership. The description of these suffixes in relation to all the parameters already mentioned has confirmed the predominance of abstract suffixes of Romance origin although Germanic abstract suffixes are also abundant. More hybrid formations have been found with Germanic noun suffixes than with Romance ones which might be indicative of their versatility towards vernacularisation.

  16. Acute cortisol effects on immediate free recall and recognition of nouns depend on stimulus valence

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Tops, M.; van der Pompe, G.; Baas, D; Mulder, L.J.M.; Den Boer, J.A.; Meijman, T.F.; Korf, J

    The present study investigated the acute effects of cortisol administration in normal healthy male volunteers on immediate free recall and recognition of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral nouns using a between-subjects double-blind design. Two hours after cortisol (10 mg) or placebo administration,

  17. Decomposition into Multiple Morphemes during Lexical Access: A Masked Priming Study of Russian Nouns

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kazanina, Nina; Dukova-Zheleva, Galina; Geber, Dana; Kharlamov, Viktor; Tonciulescu, Keren

    2008-01-01

    The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

  18. Nouns and verbs in Chintang: children's usage and surrounding adult speech

    OpenAIRE

    Stoll, Sabine; Bickel, Balthasar; Lieven, Elena; Banjade, Goma; Bhatta, Toya Nath; Gaenszle, Martin; Paudyal, Netra P; Pettigrew, Judith; Rai, Ichchha Purna; Rai, Manoj; Rai, Novel Kishore

    2012-01-01

    peer-reviewed Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in [*] This research was made by possible by Grant Nos. BI 799/1-2 and II/81 961 from the Volkswagen Foundation (DoBeS program). Author contributions: Stoll designed the study; Bickel ...

  19. Student Assessment of Quality of Access at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Juliet Obhajajie Inegbedion

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available This paper presents a study conducted by Inegbedion, Adu and Ofulue from the National Open University of Nigeria. The study focused on the quality of access (admission and registration at NOUN from a student perspective. A survey design was used for the study while a multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the sample size. All the 78,555 registered students in all the 61 Study Centres of the University at the time of the study formed the population; out of which 3,060 students were sampled. The questionnaire instrument is the Institutional Internal QA Tools and Instrument developed by the African Council for Distance Education (ACDE as a regulatory mechanism. The data collected were analyzed using simple statistics. The result showed that 66% of the students confirmed that NOUN has published clear policies on the admission and registration of students. About 29.1% of the students were not satisfied with the transparency of the admission process. In conclusion, the study revealed high quality of access and some deficiencies in website and Internet connectivity.

  20. How Are ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘President Elect’ Differentially Stored in the Brain? An ERP Investigation on the Processing of Proper and Common Noun Pairs

    Science.gov (United States)

    Proverbio, Alice Mado; Mariani, Serena; Zani, Alberto; Adorni, Roberta

    2009-01-01

    Background One of the most debated issues in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether distinct semantic domains are differentially represented in the brain. Clinical studies described several anomic dissociations with no clear neuroanatomical correlate. Neuroimaging studies have shown that memory retrieval is more demanding for proper than common nouns in that the former are purely arbitrary referential expressions. In this study a semantic relatedness paradigm was devised to investigate neural processing of proper and common nouns. Methodology/Principal Findings 780 words (arranged in pairs of Italian nouns/adjectives and the first/last names of well known persons) were presented. Half pairs were semantically related (“Woody Allen” or “social security”), while the others were not (“Sigmund Parodi” or “judicial cream”). All items were balanced for length, frequency, familiarity and semantic relatedness. Participants were to decide about the semantic relatedness of the two items in a pair. RTs and N400 data suggest that the task was more demanding for common nouns. The LORETA neural generators for the related-unrelated contrast (for proper names) included the left fusiform gyrus, right medial temporal gyrus, limbic and parahippocampal regions, inferior parietal and inferior frontal areas, which are thought to be involved in the conjoined processing a familiar face with the relevant episodic information. Person name was more emotional and sensory vivid than common noun semantic access. Conclusions/Significance When memory retrieval is not required, proper name access (conspecifics knowledge) is not more demanding. The neural generators of N400 to unrelated items (unknown persons and things) did not differ as a function of lexical class, thus suggesting that proper and common nouns are not treated differently as belonging to different grammatical classes. PMID:19774070

  1. Exploring atypical verb+noun combinations in learner technical writing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    María José Luzón Marco

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and attempt to explore the reasons why the learners deviate from NS's norms. The analysis indicates that these learners tend to have problems with a set of sub-technical and high-frequency verbs. Deviant combinations involving these verbs are frequently the result of a deficient knowledge of the phraseology of academic and technical discourse. The unawareness of collocations that are typical of this discourse often leads students to create V+N combinations by relying on the “Open Choice Principle” (Sinclair, 1991 or by using patterns from their mother tongue.El discurso profesional y académico se caracteriza por una fraseología específica, que suele plantear problemas a los estudiantes. Este artículo investiga colocaciones de verbo+nombre atípicas en un corpus de textos técnicos en inglés escritos por estudiantes españoles. El estudio se centra en los verbos que más frecuentemente aparecen en estas combinaciones atípicas y explora las razones por las que los estudiantes se desvían de la norma. El análisis indica que estos estudiantes suelen tener problemas con un grupo de verbos sub-técnicos y verbos de alta frecuencia. Las combinaciones atípicas en las que estos verbos aparecen son frecuentemente el resultado de un conocimiento deficiente de la fraseología del discurso académico y técnico. El desconocimiento de colocaciones que son típicas de este discurso a menudo lleva a los estudiantes a crear combinaciones basándose en el “principio de opción abierta” (Sinclair, 1991 o a usar colocaciones prestadas de su lengua materna.

  2. Non-Adherence to Study Time Management Strategies among NOUN Students and Implications for Academic Stress

    Science.gov (United States)

    Okopi, Fidel O.

    2011-01-01

    The study was designed to investigate the NOUN students' non-adherence to their time management strategies (TMS) during the course of their studies. The researcher also wanted to find out whether their gender, age, marital and employment statuses have influence on their adherence/non-adherence to the plan or not. The researcher also examined the…

  3. Noun or Verb? Adult Readers' Sensitivity to Spelling Cues to Grammatical Category in Word Endings

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kemp, Nenagh; Nilsson, Jodi; Arciuli, Joanne

    2009-01-01

    The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as "-ing" for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., "-oon") and others with verbs (e.g., "-erge"). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006),…

  4. COGNITIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES OF NON-ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS ON NOUN STRUCTURE

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Shierly Novalita Yappy

    2006-01-01

    Full Text Available Learning English for non-English department students is not as easy as it seems. Besides, as much as it is necessary to know how successful learners learn, not less important is to know how less successful learners learn. Using think aloud method, this study aims at finding out the cognitive strategies used by the engineering department students in answering incorrectly problems on TOEFL noun structure-the grammar point in which students made the most errors. Findings uncover the students' strategies and reasoning upon which pedagogical implications can be put forth so that more effective and fruitful instruction can be tailored.

  5. Research Notes ~ Combating HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Nigeria: Responses from National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Terhemba Nom Ambe-Uva

    2007-11-01

    Full Text Available Universities have come under serious attack because of their lackluster response to HIV/AIDS. This article examines the response of National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN and its strategic responses in combating HIV/AIDS epidemic. This is achieved by examining NOUN’s basic structures that position the University to respond to the epidemic; and second, by assessing HIV/AIDS strategies and policy framework the University has put in place. An interpretative epistemological stance was used for this study, and a qualitative research involving focus group discussion (FGD and analysis of secondary data was carried out. Results showed that NOUN has identified the impact the epidemic has on the university, although it has yet to institutionalize an HIV/AIDS policy. NOUN’s Draft Service Charter, however, has identified the fight against HIV/AIDS as a core mandate of the University, and the introduction of HIV/AIDS certification programs can be viewed as proactive policies in response to the epidemic. Results of this study are discussed in terms of their relevance to future research and the impact such policy frameworks may have on combating the epidemic, both within the University and the wider community.

  6. Mothers' Talk to Children with Down Syndrome, Language Impairment, or Typical Development about Familiar and Unfamiliar Nouns and Verbs

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bird, Elizabeth Kay-Raining; Cleave, Patricia

    2016-01-01

    This study investigated how forty-six mothers modified their talk about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs when interacting with their children with Down Syndrome (DS), language impairment (LI), or typical development (TD). Children (MLUs < 2·7) were group-matched on expressive vocabulary size. Mother-child dyads were recorded playing with…

  7. A SUFFIX USED TO FORM COLLECTIVE/FAMILY NOUN IN THE SOME DIALECTS OF TURKISH: +ēNi/+îNi / BAZI TÜRKIYE TÜRKÇESI AĞIZLARINDA TOPLULUK/AILE ADI YAPAN BIR EK: +ēNi / +îNi

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dr. Serpil ERSÖZ

    2008-08-01

    Full Text Available There are two suffixes used to form collective/family nouns: +giland +lAr. These suffixes which also indicates plurality in nouns are used inalmost all dialects of Turkish. This essay’s topic is suffix +ēNi+/+îNi whichis used to form collective/family nouns as +gil and +lAr in some dialects ofTurkish. In this essay, we extrapolate that the form of the suffix +îN(i withclose unrounded vowel is used in dialect of immigrants whereas the form ofthe suffix +ēNi with open unrounded vowel is used in dialects of noimmigrants, of yoruk and some Oguz tribes.

  8. Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Haman, Ewa; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Hansen, Pernille; Simonsen, Hanne Gram; Chiat, Shula; Bjekić, Jovana; Blažienė, Agnė; Chyl, Katarzyna; Dabašinskienė, Ineta; Engel de Abreu, Pascale; Gagarina, Natalia; Gavarró, Anna; Håkansson, Gisela; Harel, Efrat; Holm, Elisabeth; Kapalková, Svetlana; Kunnari, Sari; Levorato, Chiara; Lindgren, Josefin; Mieszkowska, Karolina; Montes Salarich, Laia; Potgieter, Anneke; Ribu, Ingeborg; Ringblom, Natalia; Rinker, Tanja; Roch, Maja; Slančová, Daniela; Southwood, Frenette; Tedeschi, Roberta; Tuncer, Aylin Müge; Ünal-Logacev, Özlem; Vuksanović, Jasmina; Armon-Lotem, Sharon

    2017-01-01

    This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

  9. The prosody of Swedish underived nouns: No lexical tones required

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Bruce Morén-Duolljá

    2013-02-01

    Full Text Available This paper provides a detailed representational analysis of the morpho-prosodic system of underived nouns in a dialect of Swedish.  It shows that the morphology, stress and tonal patterns are not as complex as they first appear once the data are looked at in sufficient detail.  Further, it shows that the renowned Swedish "lexical pitch accent" is not the result of lexical tones/tonemes.  Rather, Swedish is like all other languages and uses tones to mark the edges of prosodic constituents on the surface. "Accent 2" occurs when tones mark the edge of a structural uneven trochee (i.e. recursive foot and "accent 1" occurs elsewhere. This analysis is counter all other treatments of North Germanic tones and denies the almost unquestioned assumption that there is an underlying tone specification on roots and/or affixes in many North Germanic varieties. At the same time, it unifies the intuitions behind the three previous approaches found in the literature.

  10. Clustering, Hierarchical Organization, and the Topography of Abstract and Concrete Nouns

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Joshua eTroche

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available The empirical study of language has historically relied heavily upon concrete word stimuli. By definition, concrete words evoke salient perceptual associations that fit well within feature-based, sensorimotor models of word meaning. In contrast, many theorists argue that abstract words are disembodied in that their meaning is mediated through language. We investigated word meaning as distributed in multidimensional space using hierarchical cluster analysis. Participants (N=365 rated target words (n=400 English nouns across 12 cognitive dimensions (e.g., polarity, ease of teaching, emotional valence. Factor reduction revealed three latent factors, corresponding roughly to perceptual salience, affective association, and magnitude. We plotted the original 400 words for the three latent factors. Abstract and concrete words showed overlap in their topography but also differentiated themselves in semantic space. This topographic approach to word meaning offers a unique perspective to word concreteness.

  11. Clustering, hierarchical organization, and the topography of abstract and concrete nouns.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Troche, Joshua; Crutch, Sebastian; Reilly, Jamie

    2014-01-01

    The empirical study of language has historically relied heavily upon concrete word stimuli. By definition, concrete words evoke salient perceptual associations that fit well within feature-based, sensorimotor models of word meaning. In contrast, many theorists argue that abstract words are "disembodied" in that their meaning is mediated through language. We investigated word meaning as distributed in multidimensional space using hierarchical cluster analysis. Participants (N = 365) rated target words (n = 400 English nouns) across 12 cognitive dimensions (e.g., polarity, ease of teaching, emotional valence). Factor reduction revealed three latent factors, corresponding roughly to perceptual salience, affective association, and magnitude. We plotted the original 400 words for the three latent factors. Abstract and concrete words showed overlap in their topography but also differentiated themselves in semantic space. This topographic approach to word meaning offers a unique perspective to word concreteness.

  12. The Morphosyntactic Structure of the Noun and Verb Phrases in Dholuo/Kiswahili Code Switching

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jael Anyango Ojanga

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available Code switching, the use of any two or more languages or dialects interchangeably in a single communication context, is a common linguistic practice owing to the trend of multilingualism in the world today. In many situations of language in contact, constituents of one language can be found within the constituents of another language in a number of linguistic phenomenon namely lexical borrowing, transferring, interference, code switching and diffusion (Annamalai, 1989. Codeswitching is one of the linguistic phenomenon claimed to be the most prevalent and common mode of interaction among multilingual speakers. Brock and Eastman (1971 suggest that topic discussed influences the choice of the language. Nouns and verbs have been found to be the most code switched elements in bilingual exchange. The study took a qualitative approach with the descriptive research design. It was guided by the Matrix Language Frame Model which was formulated by Myers-Scotton in1993. This model expounds on the realization and structure of the major word classes as used in code switching. Data was collected in Nyangeta Zone, Winam Division of Kisumu East District. Winam Division is mostly inhabited by elite Dholuo L1 speakers. A sample of twenty four teachers was purposively selected to provide data needed for the study. Focus group discussion was used to collect a corpus of Dholuo/Kiswahili data which was recorded through audio taping. The recorded data was then analyzed morphosyntactaically using the Matrix Language Frame Model. The data revealed that the noun and verb phrases were realized under three categories: Matrix Language Island constituent (ML Island ML+EL and Embedded Language Island (EL Island. Keywords: Code switching, multilingualism, morphosyntactic

  13. Functional categories in the noun phrase: on jacks-of-all-trades and one-trick-ponies in Danish, Dutch and German

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    2010-01-01

    This paper deals with functionally defined modifier categories of the noun phrase in some Germanic languages, in particular Danish, Dutch and German. It is argued that functional categories, unlike semantic or form-based categories, are the only categories that can be applied within and across...... in German: attitudinal arm (e.g. Der arme Junge! ‘The poor boy!’)....

  14. Cognitive categories and noun classification. Romance neuter: from [passivity] to [indifference

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maria M. Manoliu

    2009-01-01

    Full Text Available The present contribution aims to reveal the ways in which the evolution of the grammatical category of gender from Latin to Romance reflects the dramatic changes undergone by its semantic domains. Arguments for the hypothesis that Latin gender oppositions were determined by the important role played by activeness (and not animacy in the interpretation of the state of affairs are brought into the picture in order to explain the subcategorization of nouns in both Latin and in Romance. The term activeness is to be understood as a reflection of the ‘capacity of referents for influencing human life in positive or negative ways’. The changes undergone by grammatical gender in Romance languages were triggered not only by a morpho-syntactic reorganization of case and number, but also by social and pragmatic factors that triggered a reorganization of cognitive categories and their linguistic encoding

  15. الاسماء المربكة في اللغة الانكليزية: تحليل الاخطاء Confusing Nouns in English: An Error Analysis

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    Sabeeha Hamza Dehham Al- Jobouri أ.م. صبيحة حمزة دحام

    2016-10-01

    Full Text Available The present study is an attempt to identify the errors made by Iraqi EFL learners in the Department of English / College of Basic Education, University of Babylon in using confusing nouns .The Classification of English Nouns is as diverse and varied as English Grammar. The researcher in the paper under review has sought to examine in details how nouns are a source of confusion for EFL learners. This study aims at (1 investigating the difficulties faced Iraqi EFL university learners in using confusing nouns and (2 identifying the errors made by EFL learners in using confusing nouns . To achieve the two goals mentioned above, the study hypothesizes that Iraqi EFL University Learners committed errors in using confusing nouns because of their intralingual transference. The Hypothesis has been verified through adopted a diagnostic test of two questions .The test has been applied to a sample of 100 Iraqi EFL university learners at their fourth year from Department of English, College of Basic Education, University of Babylon during the academic year 2014-2015. Errors have been pointed and results have been analyzed statistically. The analysis gives the following results: (1 EFL University learners face difficulties in recognizing and producing confusing nouns . This is indicated by their low performance in the test as the, rate. of their correct responses (782, 39.1% is lower significantly than that of their incorrect ones (1218, 60.9 %. (2 The subjects' performance in the test has also revealed that EFL university learners encounter more difficulties in using confusing nouns at the production level than at the recognition one. This is due to the fact that the total number and the percentage of the correct responses at the production level (349, 34.9 % is lower than the total the total number and the percentage of the correct responses at the recognition level which are equal (433, 43.3 % and (3 Some of errors are due to the student's lack knowledge

  16. Inter-subject variability modulates phonological advance planning in the production of adjective-noun phrases.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Michel Lange, Violaine; Laganaro, Marina

    2014-01-01

    The literature on advance phonological planning in adjective-noun phrases (NPs) presents diverging results: while many experimental studies suggest that the entire NP is encoded before articulation, other results favor a span of encoding limited to the first word. Although cross-linguistic differences in the structure of adjective-NPs may account for some of these contrasting results, divergences have been reported even among similar languages and syntactic structures. Here we examined whether inter-individual differences account for variability in the span of phonological planning in the production of French NPs, where previous results indicated encoding limited to the first word. The span of phonological encoding is tested with the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm using phonological distractors related to the noun or to the adjective of the NPs. In Experiment 1, phonological priming effects were limited to the first word in adjective NPs whichever the position of the adjective (pre-nominal or post-nominal). Crucially, phonological priming effects on the second word interacted with speakers' production speed suggesting different encoding strategies for participants. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis further with a larger group of participants. Results clearly showed that slow and fast initializing participants presented different phonological priming patterns on the last element of adjective-NPs: while the first word was primed by a distractor for all speakers, only the slow speaker group presented a priming effect on the second element of the NP. These results show that the span of phonological encoding is modulated by inter-individual strategies: in experimental paradigms some speakers plan word by word whereas others encode beyond the initial word. We suggest that the diverging results reported in the literature on advance phonological planning may partly be reconciled in light of the present results.

  17. AHP 1:A RESPONSE TO WAYS AND THE SYNTAX OF NOUN PHRASES IN QĪNGHĂI CHINESE DIALECTS

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    Keith Dede

    2009-06-01

    Full Text Available In the course of offering a review of Zhāng Chéngcái's Ways, this paper describes the syntax of noun phrases in the Chinese dialect of Huángshuĭ, in Qīnghăi Province. Unlike other Chinese dialects, this dialect employs several postpositions for indicating syntactic nominal relationships. The origin of this phenomenon in contact with non-Sinitic languages in the region and its significance are also explored.

  18. A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ARABIC AND ENGLISH NOUN PLURAL MARKERS

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    Aliyatul Himmah

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper is attempting to explore the plural markers in both Arabic and English. The data collected qualitatively are sorted to meet the scope of this paper. Through contrastive analysis, it is discovered that there are numerous significant differences rather than similarities in terms of syllable count start, patterns of plural nouns in relation to gender, regularity, regular vs irregular plural and internal vowel change. Moreover, Arabic has some uniqueness in its plural marking system. Being well informed on all of these might pave the way for second or foreign language learners to comprehensively understand the plural marking system in Arabic and English.   Tulisan ini mencoba untuk mengeksplorasi penanda jamak dalam bahasa Arab dan bahasa Inggris. Data yang dikumpulkan secara kualitatif diurutkan untuk memenuhi cakupan makalah ini. Melalui analisis kontrastif, ditemukan banyak perbedaan yang signifikan daripada kesamaan dalam segi jumlah awal suku kata, pola kata benda jamak dalam kaitannya dengan gender, keteraturan dan ketidakteraturan jamak, serta perubahan vokal. Selain itu, bahasa Arab memiliki beberapa keunikan dalam sistem menandai jamaknya. Memahami informasi hal tersebut dengan baik mungkin memudahkan pembelajar bahasa kedua atau asing untuk memahami secara komprehensif sistem penanda jamak dalam bahasa Arab dan Inggris

  19. THE DISCUSSION OF NOUN COMPLEMENTS WITH NO SUFFIXES AND THE RELATION BETWEEN WORD CLASSES AND PHRASES TAKISIZ AD TAMLAMASI TARTIŞMASI VE TÜR – ÖBEK İLİŞKİSİ

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Caner KERİMOĞLU

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available The discussion of compound nouns with no suffixes has an important place in Turkish grammar writing. Recently, it is seen that this discussion has come to an end and the constructions like tahta kaşık “wooden spoon”, altın kolye “golden necklace” are accepted as adjective complements. In this study, firstly these discussions are evaluated and then the roles of word classes in phrases are discussed with regard to nouns and adjectives. Takısız ad tamlaması tartışması Türkçe dil bilgisi yazımında önemli bir yere sahiptir. Son yıllarda bu konuyla ilgili tartışmaların azaldığı ve akademik yayınların çoğunda tahta kaşık, altın kolye dizilişindeki yapıların sıfat tamlaması kabul edildiği görülmektedir. Bu çalışmada takısız ad tamlaması tartışmaları değerlendirildikten sonra, kelime türlerinin öbek kurmadaki rolleri sıfat ve ad türleri temelinde tartışılmaktadır.

  20. THE COMPOUND NOUNS BETWEEN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN LANGUAGE

    OpenAIRE

    Shkelqim Millaku; Xhevahire Topanica

    2016-01-01

    The compound words are all the words that are compound from two or more words and both of them creative the new words with the new meaning. In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word-formation that creates compound lexemes (the other word-formation process being derivation). Compounding or Word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting toget...

  1. The Study of the Effect of Syntactic Complexity of Noun and Verb Phrase Structure on the Occurrence of Stuttering in 4-6 Year Pre-School Stuttering Persian Children

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    Abbas Ali Ahangar

    2013-04-01

    Full Text Available Objective: The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of syntactic complexity of noun phrase and verb phrase on the occurrence of stuttering in 4-6 year Persian speaking children with stuttering. Materials & Methods: This descriptive-analytic research was done on 15 stuttering children, consisting of 12 boys and 3 girls, 4 to 6 years old monolingual Persian speaking who referred to Javad-Ol-Aemmeh speech therapy clinic in Mashhad city. The sampling approach was simple (available sampling method. To do this research, sampling was carried out in a quiet home of speech therapy where there were just the speech therapist, the parent, the child and the researcher. While speaking, the speech of the children was recorded by an MP3 with Creative brand. Finally, a 30-minute spontaneous speech sample was gathered from each of the given stuttering children. The children produced around 60 utterances during a verbal interaction with the speech therapist, parents (mother or father or the researcher. Then the produced spontaneous speech sample by any of these stuttering children was transcribed on paper. The data were analyzed only as groups and not individually. The data were analyzed using SPSS software and Paired T-test method. Results: The group analyses showed significant differences between fluent and stuttered utterances in terms of syntactic complexity of noun and verb phrase structures. Also, the results confirm that at phrasal level, in noun phrases, based on their three functions as subject, direct object and object of preposition, there is a meaningful relationship between the number of subject (P<0.001 and object of preposition (P=0.050 with the stuttering frequency. In verb phrases, based on the presence of the auxiliary verb, copula verb, and negative prefix, just there is a meaningful relationship between the presence of the auxiliary verb and the stuttering frequency (P=0.010. Conclusion: The research findings indicate

  2. Using noun phrases for navigating biomedical literature on Pubmed: how many updates are we losing track of?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Srikrishna, Devabhaktuni; Coram, Marc A

    2011-01-01

    Author-supplied citations are a fraction of the related literature for a paper. The "related citations" on PubMed is typically dozens or hundreds of results long, and does not offer hints why these results are related. Using noun phrases derived from the sentences of the paper, we show it is possible to more transparently navigate to PubMed updates through search terms that can associate a paper with its citations. The algorithm to generate these search terms involved automatically extracting noun phrases from the paper using natural language processing tools, and ranking them by the number of occurrences in the paper compared to the number of occurrences on the web. We define search queries having at least one instance of overlap between the author-supplied citations of the paper and the top 20 search results as citation validated (CV). When the overlapping citations were written by same authors as the paper itself, we define it as CV-S and different authors is defined as CV-D. For a systematic sample of 883 papers on PubMed Central, at least one of the search terms for 86% of the papers is CV-D versus 65% for the top 20 PubMed "related citations." We hypothesize these quantities computed for the 20 million papers on PubMed to differ within 5% of these percentages. Averaged across all 883 papers, 5 search terms are CV-D, and 10 search terms are CV-S, and 6 unique citations validate these searches. Potentially related literature uncovered by citation-validated searches (either CV-S or CV-D) are on the order of ten per paper--many more if the remaining searches that are not citation-validated are taken into account. The significance and relationship of each search result to the paper can only be vetted and explained by a researcher with knowledge of or interest in that paper.

  3. Affixation and compounding in Hakka

    OpenAIRE

    Ungsitipoonporn, Siriopen

    2014-01-01

    This paper aims to present the internal structures of words in the Hakka language. Similar to other languages, affixation and compounding are outstanding in Hakka. In general, prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes which do not occur independently, but in Hakka they sometimes appear as independent forms. Apart from single words, identifying compound words is of particular interest. Compound nouns can be made up of two or three words (characters) which ...

  4. Tools for language: patterned iconicity in sign language nouns and verbs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Padden, Carol; Hwang, So-One; Lepic, Ryan; Seegers, Sharon

    2015-01-01

    When naming certain hand-held, man-made tools, American Sign Language (ASL) signers exhibit either of two iconic strategies: a handling strategy, where the hands show holding or grasping an imagined object in action, or an instrument strategy, where the hands represent the shape or a dimension of the object in a typical action. The same strategies are also observed in the gestures of hearing nonsigners identifying pictures of the same set of tools. In this paper, we compare spontaneously created gestures from hearing nonsigning participants to commonly used lexical signs in ASL. Signers and gesturers were asked to respond to pictures of tools and to video vignettes of actions involving the same tools. Nonsigning gesturers overwhelmingly prefer the handling strategy for both the Picture and Video conditions. Nevertheless, they use more instrument forms when identifying tools in pictures, and more handling forms when identifying actions with tools. We found that ASL signers generally favor the instrument strategy when naming tools, but when describing tools being used by an actor, they are significantly more likely to use more handling forms. The finding that both gesturers and signers are more likely to alternate strategies when the stimuli are pictures or video suggests a common cognitive basis for differentiating objects from actions. Furthermore, the presence of a systematic handling/instrument iconic pattern in a sign language demonstrates that a conventionalized sign language exploits the distinction for grammatical purpose, to distinguish nouns and verbs related to tool use. Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  5. Early sensitivity of left perisylvian cortex to relationality in nouns and verbs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Williams, Adina; Reddigari, Samir; Pylkkänen, Liina

    2017-06-01

    The ability to track the relationality of concepts, i.e., their capacity to encode a relationship between entities, is one of the core semantic abilities humans possess. In language processing, we systematically leverage this ability when computing verbal argument structure, in order to link participants to the events they participate in. Previous work has converged on a large region of left posterior perisylvian cortex as a locus for such processing, but the wide range of experimental stimuli and manipulations has yielded an unclear picture of the region's exact role(s). Importantly, there is a tendency for effects of relationality in single-word studies to localize to posterior temporo-parietal cortex, while argument structure effects in sentences appear in left superior temporal cortex. To characterize these sensitivities, we designed two MEG experiments that cross the factors relationality and eventivity. The first used minimal noun phrases and tested for an effect of semantic composition, while the second employed full sentences and a manipulation of grammatical category. The former identified a region of the left inferior parietal lobe sensitive to relationality, but not eventivity or combination, beginning at 170ms. The latter revealed a similarly-timed effect of relationality in left mid-superior temporal cortex, independent of eventivity and category. The results suggest that i) multiple sub-regions of perisylvian cortex are sensitive to the relationality carried by concepts even in the absence of arguments, ii) linguistic context modulates the locus of this sensitivity, consistent with prior studies, and iii) relationality information is accessed early - before 200ms - regardless of the concept's event status or syntactic category. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  6. Mgbakoigba, Journal of African Studies. Vol.5 No.2. June 2016 ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    MRS ADAOBl

    2016-06-02

    Jun 2, 2016 ... blending theory can account for the Etulo noun-noun compound words. Furthermore, there is ..... house black d.únyì àjó 'court' ..... For the compound word ìkp ndù 'lip', the mouth is likened to a hole or an aperture that has the ...

  7. The Time-Course of Morphological Constraints: Evidence from Eye-Movements during Reading

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cunnings, Ian; Clahsen, Harald

    2007-01-01

    Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater…

  8. Elucidating semantic disorganisation from a word comprehension task: do patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder show differential processing of nouns, verbs and adjectives?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rossell, Susan L; Batty, Rachel A

    2008-07-01

    Memory deficits have been reported in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, the precise impact of semantic memory deficits on word comprehension, particularly across grammatical categories, has not been adequately investigated in these disorders. Furthermore, previous studies examining semantic memory have predominantly been designed so that most healthy controls perform at ceiling, questioning the validity of observed differences between patient and control groups. A new word definition task examined word comprehension across grammatical categories, i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives, and was designed to overcome the ceiling effect. It was administered to 32 schizophrenia patients, 28 bipolar disorder patients and 32 matched healthy controls. Schizophrenia patients had a global impairment on the task but bipolar patients were only impaired on a recognition memory component. Word comprehension, however, across grammatical categories was comparable across groups.

  9. On metaphorical designation of humans, animals, plants and things in Serbian and English language

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    Rakić Stanimir

    2004-01-01

    Full Text Available In this paper I examine compound names of plants, animals, human beings and other things in which at least one nominal component designates a part of the body or clothes, or some basic elements of houshold in Serbian and English. The object of my analysis are complex derivatives of the type (adjective noun + suffix in Serbian and componds of the type noun's + noun, noun + noun and adjective + noun in English. I try to show that there is a difference in metaphorical designation of human beings and other living creatures and things by such compound nouns. My thesis is that the metathorical designation of human beings by such compounds is based on the symbolic meaning of some words and expressions while the designation of other things and beings relies on noticed similarity. In Serbian language such designation is provided by comples derivatives praznoglavac 'empty-headed person', tupoglavac 'dullard' debolokoiac 'callos person', golobradac 'young, inexperienced person' žutokljunac 'tledling' (fig, in English chicken liver, beetle brain birdbrain, bonehead, butterfingers, bigwig, blackleg, blue blood bluestocking, eat's paw, deadhead,fat-guts,fathead, goldbrick (kol hardhat, hardhead, greenhorn, redcoat (ist, redneck (sl, thickhead, etc. Polisemous compounds like eat's paw lend support for this thesis because their designation of human beings is based on symbolic meaning of some words or expressions. I hypothesize that the direction and extend of the possible metaphorization of names may be accounted for by the following hierarchy (11 people - animals - plants - meterial things. Such hierarchy is well supported by the observations of Lakoff (1987 and Taylor (1995 about the role of human body in early experience and perception ofthe reality. Different restrictions which may be imposed in the hierarchy (11 should be the matter of further study, some of which have been noted on this paper. The compounds of this type denoting people have

  10. THE FUNCTION OF SIMPLE SENTENCE BETWEEN ALBANIAN AND ENGLISH

    OpenAIRE

    Shkelqim Millaku

    2017-01-01

    In Albanian and English we have same kind of sentences (simple, compound or complex sentence). The major of elements or constituents that can be found in clauses are subject, predicate, object, complement etc. For Albanian and English most linguists agree on the needs to recognize at least the following word classes: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb, determinative and conjunction. Each of these words classes is illustrated in the sentence below. The noun or noun phrase can be subjec...

  11. Direct current induced short-term modulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while learning auditory presented nouns

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    Meyer Martin

    2009-07-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Little is known about the contribution of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS to the exploration of memory functions. The aim of the present study was to examine the behavioural effects of right or left-hemisphere frontal direct current delivery while committing to memory auditory presented nouns on short-term learning and subsequent long-term retrieval. Methods Twenty subjects, divided into two groups, performed an episodic verbal memory task during anodal, cathodal and sham current application on the right or left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC. Results Our results imply that only cathodal tDCS elicits behavioural effects on verbal memory performance. In particular, left-sided application of cathodal tDCS impaired short-term verbal learning when compared to the baseline. We did not observe tDCS effects on long-term retrieval. Conclusion Our results imply that the left DLPFC is a crucial area involved in short-term verbal learning mechanisms. However, we found further support that direct current delivery with an intensity of 1.5 mA to the DLPFC during short-term learning does not disrupt longer lasting consolidation processes that are mainly known to be related to mesial temporal lobe areas. In the present study, we have shown that the tDCS technique has the potential to modulate short-term verbal learning mechanism.

  12. Een voorbeeld van gecamoufleerde taalbeïnvloeding: samenstellingsvormen van sjwasubstantieven in het Fries

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Slofstra, B.; Hoekstra, E.; Versloot, A.

    2009-01-01

    Frisian nouns ending in schwa (henceforth: schwa nouns) like brêge (‘bridge’) show unpredictable behaviour when used as a fi rst member of a nominal compound. In some cases the schwa is retained (e.g. brêgeman ‘bridge man’), in other cases the schwa can or must be dropped (e.g. bûsjild ‘pocket

  13. Cascaded processing in written compound word production

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Raymond eBertram

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to assess what processes were completed before writing and inter-key intervals to assess what processes were going on during writing. It was found that writing onset time was determined by whole word frequency rather than constituent frequencies, indicating that compound words are retrieved as whole orthographic units before writing is initiated. In addition, we found that the length of the first syllable also affects writing onset time, indicating that the first syllable is fully prepared before writing commences. The inter-key interval results showed that linguistic planning is not fully ready before writing, but cascades into the motor execution phase. More specifically, inter-key intervals were largest at syllable and morpheme boundaries, supporting the view that additional linguistic planning takes place at these boundaries. Bigram and trigram frequency also affected inter-key intervals with shorter intervals corresponding to higher frequencies. This can be explained by stronger memory traces for frequently co-occurring letter sequences in the motor memory for typewriting. These frequency effects were even larger in the second than in the first constituent, indicating that low-level motor memory starts to become more important during the course of writing compound words. We discuss our results in the light of current models of morphological processing and written word production.

  14. Cascaded processing in written compound word production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bertram, Raymond; Tønnessen, Finn Egil; Strömqvist, Sven; Hyönä, Jukka; Niemi, Pekka

    2015-01-01

    In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun) Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to assess what processes were completed before writing and inter-key intervals to assess what processes were going on during writing. It was found that writing onset time was determined by whole word frequency rather than constituent frequencies, indicating that compound words are retrieved as whole orthographic units before writing is initiated. In addition, we found that the length of the first syllable also affects writing onset time, indicating that the first syllable is fully prepared before writing commences. The inter-key interval results showed that linguistic planning is not fully ready before writing, but cascades into the motor execution phase. More specifically, inter-key intervals were largest at syllable and morpheme boundaries, supporting the view that additional linguistic planning takes place at these boundaries. Bigram and trigram frequency also affected inter-key intervals with shorter intervals corresponding to higher frequencies. This can be explained by stronger memory traces for frequently co-occurring letter sequences in the motor memory for typewriting. These frequency effects were even larger in the second than in the first constituent, indicating that low-level motor memory starts to become more important during the course of writing compound words. We discuss our results in the light of current models of morphological processing and written word production.

  15. Exponence, allomorphy and haplology in the number and State morphology of Modern Hebrew

    OpenAIRE

    Faust, Noam

    2018-01-01

    This paper provides an account of the regularities of plural exponence in Modern Hebrew. There are two genders in Modern Hebrew, each with its specific plural marker. Nouns can appear in the Construct or Free states, and the State of a noun also has an effect on the plural marking, though only in the case of masculine nouns. Finally, in nouns with possessive suffixes and in newly-formed dual nouns, plural number seems to be marked twice in the feminine noun, but only once in the masculine nou...

  16. Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Deutsch, Avital; Dank, Maya

    2018-02-01

    This study investigated the gender-congruency effect of animate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture-Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency revealed an inhibitory gender-congruency effect, as naming the pictures took longer in the presence of a gender-congruent distractor than with a distractor from a different gender category. The inhibitory effect was demonstrated for feminine (morphologically marked) nouns, across two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) (Experiments 1a and 1b), and masculine (morphologically unmarked) nouns (Experiment 2). The same pattern was observed when participants had to produce bare nouns (Experiment 1) or gender-marked noun phrases (Experiment 3). The inhibitory pattern of the effect resembles previous findings of bare nouns in a subset of Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish. These findings add to previous research which investigated the gender-congruency effect of inanimate nouns, where no effect of gender-congruent words was found. The results are discussed in relation to the null effect previously found for inanimate nouns. The comparison of the present and previous studies is motivated by a common linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in Hebrew, which ascribes grammatical gender specifications to derivational structures (for inanimate nouns) versus inflectional structures (for animate nouns). Given the difference in the notional meaning of gender specification for animate and inanimate nouns, the case of Hebrew exemplifies how language-specific characteristics, such as rich morphological structures, can be used by the linguistic system to express conceptual distinctions at the form-word level.

  17. Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

    Science.gov (United States)

    Johannessen, Janne Bondi; Larsson, Ida

    2015-01-01

    This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the noun phrase, but not the declension of the noun. We discuss whether this means that gender is lost and has been reduced to a pure declension class, or whether gender is retained. We argue that gender is actually retained in these heritage speakers. One argument for this is that the speakers who lack agreement in complex noun phrases, have agreement intact in simpler phrases. We have thus found that the complexity of the noun phrase is crucial for some speakers. However, among the heritage speakers we also find considerable inter-individual variation, and different speakers can have partly different systems. PMID:26733114

  18. Terminology of the public relations field: corpus — automatic term recognition — terminology database

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nataša Logar Berginc

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available The article describes an analysis of automatic term recognition results performed for single- and multi-word terms with the LUIZ term extraction system. The target application of the results is a terminology database of Public Relations and the main resource the KoRP Public Relations Corpus. Our analysis is focused on two segments: (a single-word noun term candidates, which we compare with the frequency list of nouns from KoRP and evaluate termhood on the basis of the judgements of two domain experts, and (b multi-word term candidates with verb and noun as headword. In order to better assess the performance of the system and the soundness of our approach we also performed an analysis of recall. Our results show that the terminological relevance of extracted nouns is indeed higher than that of merely frequent nouns, and that verbal phrases only rarely count as proper terms. The most productive patterns of multi-word terms with noun as a headword have the following structure: [adjective + noun], [adjective + and + adjective + noun] and [adjective + adjective + noun]. The analysis of recall shows low inter-annotator agreement, but nevertheless very satisfactory recall levels.

  19. Symmetric and Asymmetric Patterns of Attraction Errors in Producing Subject-Predicate Agreement in Hebrew: An Issue of Morphological Structure

    Science.gov (United States)

    Deutsch, Avital; Dank, Maya

    2011-01-01

    A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…

  20. Pickpocket compounds from Latin to Romance

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Whitehead, Benedicte Nielsen

    This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’. The first member of such compounds...... derives from a verb, while the second mostly represents its direct object: thus English pickpocket. Most English examples are functionally agent–nouns, referring to the agent of the implied verbal act. Nevertheless, they lack a suffix indicating this. By contrast, the more prolific type of compound agent....... It contains a cursory discussion of Homeric Greek, Indo–Iranian and Germanic representatives. This comparative perspective on the morphology of the type is continued in chapters 3–5 on Latin and Romance. An important conclusion, and an answer to one of the most–discussed questions in the debate...

  1. Carving up Word Meaning: Portioning and Grinding

    Science.gov (United States)

    Frisson, S.; Frazier, L.

    2005-01-01

    Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the processing of mass nouns used as count nouns and count nouns used as mass nouns. Following Copestake and Briscoe (1995), the basic or underived sense of a word was treated as the input to a derivational rule (''grinding'' or ''portioning'') which produced the derived sense as output. It was…

  2. Syntactic versus Lexical Therapy for Anomia in Acquired Aphasia: Differential Effects on Narrative and Conversation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Herbert, Ruth; Gregory, Emma; Best, Wendy

    2014-01-01

    Background: Previous studies of therapy for acquired anomia have treated nouns in isolation. The effect on nouns in connected speech remains unclear. In a recent study in 2012, we used a novel noun syntax therapy and found an increase in the number of determiner plus noun constructions in narrative after therapy. Aims: Two aims arose from the…

  3. THE SPECIFICITY OF CORRELATION CATEGORY REALIZATION IN THE MODERN GERMAN LANGUAGE

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Goryunova Yuliya Nikolaevna

    2014-06-01

    Full Text Available The article studies the German article in functional aspect taking into account the conception of the grammatical category of correlation / non-correlation, proposed by L.R. Zinder and T.V. Stroeva. The author describes the specificity of the correlation category realization with nouns of different semantic classes and explains the limitations of using article with definite classes of nouns. It is proved that the common nouns, realizing the five types of correlation, can be used with definite, indefinite and zero articles; abstract and material nouns, as a rule, correlate with the concept and are used with zero article, however, if their semantics is specified in the context, they pass into the class of common nouns, realizing the definite correlation and being used with definite article; proper names, correlating both with a concrete subject and a concept are used, as a rule, with zero or definite article; unique nouns correlate only with a single object and are used only with a definite article. The author reveals that if the abstract, material, unique and proper nouns are contextually specified in the context, they can be used with the indefinite article, which becomes the marker of nouns transposition from one semantic class to another, especially into the lexical and grammatical class of common nouns.

  4. GENERATIVE WORDS OF ALBANIAN AND ENGLISH SENTENCE

    OpenAIRE

    Shkelqim Millaku

    2017-01-01

    This studies or the aim of the research is to deals the generative “morphems, words or “simple or compound[1]” sentence. The full congrast of Albanian and English language in this phenomena of generative is in morphology and in syntactic structure. This accepts of studies will comparted, contrasted and generated between two languages. This studies deals with noun (noun phrase), verb (verb phrase) of syntactic structure between Albanian and English language. In both of languages, most linguis...

  5. Using Graph Components Derived from an Associative Concept Dictionary to Predict fMRI Neural Activation Patterns that Represent the Meaning of Nouns.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Hiroyuki Akama

    Full Text Available In this study, we introduce an original distance definition for graphs, called the Markov-inverse-F measure (MiF. This measure enables the integration of classical graph theory indices with new knowledge pertaining to structural feature extraction from semantic networks. MiF improves the conventional Jaccard and/or Simpson indices, and reconciles both the geodesic information (random walk and co-occurrence adjustment (degree balance and distribution. We measure the effectiveness of graph-based coefficients through the application of linguistic graph information for a neural activity recorded during conceptual processing in the human brain. Specifically, the MiF distance is computed between each of the nouns used in a previous neural experiment and each of the in-between words in a subgraph derived from the Edinburgh Word Association Thesaurus of English. From the MiF-based information matrix, a machine learning model can accurately obtain a scalar parameter that specifies the degree to which each voxel in (the MRI image of the brain is activated by each word or each principal component of the intermediate semantic features. Furthermore, correlating the voxel information with the MiF-based principal components, a new computational neurolinguistics model with a network connectivity paradigm is created. This allows two dimensions of context space to be incorporated with both semantic and neural distributional representations.

  6. Mixing positive and negative valence: Affective-semantic integration of bivalent words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kuhlmann, Michael; Hofmann, Markus J; Briesemeister, Benny B; Jacobs, Arthur M

    2016-08-05

    Single words have affective and aesthetic properties that influence their processing. Here we investigated the processing of a special case of word stimuli that are extremely difficult to evaluate, bivalent noun-noun-compounds (NNCs), i.e. novel words that mix a positive and negative noun, e.g. 'Bombensex' (bomb-sex). In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment we compared their processing with easier-to-evaluate non-bivalent NNCs in a valence decision task (VDT). Bivalent NNCs produced longer reaction times and elicited greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) than non-bivalent words, especially in contrast to words of negative valence. We attribute this effect to a LIFG-grounded process of semantic integration that requires greater effort for processing converse information, supporting the notion of a valence representation based on associations in semantic networks.

  7. subordination across ghanaian and british newspaper editorials

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    What functional motivation underlies the distribution of dependent clause patterns in newspaper .... The mode is as relevant to our understanding of newspaper editorials as the ..... Emotive nouns: nouns which express emotion. Attested nouns ...

  8. PHRASAL COMPOUNDS IN AFRIKAANS: A GENERATIVE ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    phrase may be generated by a rule/rules similar to that/ those required to generate .... is adjoined to a noun exists on the level of syntactic surface struc- ture. ...... cat and lOOuse games. "cat and .... aI, derivational and syntactic processes. [70J.

  9. Compounds in different aphasia categories: a study on picture naming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Semenza, Carlo; De Pellegrin, Serena; Battel, Irene; Garzon, Martina; Meneghello, Francesca; Chiarelli, Valentina

    2011-12-01

    This study investigated the production of compounds in Italian-speaking patients affected by different aphasia categories (i.e., Broca's, Wernicke's, and anomic aphasia) in a confrontation naming task. Questions of theoretical interest concerning the processing of compounds within the framework of the "lemma theory" as well as the role of morphological productivity in compound processing are addressed. Results indicate that all persons with aphasia retain knowledge of the morphological status of words, even when they fail to retrieve the corresponding phonological form (the "compound effect"). A difference was found among aphasia categories in the type of errors produced (omission vs. substitution) and in the position (first or second) of these errors within the compound words. In Broca's aphasia, the first component is omitted more frequently than the second one, but only in verb-noun compounds. Anomic and Wernicke's aphasia, unlike in Broca's aphasia, seem to retain sensitivity to morphological productivity.

  10. Self-reference modulates the processing of emotional stimuli in the absence of explicit self-referential appraisal instructions

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pauli, Paul; Herbert, Beate M.

    2011-01-01

    Self-referential evaluation of emotional stimuli has been shown to modify the way emotional stimuli are processed. This study aimed at a new approach by investigating whether self-reference alters emotion processing in the absence of explicit self-referential appraisal instructions. Event-related potentials were measured while subjects spontaneously viewed a series of emotional and neutral nouns. Nouns were preceded either by personal pronouns (‘my’) indicating self-reference or a definite article (‘the’) without self-reference. The early posterior negativity, a brain potential reflecting rapid attention capture by emotional stimuli was enhanced for unpleasant and pleasant nouns relative to neutral nouns irrespective of whether nouns were preceded by personal pronouns or articles. Later brain potentials such as the late positive potential were enhanced for unpleasant nouns only when preceded by personal pronouns. Unpleasant nouns were better remembered than pleasant or neutral nouns when paired with a personal pronoun. Correlation analysis showed that this bias in favor of self-related unpleasant concepts can be explained by participants’ depression scores. Our results demonstrate that self-reference acts as a first processing filter for emotional material to receive higher order processing after an initial rapid attention capture by emotional content has been completed. Mood-congruent processing may contribute to this effect. PMID:20855295

  11. Extracting Date/Time Expressions in Super-Function Based Japanese-English Machine Translation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sasayama, Manabu; Kuroiwa, Shingo; Ren, Fuji

    Super-Function Based Machine Translation(SFBMT) which is a type of Example-Based Machine Translation has a feature which makes it possible to expand the coverage of examples by changing nouns into variables, however, there were problems extracting entire date/time expressions containing parts-of-speech other than nouns, because only nouns/numbers were changed into variables. We describe a method for extracting date/time expressions for SFBMT. SFBMT uses noun determination rules to extract nouns and a bilingual dictionary to obtain correspondence of the extracted nouns between the source and the target languages. In this method, we add a rule to extract date/time expressions and then extract date/time expressions from a Japanese-English bilingual corpus. The evaluation results shows that the precision of this method for Japanese sentences is 96.7%, with a recall of 98.2% and the precision for English sentences is 94.7%, with a recall of 92.7%.

  12. AudioPairBank: Towards A Large-Scale Tag-Pair-Based Audio Content Analysis

    OpenAIRE

    Sager, Sebastian; Elizalde, Benjamin; Borth, Damian; Schulze, Christian; Raj, Bhiksha; Lane, Ian

    2016-01-01

    Recently, sound recognition has been used to identify sounds, such as car and river. However, sounds have nuances that may be better described by adjective-noun pairs such as slow car, and verb-noun pairs such as flying insects, which are under explored. Therefore, in this work we investigate the relation between audio content and both adjective-noun pairs and verb-noun pairs. Due to the lack of datasets with these kinds of annotations, we collected and processed the AudioPairBank corpus cons...

  13. Grammatical categories in the brain: the role of morphological structure.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Longe, O; Randall, B; Stamatakis, E A; Tyler, L K

    2007-08-01

    The current study addresses the controversial issue of how different grammatical categories are neurally processed. Several lesion-deficit studies suggest that distinct neural substrates underlie the representation of nouns and verbs, with verb deficits associated with damage to left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and noun deficits with damage to left temporal cortex. However, this view is not universally shared by neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies. We have suggested that these inconsistencies may reflect interactions between the morphological structure of nouns and verbs and the processing implications of this, rather than differences in their neural representations (Tyler et al. 2004). We tested this hypothesis using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, to scan subjects performing a valence judgment on unambiguous nouns and verbs, presented as stems ('snail, hear') and inflected forms ('snails, hears'). We predicted that activations for noun and verb stems would not differ, whereas inflected verbs would generate more activation in left frontotemporal areas than inflected nouns. Our findings supported this hypothesis, with greater activation of this network for inflected verbs compared with inflected nouns. These results support the claim that form class is not a first-order organizing principle underlying the representation of words but rather interacts with the processes that operate over lexical representations.

  14. Effects of testing on subsequent re-encoding and long-term forgetting of action-relevant materials: On the influence of recall type.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kubik, Veit; Nilsson, Lars-Göran; Olofsson, Jonas K; Jönsson, Fredrik U

    2015-10-01

    Testing one's memory of previously studied information reduces the rate of forgetting, compared to restudy. However, little is known about how this direct testing effect applies to action phrases (e.g., "wash the car") - a learning material relevant to everyday memory. As action phrases consist of two different components, a verb (e.g., "wash") and a noun (e.g., "car"), testing can either be implemented as noun-cued recall of verbs or verb-cued recall of nouns, which may differently affect later memory performance. In the present study, we investigated the effect of testing for these two recall types, using verbally encoded action phrases as learning materials. Results showed that repeated study-test practice, compared to repeated study-restudy practice, decreased the forgetting rate across 1 week to a similar degree for both noun-cued and verb-cued recall types. However, noun-cued recall of verbs initiated more new subsequent learning during the first restudy, compared to verb-cued recall of nouns. The study provides evidence that testing has benefits on both subsequent restudy and long-term retention of action-relevant materials, but that these benefits are differently expressed with testing via noun-cued versus verb-cued recall. © 2015 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  15. The Adoption of Cloud Computing Technology for Library Services ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The study investigated the rationales for the adoption of cloud computing technology for library services in NOUN Library. Issues related to the existing computer network available in NOUN library such as LAN, WAN, rationales for the adoption of cloud computing in NOUN library such as the need to disclose their collections ...

  16. Speeded Recognition of Ungrammaticality: Double Violations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Moore, Timothy E.; Biederman, Irving

    1979-01-01

    The speed at which sentences with various kinds of violations could be rejected was studied. Compatible with the sequential model was the finding that noun-verb and adjective-noun double violations did not result in shorter reaction times than noun-verb single violations, although double violations were judged less acceptable. (Author/RD)

  17. [Eye movement parameters in reading the sentences with syntactic ambiguity in Russian language].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Anisimov, V A; Fedorova, O V; Latanov, A V

    2014-01-01

    We studied the eye movement parameters during reading of syntactically ambiguous sentences with feminine relative clause in Russian language. A priori difficulties of sentence structural analysis results in increase of time spent on reading as opposed to reading control sentences (unambiguous). Such a delay is caused by an increase of frequency of regressions (backward saccades) which are executed for rereading an ambiguous fragment ofsentence. This fact in turn leads to an increase in number of fixations and their duration. The total reading time for particular words composing the ambiguous fragment of sentence depended on disambiguation result (relative clause attachment, early/late closure). In case of early closure (when the subject attached relative clause to first noun) the total reading time for this noun exceeded one for second noun. In case of late closure (when the subject attached relative clause to second noun) the total reading time for both nouns didn't differ. Our results indicate that early closure domination in Russian language determines the greater total reading time for first noun of nominal group associated with relative clause.

  18. Incipient merger of Cls 11 and 5 in Xhosa? | Gowlett | South African ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    In Xhosa, there appears to be an incipient merger between Noun Classes 5 and 11, as revealed by frequent mismatches between Cl. 11 nouns and various concordial elements, and even the replacement of the Cl. 11 noun prefix by that of Cl. 5. In this article we explore possible reasons for this putative merger, and present ...

  19. Input that Contradicts Young Children's Strategy for Mapping Novel Words Affects Their Phonological and Semantic Interpretation of Other Novel Words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jarvis, Lorna Hernandez; Merriman, William E.; Barnett, Michelle; Hanba, Jessica; Van Haitsma, Kylee S.

    2004-01-01

    Children tend to choose an entity they cannot already label, rather than one they can, as the likely referent of a novel noun. The effect of input that contradicts this strategy on the interpretation of other novel nouns was investigated. In pre- and posttests, 4-year-olds were asked to judge whether novel nouns referred to "name-similar" familiar…

  20. Prediction signatures in the brain: Semantic pre-activation during language comprehension

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Burkhard Maess

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available There is broad agreement that context-based predictions facilitate lexical-semantic processing. A robust index of semantic prediction during language comprehension is an evoked response, known as the N400, whose amplitude is modulated as a function of semantic context. However, the underlying neural mechanisms that utilize relations of the prior context and the embedded word within it are largely unknown. We measured magnetoencephalography (MEG data while participants were listening to simple German sentences in which the verbs were either highly predictive for the occurrence of a particular noun (i.e., provided context or not. The identical set of nouns was presented in both conditions. Hence, differences for the evoked responses of the nouns can only be due to differences in the earlier context. We observed a reduction of the N400 response for highly predicted nouns. Interestingly, the opposite pattern was observed for the preceding verbs: Highly predictive (that is more informative verbs yielded stronger neural magnitude compared to less predictive verbs. A negative correlation between the N400 effect of the verb and that of the noun was found in a distributed brain network, indicating an integral relation between the predictive power of the verb and the processing of the subsequent noun. This network consisted of left hemispheric superior and middle temporal areas and a subcortical area; the parahippocampus. Enhanced activity for highly predictive relative to less predictive verbs, likely reflects establishing semantic features associated with the expected nouns, that is a pre-activation of the expected nouns.

  1. Deriving ontological semantic relations between Arabic compound nouns concepts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Imen Bouaziz Mezghanni

    2017-04-01

    Experiments carried out on Arabic legal dataset showed that the proposed approach reached encouraging performance through achieving high precision and recall scores. This performance affects positively the retrieval results of legal documents based on a powerful ontology, which presents our main objective.

  2. Object and Action Naming: A Study on Persian-Speaking Children

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Reza Nilipour

    2013-04-01

    Full Text Available Objectives: Nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. While the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on Mandarin and Korean and other languages have challenged this view. More recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in German, Turkish, English and Korean demonstrate that all languages, including Korean show a noun advantage however the degree of this discrepancy differs between languages. The aim of this study wasto look at object and action naming in normal Persian children as a measure of conceptual developmentin preschool children and its possible use for screening and therapeutic procedures. Methods: In this analytical study, noun bias and processing dissociation of object and action naming in 64 three to six year old healthy monolingual Persian-speaking children was investigated. A black and white picture naming task, consisting of 36 nouns (natural and man-made, and 36 verbs (transitive and intransitive was designed using DMDX software to measure response accuracy and reaction time of the subjects. Results: The results indicate a significant noun advantage with regard to accuracy and naming latencies. The results also reveal that transitive verbs are named more accurately than intransitive ones in Persianspeaking children. Also,the data indicate that accuracy of object and action namingimprove with age (P=0.000. Discussion: Based on the resultswe recommended that a standardized Persian object and action naming battery be used. Such a tool would have the potential of screening lexical development delay and possible noun-verb performance gap in preschool children.

  3. Pop in a Popper

    Science.gov (United States)

    Reading Teacher, 2011

    2011-01-01

    This article describes Pop in a Popper, an effective lesson for teaching students how to choose and use words to give their writing fluency and flair. Pop in a Popper introduces the appositive: a group of words inserted after a noun to modify that noun. In simplest terms, writers pop this group of words into a sentence to tell more about a noun.…

  4. 184 Compounding in Igala: Defining Criteria, Forms and Functions ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Ike Odimegwu

    West Benue-Congo language spoken in north central Nigeria. Defining ..... argues, in Ígálà, ọ́ma 'child', for instance, can stand in for the noun phrase 'ọ́ma óko' 'Oko's .... e.g. 'in Pawnee it is mainly body part words which are incorporated' (c.f. ...

  5. Phrase frequency effects in language production.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Niels Janssen

    Full Text Available A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red', and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car' are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words.

  6. THE CATEGORY OF COUNTABILITY IN THE CROATIAN LANGUAGE

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marija Znika

    2005-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper considers the category of countability as a category established on the lexical meaning of nouns. The lexical meaning of nouns can be dually structured, in a unit and mass forms, relative to the opposition one ≠ many. The category of countability has its content and expression. The content of the category of countability consists of the feature [± countable], and its marker [+ countable] and [- countable]. A noun is countable if its content can be conceived as a unit opposed to mass (table, apple. A noun is uncoutable if its content cannot be perceived as a unit that could be opposed to mass (water, sugar. The expression of the category of countability depends on its content. In the Croatian language the category of countability has its expression in the grammatical category of number and its grammems: singular and plural. These two grammems are formally, and frequently accentually, distinctive from the majority of nouns. The analysis focuses on the meaning of nouns, while their expression is considered as a possible indicator of semantic relationships the category of countability is based on. The paper analyses pluralia tantum and singularia tantum, and their different status countability-wise. It points out the possibility of semantic recategorization of nouns and thus demonstrates a dynamic quality of the category of countability. It also analyses the process of appelativisation (eponomisation of personal names, and the process of appelative deappelativisation. It shows the relationship between the category of countability and the category of definiteness, when definiteness is expressed by an adjectival aspect.

  7. Shindigs, brunches, and rodeos: the neural basis of event words.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bedny, Marina; Dravida, Swethasri; Saxe, Rebecca

    2014-09-01

    Events (e.g., "running" or "eating") constitute a basic type within human cognition and human language. We asked whether thinking about events, as compared to other conceptual categories, depends on partially independent neural circuits. Indirect evidence for this hypothesis comes from previous studies showing elevated posterior temporal responses to verbs, which typically label events. Neural responses to verbs could, however, be driven either by their grammatical or by their semantic properties. In the present experiment, we separated the effects of grammatical class (verb vs. noun) and semantic category (event vs. object) by measuring neural responses to event nouns (e.g., "the hurricane"). Participants rated the semantic relatedness of event nouns, as well as of two categories of object nouns-animals (e.g., "the alligator") and plants (e.g., "the acorn")-and three categories of verbs-manner of motion (e.g., "to roll"), emission (e.g., "to sparkle"), and perception (e.g., "to gaze"). As has previously been observed, we found larger responses to verbs than to object nouns in the left posterior middle (LMTG) and superior (LSTG) temporal gyri. Crucially, we also found that the LMTG responds more to event than to object nouns. These data suggest that part of the posterior lateral temporal response to verbs is driven by their semantic properties. By contrast, a more superior region, at the junction of the temporal and parietal cortices, responded more to verbs than to all nouns, irrespective of their semantic category. We concluded that the neural mechanisms engaged when thinking about event and object categories are partially dissociable.

  8. On the flexibility of grammatical advance planning during sentence production: Effects of cognitive load on multiple lexical access.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wagner, Valentin; Jescheniak, Jörg D; Schriefers, Herbert

    2010-03-01

    Three picture-word interference experiments addressed the question of whether the scope of grammatical advance planning in sentence production corresponds to some fixed unit or rather is flexible. Subjects produced sentences of different formats under varying amounts of cognitive load. When speakers described 2-object displays with simple sentences of the form "the frog is next to the mug," the 2 nouns were found to be lexically-semantically activated to similar degrees at speech onset, as indexed by similarly sized interference effects from semantic distractors related to either the first or the second noun. When speakers used more complex sentences (including prenominal color adjectives; e.g., "the blue frog is next to the blue mug") much larger interference effects were observed for the first than the second noun, suggesting that the second noun was lexically-semantically activated before speech onset on only a subset of trials. With increased cognitive load, introduced by an additional conceptual decision task and variable utterance formats, the interference effect for the first noun was increased and the interference effect for second noun disappeared, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had been narrowed. By contrast, if cognitive load was induced by a secondary working memory task to be performed during speech planning, the interference effect for both nouns was increased, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had not been affected. In all, the data suggest that the scope of advance planning during grammatical encoding in sentence production is flexible, rather than structurally fixed.

  9. Case inflection of construct state constructions in Dinka

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Andersen, Torben

    2016-01-01

    Dinka, a Nilo-Saharan language, is largely monosyllabic, but nevertheless it has a fairly rich morphology. Thus, most of its morphology is expressed by alternations in phonological material of the root. The inflectional categories of nouns manifested in this way include state and case in addition...... to number. The state category consists of an absolute state and two construct states. The case category includes a nominative, a genitive, an allative, and an essive/ablative. The present article shows how case inflection is manifested in complex noun phrases consisting of a noun in a construct state...... simultaneously carry state information and case information. Thus, the case inflection of construct state constructions in Dinka adds yet another layer of nonlinear morphology to nouns in this language....

  10. The Noun Phrase

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    of modifier categories. He introduces the notion of Seinsart or ‘mode of being’ as the nominal counterpart of Aktionsart or ‘mode of action’ in lexical verb semantics. He furthermore proposes a new grammatical category of nominal aspect (cf. verbal aspect) and an implicational universal concerning...

  11. Young children's knowledge of the "determiner" and "adjective" categories.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kemp, Nenagh; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael

    2005-06-01

    Children's understanding of the grammatical categories of "determiner" and "adjective" was examined using 2 different methodologies. In Experiment 1, children heard novel nouns combined with either a or the. Few 2-year-olds, but nearly all 3- and 4-year-olds, subsequently produced the novel nouns with a different determiner from the modeled combination. Experiment 2 used a priming methodology. Children age 2, 3, 4, and 6 years repeated descriptions of pictures, before describing target pictures themselves. When the primes consisted of a varied determiner + noun, all age groups produced more determiner + noun descriptions. When the primes consisted of a determiner + adjective + noun, 2-year-olds showed no priming. Three- to 6-year-olds showed item-specific priming, but only 6-year-olds (and to a limited extent 4-year-olds) showed both item-specific and structural priming. These results suggest that children build an understanding of determiners and adjectives gradually, perhaps from individual lexical items, over a number of years, and that pragmatic correctness may be attained particularly late.

  12. Neuter is not common in Dutch: eye movements reveal asymmetrical gender processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Loerts, Hanneke; Wieling, Martijn; Schmid, Monika S

    2013-12-01

    Native speakers of languages with transparent gender systems can use gender cues to anticipate upcoming words. To examine whether this also holds true for a non-transparent two-way gender system, i.e. Dutch, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to click on one of four displayed items on a screen (e.g., Klik op [Formula: see text] rode appel [Formula: see text], 'Click on the[Formula: see text] red apple[Formula: see text]'). The items contained the target, a colour- and/or gender-matching competitor, and two unrelated distractors. A mixed-effects regression analysis revealed that the presence of a colour-matching and/or gender-matching competitor significantly slowed the process of finding the target. The gender effect, however, was only observed for common nouns, reflecting the fact that neuter gender-marking cannot disambiguate as all Dutch nouns become neuter when used as diminutives. The gender effect for common nouns occurred before noun onset, suggesting that gender information is, at least partially, activated automatically before encountering the noun.

  13. Language-invariant verb processing regions in Spanish-English bilinguals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Willms, Joanna L; Shapiro, Kevin A; Peelen, Marius V; Pajtas, Petra E; Costa, Albert; Moo, Lauren R; Caramazza, Alfonso

    2011-07-01

    Nouns and verbs are fundamental grammatical building blocks of all languages. Studies of brain-damaged patients and healthy individuals have demonstrated that verb processing can be dissociated from noun processing at a neuroanatomical level. In cases where bilingual patients have a noun or verb deficit, the deficit has been observed in both languages. This suggests that the noun-verb distinction may be based on neural components that are common across languages. Here we investigated the cortical organization of grammatical categories in healthy, early Spanish-English bilinguals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a morphophonological alternation task. Four regions showed greater activity for verbs than for nouns in both languages: left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LMTG), left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG), pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), and right middle occipital gyrus (RMOG); no regions showed greater activation for nouns. Multi-voxel pattern analysis within verb-specific regions showed indistinguishable activity patterns for English and Spanish, indicating language-invariant bilingual processing. In LMTG and LMFG, patterns were more similar within than across grammatical category, both within and across languages, indicating language-invariant grammatical class information. These results suggest that the neural substrates underlying verb-specific processing are largely independent of language in bilinguals, both at the macroscopic neuroanatomical level and at the level of voxel activity patterns. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. Reduced verbal fluency for proper names in nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease: a quantitative and qualitative analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fine, Eric M; Delis, Dean C; Paul, Brianna M; Filoteo, J Vincent

    2011-02-01

    There has been an increasing interest within neuropsychology in comparing verbal fluency for different grammatical classes (e.g., verb generation vs. noun generation) in neurological populations, including Parkinson's disease (PD). However, to our knowledge, few studies have compared verbal fluency for common nouns and proper names in PD. Common nouns and proper names differ in terms of their semantic characteristics, as categories of common nouns are organized hierarchically based on semantics, while categories of proper nouns lack a well-defined semantic organization. In addition, there is accumulating evidence that the retrieval of these distinct grammatical classes are subserved by somewhat distinct neural systems. Given that verbal fluency deficits are among the first impairments to emerge in PD, and that such deficits are predictors of future cognitive decline, it is important to examine all aspects of verbal fluency in this population. For the current study, we compared the performance of a group of 32 nondemented PD patients with 32 healthy participants (HP) on verbal fluency tasks for common nouns (animals) and proper names (boys' first names). A significant interaction between verbal fluency task and diagnostic status emerged, as the PD group performed significantly worse on only the proper name fluency task. This finding may reflect the absence of well-defined semantic organization that structures the verbal search for first names, thus placing a greater onus on strategic or "executive" verbal retrieval processes.

  15. Attitudes and Perceptions of Students to Open and Distance Learning in Nigeria

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    David Olugbenga Ojo

    2006-06-01

    Full Text Available In the West African Region of Africa, the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN is the first full fledged university that operates in an exclusively open and distance learning (ODL mode of education. NOUN focuses mainly on open and distance teaching and learning system, and delivers its courses materials via print in conjunction with information and communication technology (ICT, when applicable. This ‘single mode’ of open education is different from the integration of distance learning system into the face- to- face teaching and learning system, which is more typical of conventional Universities in Nigeria and other parts of the world. Thus, NOUN reflects a novel development in the provision of higher education in Nigeria. This study assesses the attitudes and perceptions of distance teaching and learning by students enrolled in the NOUN and of the National Teachers’ Institute (NTI compared to their experiences at conventional universities. One hundred and twenty (n = 120 randomly selected NOUN and NTI students of NOUN were the subjects of the study. The Students’ Attitude and Perception Rating of Open and Distance Learning Institutions Inventory (SAPRODLII, developed by the researchers, was administered to the subjects to measure their attitudes and experiences. Results of the study showed that students generally have a positive perception and attitude towards ODL, compared to traditional forms of higher education.

  16. Mixed metaphors: Electrophysiological brain responses to (un)expected concrete and abstract prepositional phrases.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zane, Emily; Shafer, Valerie

    2018-02-01

    Languages around the world use spatial terminology, like prepositions, to describe non-spatial, abstract concepts, including time (e.g., in the moment). The Metaphoric Mapping Theory explains this pattern by positing that a universal human cognitive process underlies it, whereby abstract concepts are conceptualized via the application of concrete, three-dimensional space onto abstract domains. The alternative view is that the use of spatial propositions in abstract phrases is idiomatic, and thus does not trigger metaphoric mapping. In the current study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the time-course of neural processing of concrete and abstract phrases consisting of the prepositions in or on followed by congruent and incongruent nouns (e.g., in the bowl/plate and in the moment/mend). ERPs were recorded from the onset of reference nouns in 28 adult participants using a 128-channel electrode net. Results show that congruency has differential effects on neural measures, depending on whether the noun is concrete or abstract. Incongruent reference nouns in concrete phrases (e.g., on the bowl) elicited a significant central negativity (an N400 effect), while incongruent reference nouns in abstract phrases (e.g., on the moment) did not. These results suggest that spatially incongruent concrete nouns are semantically unexpected (N400 effect). A P600 effect, which might indicate rechecking, reanalysis and/or reconstruction, was predicted for incongruent abstract nouns, but was not observed, possibly due to the variability in abstract stimuli. Findings cast doubt on accounts claiming that abstract uses of prepositions are cognitively and metaphorically linked to their spatial sense during natural, on-line processing. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhao, Li-Ming; Yang, Yu-Fang

    2016-01-01

    The scope of lexical planning, which means how far ahead speakers plan lexically before they start producing an utterance, is an important issue for research into speech production, but remains highly controversial. The present research investigated this issue using the semantic blocking effect, which refers to the widely observed effects that participants take longer to say aloud the names of items in pictures when the pictures in a block of trials in an experiment depict items that belong to the same semantic category than different categories. As this effect is often interpreted as a reflection of difficulty in lexical selection, the current study took the semantic blocking effect and its associated pattern of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a proxy to test whether lexical planning during sentence production extends beyond the first noun when a subject noun-phrase includes two nouns, such as "The chair and the boat are both red" and "The chair above the boat is red". The results showed a semantic blocking effect both in onset latencies and in ERPs during the utterance of the first noun of these complex noun-phrases but not for the second noun. The indication, therefore, is that the lexical planning scope does not encompass this second noun-phrase. Indeed, the present findings are in line with accounts that propose radically incremental lexical planning, in which speakers plan ahead only one word at a time. This study also provides a highly novel example of using ERPs to examine the production of long utterances, and it is hoped the present demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach inspires further application of ERP techniques in this area of research.

  18. A STUDY IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE HINDI VERB.

    Science.gov (United States)

    BAHL, KALI C.

    A CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE OF HINDI WAS FORMULATED TO ACCOUNT FOR THE PHENOMENA OF COMPOUND AND CONJUNCT VERBS IN THE LANGUAGE. THE TRADITIONAL CLASS OF CONJUNCT VERBS OR THE COMPOUND VERBS, CONSISTING OF NOUN OR ADJECTIVE PLUS VERB, WAS REINTERPRETED IN THIS ANALYSIS. THE FOUR SECTIONS OF THE TEXT DEALT WITH (1) THE SUBJECT-PREDICATE KERNEL…

  19. THE NOMINAL PREDICATE (ALBANIAN - ENGLISH)

    OpenAIRE

    Shkelqim Millaku

    2017-01-01

    The aim of this paper is to description the nominal of predicate between two languages (Albanian – English). The purpose of the following discussing is to show that some noun phrases, namely predicate nominal’s, do not seem to exhibit. What is considering the typical behavior of noun phrase? First, they do not seem to be assigned case. Second, they may not assign are roles in normal sense so that they are probably as Theta-marker arguments, unlike referential Noun Phrases.[1] In Albanian lang...

  20. The role of grammatical category information in spoken word retrieval.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Duràn, Carolina Palma; Pillon, Agnesa

    2011-01-01

    We investigated the role of lexical syntactic information such as grammatical gender and category in spoken word retrieval processes by using a blocking paradigm in picture and written word naming experiments. In Experiments 1, 3, and 4, we found that the naming of target words (nouns) from pictures or written words was faster when these target words were named within a list where only words from the same grammatical category had to be produced (homogeneous category list: all nouns) than when they had to be produced within a list comprising also words from another grammatical category (heterogeneous category list: nouns and verbs). On the other hand, we detected no significant facilitation effect when the target words had to be named within a homogeneous gender list (all masculine nouns) compared to a heterogeneous gender list (both masculine and feminine nouns). In Experiment 2, using the same blocking paradigm by manipulating the semantic category of the items, we found that naming latencies were significantly slower in the semantic category homogeneous in comparison with the semantic category heterogeneous condition. Thus semantic category homogeneity caused an interference, not a facilitation effect like grammatical category homogeneity. Finally, in Experiment 5, nouns in the heterogeneous category condition had to be named just after a verb (category-switching position) or a noun (same-category position). We found a facilitation effect of category homogeneity but no significant effect of position, which showed that the effect of category homogeneity found in Experiments 1, 3, and 4 was not due to a cost of switching between grammatical categories in the heterogeneous grammatical category list. These findings supported the hypothesis that grammatical category information impacts word retrieval processes in speech production, even when words are to be produced in isolation. They are discussed within the context of extant theories of lexical production.

  1. Self-awareness and the subconscious effect of personal pronouns on word encoding: a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Walla, Peter; Greiner, Katharina; Duregger, Cornelia; Deecke, Lüder; Thurner, Stefan

    2007-03-02

    The effect of personal pronouns such as "ein" (German for "a"), "mein" (German for "my") and "sein" (German for "his") on the processing of associated nouns was investigated using MEG. Three different encoding strategies were provided in order to vary the level of consciousness involved in verbal information processing. A shallow (alphabetic), a deep (semantic) and a very deep (contextual) encoding instruction related to visual word presentation were given to all study participants. After the encoding of pronoun-noun pairs, recognition performances of nouns only were tested. The number of correctly recognized nouns previously associated with "sein" was significantly lower than the number of correctly recognized nouns previously associated with "ein" in the shallow encoding condition. The same trend was found for "mein" associated nouns which were also less accurately recognized compared to "ein" associated nouns. Magnetic field distributions recorded during the encoding phases revealed two significant effects, one between about 200 and 400ms after stimulus onset and the other between about 500 and 800ms. The earlier effect was found over occipito-parietal sensors, whereas the later effect occurred over left frontal sensors. Within both time ranges, brain activation varied significantly as a function of associated pronoun independent of depth of word processing. In the respective areas of both time ranges, conditions including personal pronouns ("mein" and "sein") showed higher magnetic field components compared to the control condition of no personal pronouns ("ein"). Evidence is shown that early stage processing is able to distinguish between no personal and personal information, whereas later stage processing is able to distinguish between information related to oneself and to another person (self and non-self). Along with other previous reports our MEG findings support the notion that particular human brain functions involved in processing neurophysiological

  2. Structural syntactic prediction measured with ELAN: evidence from ERPs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fonteneau, Elisabeth

    2013-02-08

    The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how and when argument structure information is used during the processing of sentences with a filler-gap dependency. We hypothesize that one specific property - animacy (living vs. non-living) - is used by the parser during the building of the syntactic structure. Participants heard sentences that were rated off-line as having an expected noun (Who did the Lion King chase the caravan with?) or an unexpected noun (Who did Lion King chase the animal with?). This prediction is based on the animacy properties relation between the wh-word and the noun in the object position. ERPs from the noun in the unexpected condition (animal) elicited a typical Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN)/P600 complex compared to the noun in the expected condition (caravan). Firstly, these results demonstrate that the ELAN reflects not only grammatical category violation but also animacy property expectations in filler-gap dependency. Secondly, our data suggests that the language comprehension system is able to make detailed predictions about aspects of the upcoming words to build up the syntactic structure. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  3. How Well can We Learn Interpretable Entity Types from Text?

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hovy, Dirk

    2014-01-01

    We investigate a largely unsupervised approach to learning interpretable, domain-specific entity types from unlabeled text. It assumes that any common noun in a domain can function as potential entity type, and uses those nouns as hidden variables in a HMM. To constrain training, it extracts co......-occurrence dictionaries of entities and common nouns from the data. We evaluate the learned types by measuring their prediction accuracy for verb arguments in several domains. The results suggest that it is possible to learn domain-specific entity types from unlabeled data. We show significant improvements over...

  4. Kategorie čísla a tzv. singularia tantum na základě výzkumu Českého národního korpusu.

    OpenAIRE

    Chobalko, Antonina

    2017-01-01

    In our thesis, we focus on singularia tantum, which are nouns that are used only in the singular. More specifically, we focused on the names of the food that are typical examples of singularia tantum. However, we found that many of these nouns are to be found in the plural as well, but the most recent Czech dictionary (2005) does not include this kind of information. In our thesis, we show list of these nouns and we show how they are used in plural. At the same time we find many examples, whe...

  5. Neural Differentiation of Lexico-Syntactic Categories or Semantic Features?

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Kellenbach, ML; Wijers, AA; Hovius, M; Mulder, Juul; Mulder, Gysbertus

    2002-01-01

    Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate whether processing differences between nouns and verbs can be accounted for by the differential salience of visual-perceptual and motor attributes in their semantic specifications. Three subclasses of nouns and verbs were selected, which

  6. ANIMACY IN NKAMI

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    acer

    Thus, because the subject position of (4a) is occupied by a singular animate noun ..... ANIMACY - requires that the overt statement of constituents in a clause be based ..... Thus, ba is attached to ana 'four' in (46) because the modifying noun ...

  7. Memory-Based Shallow Parsing

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Tjong Kim Sang, E.F.

    2002-01-01

    We present memory-based learning approaches to shallow parsing and apply these to five tasks: base noun phrase identification, arbitrary base phrase recognition, clause detection, noun phrase parsing and full parsing. We use feature selection techniques and system combination methods for improving

  8. Two sides of gender: ERP evidence for the presence of two routes during gender agreement processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Caffarra, Sendy; Janssen, Niels; Barber, Horacio A

    2014-10-01

    The present ERP study aimed at providing evidence for the existence of two routes in the brain for the processing of morphosyntactic features during language comprehension; a lexical route which retrieves grammatical properties stored in the lexicon without reliance on formal cues, and a form-based route that takes advantage of sub-lexical units strongly related to a specific grammatical class. In the experiment, we investigated grammatical gender agreement processing in Spanish article-noun word pairs using a grammaticality judgment task. Article-noun pairs either agreed or did not agree in gender. Noun transparency was manipulated such that the ending could be strongly associated with a specific gender class (i.e., transparent nouns) or not (i.e., opaque nouns). A visual half-field method was employed and ERPs were recorded in response to the target nouns in order to disentangle the initial hemisphere-specific computations of gender processing. ERP results showed that, while both hemispheres compute agreement dependencies, the left hemisphere is sensitive to the presence of formal gender cues at an early stage (i.e., 350-500 ms) indicating the presence of a form-based route. The right hemisphere showed an ERP effect of transparency, but later than the left hemisphere (i.e., 500-750 ms). These findings confirm the presence of two routes to gender, which can be differently used depending on the availability of transparent endings. In addition, the results showed hemispheric differences in the time course of the form-based route. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  9. Generation of Dutch referring expressions using the D-TUNA corpus

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Hoek, Marissa; Theune, Mariet; Gatt, A.; van Gompel, R.; Gurman-Bard, E.; Krahmer, E.; van Deemter, K.

    This paper describes our research into generating Dutch noun phrases as descriptions of furniture objects or people. This is usually done in two steps: attribute selection and realisation. This research focuses only on the realisation step: generating a noun phrase from given attributes. The

  10. Serbo-Croatian Workbook. Phase 1. Part 1A,

    Science.gov (United States)

    1983-10-25

    1 PRACTICE OF NOUN GENDERS * Determine the gender of the following nouns: kiupa zadruga junak me so zora novac stolica voce jastuk Pismo izvinjenje...tamo? (povrce i voce ) 7. Da li ste napisali ?___________________________ (pismo, zadatak, knjiga) 71 8. Koga niste videli? (majka, otac, sin, moji

  11. La quantification en Kabiye: une approche linguistique | Pali ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    ... which is denoted by lexical quantifiers. Quantification with specific reference is provided by different types of linguistic units (nouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, ideophones and verbs) in arguments/noun phrases and in the predicative phrase in the sense of Chomsky. Keywords: quantification, class, number, reference, ...

  12. Cerebellum engages in automation of verb-generation skill.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yang, Zhi; Wu, Paula; Weng, Xuchu; Bandettini, Peter A

    2014-03-01

    Numerous studies have shown cerebellar involvement in item-specific association, a form of explicit learning. However, very few have demonstrated cerebellar participation in automation of non-motor cognitive tasks. Applying fMRI to a repeated verb-generation task, we sought to distinguish cerebellar involvement in learning of item-specific noun-verb association and automation of verb generation skill. The same set of nouns was repeated in six verb-generation blocks so that subjects practiced generating verbs for the nouns. The practice was followed by a novel block with a different set of nouns. The cerebellar vermis (IV/V) and the right cerebellar lobule VI showed decreased activation following practice; activation in the right cerebellar Crus I was significantly lower in the novel challenge than in the initial verb-generation task. Furthermore, activation in this region during well-practiced blocks strongly correlated with improvement of behavioral performance in both the well-practiced and the novel blocks, suggesting its role in the learning of general mental skills not specific to the practiced noun-verb pairs. Therefore, the cerebellum processes both explicit verbal associative learning and automation of cognitive tasks. Different cerebellar regions predominate in this processing: lobule VI during the acquisition of item-specific association, and Crus I during automation of verb-generation skills through practice.

  13. Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pilley, John W; Reid, Alliston K

    2011-02-01

    Four experiments investigated the ability of a border collie (Chaser) to acquire receptive language skills. Experiment 1 demonstrated that Chaser learned and retained, over a 3-year period of intensive training, the proper-noun names of 1022 objects. Experiment 2 presented random pair-wise combinations of three commands and three names, and demonstrated that she understood the separate meanings of proper-noun names and commands. Chaser understood that names refer to objects, independent of the behavior directed toward those objects. Experiment 3 demonstrated Chaser's ability to learn three common nouns--words that represent categories. Chaser demonstrated one-to-many (common noun) and many-to-one (multiple-name) name-object mappings. Experiment 4 demonstrated Chaser's ability to learn words by inferential reasoning by exclusion--inferring the name of an object based on its novelty among familiar objects that already had names. Together, these studies indicate that Chaser acquired referential understanding of nouns, an ability normally attributed to children, which included: (a) awareness that words may refer to objects, (b) awareness of verbal cues that map words upon the object referent, and (c) awareness that names may refer to unique objects or categories of objects, independent of the behaviors directed toward those objects. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  14. K významu substantiv s převahou plurálových tvarů

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Michalec, Vít; Veselý, Vojtěch

    2016-01-01

    Roč. 77, č. 3 (2016), s. 163-184 ISSN 0037-7031 R&D Projects: GA MK DF13P01OVV011 Keywords : mass noun * plural form of a noun * collective meaning * quantifier * measure phrase Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics Impact factor: 0.625, year: 2016

  15. Planning at the Phonological Level during Sentence Production

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schnur, Tatiana T.; Costa, Albert; Caramazza, Alfonso

    2006-01-01

    In two picture-word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short determiner + noun + verb or long determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and…

  16. Representation of grammatical categories of words in the brain.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hillis, A E; Caramazza, A

    1995-01-01

    We report the performance of a patient who, as a consequence of left frontal and temporoparietal strokes, makes far more errors on nouns than on verbs in spoken output tasks, but makes far more errors on verbs than on nouns in written input tasks. This double dissociation within a single patient with respect to grammatical category provides evidence for the hypothesis that phonological and orthographic representations of nouns and verbs are processed by independent neural mechanisms. Furthermore, the opposite dissociation in the verbal output modality, an advantage for nouns over verbs in spoken tasks, by a different patient using the same stimuli has also been reported (Caramazza & Hillis, 1991). This double dissociation across patients on the same task indicates that results cannot be ascribed to "greater difficulty" with one type of stimulus, and provides further evidence for the view that grammatical category information is an important organizational principle of lexical knowledge in the brain.

  17. Grammatical distinctions in the left frontal cortex.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shapiro, K A; Pascual-Leone, A; Mottaghy, F M; Gangitano, M; Caramazza, A

    2001-08-15

    Selective deficits in producing verbs relative to nouns in speech are well documented in neuropsychology and have been associated with left hemisphere frontal cortical lesions resulting from stroke and other neurological disorders. The basis for these impairments is unresolved: Do they arise because of differences in the way grammatical categories of words are organized in the brain, or because of differences in the neural representation of actions and objects? We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of a portion of left prefrontal cortex and to assess its role in producing nouns and verbs. In one experiment subjects generated real words; in a second, they produced pseudowords as nouns or verbs. In both experiments, response latencies increased for verbs but were unaffected for nouns following rTMS. These results demonstrate that grammatical categories have a neuroanatomical basis and that the left prefrontal cortex is selectively engaged in processing verbs as grammatical objects.

  18. The development of the suffix –erni in Icelandic

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Jóhannsson, Ellert Þór

    This paper investigates the suffix –erni in Icelandic, its origin, and development from the period of Old Norse to Modern Icelandic. This suffix is most often used to derive a neuter noun from nouns and adjectives with the meaning ‘belonging to’ e.g. faðir ‘father’ => faðerni ‘fatherhood’. By tak......This paper investigates the suffix –erni in Icelandic, its origin, and development from the period of Old Norse to Modern Icelandic. This suffix is most often used to derive a neuter noun from nouns and adjectives with the meaning ‘belonging to’ e.g. faðir ‘father’ => faðerni ‘fatherhood...... stages to establish a clear derivational pattern that is productively used in the language to form new words. Having access to continuous written material in Icelandic from ca. 1200 to 2011 gives us the possibility to track this process through time and follow each step in the development....

  19. Study of the AlON-VN composite ceramic

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Sainbaatar; Zhang Zuotai; Li Wenchao; Wang Xidong [Dept. of Physical Chemistry of Metallurgy, Univ. of Science and Technology Beijing, BJ (China)

    2005-07-01

    Aluminium oxynitride-vanadium nitride (AlON-VN) composite ceramic was fabricated based on thermodynamic analysis of V-Al-O-N systems. The results indicated that the VN dispersed homogeneously in AlON matrix and can reinforce AlON matrix. Oxidation behavior was studied and the results showed that it belongs to self-protective oxidation due to the good adherence of oxidation product. Therefore, AlON-VN composites have excellent oxidation resistance. (orig.)

  20. Age of Acquisition and Sensitivity to Gender in Spanish Word Recognition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Foote, Rebecca

    2014-01-01

    Speakers of gender-agreement languages use gender-marked elements of the noun phrase in spoken-word recognition: A congruent marking on a determiner or adjective facilitates the recognition of a subsequent noun, while an incongruent marking inhibits its recognition. However, while monolinguals and early language learners evidence this…

  1. Una caracterización morfológica de sustantivos en textos científicos

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Siversen, Anne Lise Münster

    2007-01-01

    The purpose of this article is to determine to if the presence of specialised vocabulary coincides with the presence of complex morphology in nouns. In doing so, it is necessary to answer tw questions: what characterizes the nouns in so-called scientific texts morphologically, and whether these n...

  2. Examining Second Language Receptive Knowledge of Collocation and Factors That Affect Learning

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nguyen, Thi My Hang; Webb, Stuart

    2017-01-01

    This study investigated Vietnamese EFL learners' knowledge of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations at the first three 1,000 word frequency levels, and the extent to which five factors (node word frequency, collocation frequency, mutual information score, congruency, and part of speech) predicted receptive knowledge of collocation. Knowledge…

  3. La heteróclisis en hetita

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Juan Antonio Álvarez Pedrosa

    1990-12-01

    Full Text Available Hittite presents two types of alternance: The type -r/n-, which is inherited and relatively productive, forms nouns within well-defined semantic fields: temporal designations: meh̬ur meh̬unaš; body-parts: kuttar kuttanaš; fluids: watar wetenaš, and basic natural elements: pah̬h̬ur pah̬h̬uenaš. The type -r/ø appears only in the suffix -war/-waš which forms abstract nouns like taruppuwar taruppuwaš ‘meeting’. It is a development exclusive of Hittite. There are three suffixes inflected by the alternance -r/n-; -(atar / -(annaš < -(atnaš; -eššar/-ešnaš; -war/-unaš. The great development of these suffixes —an exclusive feature of Hittite— seems to be a peculiar innovation of this language, destined to integrate certain stems in its flexion: The suffix -tar/-nnaš, supposedly the inheritor of an I.E. suffix *-ter/-tn-, is used again in order to integrate the *-eH2/-H2 stems, which formed abstract nouns already from the l.E. and did not present any other productive type in Hittite. This would be the suffix -atar/-annaš. The suffix -eššar/-ešnaš integrates the *-es/-os I.E. nouns in the Hittite nominal system, which formed abstract nouns already in I.E.; this suffix does not appear in other inflected type in Hittite. The suffix -war/-unaš, on the contrary, is not productive and can create designations of parts of animal bodies and abstract nouns as well.

  4. Morphological isolates in idioms: cranberries or real words?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nenonen, M; Niemi, J

    The present study focuses on a subtype of Finnish nouns that appear only as complements in idiomatic verb phrases. In addition to the idioms as their sole environment, these idiomatic isolates, as we call them, are typically frozen to a single case form. In two experiments, in a subjective rating task and a lexical decision task, the isolates are pitted against ordinary nouns and nouns that appear as frozen forms in idioms in addition to being ordinary, free words. The experiments show that the isolates, in spite of their defective syntactic and morphological properties, are processed like ordinary lexical items. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.

  5. Reference in English-Arabic Translation

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ehrensvärd, Martin

    2008-01-01

    The use of referring expressions (proper nouns, noun phrases [NPs] and pronouns) in a target language [TL] text may differ from the source language [SL] text with regard to how explicit they are: One may have a pronoun (less explicit) where the other has a proper noun (more explicit), or one may...... of the text? The last option would make good sense. The SL text is written for an audience who knows the language and hence is expected to be more or less familiar with the culture. Therefore the author may not need to be as explicit as he or she would be if writing for an audience not so familiar...

  6. Reference in English-Arabic Translation

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ehrensvärd, Martin Gustaf

    2007-01-01

    The use of referring expressions (proper nouns, noun phrases [NPs] and pronouns) in a target language [TL] text may differ from the source language [SL] text with regard to how explicit they are: One may have a pronoun (less explicit) where the other has a proper noun (more explicit), or one may...... of the text? The last option would make good sense. The SL text is written for an audience who knows the language and hence is expected to be more or less familiar with the culture. Therefore the author may not need to be as explicit as he or she would be if writing for an audience not so familiar...

  7. A propos du verbe traduire et du nom traduction

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nelly Flaux

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available This paper deals with the main semantic and syntactic properties of the verb traduire ‘to translate’ and of the noun traduction ‘translation’. First, the different meanings of these two words will be outlined, in French and in other languages; it will be shown that the Husserlian notion of “ideal object” is essential to give a real account of the linguistic properties of the noun traduction when it denotes a text translated from one language into another; furthermore, the notion of ideality is important for the study of many nouns of music or language and might be extended to the domain of fine arts.

  8. Cognitive Predictors of Generalization of Russian Grammatical Gender Categories

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kempe, Vera; Brooks, Patricia J.; Kharkhurin, Anatoliy

    2010-01-01

    This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17-55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities…

  9. Syntactic processes in speech production: The retrieval of grammatical gender.

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van Berkum, J.J.A.

    1997-01-01

    Two picture-naming experiments tested the hypothesis that the speed with which native speakers of a gender-marking language retrieve the grammatical gender of a noun from their mental lexicon may depend on the recency of earlier access to that same noun's gender. Ss were 96 native speakers of Dutch.

  10. Planning in Sentence Production: Evidence for the Phrase as a Default Planning Scope

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martin, Randi C.; Crowther, Jason E.; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P., II; Yang, Chin-Lung

    2010-01-01

    Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

  11. Gender Congruency From a Neutral Point of View: The Roles of Gender Classes and Conceptual Connotations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard; Klauer, Karl Christoph

    2018-02-01

    The question of whether language affects thought is long-standing, with grammatical gender being one of the most contended instances. Empirical evidence focuses on the gender congruency effect, according to which referents of masculine nouns are conceptualized more strongly as male and those of feminine nouns more strongly as female. While some recent studies suggest that this effect is driven by conceptual connotations rather than grammatical properties, research remains theoretically inconclusive because of the confounding of grammatical gender and conceptual connotations in gendered (masculine or feminine) nouns. Taking advantage of the fact that German also includes a neuter gender, the current study attempted to disentangle the relative contributions of grammatical properties and connotations to the emergence of the gender congruency effect. In three pairs of experiments, neuter and gendered nouns were compared in an Extrinsic Affective Simon Task based on gender associations, controlled for a possible role of gender-indicating articles. A congruency effect emerged equally strongly for neuter and gendered nouns, but disappeared when including connotations as covariate, thereby effectively excluding grammatical gender as the (only) driving force for this effect. Based on a critical discussion of these findings, we propose a possible mechanism for the emergence of the effect that also has the potential to accommodate conflicting patterns of findings from previous research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  12. Hybrid MnO2/carbon nanotube-VN/carbon nanotube supercapacitors

    Science.gov (United States)

    Su, Y.; Zhitomirsky, I.

    2014-12-01

    Composite materials, containing fibrous VN nanoparticles and multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) are prepared by a chemical method for application in electrochemical supercapacitors. We demonstrate for the first time that VN-MWCNT electrodes exhibit good capacitive behavior in 0.5 M Na2SO4 electrolyte in a negative voltage window of 0.9 V. Quartz crystal microbalance studies provide an insight into the mechanism of charge storage. Composite VN-MWCNT materials show significant improvement in capacitance, compared to individual VN and MWCNT materials. Testing results indicate that VN-MWCNT electrodes exhibit high specific capacitance at high mass loadings in the range of 10-30 mg cm-2, good capacitance retention at scan rates in the range of 2-200 mV s-1 and good cycling stability. The highest specific capacitance of 160 F g-1 is achieved at a scan rate of 2 mV s-1. The new findings open a new and promising strategy in the fabrication of hybrid devices based on VN. The proof-of-principle is demonstrated by the fabrication of hybrid supercapacitor devices based on VN-MWCNT negative electrodes and MnO2 -MWCNT positive electrodes with voltage window of 1.8 V in aqueous 0.5 M Na2SO4 electrolyte. The hybrid VN-MWCNT/MnO2-MWCNT supercapacitor cells show promising capacitive and power-energy characteristics.

  13. Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA in the Treatment of Naming Deficits: Evidence from a Malay Speaker with Non-Fluent Aphasia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mohd Azmarul A Aziz

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available Introduction Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA is a treatment for lexical retrieval impairment in which participants are cued by providing semantic information regarding concepts they have difficulty with in naming tasks in an effort to facilitate accurate lexical retrieval (Boyle & Coelho, 1995. People with aphasia are commonly found to have naming deficits and speech-language therapists (SLTs face difficulties in providing an effective treatment method to treat this deficit. This study aims to examine the use of SFA to address naming deficits for nouns and verbs in a Malay patient (KM with non-fluent aphasia. Methods The following tests were administered to the subject pre- and post- treatment: 1 Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE; 2 Malay Object and Action Test (MOAT; and 3 A series of comprehension and production assessments in Malay. Subject was asked to name 101 and 50 pictures from MOAT. The stimuli were coloured photograph pictures. Treatment and probe (untrained stimuli were selected from pictures that a subject could not name, yielding 40 nouns and 30 verbs. From these, 20 stimuli were randomly chosen as probe items and 20 as treatment stimuli (nouns, 15 treatment and 15 probes (verbs. For the treatment study, single subject A-B-A design was implemented. Three baseline sessions were completed prior to treatment initiation naming for both probe and treatment pictures. Subject attended once-weekly therapy sessions over 8 months. Probes assessing generalizations to untrained pictures were presented at 4th, 8th, and 12th and so on until the end of the programme. Results Results showed that KM’s ability to name trained and untrained picture stimuli improved for both nouns and verbs. KM demonstrated steady improvement in the SFA treatment of trained nouns and verbs: from 5% baseline accuracy to over 90% accuracy at treatment end for nouns and from 0% baseline accuracy to 90% accuracy at treatment end for verbs. Generalizations to

  14. Response to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011)

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yang, WeiWei

    2013-01-01

    The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

  15. Aspects de la communication orale dans les parlers de la vallée inférieure de Suceava : le nom

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maria DOLHĂSCU-ALEXANDRIUC

    2012-12-01

    Full Text Available The noun is an open lexical-grammatical class, bounded by some semantic-referential and grammatical features. In the dialect of the lower valley of Suceava, the form of nouns is sometimes modified in the phonetic processes and some other times the prepositional phrases are expressing the possession as secondary significance.

  16. Somali Syntax,

    Science.gov (United States)

    1979-01-01

    they - go The Vietnamese people should be allowed the right of determining their own destiny . 174" a.- ] !- ’--- _ (373) Anaa warrameya. I/SP (baa... embryo of a form of prepositional government which is the same for verbs and nouns alike and which is developing on the basis of a spatial noun

  17. Browse Title Index

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Items 151 - 194 of 194 ... Vol 20, No 1 (2006), The metamorphosis of Eros: The god of love in early Greek poetry, Abstract PDF. Edward Jennar. Vol 23 (2013), The noun concordance system: some remarks on nouns' participation in Bantu languages syntactic structure, Abstract PDF. Francis Matambirofa. Vol 4, No 1 (1990) ...

  18. Variables and Values in Children’s Early Word-Combinations

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ninio Anat

    2014-08-01

    Full Text Available A model of syntactic development proposes that children’s very first word-combinations are already generated via productive rules that express in syntactic form the relation between a predicate word and its semantic argument. An alternative hypothesis is that they learn frozen chunks. In Study 1 we analyzed a large sample of young children’s early two-word sentences comprising of verbs with direct objects. A majority of objects were generated by pronouns but a third of children’s sentences used bare common nouns as objects. We checked parents’ twoword long sentences of verbs with objects and found almost no bare common nouns. Children cannot have copied sentences with bare noun objects from parents’ two-word long sentences as frozen chunks. In Study 2 we raised the possibility that children’s early sentences with bare nouns are rote-learned ‘telegraphic speech’, acquired as unanalyzed frozen chunks from longer input sentences due to perceptual problem to hear the unstressed determiners. To test this explanation, we tested the children’s speech corpus for evidence that they avoid determiners in their word-combinations. The results showed that they do not; in fact they generate very many determiner-common noun combinations as two-word utterances. The findings suggest that children produce their early word-combinations of the core-grammar type by a productive rule that maps the predicate-argument relations of verbs and their semantic arguments to headdependent syntax, and not as frozen word-combinations. Children mostly learn to use indexical expressions such as pronouns to express the variable semantic arguments of verbs as context dependent; they also employ bare common nouns to express specific values of the arguments. The earliest word-combinations demonstrate that children understand that syntax is built on the predicate-argument relations of words and use this insight to produce their early sentences.

  19. Composing lexical versus functional adjectives: Evidence for uniformity in the left temporal lobe.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Linmin; Pylkkänen, Liina

    2018-04-24

    Featural information (e.g., color or shape) allows interlocutors to focus their attention on the specific items under discussion from the vast set of possibilities in the environment. Intriguingly, when they are used to modify and restrict nouns, adjectives can either carry featural information themselves (e.g., green car) or retrieve featural information from the context (e.g., somebody points at a car and claims that she has the same car or a different car). Do the processing of same/different car and green car share neural correlates? For the composition of nouns with feature-carrying adjectives, prior work revealed early compositional effects (roughly 200 ms after noun onset) in the left anterior temporal lobe. However, although we know that such effects do not extend to cases of numeral quantification, which add no conceptual features to the noun (e.g., two boats), we do not know whether they extend to functional adjectives that themselves introduce no features, but instead reference features in the context. To address this question, we measured magnetoencephalography (MEG) during the processing of five types of noun phrases (NPs): same NPs (e.g., same star), different NPs (e.g., different star), color NPs (e.g., green star), comparative NPs (e.g., larger star), and another NPs (e.g., another star). Our main finding was that between 185 to 240 ms after noun onset, same and different NPs patterned with the color NPs in their elicited left temporal lobe activity, and same NPs even trended toward higher amplitudes than the color NPs. This shows that the mechanism driving combinatory effects in the left temporal cortex does not require the input words to directly name conceptual features, as long as the words reference featural information in the context, and that overlapping neural correlates underlie the composition of featural information from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources.

  20. Feature-Specific Event-Related Potential Effects to Action- and Sound-Related Verbs during Visual Word Recognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Popp, Margot; Trumpp, Natalie M; Kiefer, Markus

    2016-01-01

    Grounded cognition theories suggest that conceptual representations essentially depend on modality-specific sensory and motor systems. Feature-specific brain activation across different feature types such as action or audition has been intensively investigated in nouns, while feature-specific conceptual category differences in verbs mainly focused on body part specific effects. The present work aimed at assessing whether feature-specific event-related potential (ERP) differences between action and sound concepts, as previously observed in nouns, can also be found within the word class of verbs. In Experiment 1, participants were visually presented with carefully matched sound and action verbs within a lexical decision task, which provides implicit access to word meaning and minimizes strategic access to semantic word features. Experiment 2 tested whether pre-activating the verb concept in a context phase, in which the verb is presented with a related context noun, modulates subsequent feature-specific action vs. sound verb processing within the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, ERP analyses revealed a differential ERP polarity pattern for action and sound verbs at parietal and central electrodes similar to previous results in nouns. Pre-activation of the meaning of verbs in the preceding context phase in Experiment 2 resulted in a polarity-reversal of feature-specific ERP effects in the lexical decision task compared with Experiment 1. This parallels analogous earlier findings for primed action and sound related nouns. In line with grounded cognitions theories, our ERP study provides evidence for a differential processing of action and sound verbs similar to earlier observation for concrete nouns. Although the localizational value of ERPs must be viewed with caution, our results indicate that the meaning of verbs is linked to different neural circuits depending on conceptual feature relevance.

  1. Selective Listening in L2 Learners of French

    Science.gov (United States)

    Graham, Suzanne; Santos, Denise

    2013-01-01

    This paper considers the issue raised in 2008 by Gillian Brown in her article "Selective listening" regarding whether nouns are "privileged" in memory over verbs during listening tasks, and whether attention to nouns, at least in the early stages of L2 learning, is a desirable strategy to be taught to learners, as Brown…

  2. Loanwords in Cilubà | Kabuta | Lexikos

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Thus, the gender of a noun appears to play a fundamental role in the macrostructure of a noun lemma. Finally, the study of the processes which are intuitively applied by the speakers to integrate foreign words will be a useful source of stimulation for the coinage of neologisms. Keywords: class; dictionary; loanword; gender; ...

  3. Compiling Dictionaries

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Information Technology

    This method results in a classified word list that can be efficiently ... standardized list of domains to classify multiple dictionaries opens up possibilities for cross-lin- .... part of speech, noun class, the plural form of each noun, and a simple gloss. ... But these mental links tend to cluster around a ... group, duet, trio, ensemble.

  4. Conceptual plural information is used to guide early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Patson, Nikole D; Ferreira, Fernanda

    2009-05-01

    In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases (the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions (the lovers), and numerically quantified noun phrases (the two lovers). We found no evidence for garden-path effects when the subject was conjoined (Ferreira & McClure, 1997), but traditional garden-path effects were found with the other plural noun phrases. In addition, we tested plural anaphors that had a plural antecedent present in the discourse. We found that when the antecedent was conjoined, garden-path effects were absent compared to cases in which the antecedent was a plural definite description. Our results indicate that the parser is sensitive to the conceptual representation of a plural constituent. In particular, it appears that a Complex Reference Object (Moxey et al., 2004) automatically activates a reciprocal reading of a reciprocal verb.

  5. Cues, quantification, and agreement in language comprehension.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tanner, Darren; Bulkes, Nyssa Z

    2015-12-01

    We investigated factors that affect the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in English, using quantification as a window into the relationship between morphosyntactic processes in language production and comprehension. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical verbs, in which the plurality of the subject noun phrase was either doubly marked (via overt plural quantification and morphological marking on the noun) or singly marked (via only plural morphology on the noun). Both acceptability judgments and the ERP data showed heightened sensitivity to agreement violations when quantification provided an additional cue to the grammatical number of the subject noun phrase, over and above plural morphology. This is consistent with models of grammatical comprehension that emphasize feature prediction in tandem with cue-based memory retrieval. Our results additionally contrast with those of prior studies that showed no effects of plural quantification on agreement in language production. These findings therefore highlight some nontrivial divergences in the cues and mechanisms supporting morphosyntactic processing in language production and comprehension.

  6. Lady Liberty and Godfather Death as candidates for linguistic relativity? Scrutinizing the gender congruency effect on personified allegories with explicit and implicit measures.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard; Klauer, Karl Christoph

    2016-01-01

    Linguistic relativity--the idea that language affects thought by way of its grammatical categorizations--has been controversially debated for decades. One of the contested cases is the grammatical gender of nouns, which is claimed to affect how their referents are conceptualized (i.e., as rather female or male in congruence with the grammatical gender of the noun), especially when used allegorically. But is this association strong enough to be detected in implicit measures, and, if so, can we disentangle effects of grammatical gender and allegorical association? Three experiments with native speakers of German tackled these questions. They revealed a gender congruency effect on allegorically used nouns, but this effect was stronger with an explicit measure (assignment of biological sex) than with an implicit measure (Extrinsic Affective Simon Task) and disappeared in the implicit measure when grammatical gender and allegorical associations were set into contrast. Taken together, these findings indicate that the observed congruency effect was driven by the association of nouns with personifications rather than by their grammatical gender. In conclusion, we also discuss implications of these findings for linguistic relativity.

  7. Social Networking Sites (SNSs- Shifting Paradigm of English Language Usage

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Hetal K. Kachhia

    2014-06-01

    Full Text Available English is the globally accepted language in various nations and professions in different varieties, but the English that has acquired a wider spectrum than all these Englishes is the English used in Social Networking Sites which has changed the scenario of English language usage due to the ease in its accessibility and the kind of flexibility of language usage. The English used in Social Networking Sites like Facebook and Twitter has changed the linguistic behaviour of the people by producing a number of acronyms like BFF, FB etc, creating new verb forms like ‘to tweet’ or nouns like ‘tweeple’ or producing many compound nouns such as ‘netiquette’, changing the meaning of traditional verbs and nouns by introducing new meanings to them, e.g. the word ‘friend’ is used to refer “someone to an online list of acquaintances”, and by making use of prefixes like ‘un’ for the purpose of conveying the meaning of negation as in ‘unlike a comment/update’ by ignoring its original prefix ‘dis’ for referring the antonym of ‘like’. By emphasizing on the aim of communication, grammar and vocabulary are put on the peripheral value in Social Networking Sites. Therefore, the focal point of this paper is to study the changes in the linguistic behaviour of the people caused by the SNSs.

  8. CONFUSION IN SIMPLE STATE / YALIN DURUM KARMAŞASI

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kerime ÜSTÜNOVA

    2007-05-01

    Full Text Available The simple state which is shown with zero form unit in Turkish is a type of state incorporating language units that are at position of subject. Therefore only the language units that assume "noun” and “pronoun” functions are able to stay in simple state. Even if they are of noun origin, because adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and exclamations can not enter into noun state inflection, they do not show the characteristic of simple state. However the language units having assumed the function of a noun may only enter into simple state inflection if they undertake the function of indicating the work, event, rendering and one who performs the action, establishing a connection with the verb.

  9. Concord, Convergence and Accommodation in Bilingual Children

    Science.gov (United States)

    Radford, Andrew; Kupisch, Tanja; Koppe, Regina; Azzaro, Gabriele

    2007-01-01

    This paper examines the syntax of "GENDER CONCORD" in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not,…

  10. Case Grammar in Philippine Languages. Preliminary Draft.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stevens, Alan M.

    This paper presents evidence from Philippine languages which suggests a number of modifications in the theory of case grammar. Philippine languages and adjacent related languages mark the case relationship between the verb and one noun phrase in the sentence by a particle on the noun phrase and an affix on the verb, a phenomenon which in recent…

  11. A Report Generator Volume 2

    Science.gov (United States)

    1988-01-01

    her Nicholle) ( korsakoffs (proper-noun singlp neuter) korsakoffs korekoffs) (huntingtons (proper-noun sing3p neuter) huntingtons huntingtons...hemisphere)) (sub-class (value gerstmann- syndrome 1-constructional-dyspraxia reading-coup aphasia)) (type (value lobe)) (dda (value (location...class)) (dda (value (function damage memory) (location brain))) (importance (value 10)) (damage (value 8))) ( korsakoffs (super-class (value stm)) (sub

  12. Successful Written Subject-Verb Agreement: An Online Analysis of the Procedure Used by Students in Grades 3, 5 and 12

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alamargot, Denis; Flouret, Lisa; Larocque, Denis; Caporossi, Gilles; Pontart, Virginie; Paduraru, Carmen; Morisset, Pauline; Fayol, Michel

    2015-01-01

    This study was designed to (1) investigate the procedure responsible for successful written subject-verb agreement, and (2) describe how it develops across grades. Students in Grades 3, 5 and 12 were asked to read noun-noun-verb sentences aloud (e.g., "Le chien des voisins mange" ["The dog of the neighbors eats"]) and write out…

  13. An Object-Oriented Approach to the Development of Computer-Assisted Instructional Material Using Hypertext

    Science.gov (United States)

    1988-12-01

    350-353). In this encapsulated manner, there exists a bond between an object, its data types, and the operations which act on or are exported by the...whose subject is a single concept-relationship pair. The subject name is a noun or noun phrase, e.g. "books." The module’s callable components are

  14. Event-related potentials to event-related words: grammatical class and semantic attributes in the representation of knowledge.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Barber, Horacio A; Kousta, Stavroula-Thaleia; Otten, Leun J; Vigliocco, Gabriella

    2010-05-21

    A number of recent studies have provided contradictory evidence on the question of whether grammatical class plays a role in the neural representation of lexical knowledge. Most of the previous studies comparing the processing of nouns and verbs, however, confounded word meaning and grammatical class by comparing verbs referring to actions with nouns referring to objects. Here, we recorded electrical brain activity from native Italian speakers reading single words all referring to events (e.g., corsa [the run]; correre [to run]), thus avoiding confounding nouns and verbs with objects and actions. We manipulated grammatical class (noun versus verb) as well as semantic attributes (motor versus sensory events). Activity between 300 and 450ms was more negative for nouns than verbs, and for sensory than motor words, over posterior scalp sites. These grammatical class and semantic effects were not dissociable in terms of latency, duration, or scalp distribution. In a later time window (450-110ms) and at frontal regions, grammatical class and semantic effects interacted; motor verbs were more positive than the other three word categories. We suggest that the lack of a temporal and topographical dissociation between grammatical class and semantic effects in the time range of the N400 component is compatible with an account in which both effects reflect the same underlying process related to meaning retrieval, and we link the later effect with working memory operations associated to the experimental task. Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  15. Is conversion a syntactic or a lexical process of word formation?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alexandra Soares Rodrigues

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available Conversion is sometimes described as a syntactic phenomenon by which a lexical item changes its lexical category according to the syntactic environment where it is inserted. This syntactic-ordered approach comes from theoretical fields that conceive the lexicon as the domain of irregularity, whilst regular patterns are treated in syntax (Chomsky 1995. However, Portuguese converted deverbal nouns (remendo ‘event of mending’, curte ‘event of having fun’, trinca ‘event of biting’ manifest a structural behaviour that permits us to situate their formation in the lexicon instead of in the syntax. According to the theoretical allusion we made above, this would characterise converted deverbal nouns as lacking a regular pattern. However, what we mean is that the lexicon is not the field of irregularity. Apart from the irregular material that must be stored in long term memory as to be used by speakers, such as inherited lexemes (e.g. rato ‘mouse’, cão ‘dog’, rir ‘to laugh’, verde ‘green’, etc., the lexicon is the domain of word formation, which is constraint-based (Rodrigues 2008, 2009. This means the word formation part of the lexicon is constrained by regular patterns that are neither directional in principle, nor syntactic in nature. We follow Jackendoff (2002 conception on the lexicon, conceiving it an interface of syntax, phonology and semantics. Converted deverbal nouns formation seems to agree with this conception, since it depends on phonological, semantic and syntactical constraints (Rodrigues 2004, 2009. Portuguese verb-into-noun conversion is not a simple case of syntactic environment. This is specially visible when we confront this lexical conversion with a purely syntactic type of nominalisation (Kerleroux 1996, such as the one that occurs in O estudar matemática traz-me vantagens. ‘Studying maths brings me advantages’ or O remendar roupa é um recurso nesta época. ‘Mending cloths is a good resource

  16. Of Substance: The Nature of Language Effects on Entity Construal

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Peggy; Dunham, Yarrow; Carey, Susan

    2009-01-01

    Shown an entity (e.g., a plastic whisk) labeled by a novel noun in neutral syntax, speakers of Japanese, a classifier language, are more likely to assume the noun refers to the substance (plastic) than are speakers of English, a count/mass language, who are instead more likely to assume it refers to the object kind [whisk; Imai, M., & Gentner, D.…

  17. Treatment of Aphasia Combining Neuromodulation and Behavioral Intervention: Taking an Impairment and Functional Approach

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Elizabeth E. Galletta

    2014-04-01

    Baseline measures of naming nouns and verbs in single words, and sentences, were obtained. While there was no improvement in production of nouns or verbs in single words or sentence production after sham tDCS, and no improvement of noun production after anodal tDCS and speech-language treatment, production of verbs in sentences improved after a 10-session treatment block of anodal tDCS and behavioral therapy. Conclusion Administering a behavioral treatment that is impairment-based as well as functionally-based in conjunction with tDCS is both feasible and promising. Anodal tDCS in conjunction with behavioral intervention is a treatment approach that warrants continued investigation. The results will be discussed in relation to the tDCS and aphasia literature.

  18. The Interface of Syntax with Pragmatics and Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Terzi, Arhonto; Marinis, Theodoros; Francis, Kostantinos

    2016-08-01

    In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with ASD fell behind typically developing children in comprehending and producing simple clitics and producing noun phrases in focus structures. The two groups performed similarly in comprehending and producing clitics in clitic left dislocation and in producing noun phrases in non-focus structures. We argue that children with ASD have difficulties at the interface of (morpho)syntax with pragmatics and prosody, namely, distinguishing a discourse prominent element, and considering intonation relevant for a particular interpretation that excludes clitics.

  19. Novel VN/C nanocomposites as methanol-tolerant oxygen reduction electrocatalyst in alkaline electrolyte

    OpenAIRE

    K. Huang; K. Bi; C. Liang; S. Lin; R. Zhang; W. J. Wang; H. L. Tang; M. Lei

    2015-01-01

    A novel VN/C nanostructure consisting of VN nanoparticles and graphite-dominant carbon layers is synthesized by nitridation of V2O5 using melamine as reductant under inert atmosphere. High crystalline VN nanoparticles are observed to be uniformly distributed in carbon layers with an average size of ca13.45?nm. Moreover, the electrocatalytic performance of VN/C towards oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in alkaline electrolyte is fascinating. The results show that VN/C has a considerable ORR acti...

  20. Neuroanatomical correlates of encoding in episodic memory: levels of processing effect.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kapur, S; Craik, F I; Tulving, E; Wilson, A A; Houle, S; Brown, G M

    1994-03-15

    Cognitive studies of memory processes demonstrate that memory for stimuli is a function of how they are encoded; stimuli processed semantically are better remembered than those processed in a perceptual or shallow fashion. This study investigates the neural correlates of this cognitive phenomenon. Twelve subjects performed two different cognitive tasks on a series of visually presented nouns. In one task, subjects detected the presence or absence of the letter a; in the other, subjects categorized each noun as living or nonliving. Positron emission tomography (PET) scans using 15O-labeled water were obtained during both tasks. Subjects showed substantially better recognition memory for nouns seen in the living/nonliving task, compared to nouns seen in the a-checking task. Comparison of the PET images between the two cognitive tasks revealed a significant activation in the left inferior prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's areas 45, 46, 47, and 10) in the semantic task as compared to the perceptual task. We propose that memory processes are subserved by a wide neurocognitive network and that encoding processes involve preferential activation of the structures in the left inferior prefrontal cortex.

  1. Gauging the Impact of Gender Grammaticization in Different Languages: Application of a Linguistic-Visual Paradigm

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sato, Sayaka; Gygax, Pascal M.; Gabriel, Ute

    2016-01-01

    Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determiners (French: les [generic] vs. German: die [morphologically feminine]). Bilingual speakers of French and German had to judge whether a pair of facial images representing two men or a man and a woman could represent a gender stereotypical role noun prime (e.g., nurses). The prime was presented in the masculine plural form with or without a plural determiner. Results indicated that the overt grammaticization of the male gender in the masculine form dominated the representation of the role nouns (though interpretable as generic). However, the effect of the determiner was not found, indicating that only gender information associated to a human reference role noun had impacted readers’ representations. The results, discussed in the framework of the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, demonstrated that linguistic-visual paradigms are well-suited to gauge the impact of both stereotype information and grammaticization when processing role nouns. PMID:26941663

  2. 中国人日本語学習者によく見られるアクセントの問題点

    OpenAIRE

    尤, 東旭; YOU, Dongxu

    2002-01-01

    When Chinese study Japanese, they have various problems in the accent because their native language influences. To evaluate this problem a seven items questionnaire was applied to Chinese students. The contents of this guestionnaire compared how the accent of articles, verbs and compound nouns differentiates. The possible causes of these accent differences were evaluated and possible teaching methods are proposed.

  3. The Agreement between Conjoined Subjects and Predicate: Croatian Church Slavonic Corpus Analysis

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ana Kovačević

    2017-08-01

    Full Text Available The abundance of grammatical categories in Slavonic and their overlap are particularly evident in the agreement between conjoined subjects and predicate. When they are accompanied by agreement conditions, such as word order and animacy in Slavic languages, different agreement patterns, dependent also on concrete context and speaker, are to be expected. In this paper the study of the agreement between conjoined subjects and predicate is based on an analysis of the medieval Glagolitic Croatian Church Slavonic corpus. Number, gender, and person are grammatical categories, i. e., features of conjoined noun phrases and predicate agreement. The analysis includes noun phrases conjoined by coordinating and some non-coordinating conjunctions as well as noun phrases conjoined by a gradational ‛not only [. . .] but also’ structure. Comitative and reciprocal noun phrases are included as well. The research in the given corpus shows that the conjoined noun phrases with predicate agreement can be syntactic (predicate showing agreement with one conjunct or semantic (predicate showing agreement with all conjuncts. Syntactic agreement appears as the so-called contact agreement (predicate showing agreement with the closest conjunct and as distant agreement (predicate showing agreement with the most distant conjunct. Semantic agreement is applied mostly in accordance with G. G. Corbett’s resolution rules for Slavic languages. However, the analysis shows that some resolution rules for number should be revised due to dual number. Although absent from the majority of contemporary Slavic languages, it is precisely in historical Slavic idioms that dual number reveals its identity, highlighted in agreement study as well.

  4. The role of the left anterior temporal lobe in semantic composition vs. semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Westerlund, Masha; Pylkkänen, Liina

    2014-05-01

    The left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) is robustly implicated in semantic processing by a growing body of literature. However, these results have emerged from two distinct bodies of work, addressing two different processing levels. On the one hand, the LATL has been characterized as a 'semantic hub׳ that binds features of concepts across a distributed network, based on results from semantic dementia and hemodynamic findings on the categorization of specific compared to basic exemplars. On the other, the LATL has been implicated in combinatorial operations in language, as shown by increased activity in this region associated with the processing of sentences and of basic phrases. The present work aimed to reconcile these two literatures by independently manipulating combination and concept specificity within a minimal MEG paradigm. Participants viewed simple nouns that denoted either low specificity (fish) or high specificity categories (trout) presented in either combinatorial (spotted fish/trout) or non-combinatorial contexts (xhsl fish/trout). By combining these paradigms from the two literatures, we directly compared the engagement of the LATL in semantic memory vs. semantic composition. Our results indicate that although noun specificity subtly modulates the LATL activity elicited by single nouns, it most robustly affects the size of the composition effect when these nouns are adjectivally modified, with low specificity nouns eliciting a much larger effect. We conclude that these findings are compatible with an account in which the specificity and composition effects arise from a shared mechanism of meaning specification. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  5. Internal mechanisms underlying anticipatory language processing: Evidence from event-related-potentials and neural oscillations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Xiaoqing; Zhang, Yuping; Xia, Jinyan; Swaab, Tamara Y

    2017-07-28

    Although numerous studies have demonstrated that the language processing system can predict upcoming content during comprehension, there is still no clear picture of the anticipatory stage of predictive processing. This electroencephalograph study examined the cognitive and neural oscillatory mechanisms underlying anticipatory processing during language comprehension, and the consequences of this prediction for bottom-up processing of predicted/unpredicted content. Participants read Mandarin Chinese sentences that were either strongly or weakly constraining and that contained critical nouns that were congruent or incongruent with the sentence contexts. We examined the effects of semantic predictability on anticipatory processing prior to the onset of the critical nouns and on integration of the critical nouns. The results revealed that, at the integration stage, the strong-constraint condition (compared to the weak-constraint condition) elicited a reduced N400 and reduced theta activity (4-7Hz) for the congruent nouns, but induced beta (13-18Hz) and theta (4-7Hz) power decreases for the incongruent nouns, indicating benefits of confirmed predictions and potential costs of disconfirmed predictions. More importantly, at the anticipatory stage, the strongly constraining context elicited an enhanced sustained anterior negativity and beta power decrease (19-25Hz), which indicates that strong prediction places a higher processing load on the anticipatory stage of processing. The differences (in the ease of processing and the underlying neural oscillatory activities) between anticipatory and integration stages of lexical processing were discussed with regard to predictive processing models. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  6. Multisensory integration: the case of a time window of gesture-speech integration.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Obermeier, Christian; Gunter, Thomas C

    2015-02-01

    This experiment investigates the integration of gesture and speech from a multisensory perspective. In a disambiguation paradigm, participants were presented with short videos of an actress uttering sentences like "She was impressed by the BALL, because the GAME/DANCE...." The ambiguous noun (BALL) was accompanied by an iconic gesture fragment containing information to disambiguate the noun toward its dominant or subordinate meaning. We used four different temporal alignments between noun and gesture fragment: the identification point (IP) of the noun was either prior to (+120 msec), synchronous with (0 msec), or lagging behind the end of the gesture fragment (-200 and -600 msec). ERPs triggered to the IP of the noun showed significant differences for the integration of dominant and subordinate gesture fragments in the -200, 0, and +120 msec conditions. The outcome of this integration was revealed at the target words. These data suggest a time window for direct semantic gesture-speech integration ranging from at least -200 up to +120 msec. Although the -600 msec condition did not show any signs of direct integration at the homonym, significant disambiguation was found at the target word. An explorative analysis suggested that gesture information was directly integrated at the verb, indicating that there are multiple positions in a sentence where direct gesture-speech integration takes place. Ultimately, this would implicate that in natural communication, where a gesture lasts for some time, several aspects of that gesture will have their specific and possibly distinct impact on different positions in an utterance.

  7. tDCS stimulation segregates words in the brain: evidence from aphasia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Valentina eFiori

    2013-06-01

    Full Text Available A number of studies have already shown that modulating cortical activity by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS improves noun or verb naming in aphasic patients. However, it is not yet clear whether these effects are equally obtained through stimulation over the frontal or the temporal regions. In the present study, the same group of aphasic subjects participated in two randomized double-blind experiments involving two intensive language treatments for their noun and verb retrieval difficulties. During each training, each subject was treated with tDCS (20 min., 1mA over the left hemisphere in three different conditions: anodic tDCS over the temporal areas, anodic tDCS over the frontal areas and sham stimulation, while they performed a noun and an action naming tasks. Each experimental condition was run in five consecutive daily sessions over three weeks with 6 days of intersession interval. The order of administration of the two language trainings was randomly assigned to all patients. Overall, with respect to the other two conditions, results showed a significant greater improvement in noun naming after stimulation over the temporal region, while verb naming recovered significantly better after stimulation of the frontal region. These improvements persisted at one month after the end of each treatment suggesting a long-term effect on recovery of the patients’ noun and verb difficulties. These data clearly suggest that the mechanisms of recovery for naming can be segregated coupling tDCS with an intensive language training.

  8. Lexikalische Typologie – Dänisch und Französisch als endo- bzw. exozentrische Sprachen

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Michael Herslund

    2007-05-01

    Full Text Available The article discusses one of the lesser studied aspects of linguistic typology, the lexicon. Taking as its point of departure the theory of lexicalisation of Leonard Talmy (1985, i.e. the different combinations of (presumably universal semantic components different (types of languages choose to code in their simple lexical roots, the article applies this approach to French and Danish – typology is not just a question of comparing so-called exotic languages. It appears that just as verb roots in Germanic, such as Danish, and Romance languages, such as French, differ fundamentally in their lexicalisation patterns, so do their nouns. And more importantly, the two word classes exhibit complementary lexicalisation patterns: in Germanic languages the verbs are rather concrete – what is lexicalised is the external, visible aspect of the situation described by the verb, the manner – whereas the Romance verbs are abstract, describing i.e. the idea of a movement and its direction; in nouns, however, the situation is the exact opposite: the Germanic nouns are rather abstract, covering a wide range of phenomena having a certain function in common, but the Romance nouns are concrete, describing the external, visible aspect of things, their form rather than their function. This finding permits the hypothesis of two fundamental linguistic types: the endocentric languages (Germanic, where the concrete information is found in the centre of the clause, the verb, and the exocentric languages (Romance, where this information is found outside the centre, in the nouns.

  9. K funkčnímu využití verbálních substantiv ve staré a střední češtině

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Pergler, Jiří

    2017-01-01

    Roč. 9, č. 2 (2017), s. 56-70 ISSN 1803-876X R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA15-00987S Institutional support: RVO:68378092 Keywords : verbal noun * word formation * Old Czech * Middle Czech * action noun Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Linguistics https://www.upol.cz/fileadmin/userdata/FF/katedry/kbh/veda_a_vyzkum/bohemica_olomucensia/BO_2017_2_final.pdf

  10. The processing of actions and action-words in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Papeo, Liuba; Cecchetto, Cinzia; Mazzon, Giulia; Granello, Giulia; Cattaruzza, Tatiana; Verriello, Lorenzo; Eleopra, Roberto; Rumiati, Raffaella I

    2015-03-01

    Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with prime consequences on the motor function and concomitant cognitive changes, most frequently in the domain of executive functions. Moreover, poorer performance with action-verbs versus object-nouns has been reported in ALS patients, raising the hypothesis that the motor dysfunction deteriorates the semantic representation of actions. Using action-verbs and manipulable-object nouns sharing semantic relationship with the same motor representations, the verb-noun difference was assessed in a group of 21 ALS-patients with severely impaired motor behavior, and compared with a normal sample's performance. ALS-group performed better on nouns than verbs, both in production (action and object naming) and comprehension (word-picture matching). This observation implies that the interpretation of the verb-noun difference in ALS cannot be accounted by the relatedness of verbs to motor representations, but has to consider the role of other semantic and/or morpho-phonological dimensions that distinctively define the two grammatical classes. Moreover, this difference in the ALS-group was not greater than the noun-verb difference in the normal sample. The mental representation of actions also involves an executive-control component to organize, in logical/temporal order, the individual motor events (or sub-goals) that form a purposeful action. We assessed this ability with action sequencing tasks, requiring participants to re-construct a purposeful action from the scrambled presentation of its constitutive motor events, shown in the form of photographs or short sentences. In those tasks, ALS-group's performance was significantly poorer than controls'. Thus, the executive dysfunction manifested in the sequencing deficit -but not the selective verb deficit- appears as a consistent feature of the cognitive profile associated with ALS. We suggest that ALS can offer a valuable model to study the relationship between

  11. Keeping it simple: Studying grammatical encoding with lexically-reduced item sets

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alma eVeenstra

    2014-07-01

    Full Text Available Compared to the large body of work on lexical access, little research has been done on grammatical encoding in language production. An exception is the generation of subject-verb agreement. Here, two key findings have been reported: (1 Speakers make more agreement errors when the head and local noun of a phrase mismatch in number than when they match (e.g., the key to the cabinet(s; and (2 this attraction effect is asymmetric, with stronger attraction for singular than for plural head nouns. Although these findings are robust, the cognitive processes leading to agreement errors and their significance for the generation of correct agreement are not fully understood. We propose that future studies of agreement, and grammatical encoding in general, may benefit from using paradigms that tightly control the variability of the lexical content of the material.We report two experiments illustrating this approach. In both of them, the experimental items featured combinations of four nouns, four color adjectives, and two prepositions. In Experiment 1, native speakers of Dutch described pictures in sentences such as the circle next to the stars is blue. In Experiment 2, they carried out a forced-choice task, where they read subject noun phrases (e.g., the circle next to the stars and selected the correct verb-phrase (is blue or are blue with a button press. Both experiments showed an attraction effect, with more errors after subject phrases with mismatching, compared to matching head and local nouns. This effect was stronger for singular than plural heads, replicating the attraction asymmetry. In contrast, the response times recorded in Experiment 2 showed similar attraction effects for singular and plural head nouns. These results demonstrate that critical agreement phenomena can be elicited reliably in lexically-reduced contexts. We discuss the theoretical implications of the findings and the potential and limitations of studies using lexically simple

  12. Novel VN/C nanocomposites as methanol-tolerant oxygen reduction electrocatalyst in alkaline electrolyte

    Science.gov (United States)

    Huang, K.; Bi, K.; Liang, C.; Lin, S.; Zhang, R.; Wang, W. J.; Tang, H. L.; Lei, M.

    2015-06-01

    A novel VN/C nanostructure consisting of VN nanoparticles and graphite-dominant carbon layers is synthesized by nitridation of V2O5 using melamine as reductant under inert atmosphere. High crystalline VN nanoparticles are observed to be uniformly distributed in carbon layers with an average size of ca13.45 nm. Moreover, the electrocatalytic performance of VN/C towards oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in alkaline electrolyte is fascinating. The results show that VN/C has a considerable ORR activity, including a 75 percent value of the diffusion-limited current density and a 0.11 V smaller value about the onset potential with respect to Pt/C catalyst. Moreover, the excellent methanol-tolerance performance of VN/C has also been verified with 3 M methanol. Combined with the competitive prices, this VN/C nanocomposite can serve as an appropriate non-precious methanol-tolerant ORR catalyst for alkaline fuel cells.

  13. Un cas particulier de la relation partie-tout: les compléments adnominaux en à avec et sans article défini anaphorique

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vassil Mostrov

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available This paper deals with the syntax and the interpretation of French noun phrases of the type N à N where a part-whole relationship is involved. We focus on the differences arising from the presence (un verre au pied doré/cassé or absence of a determiner (un verre à pied [doré] before the N denoting the part. We argue that both the adnominal complements à N (Mod and à LE N Mod function as adjectival constituents that qualify the noun denoting the whole, but the actualization of the part noun can be linguistically effective only in cases where the definite determiner, A-bound according to Guéron’s (1985, 2005 hypothesis, is present. The discussion considers the consequences of our analysis.

  14. Identificação e classificação de entidades mencionadas em galego

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marcos Garcia

    2012-01-01

    Full Text Available Automatic named entity recognition and classification are important tasks for many natural language processing applications, such as machine translation, information extraction or question-answering systems. This paper describes the adaptation and implementation of several open-source systems for the identification and classification of the following named entities in Galician: (i dates, (ii numerals, (iii quantities and (iv proper nouns. Analysis of the first three types of named entities is performed with the software FreeLing, using finite-state automata. For the proper noun recognition task, two methods were compared: (i finite-state automata and (ii machine learning models. Finally, the semantic classification of proper nouns was carried out with a rulebased system that takes advantage of automatically obtained resources. This paper shows some evaluations for each tool, all available under free licenses.

  15. TEXT DEIXIS IN NARRATIVE SEQUENCES

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Josep Rivera

    2007-06-01

    Full Text Available This study looks at demonstrative descriptions, regarding them as text-deictic procedures which contribute to weave discourse reference. Text deixis is thought of as a metaphorical referential device which maps the ground of utterance onto the text itself. Demonstrative expressions with textual antecedent-triggers, considered as the most important text-deictic units, are identified in a narrative corpus consisting of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and its translation into Catalan. Some linguistic and discourse variables related to DemNPs are analysed to characterise adequately text deixis. It is shown that this referential device is usually combined with abstract nouns, thus categorising and encapsulating (non-nominal complex discourse entities as nouns, while performing a referential cohesive function by means of the text deixis + general noun type of lexical cohesion.

  16. Proactive interference effects on sentence production

    OpenAIRE

    FERREIRA, VICTOR S.; FIRATO, CARLA E.

    2002-01-01

    Proactive interference refers to recall difficulties caused by prior similar memory-related processing. Information-processing approaches to sentence production predict that retrievability affects sentence form: Speakers may word sentences so that material that is difficult to retrieve is spoken later. In this experiment, speakers produced sentence structures that could include an optional that, thereby delaying the mention of a subsequent noun phrase. This subsequent noun phrase was either (...

  17. Limited geographic distribution of the novel cyclovirus CyCV-VN.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Le, Van Tan; de Jong, Menno D; Nguyen, Van Kinh; Nguyen, Vu Trung; Taylor, Walter; Wertheim, Heiman F L; van der Ende, Arie; van der Hoek, Lia; Canuti, Marta; Crusat, Martin; Sona, Soeng; Nguyen, Hanh Uyen; Giri, Abhishek; Nguyen, Thi Thuy Chinh Bkrong; Ho, Dang Trung Nghia; Farrar, Jeremy; Bryant, Juliet E; Tran, Tinh Hien; Nguyen, Van Vinh Chau; van Doorn, H Rogier

    2014-02-05

    A novel cyclovirus, CyCV-VN, was recently identified in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from patients with central nervous system (CNS) infections in central and southern Vietnam. To explore the geographic distribution of this novel virus, more than 600 CSF specimens from patients with suspected CNS infections in northern Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal and The Netherlands were screened for the presence of CyCV-VN but all were negative. Sequence comparison and phylogenetic analysis between CyCV-VN and another novel cyclovirus recently identified in CSF from Malawian patients indicated that these represent distinct cycloviral species, albeit phylogenetically closely related. The data suggest that CyCV-VN has a limited geographic distribution within southern and central Vietnam. Further research is needed to determine the global distribution and diversity of cycloviruses and importantly their possible association with human disease.

  18. Speech parts as Poisson processes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Badalamenti, A F

    2001-09-01

    This paper presents evidence that six of the seven parts of speech occur in written text as Poisson processes, simple or recurring. The six major parts are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, with the interjection occurring too infrequently to support a model. The data consist of more than the first 5000 words of works by four major authors coded to label the parts of speech, as well as periods (sentence terminators). Sentence length is measured via the period and found to be normally distributed with no stochastic model identified for its occurrence. The models for all six speech parts but the noun significantly distinguish some pairs of authors and likewise for the joint use of all words types. Any one author is significantly distinguished from any other by at least one word type and sentence length very significantly distinguishes each from all others. The variety of word type use, measured by Shannon entropy, builds to about 90% of its maximum possible value. The rate constants for nouns are close to the fractions of maximum entropy achieved. This finding together with the stochastic models and the relations among them suggest that the noun may be a primitive organizer of written text.

  19. Gauging the impact of gender grammaticization in different languages: Application of a linguistic-visual paradigm

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sayaka eSato

    2016-02-01

    Full Text Available Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determiners (French: les [generic] vs. German: die [morphologically feminine]. Bilingual speakers of French and German had to judge whether a pair of facial images representing two men or a man and a woman could represent a gender stereotypical role noun prime (e.g., nurses. The prime was presented in the masculine plural form with or without a plural determiner. Results indicated that the overt grammaticization of the male gender in the masculine form dominated the representation of the role nouns (though interpretable as generic. However, the effect of the determiner was not found, indicating that only gender information associated to a human reference role noun had impacted readers’ representations. The results, discussed in the framework of the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, demonstrated that linguistic-visual paradigms are well-suited to gauge the impact of both stereotype information and grammaticization when processing role nouns.Keywords: gender representation, gender stereotypes, grammatical gender, generic masculine, thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, bilingualism

  20. Personality differences in mental imagery and the effects on verbal memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    McDougall, Siné; Pfeifer, Gaby

    2012-11-01

    This study examined the effects of extraversion and neuroticism on participants' reported vividness of visual imagery and on their memory performance for concrete and abstract nouns. Groups of extraverts (n = 15) and introverts (n = 15) were selected from a larger original sample and asked to remember a series of concrete and abstract nouns, including a set of lexically ambiguous concrete homonyms (e.g., earth = 1. planet, 2. soil). Extraverts reported more vivid imagery than introverts but this did not translate into better recall for extraverts, even for concrete stimuli. Recall was best for unambiguous concrete nouns, followed by concrete homonyms, then abstract nouns. While initial analyses suggested that there was an interaction between extraversion and the type of word presented, later analyses revealed that neuroticism was the main driver in differences in recall between different word types. While differences in recall were best explained by context availability theory (Schwanenflugel, 1991) rather than dual coding theory (Paivio, 1991), questions remain about the power of either theory to explain the role of individual differences in personality on recall, particularly given that imagery vividness effects were related to extraversion while differences in recall were related to neuroticism. The implications of these findings for future research and theoretical development are discussed. ©2012 The British Psychological Society.

  1. Category specific spatial dissociations of parallel processes underlying visual naming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Conner, Christopher R; Chen, Gang; Pieters, Thomas A; Tandon, Nitin

    2014-10-01

    The constituent elements and dynamics of the networks responsible for word production are a central issue to understanding human language. Of particular interest is their dependency on lexical category, particularly the possible segregation of nouns and verbs into separate processing streams. We applied a novel mixed-effects, multilevel analysis to electrocorticographic data collected from 19 patients (1942 electrodes) to examine the activity of broadly disseminated cortical networks during the retrieval of distinct lexical categories. This approach was designed to overcome the issues of sparse sampling and individual variability inherent to invasive electrophysiology. Both noun and verb generation evoked overlapping, yet distinct nonhierarchical processes favoring ventral and dorsal visual streams, respectively. Notable differences in activity patterns were noted in Broca's area and superior lateral temporo-occipital regions (verb > noun) and in parahippocampal and fusiform cortices (noun > verb). Comparisons with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results yielded a strong correlation of blood oxygen level-dependent signal and gamma power and an independent estimate of group size needed for fMRI studies of cognition. Our findings imply parallel, lexical category-specific processes and reconcile discrepancies between lesional and functional imaging studies. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  2. Bodily Effort Enhances Learning and Metacognition: Investigating the Relation Between Physical Effort and Cognition Using Dual-Process Models of Embodiment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Skulmowski, Alexander; Rey, Günter Daniel

    2017-01-01

    Recent embodiment research revealed that cognitive processes can be influenced by bodily cues. Some of these cues were found to elicit disparate effects on cognition. For instance, weight sensations can inhibit problem-solving performance, but were shown to increase judgments regarding recall probability (judgments of learning; JOLs) in memory tasks. We investigated the effects of physical effort on learning and metacognition by conducting two studies in which we varied whether a backpack was worn or not while 20 nouns were to be learned. Participants entered a JOL for each word and completed a recall test. Experiment 1 ( N = 18) revealed that exerting physical effort by wearing a backpack led to higher JOLs for easy nouns, without a notable effect on difficult nouns. Participants who wore a backpack reached higher recall scores. Therefore, physical effort may act as a form of desirable difficulty during learning. In Experiment 2 ( N = 30), the influence of physical effort on JOL s and learning disappeared when more difficult nouns were to be learned, implying that a high cognitive load may diminish bodily effects. These findings suggest that physical effort mainly influences superficial modes of thought and raise doubts concerning the explanatory power of metaphor-centered accounts of embodiment for higher-level cognition.

  3. Normative data for Chinese compound remote associate problems.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wu, Ching-Lin; Chen, Hsueh-Chih

    2017-12-01

    The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a well-known measure of creativity, with each item on the RAT is composed of three unrelated stimulus words. The participant's task is to find an answer in the form of a word that could combine with each of the stimulus words, thus forming three new actual nouns. Researchers have modified the RAT to develop compound remote associate problems that emphasize combining vocabulary to form compound words. In the field of creativity research for Mandarin speakers, the Chinese RAT has been widely applied for over 10 years. The original RAT, compound remote associate problems, and Chinese RAT have various common advantages, such as being convenient to use and having objective scoring; additionally, the development of items for certain tests is easy and satisfies the requirements of psychological assessments in terms of the quantity of items. Currently, many language editions of the RAT and compound remote associate problems already exist. In particular, the English and Italian versions of these tests already have derived normative data. Because approximately 20% of the world's population are native Mandarin speakers, and because increasing numbers of people are choosing Mandarin as a second language, the need to increase Mandarin-language resources is growing; however, normative data for the Chinese RAT still do not exist. To address this issue, in the present study we developed Chinese compound remote associate problems and analyzed the passing rates by items, problem solving times, and various normative data, using the responses of 253 subjects in three experiments.

  4. On the co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    2009-01-01

    in the noun phrase (section 3); a tentative explanation is given in section 4. The more general point this paper wants to make is that functional modifier categories like CLASSIFYING MODIFIER or QUALIFYING MODIFIER can be characterized in grammatical terms and, furthermore, that important grammatical...... that the remarkable variation in the grammatical properties of this possessive construction directly correlates with the kind of modifier function it has in the noun phrase. It is first shown that lexical possessive modifiers with van ‘of’ (“adnominal possessives” for short) are used to express most of the modifier...... functions recognized in a semantic, five-layered model of the noun phrase (section 2). I will then argue that the values for certain grammatical parameters (here subsumed under the labels MODIFICATION, PREDICATION, REFERENCE) correlate with the kind of modifier function the adnominal possessive has...

  5. Grammatical gender effects on cognition: implications for language learning and language use.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vigliocco, Gabriella; Vinson, David P; Paganelli, Federica; Dworzynski, Katharina

    2005-11-01

    In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level. Copyright (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved.

  6. The Lemmatisation of Nouns in

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    user

    Abstract: Tshivend a is one of the official languages of South Africa, mostly spoken in Limpopo. Province at Vhembe District. From 1994, when the Republic of South Africa became a democratic government, speakers of the Tshivend a language spread to all nine provinces of South Africa. Tshi- vend a has different word ...

  7. Noun Phrase Structure and Movement

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Wood, Johanna; Vikner, Sten

    2011-01-01

    /solch to follow the article. We discuss two possible syntactic derivations, predicate raising (e.g. Corver 1998, Bennis, Corver & den Dikken 1998) and XP movement from an attributive adjective position within the nominal (e.g. Matushansky 2002). The analysis links up with the morphological agreement facts...

  8. Beyond Gender Stereotypes in Language Comprehension: Self Sex-Role Descriptions Affect the Brain’s Potentials Associated with Agreement Processing

    OpenAIRE

    Canal, Paolo; Garnham, Alan; Oakhill, Jane

    2015-01-01

    We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a...

  9. Beyond gender stereotypes in language comprehension: self sex-role descriptions affect the brain's potentials associated with agreement processing

    OpenAIRE

    Paolo eCanal; Paolo eCanal; Alan eGarnham; Jane eOakhill

    2015-01-01

    We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as king or engineer) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P60...

  10. Memory-Based Shallow Parsing

    OpenAIRE

    Sang, Erik F. Tjong Kim

    2002-01-01

    We present memory-based learning approaches to shallow parsing and apply these to five tasks: base noun phrase identification, arbitrary base phrase recognition, clause detection, noun phrase parsing and full parsing. We use feature selection techniques and system combination methods for improving the performance of the memory-based learner. Our approach is evaluated on standard data sets and the results are compared with that of other systems. This reveals that our approach works well for ba...

  11. Mechanical and electrochemical characterization of vanadium nitride (VN) thin films

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Caicedo, J.C., E-mail: Jcesarca@calima.univalle.edu.co [Grupo de Peliculas Delgadas, Departamento de Fisica, Universidad del Valle, Cali (Colombia); Zambrano, G. [Grupo de Peliculas Delgadas, Departamento de Fisica, Universidad del Valle, Cali (Colombia); Aperador, W. [Ingenieria Mecatronica, Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, Bogota (Colombia); Escobar-Alarcon, L.; Camps, E. [Departamento de Fisica, Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares, Apdo. Postal 18-1027, Mexico, DF 11801 (Mexico)

    2011-10-15

    Vanadium nitride (V-N) thin films were grown using a reactive d.c. magnetron sputtering process, from a vanadium target (99.999%) in an Ar/N{sub 2} gas mixture at different deposition bias voltage. Films were deposited onto silicon (1 0 0) and RUS-3 steel substrates at 400 deg. C. Structural, compositional, mechanical and electrochemical characterizations were performed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), elastic forward analysis (EFA), nanoindentation, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and Tafel polarization curves, respectively. X-ray diffraction patterns show the presence of (1 1 1) and (2 0 0) crystallographic orientations associated to the V-N cubic phase. Nanoindentation measurements revealed that when the bias voltage increases from 0 V to -150 V the hardness and elastic modulus are increased from 11 GPa to 20 GPa and from 187 GPa to 221 GPa, respectively. EIS and Tafel curves showed that the corrosion rate of steel, coated with V-N single layer films deposited without bias voltage, diminishes 90% compared to the steel without this coating. On the other hand, when the V-N coating was deposited at the highest d.c. bias voltage (-150 V), the corrosion rate was greater than in the steel coated with zero-voltage (0 V) V-N films. This last result could be attributed to the formation of porosities produced by the ion bombardment during the deposition process.

  12. Mechanical and electrochemical characterization of vanadium nitride (VN) thin films

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Caicedo, J.C.; Zambrano, G.; Aperador, W.; Escobar-Alarcon, L.; Camps, E.

    2011-01-01

    Vanadium nitride (V-N) thin films were grown using a reactive d.c. magnetron sputtering process, from a vanadium target (99.999%) in an Ar/N 2 gas mixture at different deposition bias voltage. Films were deposited onto silicon (1 0 0) and RUS-3 steel substrates at 400 deg. C. Structural, compositional, mechanical and electrochemical characterizations were performed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), elastic forward analysis (EFA), nanoindentation, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and Tafel polarization curves, respectively. X-ray diffraction patterns show the presence of (1 1 1) and (2 0 0) crystallographic orientations associated to the V-N cubic phase. Nanoindentation measurements revealed that when the bias voltage increases from 0 V to -150 V the hardness and elastic modulus are increased from 11 GPa to 20 GPa and from 187 GPa to 221 GPa, respectively. EIS and Tafel curves showed that the corrosion rate of steel, coated with V-N single layer films deposited without bias voltage, diminishes 90% compared to the steel without this coating. On the other hand, when the V-N coating was deposited at the highest d.c. bias voltage (-150 V), the corrosion rate was greater than in the steel coated with zero-voltage (0 V) V-N films. This last result could be attributed to the formation of porosities produced by the ion bombardment during the deposition process.

  13. Gender Agreement Attraction in Russian: Production and Comprehension Evidence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Slioussar, Natalia; Malko, Anton

    2016-01-01

    Agreement attraction errors (such as the number error in the example "The key to the cabinets are rusty") have been the object of many studies in the last 20 years. So far, almost all production experiments and all comprehension experiments looked at binary features (primarily at number in Germanic, Romance, and some other languages, in several cases at gender in Romance languages). Among other things, it was noted that both in production and in comprehension, attraction effects are much stronger for some feature combinations than for the others: they can be observed in the sentences with singular heads and plural dependent nouns (e.g.,"The key to the cabinets…"), but not in the sentences with plural heads and singular dependent nouns (e.g., "The keys to the cabinet…"). Almost all proposed explanations of this asymmetry appeal to feature markedness, but existing findings do not allow teasing different approaches to markedness apart. We report the results of four experiments (one on production and three on comprehension) studying subject-verb gender agreement in Russian, a language with three genders. Firstly, we found attraction effects both in production and in comprehension, but, unlike in the case of number agreement, they were not parallel (in production, feminine gender triggered strongest effects, while neuter triggered weakest effects, while in comprehension, masculine triggered weakest effects). Secondly, in the comprehension experiments attraction was observed for all dependent noun genders, but only for a subset of head noun genders. This goes against the traditional assumption that the features of the dependent noun are crucial for attraction, showing the features of the head are more important. We demonstrate that this approach can be extended to previous findings on attraction and that there exists other evidence for it. In total, these findings let us reconsider the question which properties of features are crucial for agreement attraction in

  14. Proportion of categories of associates and structure of the mental lexicon

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Savić Irena

    2008-01-01

    Full Text Available The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a systematic distinction between associate pairs that constitute categories of lexical relations (e.g. synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms etc. and categories of associate pairs that have no obvious lexical relation. Proportion of categories of associates were estimated on 80 nouns from "Associative Dictionary of Serbian Language" (Piper, Dragićević & Stefanović, 2005, while frequencies of associates were estimated from "Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Serbian Language" (Kostić, Đ., 1999. Categories of associates were divided into two groups: group of categories that included standard lexical relations and group that included idiosyncratic associates. Proportions of categories were analyzed with respect to a frequency of a noun to which associates were generated and b whether it was an abstract or concrete noun. Three measures were used to estimate proportion of categories: a number of associates, b sum frequency of associates and c the average frequency per associate. When estimated with respect to number of associates and sum frequency of associates proportion of categories that included standard lexical relations were negligible (6% and 18%, but they become dominant when estimated with respect to the average frequency per associate. Such an outcome suggests that categories that include standard lexical relations are characterized by small number of associates (due to the fact that they are closed classes with high frequency associates. Distinction between abstract and concrete nouns did not affect number of associates per category, which was not the case when proportions were estimated with respect to sum frequency of associates. Frequency of a noun to which associates were generated has no effect on productivity of associates, nor does it affects sum frequency per category. However, it has significant effect on the average frequency per associate within a given category.

  15. The interaction of morphological and stereotypical gender information in Russian

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alan eGarnham

    2015-11-01

    Full Text Available Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g. that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures, in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines – noun that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb. In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, as available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those.

  16. The cognitive processing of the allomorphy in Serbian

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jovanović Tamara

    2008-01-01

    Full Text Available In this work, we explored cognitive status of suffix allomorphy of the masculine nouns in instrumental singular in Serbian language (eg. mišom-mišem; pužom-pužem. Allomorphy represents distinct variations in form of the morpheme which does not influence it’s function and meaning (cf. Lyons, 1968. Despite it’s frequent appearance in speech and language production, it has rarely been a subject of psycholinguistic explorations. First goal of this research was to determine whether the cognitive processing of allomorphic nouns has it’s specificities and second goal was to create the base for making and testing hypothesis regarding morphological and/or phonological factors that influence suffix alternation in forming of instrumental singular of masculine nouns. We conducted visual lexical decision experiment and applied a questionnaire created for the needs of investigating allomorphy in language production. Results showed that at least two processes influence cognitive processing of masculine nouns in instrumental singular: (a certain morpho-phonological restrictions that influence appearance of the suffix-em, and (b allomorphy - variations in suffix in instrumental singular. In addition, the findings indicate that allomorphy could be the consequence of the tendency to use more frequent suffix (-om, that eases the processing, and blocks the influence of the morpho-phonological restrictions.

  17. Suffixing, prefixing, and the functional order of regularities in meaningful strings

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ramscar Michael

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available The world’s languages tend to exhibit a suffixing preference, adding inflections to the ends of words, rather than the beginning of them. Previous works has suggested that this apparently universal preference arises out of the constraints imposed by general purpose learning mechanisms in the brain, and specifically, the kinds of information structures that facilitate discrimination learning (St Clair, Monaghan, & Ramscar, 2009. Here I show that learning theory predicts that prefixes and suffixes will tend to promote different kinds of learning: prefixes will facilitate the learning of the probabilities that any following elements in a sequence will follow a label, whereas suffixing will promote the abstraction of common dimensions from a set of preceding elements. The results of the artificial language learning experiment support this analysis: When words are learned with consistent prefixes, participants learned the relationship between the prefixes and the noun labels, and the relationship between the noun labels and the objects associated with them, better than when words were learned with consistent suffixes. When words were learned with consistent suffixes, participants treated similarly suffixed nouns as being more similar than nouns learned with consistent prefixes. It appears that while prefixes tend to make items more predictable and to make veridical discriminations easier, suffixes tended to make items cohere more, increasing the similarities between them.

  18. THE ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTICAL INTERFERENCE IN ENGLISH PHRASES IN STUDENTS’ WRITING (A Descriptive Study at the Second Grade Students of SMP 2 Kuta Baro, Aceh Besar

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Salwa Chaira

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available This qualitative-descriptive research attempts to describe Indonesian interference in building English phrases in writing. The research was undertaken to the second year students of SMP 2 Kuta Baro, Aceh Besar. This study aims to verify the Indonesian interference made by students in English phrases. The data were collected through document analysis which then the sample was selected to be analyzed. The sample of this study was twelve narrative texts composed by the students. The finding of data analysis reveals that there are some syntactical interference samples made by them as in scenery roads, voice strange, morning Sunday, water bath, garden flower, and advice future. These are resulted from Indonesian interference because they applied Indonesian structure in building English phrases. In conclusion, the research result shows that the students have lack of grammar knowledge in constructing English phrases. Therefore, they borrow Indonesian structure as a solution for their difficulties. For this reason, the teaching should focus more on how to build English phrases correctly by giving many samples of nounʸ + nounˣ (where nounˣ means head and nounʸ means modifier pattern all well as explaining the rule in English as the target language they are learning. It hopes that they will not transfer the Indonesian pattern when they are writing in English.Keywords: interference, syntactical, phrases

  19. Patterns and Meanings of English Words through Word Formation Processes of Acronyms, Clipping, Compound and Blending Found in Internet-Based Media

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Rio Rini Diah Moehkardi

    2017-02-01

    Full Text Available This research aims to explore the word-formation process in English new words found in the internet-based media through acronym, compound,  clipping and blending and their meanings. This study applies Plag’s (2002 framework of acronym and compound; Jamet’s (2009 framework of clipping, and Algeo’s framework (1977 in Hosseinzadeh  (2014 for blending. Despite the  formula established in each respective framework,  there could be occurrences  of novelty and modification on how words are formed and  how meaning developed in  the newly formed words. The research shows that well accepted acronyms can become real words by taking lower case and affixation. Some acronyms initialized non-lexical words, used non initial letters, and used letters and numbers that pronounced the same with the words they represent. Compounding also includes numbers as the element member of the compound. The nominal nouns are likely to have metaphorical and idiomatic meanings. Some compounds evolve to new and more specific meaning. The study also finds that back-clipping is the most dominant clipping. In blending, the sub-category clipping of blending, the study finds out that when clipping takes place, the non-head element is back-clipped and the head is fore-clipped.

  20. Syntactic processes in speech production: The retrieval of grammatical gender

    OpenAIRE

    Van Berkum, J.

    1997-01-01

    Jescheniak and Levelt (Jescheniak, J.-D., Levelt, W.J.M. 1994. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 20 (4), 824–843) have suggested that the speed with which native speakers of a gender-marking language retrieve the grammatical gender of a noun from their mental lexicon may depend on the recency of earlier access to that same noun's gender, as the result of a mechanism that is dedicated to facilitate gender-marked anaphoric reference to recently introduced discou...

  1. A typology of split conjunction

    OpenAIRE

    Palancar , Enrique L.

    2012-01-01

    International audience; In this paper, I study instances of noun phrase conjunction where the conjoined noun phrase is subject and the referents of the conjuncts are human, of the type ‘John and Mary are having lunch’. More specifically, I study different, possible splits that occur in such structures, which involve the disruption of the phrasal continuity of the conjuncts, resulting in structures roughly equivalent to ‘they are having lunch with Mary’ and ‘John are having lunch with Mary’. I...

  2. Development of quantum device simulator NEMO-VN1

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hien, Dinh Sy; Thi Luong, Nguyen; Hoang Minh, Le; Tien Phuc, Tran; Thanh Trung, Pham; Dong, Bui An; Thu Thao, Huynh Lam; Van Le Thanh, Nguyen; Tuan, Thi Tran Anh; Hoang Trung, Huynh; Thi Thanh Nhan, Nguyen; Viet Nga, Dinh

    2009-09-01

    We have developed NEMO-VN1 (NanoElectronic MOdelling), a new modelling tool that simulates a wide variety of quantum devices including Quantum Dot (QD), Resonant Tunneling Diode (RTD), Resonant Tunneling Transistor (RTT), Single Electron Transistor (SET), Molecular FET (MFET), Carbon Nanotube FET (CNTFET), Spin FET (SPINFET). It has a collection of models that allow user to trade off between calculation speed and accuracy. NEMO-VN1 also includes a graphic user interface of Matlab that enables parameter entry, calculation control, intuitive display of calculation results, and in-situ data analysis methods.

  3. Development of quantum device simulator NEMO-VN1

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Dinh Sy Hien; Nguyen Thi Luong; Le Hoang Minh; Tran Tien Phuc; Pham Thanh Trung; Bui An Dong; Huynh Lam Thu Thao; Nguyen Van Le Thanh; Thi Tran Anh Tuan; Huynh Hoang Trung; Nguyen Thi Thanh Nhan; Dinh Viet Nga

    2009-01-01

    We have developed NEMO-VN1 (NanoElectronic MOdelling), a new modelling tool that simulates a wide variety of quantum devices including Quantum Dot (QD), Resonant Tunneling Diode (RTD), Resonant Tunneling Transistor (RTT), Single Electron Transistor (SET), Molecular FET (MFET), Carbon Nanotube FET (CNTFET), Spin FET (SPINFET). It has a collection of models that allow user to trade off between calculation speed and accuracy. NEMO-VN1 also includes a graphic user interface of Matlab that enables parameter entry, calculation control, intuitive display of calculation results, and in-situ data analysis methods.

  4. Anthropocentric language theory and Serbian case systems

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Topolinjska Zuzana

    2002-01-01

    Full Text Available The author understands case as a relationship of syntactic dependence between a subordinated noun phrase and the governing syntactic construction (predicative expression and/or another noun phrase. The above definition construes case as a universal category characteristics of all the languages sharing the nomen vs verbum opposition. Particular cases are conceived as primarily semantically motivated. The two relevant semantic parameters are /+/ -human / (or /+/ -animated/ and /+/ -localized/, i. e. - in other words - the so-called hierarchy of animateness and the spatial location of the objects that the corresponding noun phrases refer to. N and D are being characterized as /+ hum/, A and I as /-hum/ and L as belonging to another semantic paradigm is defined simply as /+ loc/. Results of the analyses of morphological syncretism's and of syntactic exponents of the NPs-dependence found in Serbian case systems support the above tentative interpretation of the case as a (semantic and syntactic category.

  5. Grammatical dissociation during acquired childhood aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martins, Isabel Pavão; Loureiro, Clara; Ramos, Sara; Moreno, Teresa

    2009-12-01

    We report the case of a 6-year-old female who suffered a left hemisphere stroke attributed to a genetically determined prothrombotic state. She presented a fluent speech pattern with selective difficulty in retrieving names but not verbs. An evaluation was designed to clarify whether her symptoms represented a specific impairment of name retrieval. The child undertook an experimental battery of visual naming tasks requiring the production of 52 nouns (belonging to nine different semantic categories) and 44 verbs. Her performance was compared with that of 12 healthy children, matched for age and IQ, attending a local kindergarten. The child retrieved significantly more verbs than nouns (chi(2)=16.27, pgrammatical dissociation in a child. It suggests that nouns and verbs are subject to different processing early in development, at least before the formal acquisition of grammar. It contradicts theories that postulate a common processing of different grammatical categories early in life.

  6. Grammatical category dissociation in multilingual aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Waked, Arifi N

    2010-03-01

    Word retrieval deficits for specific grammatical categories, such as verbs versus nouns, occur as a consequence of brain damage. Such deficits are informative about the nature of lexical organization in the human brain. This study examined retrieval of grammatical categories across three languages in a trilingual person with aphasia who spoke Arabic, French, and English. In order to delineate the nature of word production difficulty, comprehension was tested, and a variety of concomitant lexical-semantic variables were analysed. The patient demonstrated a consistent noun-verb dissociation in picture naming and narrative speech, with severely impaired production of verbs across all three languages. The cross-linguistically similar noun-verb dissociation, coupled with little evidence of semantic impairment, suggests that (a) the patient has a true "nonsemantic" grammatical category specific deficit, and (b) lexical organization in multilingual speakers shares grammatical class information between languages. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the architecture of lexical organization in bilinguals.

  7. Neural Adaptation Effects in Conceptual Processing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Barbara F. M. Marino

    2015-07-01

    Full Text Available We investigated the conceptual processing of nouns referring to objects characterized by a highly typical color and orientation. We used a go/no-go task in which we asked participants to categorize each noun as referring or not to natural entities (e.g., animals after a selective adaptation of color-edge neurons in the posterior LV4 region of the visual cortex was induced by means of a McCollough effect procedure. This manipulation affected categorization: the green-vertical adaptation led to slower responses than the green-horizontal adaptation, regardless of the specific color and orientation of the to-be-categorized noun. This result suggests that the conceptual processing of natural entities may entail the activation of modality-specific neural channels with weights proportional to the reliability of the signals produced by these channels during actual perception. This finding is discussed with reference to the debate about the grounded cognition view.

  8. Working memory and planning during sentence production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martin, Randi C; Yan, Hao; Schnur, Tatiana T

    2014-10-01

    Speakers retrieve conceptual, syntactic and lexical information in advance of articulation during sentence production. What type of working memory (WM) store is used to hold the planned information before speaking? To address this question, we measured onset latencies when subjects produced sentences that began with either a complex or a simple initial noun phrase, while holding semantic, phonological or spatial information in WM. Although we found that subjects had longer onset latencies for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, showing a phrasal scope of planning, the magnitude of this complexity effect was not affected by any type of WM load. However, subjects made more syntactic errors (but not lexical errors) for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, suggesting that advance planning for these phrases occurs at a syntactic rather than lexical-semantic level, which may account for the lack of effect with various types of WM load in the current study. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  9. Mundari as a flexible language

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hengeveld, Kees; Rijkhoff, Jan

    2005-01-01

    and verbs), thus disputing E&O’s claim that Mundari has clearly definable classes of verbs and nouns. The last section is concerned with a set of grammatical features which correlate with the presence of flexible lexemes in a language. It is concluded that Mundari displays all of the predicted features......In this paper we intend to show that Mundari is one of the languages without distinct classes of verbs and nouns as far as its basic, non-derived vocabulary is concerned. Our contribution is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly presents a typology of parts-of-speech (PoS) systems, followed...... by a critical evaluation of the three criteria Evans & Osada (E&O - this volume) use to establish the lack of word class distinctions in a language (section 3). In section 4 we present evidence to support our claim that Mundari has ‘flexible’ basic lexemes (i.e. there is no fundamental distinction between nouns...

  10. HE SCIENTIFIC CONTENT OF MANAGEMENT MARKETING AND MARKETING MANAGEMENT

    OpenAIRE

    PAPUC, Mihai; SMEDESCU, Ion

    2012-01-01

    In the last decenniums, economic literature has debated more and more vividly a new concept Management Marketing1. The rightful understanding of this compound noun has to take in consideration the complex content of the two sciences, the way in which their conceptual defining, methods and specific instruments appear in the common relation generated by processes and connections through which the companys activities are organically integrated in its economical and social environment. The presen...

  11. THE SCIENTIFIC CONTENT OF MANAGEMENT MARKETING AND MARKETING MANAGEMENT

    OpenAIRE

    Ion SMEDESCU (In memoriam); Mihai PAPUC

    2012-01-01

    Concept – Management Marketing. The rightful understanding of this compound noun has to take in consideration the complex content of the two sciences, the way in which their conceptual defining, methods and specific instruments appear in the common relation generated by processes and connections through which the company’s activities are organically integrated in its economical and social environment. The present paper brings into discussion some points of view that could contribute to the co...

  12. Perspectives on the relation between composition, compositionality and exocentricity

    OpenAIRE

    Scholz, Cosima

    2014-01-01

    This PhD Project deals with Romance Verb-Noun-Compounds (VNC), a productive exocentric word formation process in several Romance languages. Due to its special structural and semantic configuration, it gives rise to many questions that partly coincide with recent issues discussed in linguistic theory. The aim of this work is twofold: First, Romance VNC are embedded in recent developments concerning aspects of morphological theory, compositionality and thoughts about the decoding of structurall...

  13. Conceptual Combination During Sentence Comprehension

    Science.gov (United States)

    Swinney, David; Love, Tracy; Walenski, Matthew; Smith, Edward E.

    2008-01-01

    This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept. PMID:17576278

  14. TiN/VN composites with core/shell structure for supercapacitors

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Dong, Shanmu; Chen, Xiao [Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 189 Songling Road, Qingdao 266101 (China); Gu, Lin [WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai 9808577 (Japan); Zhou, Xinhong [Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266101 (China); Wang, Haibo; Liu, Zhihong; Han, Pengxian; Yao, Jianhua; Wang, Li [Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 189 Songling Road, Qingdao 266101 (China); Cui, Guanglei, E-mail: cuigl@qibebt.ac.cn [Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 189 Songling Road, Qingdao 266101 (China); Chen, Liquan [Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 189 Songling Road, Qingdao 266101 (China); Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080 (China)

    2011-06-15

    Research highlights: {yields} Vanadium and titanium nitride nanocomposite with core-shell structure was prepared. {yields} TiN/VN composites with different V:Ti molar ratios were obtained. {yields} TiN/VN composites can provide promising electronic conductivity and favorable capacity storage. -- Abstract: TiN/VN core-shell composites are prepared by a two-step strategy involving coating of commercial TiN nanoparticles with V{sub 2}O{sub 5}.nH{sub 2}O sols followed by ammonia reduction. The highest specific capacitance of 170 F g{sup -1} is obtained when scanned at 2 mV s{sup -1} and a promising rate capacity performance is maintained at higher voltage sweep rates. These results indicate that these composites with good electronic conductivity can deliver a favorable capacity performance.

  15. Action Priority: Early Neurophysiological Interaction of Conceptual and Motor Representations

    Science.gov (United States)

    Koester, Dirk; Schack, Thomas

    2016-01-01

    Handling our everyday life, we often react manually to verbal requests or instruction, but the functional interrelations of motor control and language are not fully understood yet, especially their neurophysiological basis. Here, we investigated whether specific motor representations for grip types interact neurophysiologically with conceptual information, that is, when reading nouns. Participants performed lexical decisions and, for words, executed a grasp-and-lift task on objects of different sizes involving precision or power grips while the electroencephalogram was recorded. Nouns could denote objects that require either a precision or a power grip and could, thus, be (in)congruent with the performed grasp. In a control block, participants pointed at the objects instead of grasping them. The main result revealed an event-related potential (ERP) interaction of grip type and conceptual information which was not present for pointing. Incongruent compared to congruent conditions elicited an increased positivity (100–200 ms after noun onset). Grip type effects were obtained in response-locked analyses of the grasping ERPs (100–300 ms at left anterior electrodes). These findings attest that grip type and conceptual information are functionally related when planning a grasping action but such an interaction could not be detected for pointing. Generally, the results suggest that control of behaviour can be modulated by task demands; conceptual noun information (i.e., associated action knowledge) may gain processing priority if the task requires a complex motor response. PMID:27973539

  16. "Oniryczny" słownik Bolesława Leśmiana

    OpenAIRE

    Pomykała, Joanna

    2006-01-01

    The aim of my article is to describe the word “dream” and its meanings in the Leśmian’s poetry. The phrase itself is one of the most significant words which adds to Leśmian's works. In the first part I have done analyzis of grammatical categories of the word “dream” and I have distinguished three of them - verbal, adjectival and noun. Besides, I have analized the phrase-in question's word-formation. The conclusion I have drawn is that the nouns have been transformed with low fr...

  17. Matching and Abstraction in Knowledge Systems,

    Science.gov (United States)

    1980-01-01

    cuts a , 2 A,’ achine area A orpltV METHOD. PERFORM INTERSECTION SEARCH OF SEMANTIC NET RESULT: A LAWN MOWER IS A MACHINE THAT CUTS GRASS OR SIMILAR...34 Remember we created this by just reading the dictionary, and now we want to ask, "What’s a lawn mower ?" We did this more generally for noun-noun...the main method was to compare examples by partial matching over these structures. Thus we find "A lawn mower is a machine that cuts grass, or similar

  18. Influence of Productivity on the Acquisition of Inflectional Markers

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Kjærbæk, Laila; Basbøll, Hans; Christensen, René dePont

    -Productive to Fully Productive PL markers. Empirical data Task 1: semi-naturalistic picture based elicitation task formed as semi-structured interviews. Participants: 80 monolingual Danish-speaking children between 3-9 years. Task 2: picture based elicitation task. The test material consists of 48 stimulus items....... Participants: 160 monolingual Danish-speaking children between 3-10 years. Results and conclusion The study shows that PL acquisition is affected by morphophonological category: children produce more correct PL forms of nouns with a Fully Productive PL marker than of nouns with a Semi...

  19. IL NOME IN LIS NEL SEGNATO DI ADULTI UDENTI: UNA INDAGINE PRELIMINARE SUL CORPUS LISAU

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Matteo La Grassa

    2016-09-01

    Full Text Available L’indagine presenta i primi risultati emersi dall’analisi di una parte del corpus LISAU (LIS di Adulti Udenti sulla produzione segnata del sintagma nominale in LIS da parte di informanti udenti che hanno appreso la LIS come L2 in età adulta. Scopo dell’indagine è cominciare a tracciare una linea di ricerca nell’ambito della linguistica acquisizionale con riferimento all’acquisizione della LIS come L2 da parte di udenti. Il corpus LISAU include il segnato di 7 informanti udenti con livello di competenza omogenea che hanno terminato un corso di terzo livello presso la sede Ente Nazionale Sordi di Prato e di 2 informanti sordi segnanti nativi considerati come gruppo di controllo. L’analisi si è incentrata sulla realizzazione dei nomi di prima e di seconda classe rilevando anche forme non citazionali, sulla realizzazione di forme plurali e sulle modalità di accordo tra nomi e aggettivi. Dalla maggior parte dei dati analizzati si rileva la piena competenza degli informanti nella realizzazione del sintagma nominale. Nouns Signed by hearing adults in LIS: a preliminary survey on the LISAU corpus The results of an analysis concerning part of the LISAU (LIS of  Hearing Adults corpus related to the production of the noun phrase in LIS by hearing informants who learned the LIS L2 in adulthood are presented. The purpose of the investigation was to outline the process with regard to the acquisition of LIS L2 by hearing adults. The LISAU corpus is composed of the sign language of 7 hearing informants with a homogeneous level of competence who completed a third-level course at the Ente Nazionale Sordi in Prato. LISAU also includes the sign language of 2 deaf native signers, considered the control group. The analysis focuses on the first and second-class nouns, including non-citation forms, plural forms and noun-adjective agreement. Most of the analyzed data reveals the informants’ full competence in creating noun phrases.

  20. Bodily Reactions to Emotional Words Referring to Own versus Other People’s Emotions

    Science.gov (United States)

    Weis, Patrick P.; Herbert, Cornelia

    2017-01-01

    According to embodiment theories, language and emotion affect each other. In line with this, several previous studies investigated changes in bodily responses including facial expressions, heart rate or skin conductance during affective evaluation of emotional words and sentences. This study investigates the embodiment of emotional word processing from a social perspective by experimentally manipulating the emotional valence of a word and its personal reference. Stimuli consisted of pronoun-noun pairs, i.e., positive, negative, and neutral nouns paired with possessive pronouns of the first or the third person (“my,” “his”) or the non-referential negation term (“no”) as controls. Participants had to quickly evaluate the word pairs by key presses as either positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the subjective feelings they elicit. Hereafter, they elaborated the intensity of the feeling on a non-verbal scale from 1 (very unpleasant) to 9 (very pleasant). Facial expressions (M. Zygomaticus, M. Corrugator), heart rate, and, for exploratory purposes, skin conductance were recorded continuously during the spontaneous and elaborate evaluation tasks. Positive pronoun-noun phrases were responded to the quickest and judged more often as positive when they were self-related, i.e., related to the reader’s self (e.g., “my happiness,” “my joy”) than when related to the self of a virtual other (e.g., “his happiness,” “his joy”), suggesting a self-positivity bias in the emotional evaluation of word stimuli. Physiologically, evaluation of emotional, unlike neutral pronoun-noun pairs initially elicited an increase in mean heart rate irrespective of stimulus reference. Changes in facial muscle activity, M. Zygomaticus in particular, were most pronounced during spontaneous evaluation of positive other-related pronoun-noun phrases in line with theoretical assumptions that facial expressions are socially embedded even in situation where no real

  1. Bodily Reactions to Emotional Words Referring to Own versus Other People's Emotions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Weis, Patrick P; Herbert, Cornelia

    2017-01-01

    According to embodiment theories, language and emotion affect each other. In line with this, several previous studies investigated changes in bodily responses including facial expressions, heart rate or skin conductance during affective evaluation of emotional words and sentences. This study investigates the embodiment of emotional word processing from a social perspective by experimentally manipulating the emotional valence of a word and its personal reference. Stimuli consisted of pronoun-noun pairs, i.e., positive, negative, and neutral nouns paired with possessive pronouns of the first or the third person ("my," "his") or the non-referential negation term ("no") as controls. Participants had to quickly evaluate the word pairs by key presses as either positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the subjective feelings they elicit. Hereafter, they elaborated the intensity of the feeling on a non-verbal scale from 1 (very unpleasant) to 9 (very pleasant). Facial expressions ( M. Zygomaticus , M. Corrugator ), heart rate, and, for exploratory purposes, skin conductance were recorded continuously during the spontaneous and elaborate evaluation tasks. Positive pronoun-noun phrases were responded to the quickest and judged more often as positive when they were self-related, i.e., related to the reader's self (e.g., "my happiness," "my joy") than when related to the self of a virtual other (e.g., "his happiness," "his joy"), suggesting a self-positivity bias in the emotional evaluation of word stimuli. Physiologically, evaluation of emotional, unlike neutral pronoun-noun pairs initially elicited an increase in mean heart rate irrespective of stimulus reference. Changes in facial muscle activity, M. Zygomaticus in particular, were most pronounced during spontaneous evaluation of positive other-related pronoun-noun phrases in line with theoretical assumptions that facial expressions are socially embedded even in situation where no real communication partner is present

  2. Bodily Reactions to Emotional Words Referring to Own versus Other People’s Emotions

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Patrick P. Weis

    2017-08-01

    Full Text Available According to embodiment theories, language and emotion affect each other. In line with this, several previous studies investigated changes in bodily responses including facial expressions, heart rate or skin conductance during affective evaluation of emotional words and sentences. This study investigates the embodiment of emotional word processing from a social perspective by experimentally manipulating the emotional valence of a word and its personal reference. Stimuli consisted of pronoun-noun pairs, i.e., positive, negative, and neutral nouns paired with possessive pronouns of the first or the third person (“my,” “his” or the non-referential negation term (“no” as controls. Participants had to quickly evaluate the word pairs by key presses as either positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the subjective feelings they elicit. Hereafter, they elaborated the intensity of the feeling on a non-verbal scale from 1 (very unpleasant to 9 (very pleasant. Facial expressions (M. Zygomaticus, M. Corrugator, heart rate, and, for exploratory purposes, skin conductance were recorded continuously during the spontaneous and elaborate evaluation tasks. Positive pronoun-noun phrases were responded to the quickest and judged more often as positive when they were self-related, i.e., related to the reader’s self (e.g., “my happiness,” “my joy” than when related to the self of a virtual other (e.g., “his happiness,” “his joy”, suggesting a self-positivity bias in the emotional evaluation of word stimuli. Physiologically, evaluation of emotional, unlike neutral pronoun-noun pairs initially elicited an increase in mean heart rate irrespective of stimulus reference. Changes in facial muscle activity, M. Zygomaticus in particular, were most pronounced during spontaneous evaluation of positive other-related pronoun-noun phrases in line with theoretical assumptions that facial expressions are socially embedded even in situation where no

  3. -gate 語の系譜の研究 : Watergate (1972) から Indogate (1996) まで

    OpenAIRE

    須永, 紫乃生; Shinobu, SUNAGA

    1997-01-01

    As an enthusiastic reader of the columns by Mr. William Safire, who says "...I, an avid -gate-combining-form fan, ...", I have long been collecting -gate words coined to reflect unfavorable behaviors of various important people in the political, industrial, cultural, and media worlds. This paper will explore new English words formed by combining a root with a word-forming element -gate. The combining form -gate was created by clipping the prepositive element of the compound noun "Watergate, "...

  4. Preparation of nanocrystalline VN by the melamine reduction of V2O5 xerogel and its supercapacitive behavior

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cheng Fukui; He Chun; Shu Dong; Chen Hongyu; Zhang Jie; Tang Shaoqing; Finlow, David E.

    2011-01-01

    Highlights: ► Organic nitridizing agent was employed for preparation of nanocrystalline VN. ► The supercapacitive behavior of VN was studied by electrochemical method. ► The supercapacitive behavior of VN was studied in three kinds of electrolyte. ► The specific capacitance of VN was determined as 273 F g −1 in 1.0 M KOH. ► The supercapacitive mechanism and involved factor on capacitance were analyzed. - Abstract: An organic nitridizing reagent was employed in the preparation of nanocrystalline VN at 800 °C under a N 2 atmosphere. The prepared VN was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and its supercapacitive behavior was studied by cyclic voltammetry (CV) in three different types of aqueous electrolyte, 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 , 2.0 M NaNO 3 and 1.0 M KOH. The XRD results indicate that prepared VN has a cubic structure with space group Fm3m and a lattice parameter of 4.139 Å. The nanocrystalline structure of VN with a low degree of crystallinity was confirmed by TEM imaging. The presence of oxygen on the VN surface was detected by FTIR and XPS, and its molecular composition was determined to be VN 1.02 O 0.1 . The specific capacitances of nanocrystalline VN were determined to be 114, 45.7 and 273 F g −1 in 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 , 2.0 M NaNO 3 and 1.0 M KOH, respectively. Thus, the KOH solution was considered the best aqueous electrolyte for the capacitive performance of VN. The supercapacitive mechanism and the factor that influenced the specific capacitance are also analyzed in this paper.

  5. Representations of abstract grammatical feature agreement in young children.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Melançon, Andréane; Shi, Rushen

    2015-11-01

    A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un MASC ravole 'a ravole'). Test trials presented the objects side-by-side while one of them was named in new phrases containing other determiners and an adjective (e.g., le MASC joli ravole MASC 'the pretty ravole'). The gender agreement between the new determiner and the non-adjacent noun was manipulated in different test trials (e.g., le MASC __ravole MASC; *la FEM __ravole MASC). We found that online comprehension of the named target was facilitated in gender-matched trials but impeded in gender-mismatched trials. That is, children assigned the determiner genders to the novel nouns during word learning. They then processed the non-adjacent gender agreement between the two categories (Det, Noun) during test. The results demonstrate abstract featural representation and grammatical productivity in young children.

  6. Grounding by Attention Simulation in Peripersonal Space: Pupils Dilate to Pinch Grip But Not Big Size Nominal Classifier.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lobben, Marit; Bochynska, Agata

    2018-03-01

    Grammatical categories represent implicit knowledge, and it is not known if such abstract linguistic knowledge can be continuously grounded in real-life experiences, nor is it known what types of mental states can be simulated. A former study showed that attention bias in peripersonal space (PPS) affects reaction times in grammatical congruency judgments of nominal classifiers, suggesting that simulated semantics may include reenactment of attention. In this study, we contrasted a Chinese nominal classifier used with nouns denoting pinch grip objects with a classifier for nouns with big object referents in a pupil dilation experiment. Twenty Chinese native speakers read grammatical and ungrammatical classifier-noun combinations and made grammaticality judgment while their pupillary responses were measured. It was found that their pupils dilated significantly more to the pinch grip classifier than to the big object classifier, indicating attention simulation in PPS. Pupil dilations were also significantly larger with congruent trials on the whole than in incongruent trials, but crucially, congruency and classifier semantics were independent of each other. No such effects were found in controls. Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  7. The Best of Two Open Worlds at the National Open University of Nigeria

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jane-frances Obiageli Agbu

    2016-05-01

    Full Text Available It will be wise for educational institutions, from primary to tertiary level, globally, to reflect on their position and profile with respect to the new concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs. Responses will be diverse of course but the potential is so manifest that many institutions probably will consider the benefits to outweigh the barriers. The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN has decided to combine its ‘classical’ openness with the new digital openness by fully embracing the OER approach and converting its complete course base into OER. Step-by-step, NOUN is currently implementing its strategy towards becoming an OER-based Open University with a special niche for MOOCs. During a launch event in December 2015, the first 40 OER-based courses were presented as well as the first 3 OER-based MOOCs. This paper therefore presents NOUN’s OER strategy with insight on lessons learned. To the authors’ knowledge NOUN is the first Open University in the world with such a full-fledged OER (& MOOCs implementation route.

  8. Beyond Gender Stereotypes in Language Comprehension: Self Sex-Role Descriptions Affect the Brain's Potentials Associated with Agreement Processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Canal, Paolo; Garnham, Alan; Oakhill, Jane

    2015-01-01

    We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as "king" or "engineer") or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more "feminine" or "expressive" self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less "expressive" participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent.

  9. Diachronic changes in word probability distributions in daily press

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Stanković Jelena

    2006-01-01

    Full Text Available Changes in probability distributions of individual words and word types were investigated within two samples of daily press in the span of fifty years. Two samples of daily press were used in this study. The one derived from the Corpus of Serbian Language (CSL /Kostić, Đ., 2001/ that covers period between 1945. and 1957. and the other derived from the Ebart Media Documentation (EBR that was complied from seven daily news and five weekly magazines from 2002. and 2003. Each sample consisted of about 1 million words. The obtained results indicate that nouns and adjectives were more frequent in the CSL, while verbs and prepositions are more frequent in the EBR sample, suggesting a decrease of sentence length in the last five decades. Conspicuous changes in probability distribution of individual words were observed for nouns and adjectives, while minimal or no changes were observed for verbs and prepositions. Such an outcome suggests that nouns and adjectives are most susceptible to diachronic changes, while verbs and prepositions appear to be resistant to such changes.

  10. Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nieuwland, Mante S; Politzer-Ahles, Stephen; Heyselaar, Evelien; Segaert, Katrien; Darley, Emily; Kazanina, Nina; Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn, Sarah; Bartolozzi, Federica; Kogan, Vita; Ito, Aine; Mézière, Diane; Barr, Dale J; Rousselet, Guillaume A; Ferguson, Heather J; Busch-Moreno, Simon; Fu, Xiao; Tuomainen, Jyrki; Kulakova, Eugenia; Husband, E Matthew; Donaldson, David I; Kohút, Zdenko; Rueschemeyer, Shirley-Ann; Huettig, Falk

    2018-04-03

    Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment ('cloze'). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories ( N =334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words. © 2018, Nieuwland et al.

  11. Beyond gender stereotypes in language comprehension: self sex-role descriptions affect the brain's potentials associated with agreement processing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Paolo eCanal

    2015-12-01

    Full Text Available We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as king or engineer or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female, or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female. When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the ERP response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more feminine or expressive self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less expressive participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent.

  12. Neural Correlates of Morphology Acquisition through a Statistical Learning Paradigm.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sandoval, Michelle; Patterson, Dianne; Dai, Huanping; Vance, Christopher J; Plante, Elena

    2017-01-01

    The neural basis of statistical learning as it occurs over time was explored with stimuli drawn from a natural language (Russian nouns). The input reflected the "rules" for marking categories of gendered nouns, without making participants explicitly aware of the nature of what they were to learn. Participants were scanned while listening to a series of gender-marked nouns during four sequential scans, and were tested for their learning immediately after each scan. Although participants were not told the nature of the learning task, they exhibited learning after their initial exposure to the stimuli. Independent component analysis of the brain data revealed five task-related sub-networks. Unlike prior statistical learning studies of word segmentation, this morphological learning task robustly activated the inferior frontal gyrus during the learning period. This region was represented in multiple independent components, suggesting it functions as a network hub for this type of learning. Moreover, the results suggest that subnetworks activated by statistical learning are driven by the nature of the input, rather than reflecting a general statistical learning system.

  13. Improved vocabulary production after naming therapy in aphasia: can gains in picture naming generalize to connected speech?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Conroy, Paul; Sage, Karen; Ralph, Matt Lambon

    2009-01-01

    Naming accuracy for nouns and verbs in aphasia can vary across different elicitation contexts, for example, simple picture naming, composite picture description, narratives, and conversation. For some people with aphasia, naming may be more accurate to simple pictures as opposed to naming in spontaneous, connected speech; for others, the opposite pattern may be evident. These differences have, in some instances, been related to word class (for example, noun or verb) as well as aphasia subtype. Given that the aim of picture-naming therapies is to improve word-finding in general, these differences in naming accuracy across contexts may have important implications for the potential functional benefits of picture-naming therapies. This study aimed to explore single-word therapy for both nouns and verbs, and to answer the following questions. (1) To what extent does an increase in naming accuracy after picture-naming therapy (for both nouns and verbs) predict accurate naming of the same items in less constrained spontaneous connected speech tasks such as composite picture description and retelling of a narrative? (2) Does the word class targeted in therapy (verb or noun) dictate whether there is 'carry-over' of the therapy item to connected speech tasks? (3) Does the speed at which the picture is named after therapy predict whether it will also be used appropriately in connected speech tasks? Seven participants with aphasia of varying degrees of severity and subtype took part in ten therapy sessions over five weeks. A set of potentially useful items was collected from control participant accounts of the Cookie Theft Picture Description and the Cinderella Story from the Quantitative Production Analysis. Twenty-four of these words (twelve verbs and twelve nouns) were collated for each participant, on the basis that they had failed to name them in either simple picture naming or connected speech tasks (picture-supported narrative and unsupported retelling of a narrative

  14. NOUN PHRASES (NPs-MOVEMENT IN SASAK

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Lalu Erwan Husnan

    2017-11-01

    Moreover, passive verbs in Sasak can be followed by preposition of locative or not depend on the notion of the verbs used. It has the same analogy with unaccusativity verbs. They lack of internal argument and cannot assign accusative case.

  15. Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brusini, Perrine; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; van Heugten, Marieke; de Carvalho, Alex; Goffinet, François; Fiévet, Anne-Caroline; Christophe, Anne

    2017-04-01

    To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.g., the ball NOUN , I speak VERB ), provide invaluable information for this task, and children's sensitivity to such adjacent relationships develops early on in life. However, neighboring words are not the sole source of information regarding an item's word class. Here we examine whether young children also take into account preceding sentence context online during syntactic categorization. To address this question, we use the ambiguous French function word la which, depending on sentence context, can either be used as determiner (the, preceding nouns) or as object clitic (it, preceding verbs). French-learning 18-month-olds' evoked potentials (ERPs) were recorded while they listened to sentences featuring this ambiguous function word followed by either a noun or a verb (thus yielding a locally felicitous co-occurrence of la + noun or la + verb). Crucially, preceding sentence context rendered the sentence either grammatical or ungrammatical. Ungrammatical sentences elicited a late positivity (resembling a P600) that was not observed for grammatical sentences. Toddlers' analysis of the unfolding sentence was thus not limited to local co-occurrences, but rather took into account non-adjacent sentence context. These findings suggest that by 18 months of age, online word categorization is already surprisingly robust. This could be greatly beneficial for the acquisition of novel words. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  16. EVALUATING GENDER-BIAS IN THE IRANIAN PRE-UNIVERSITY ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ali Roohani

    2013-07-01

    Full Text Available Abstract: Textbooks can affect learners’ attitudes, viewpoints, and their choice of language in second/foreign language (L2 communication. The various ways in which the people are displayed in communication may affect students’ viewpoints. This study was an attempt to examine several potential areas of gender-bias in the representation of women and men in the pre-university English textbook, an English language teaching (ELT textbook with two volumes taught in the high schools of Iran. To evaluate this textbook, content analysis was done in terms of gender-bias, gender-neutral, male-generics, and the firstness in the reading texts, instructions, exercises and illustrations. The frequency and percentages of names, nouns, pronouns and pictures attributed to each gender (i.e., males and females were obtained and chi-square tests were carried out. In general, names, nouns and pictures pertinent to males outnumbered those attributed to females. Besides, there was a statistically significant difference between males and females in the two volumes of the pre-university textbook in terms of the above features. Also, male-oriented terms came first more frequently. However, there was not a statistically significant difference between male and female pronouns between the two volumes, though the percentage of male pronouns was higher. Moreover, the textbook included many gender-neutral nouns and pronouns not having any gender orientations. Findings indicated that the Iranian pre-university English textbook was somehow male-oriented and gender-biased as regards names, nouns, firstness and pictures associated with them though great efforts were made to avoid specific gender orientations.

  17. Autophagy inhibition synergistically enhances anti-cancer efficacy of RAMBA, VN/12-1 in SKBR-3 cells and tumor xenografts

    Science.gov (United States)

    Godbole, Abhijit M.; Purushottamachar, Puranik; Martin, Marlena S.; Daskalakis, Constantine; Njar, Vincent C. O.

    2012-01-01

    VN/12-1 is a novel retinoic acid metabolism blocking agent (RAMBA) discovered in our laboratory. The purpose of the study was to elucidate the molecular mechanism of VN/12-1’s anticancer activity in breast cancer cell lines and in tumor xenografts. We investigated the effects of VN/12-1 on induction of autophagy andapoptosis in SKBR-3 cells. Further, we also examined the impact of pharmacological and genomic inhibition of autophagy on VN/12-1’s anti-cancer activity. Finally, the anti-tumor activity of VN/12-1 was evaluated as a single agent and in combination with autophagy inhibitor chloroquine (CHL) in an SKBR-3 mouse xenograft model. Short exposure of low dose (< 10 µM) of VN/12-1 induced endoplasmic reticulum stress (ERS), autophagy and inhibits G1-S phase transition and caused a protective response. However, higher dose of VN/12-1 initiates apoptosis in vitro. Inhibition of autophagy using either pharmacological inhibitors or RNA interference of Beclin-1 enhanced anti-cancer activity induced by VN/12-1 in SKBR-3 cells by triggering apoptosis. Importantly, VN/12-1 (5 mg/kg twice weekly) and the combination of VN/12-1 (5 mg/kg twice weekly) + chloroquine (50 mg/kg twice weekly) significantly suppressed established SKBR-3 tumor growth by 81.4% (p < 0.001 vs. control) and 96.2% (p < 0.001 vs. control), respectively. Our novel findings suggest that VN/12-1 may be useful as a single agent or in combination with autophagy inhibitors for treating human breast cancers. Our data provides a strong rationale for clinical evaluation of VN/12-1 as single agent or in combination with autophagy inhibitors. PMID:22334589

  18. On using verbs appropriately in academic English writing

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Khrabrova Valentina Evgenievna

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available The article is concerned with English action verbs as key elements of academic English writing. Due to cognitive and semantic characteristics, verbs in the predicate function, by contrast with deverbative suffixal nouns and adjectives as parts of nominal predicates, convey the meaning of written message more concisely. The article is provided with verb classifications aimed at systematizing the information about verbs and developing a conscious approach to choosing verbs in the writing process. Syntactic transformation, limitation of passive voice forms, substitution of action verbs for stative verbs, adjectives and nouns entail perfecting the second language student writing skills.

  19. Effective Web and Desktop Retrieval with Enhanced Semantic Spaces

    Science.gov (United States)

    Daoud, Amjad M.

    We describe the design and implementation of the NETBOOK prototype system for collecting, structuring and efficiently creating semantic vectors for concepts, noun phrases, and documents from a corpus of free full text ebooks available on the World Wide Web. Automatic generation of concept maps from correlated index terms and extracted noun phrases are used to build a powerful conceptual index of individual pages. To ensure scalabilty of our system, dimension reduction is performed using Random Projection [13]. Furthermore, we present a complete evaluation of the relative effectiveness of the NETBOOK system versus the Google Desktop [8].

  20. The representation of grammatical categories in the brain.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shapiro, Kevin; Caramazza, Alfonso

    2003-05-01

    Language relies on the rule-based combination of words with different grammatical properties, such as nouns and verbs. Yet most research on the problem of word retrieval has focused on the production of concrete nouns, leaving open a crucial question: how is knowledge about different grammatical categories represented in the brain, and what components of the language production system make use of it? Drawing on evidence from neuropsychology, electrophysiology and neuroimaging, we argue that information about a word's grammatical category might be represented independently of its meaning at the levels of word form and morphological computation.

  1. Investigating the influence of epitaxial modulation on the evolution of superhardness of the VN/TiB{sub 2} multilayers

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Pan, Yupeng [Energy and Materials Engineering Centre, College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387 (China); Tianjin International Joint Research Centre of Surface Technology for Energy Storage Materials, Tianjin 300387 (China); Dong, Lei, E-mail: dlei0008@126.com [Energy and Materials Engineering Centre, College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387 (China); Tianjin International Joint Research Centre of Surface Technology for Energy Storage Materials, Tianjin 300387 (China); Liu, Na; Yu, Jiangang; Li, Chun [Energy and Materials Engineering Centre, College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387 (China); Tianjin International Joint Research Centre of Surface Technology for Energy Storage Materials, Tianjin 300387 (China); Li, Dejun, E-mail: dejunli@mail.tjnu.edu.cn [Energy and Materials Engineering Centre, College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387 (China); Tianjin International Joint Research Centre of Surface Technology for Energy Storage Materials, Tianjin 300387 (China)

    2016-12-30

    Graphical abstract: The novel VN/TiB{sub 2} multilayers were produced by a magnetron sputtering system. Reasonable modulation structure affected properties of the multilayers. The double epitaxial growth as shown in HRTEM images was newly found to be a main reason for coherent growth of the VN/TiB{sub 2} multilayers within a certain thickness. The coherent growth model of the multilayer was also used to explain the growth mechanism of the VN/TiB{sub 2} multilayers in this work, which provided a useful inspiration to understand the strategies to enhance the multilayers’ engineering applications. - Highlights: • The VN/TiB{sub 2} multilayers are produced by magnetron sputtering. • A kind of second epitaxial growth is found in multilayer. • The coherent growth model is designed to explain the growth mechanism. • Second epitaxial growth promotes to form superhardness. • Coherent growth appears twice with modulation ratios decreasing. - Abstract: A series of the VN/TiB{sub 2} nanomultilayers with different modulation ratios (t{sub VN}:t{sub TiB2}) and different modulation periods were synthesized via a magnetron sputtering system. The cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) examinations indicated that in the alternately deposited monolayers of the VN and TiB{sub 2}, due to the influence of the crystal (111){sub VN} texture, TiB{sub 2} layer presented epitaxial growth on the surface of the VN layer when its t{sub VN}:t{sub TiB2} was 5:1. Moreover, the formation of the TiB{sub 2} crystal promoted the growth of (200){sub VN} and significantly improved the preferential growth of nanomultilayers. With decreasing t{sub VN}:t{sub TiB2} to 1:7, the thin VN layer was crystallized under the introduction of crystalline TiB{sub 2} layers. A type of double epitaxial growth was observed to be a main reason for the coherent growth of the VN/TiB{sub 2} nanomultilayers within a certain thickness. Consequently, the multilayers

  2. Šiaurinių širvintiškių i, ē ir i̯ā kamienų daiktavardžių raida

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    Aurimas Markevičius

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available DEVELOPMENT OF THE i, ē AND i̯ā STEM NOUNS IN THE NORTHERN ŠIRVINTIŠKIAI SUBDIALECTSummaryThe present article is a joint analysis of three noun stems, as the majority of their endings have become syncretic due to phonetic and morphological development, and the above process resulted in good conditions for mixing of the said stems. Mostly the development of baritone stress i, ē and i̯ā stem nouns is discussed in the article, as unstressed endings have changed to a greater extent than stressed ones in the majority of Eastern Aukštaitian dialects.Quite a number of linguists attribute the majority of morphological changes to essentially phonetic changes. Numerous phonetic and accentual processes have taken place in different case endings of i, ē and i̯ā stem nouns of the Northern Širvintiškiai subdialect (in the localities of Kavarskas, Vidiškiai, Ukmergė and Pašilė. The main processes were Leskien's law (having resulted in the shortening of as many as fifteen case endings, shortening of unstressed long vowels (as unstressed endings were devoid of long vowels, fronting of the vowels a and ā preceded by palatalised consonants (this resulted in conditions for the baritone stress I̯ā stem to develop into the ē stem, cf. nom. sg. *saujā > *saujē “handful” vs. *dulkē “dust”, gen. sg. *saujās > *saujēs vs. *dulkēs etc., monophthongisation of circumflex and unstressed word‑ending diphthongs ‑ai, ‑ei and ‑ui (the dative case singular endings of all‑stem nouns have become syncretic, e.g. ká․rvi “for a cow”, í․lti “for a fang”, se̾․seri “for a sister”, etc.Following the aforementioned and other changes, a considerable part of case endings belonging to i, ē and I̯ā stem nouns have also become syncretic. Only the singular nominative case nouns with all the three stems have two different endings (e.g. í․ltis “fang”, sá․uje “handful”, dú․lke “dust”. All the remaining

  3. Academic writing in a corpus of 4th grade science notebooks: An analysis of student language use and adult expectations of the genres of school science

    Science.gov (United States)

    Esquinca, Alberto

    This is a study of language use in the context of an inquiry-based science curriculum in which conceptual understanding ratings are used split texts into groups of "successful" and "unsuccessful" texts. "Successful" texts could include known features of science language. 420 texts generated by students in 14 classrooms from three school districts, culled from a prior study on the effectiveness of science notebooks to assess understanding, in addition to the aforementioned ratings are the data sources. In science notebooks, students write in the process of learning (here, a unit on electricity). The analytical framework is systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004; Eggins, 2004), specifically the concepts of genre, register and nominalization. Genre classification involves an analysis of the purpose and register features in the text (Schleppegrell, 2004). The use of features of the scientific academic register, namely the use relational processes and nominalization (Halliday and Martin, 1993), requires transitivity analysis and noun analysis. Transitivity analysis, consisting of the identification of the process type, is conducted on 4737 ranking clauses. A manual count of each noun used in the corpus allows for a typology of nouns. Four school science genres, procedures, procedural recounts reports and explanations, are found. Most texts (85.4%) are factual, and 14.1% are classified as explanations, the analytical genre. Logistic regression analysis indicates that there is no significant probability that the texts classified as explanation are placed in the group of "successful" texts. In addition, material process clauses predominate in the corpus, followed by relational process clauses. Results of a logistic regression analysis indicate that there is a significant probability (Chi square = 15.23, p placed in the group of "successful" texts. In addition, 59.5% of 6511 nouns are references to physical materials, followed by references to

  4. Modulation of the semantic system by word imageability.

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    Sabsevitz, D S; Medler, D A; Seidenberg, M; Binder, J R

    2005-08-01

    A prevailing neurobiological theory of semantic memory proposes that part of our knowledge about concrete, highly imageable concepts is stored in the form of sensory-motor representations. While this theory predicts differential activation of the semantic system by concrete and abstract words, previous functional imaging studies employing this contrast have provided relatively little supporting evidence. We acquired event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants performed a semantic similarity judgment task on a large number of concrete and abstract noun triads. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree to which the words in the triad were similar in meaning. Concrete nouns, relative to abstract nouns, produced greater activation in a bilateral network of multimodal and heteromodal association areas, including ventral and medial temporal, posterior-inferior parietal, dorsal prefrontal, and posterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, abstract nouns produced greater activation almost exclusively in the left hemisphere in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortex. Increasing task difficulty modulated activation mainly in attention, working memory, and response monitoring systems, with almost no effect on areas that were modulated by imageability. These data provide critical support for the hypothesis that concrete, imageable concepts activate perceptually based representations not available to abstract concepts. In contrast, processing abstract concepts makes greater demands on left perisylvian phonological and lexical retrieval systems. The findings are compatible with dual coding theory and less consistent with single-code models of conceptual representation. The lack of overlap between imageability and task difficulty effects suggests that once the neural representation of a concept is activated, further maintenance and manipulation of that information in working memory does not further increase neural activation in

  5. Second Language Acquisition of Syntactic Movement in English by Turkish Adult Learners

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    Reyhan Agcam

    2015-12-01

    Full Text Available There has been much discussion on the involvement of Universal Grammar (UG in Second Language Acquisition (SLA process. Despite growing research in the field, few precise answers to the problem have been suggested so far. Hence, recent L2 studies within the generative framework have shifted from investigating this issue to determining whether or not interlanguage grammars exhibit natural language characteristics (Can, Kilimci & Altunkol, 2007. The present study aimed to investigate L2 acquisition of syntactic movement in English noun clauses by Turkish adult learners. Accordingly, L1 involvement in SLA was sought through examining the upper intermediate Turkish learners’ knowledge about the movement in question. The study addressed the questions of whether or not Turkish adult ESL learners have problems, stemming from L1 interference, with the construction of the syntactic movement in English noun clauses, and whether or not there is any order of acquisition between the noun clauses in subject position and object position along with various wh-words. The study reported related findings, and concluded with a few pedagogical implications for practice, and a couple of suggestions for further directions.

  6. Left fronto-temporal dynamics during agreement processing: evidence for feature-specific computations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Molinaro, Nicola; Barber, Horacio A; Pérez, Alejandro; Parkkonen, Lauri; Carreiras, Manuel

    2013-09-01

    Grammatical agreement is a widespread language phenomenon that indicates formal syntactic relations between words; however, it also conveys basic lexical (e.g. grammatical gender) or semantic (e.g. numerosity) information about a discourse referent. In this study, we focus on the reading of Spanish noun phrases, violating either number or gender determiner-noun agreement compared to grammatical controls. Magnetoencephalographic activity time-locked to the onset of the noun in both types of violation revealed a left-lateralized brain network involving anterior temporal regions (~220 ms) and, later in time, ventro-lateral prefrontal regions (>300 ms). These activations coexist with dependency-specific effects: in an initial step (~170 ms), occipito-temporal regions are employed for fine-grained analysis of the number marking (in Spanish, presence or absence of the suffix '-s'), while anterior temporal regions show increased activation for gender mismatches compared to grammatical controls. The semantic relevance of number agreement dependencies was mainly reflected by left superior temporal increased activity around 340 ms. These findings offer a detailed perspective on the multi-level analyses involved in the initial computation of agreement dependencies, and theoretically support a derivational approach to agreement computation. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  7. Profiling vocabulary acquisition in Irish.

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    O'Toole, Ciara; Fletcher, Paul

    2012-01-01

    Investigations into early vocabulary development, including the timing of the acquisition of nouns, verbs and closed-class words, have produced conflicting results, both within and across languages. Studying vocabulary development in Irish can contribute to this area, as it has potentially informative features such as a VSO word order, and semantically rich prepositions. This study used a parent report adapted for Irish, to measure vocabulary development longitudinally for children aged between 1,04 and 3,04. The findings indicated that the children learned closed-class words at relatively smaller vocabulary sizes compared to children acquiring other languages, and had a strong preference for nouns.

  8. Human Information Processing of Targets and Real-World Scenes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    1985-07-30

    penguin in fig. 13, or the eye of the elephant in figure 12. Such shapes can be conceptualized in two ways. The first (and less favored) is...discriminated from a "Sparrow". " Penguin " and "Ostrich" and any doubtful entries were counted as separate noun categories. The mean number of nouns...4- - - . - - . - ’B, I.’. I. 4) U S n A 0 -9* 41a* U .4 Is S A’ p* * A 4) ’.4 o S C 𔃾a I" 0 4) ** r. I. a 0 .4 4) .4 .5 fta * a B-. S I.e

  9. Preparation of nanocrystalline VN by the melamine reduction of V{sub 2}O{sub 5} xerogel and its supercapacitive behavior

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Cheng Fukui [School of Chemistry and Environment, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006 (China); He Chun [School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275 (China); Shu Dong, E-mail: dshu@scnu.edu.cn [School of Chemistry and Environment, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006 (China); Base of Production, Education and Research on Energy Storage and Power Battery of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, Guangzhou 510006 (China); Key Laboratory of Electrochemical Technology on Energy Storage and Power Generation of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006 (China); Chen Hongyu, E-mail: hychen@scnu.edu.cn [School of Chemistry and Environment, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006 (China); Base of Production, Education and Research on Energy Storage and Power Battery of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, Guangzhou 510006 (China); Key Laboratory of Electrochemical Technology on Energy Storage and Power Generation of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006 (China); Zhang Jie; Tang Shaoqing; Finlow, David E. [School of Chemistry and Environment, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006 (China)

    2011-12-15

    Highlights: Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Organic nitridizing agent was employed for preparation of nanocrystalline VN. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer The supercapacitive behavior of VN was studied by electrochemical method. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer The supercapacitive behavior of VN was studied in three kinds of electrolyte. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer The specific capacitance of VN was determined as 273 F g{sup -1} in 1.0 M KOH. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer The supercapacitive mechanism and involved factor on capacitance were analyzed. - Abstract: An organic nitridizing reagent was employed in the preparation of nanocrystalline VN at 800 Degree-Sign C under a N{sub 2} atmosphere. The prepared VN was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and its supercapacitive behavior was studied by cyclic voltammetry (CV) in three different types of aqueous electrolyte, 0.5 M H{sub 2}SO{sub 4}, 2.0 M NaNO{sub 3} and 1.0 M KOH. The XRD results indicate that prepared VN has a cubic structure with space group Fm3m and a lattice parameter of 4.139 Angstrom-Sign . The nanocrystalline structure of VN with a low degree of crystallinity was confirmed by TEM imaging. The presence of oxygen on the VN surface was detected by FTIR and XPS, and its molecular composition was determined to be VN{sub 1.02}O{sub 0.1}. The specific capacitances of nanocrystalline VN were determined to be 114, 45.7 and 273 F g{sup -1} in 0.5 M H{sub 2}SO{sub 4}, 2.0 M NaNO{sub 3} and 1.0 M KOH, respectively. Thus, the KOH solution was considered the best aqueous electrolyte for the capacitive performance of VN. The supercapacitive mechanism and the factor that influenced the specific capacitance are also analyzed in this paper.

  10. [Old English plant names from the linguistic and lexicographic viewpoint].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sauer, Hans; Krischke, Ulrike

    2004-01-01

    Roughly 1350 Old English plant names have come down to us; this is a relatively large number considering that the attested Old English vocabulary comprises ca. 24 000 words. The plant names are not only interesting for botanists, historians of medicine and many others, but also for philologists and linguists; among other aspects they can investigate their etymology, their morphology (including word-formation) and their meaning and motivation. Practically all Old English texts where plant names occur have been edited (including glosses and glossaries), the names have been listed in the Old English dictionaries, and some specific studies have been devoted to them. Nevertheless no comprehensive systematic analysis of their linguistic structure has been made. Ulrike Krischke is preparing such an analysis. A proper dictionary of the Old English plant names is also a desideratum, especially since the Old English dictionaries available and in progress normally do not deal with morphological and semantic aspects, and many do not provide etymological information. A plant-name dictionary concentrating on this information is being prepared by Hans Sauer and Ulrike Krischke. In our article here, we sketch the state of the art (ch. 1), we deal with some problems of the analysis of Old English plant names (ch. 2), e.g. the delimitation of the word-field plant names, the identification of the plants, errors and problematic spellings in the manuscripts. In ch. 3 we sketch the etymological structure according to chronological layers (Indo-European, Germanic, West-Germanic, Old English) as well as according to the distinction between native words and loan-words; in the latter category, we also mention loan-formations based on Latin models. In ch. 4 we survey the morphological aspects (simplex vs. complex words); among the complex nouns, compounds are by far the largest group (and among those, the noun + noun compounds), but there are also a few suffix formations. We also briefly

  11. The Syntactic Analysis of Pronoun Homofunction Considering Verb Structure and the Function of Connected Pronouns in Passive-Emotional Sentences

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    Mohammad Irani

    2017-04-01

       All these sentences express a kind of passive and emotional reaction; hence, it must certainly be considered to get the meaning of such sentences. Khābash gereft, for example, means he fell asleep.In the other hand, paying attention to the meaning will notably be effective in determining the verb type in structure and the grammatical role of the words in such sentences. According to the authors of this research, unlike some ideas, the verb structure is not compounded in these sentences, but is a nominal/adjectival component before the homo-function, recognized to be a part of the compound verb by some grammarians and linguists, has a subject role; and the homo-function is also a simple verb completely agreeing in suffix with the subject. The role of the pronoun suffixes, also, must be determined paying special attention to their role in traditional grammar because we think sometimes proposing ideas on some grammatical points might not bring about acceptable results regardless of their background and historic relations. Since pronoun suffixes occur only as objects, complements and genitives, the joint pronouns in these sentences are not an exception and have the same roles. The accompanying noun or adjective is the subject. The disjoint initial noun or pronoun, the “pronoun homo-role”, can be replaced by the pronoun suffix in some sentences, but makes the sentence ungrammatical in most cases.

  12. LANGUAGE FORM AND FUNCTION OF CARETAKERS FOUND IN NANNY MCPHEE AND THE BIG BANG MOVIE

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    Aditya Putri Kusuma Andani

    2016-02-01

    Full Text Available This study deals with the form and the function of caretaker speech which is found in caretaker’s utterance in Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang Movie. The objectives of this study are (1 to describe the type of language form of the caretaker and (2 to describe the type of language function of the caretaker found in Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang Movie. The type of this research is descriptive qualitative research. The data of this research are the utterance from the caretaker found in manuscript of Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang Movie. The data collection technique is documentation. The technique of analyzing data are descriptive qualitative. The writer uses the theories from Frank (1972 to analyze the type of language form, and M.A.K. Halliday (1977 to analyze the type of language function. The result of this study shows that (1 there are four types of word: noun, verb, adjective, and adverb; three types of phrase: noun phrase, verb phrase, and adverb phrase; and two types of sentence categorized into two. The first category is based on type, namely: declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentence; the second one by number of full predication, namely: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence. (2 The writer found 6 types of language function, they are: regulatory function, instrumental function, representational function, personal function, interactional function, and imaginative function.

  13. Dėl baltų *pat(is, *pat(nī pirminės reikšmės ir gramatinio statuso

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    Albertas Rosinas

    2011-11-01

    Full Text Available ON THE ORIGINAL MEANING AND THE GRAMMATICAL STATUS OF BALTIC *pat(is, *pat(nīSummaryOn the basis of the data from the Baltic and other Indo-European languages, the article rejects the common current view that Baltic *pat-root nouns, cf. Latv. pats ‘master, mister, husband’, pati ‘mistress, wife’, evolved from *pat-root pronouns with the meaning of ‘self’. The data from the Baltic languages lead to the conclusion that from Proto-Indo-European the Proto-Balts inherited the root noun of the consonantal declension *pat (noun *patnī ( Baltic *patin and i-stem acc. sing. *avin passed to the i-stem declension, i. e. it was modified to *patis and began to be declined as an i-stem noun, although also retaining some C-stem forms; under the influence of the *patis model, *patnī gradually lost the suffix *-n- and became *patī (>Lith. patì, Latv. pati. The assumption that the Baltic nouns *patis, *patnī did not evolve from pronouns could be supported by the following: (a i-stem resp. C-stem pronominal paradigms are not characteristic of the Baltic pronominal systems; (b moreover, the Prussian language (like the German, Slavonic and Indo-Iranian languages never possessed *pat-root pronouns.In the East Baltic languages, pronouns with the meaning of ‘self’ evolved from the nouns *pat(is, *pat(nī in the process of pronominalization, which originally occurred in the sphere of the addressee and the non-participant person. In the process of pronominalization, *pat(is eventually acquired endings typical of pronouns, cf. dat. sing, pačiam <— pačiamu(i, ines. sing, patime and a newer form pačiame, dat. pl. patiems ← patiemus.The identifying particle pat in the collocative pronouns toks pat, tokia pat

  14. Representing number in the real-time processing of agreement: Self-paced reading evidence from Arabic

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    Matthew A. Tucker

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes attract the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical number in working memory during sentence processing. Research in this topic, however, is primarily done in related languages with similar agreement systems. In order to increase the cross-linguistic coverage of the processing of agreement, we conducted a self-paced reading study in Modern Standard Arabic. We report robust agreement attraction errors in relative clauses, a configuration not particularly conducive to the generation of such errors for all possible lexicalizations. In particular, we examined the speed with which readers retrieve a subject controller for both grammatical and ungrammatical agreeing verbs in sentences where verbs are preceded by two NPs, one of which is a local non-subject NP that can act as a distractor for the successful resolution of subject-verb agreement. Our results suggest that the frequency of errors is modulated by the kind of plural formation strategy used on the attractor noun: nouns which form plurals by suffixation condition high rates of attraction, whereas nouns which form their plurals by internal vowel change (ablaut generate lower rates of errors and reading-time attraction effects of smaller magnitudes. Furthermore, we show some evidence that these agreement attraction effects are mostly contained in the right tail of reaction time distributions. We also present modeling data in the ACT-R framework which supports a view of these ablauting patterns wherein they are differentially specified for number and evaluate the consequences of possible representations for theories of grammar and parsing.

  15. Human simulations of vocabulary learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gillette, J; Gleitman, H; Gleitman, L; Lederer, A

    1999-12-07

    The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual requirements, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental "learners" are adults. The items to be "acquired" in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs from a sample of maternal speech to 18-24-month-old infants. The various experiments ask about the kinds of information that will support identification of these words as they occur in mother-to-child discourse. Both the proportion correctly identified and the type of word that is identifiable changes significantly as a function of information type. We discuss these results as consistent with the incremental construction of a highly lexicalized grammar by cognitively and pragmatically

  16. Effects of Age and Working Memory Load on Syntactic Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study

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    Graciela C. Alatorre-Cruz

    2018-05-01

    Full Text Available Cognitive changes in aging include working memory (WM decline, which may hamper language comprehension. An increase in WM demands in older adults would probably provoke a poorer sentence processing performance in this age group. A way to increase the WM load is to separate two lexical units in an agreement relation (i.e., adjective and noun, in a given sentence. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials (ERPs were collected from Spanish speakers (30 older adults, mean age = 66.06 years old; and 30 young adults, mean age = 25.7 years old who read sentences to detect grammatical errors. The sentences varied with regard to (1 the gender agreement of the noun and adjective, where the gender of the adjective either agreed or disagreed with the noun, and (2 the WM load (i.e., the number of words between the noun and adjective in the sentence. No significant behavioral differences between groups were observed in the accuracy of the response, but older adults showed longer reaction times regardless of WM load condition. Compared with young participants, older adults showed a different pattern of ERP components characterized by smaller amplitudes of LAN, P600a, and P600b effects when the WM load was increased. A smaller LAN effect probably reflects greater difficulties in processing the morpho-syntactic features of the sentence, while smaller P600a and P600b effects could be related to difficulties in recovering and mapping all sentence constituents. We concluded that the ERP pattern in older adults showed subtle problems in syntactic processing when the WM load was increased, which was not sufficient to affect response accuracy but was only observed to result in a longer reaction time.

  17. The Time-Course of Sentence Meaning Composition. N400 Effects of the Interaction between Context-Induced and Lexically Stored Affordances

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    Erica Cosentino

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into containers and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun's telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container.” However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat, we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information.

  18. Effects of parallel planning on agreement production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Veenstra, Alma; Meyer, Antje S; Acheson, Daniel J

    2015-11-01

    An important issue in current psycholinguistics is how the time course of utterance planning affects the generation of grammatical structures. The current study investigated the influence of parallel activation of the components of complex noun phrases on the generation of subject-verb agreement. Specifically, the lexical interference account (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b; Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004) predicts more agreement errors (i.e., attraction) for subject phrases in which the head and local noun mismatch in number (e.g., the apple next to the pears) when nouns are planned in parallel than when they are planned in sequence. We used a speeded picture description task that yielded sentences such as the apple next to the pears is red. The objects mentioned in the noun phrase were either semantically related or unrelated. To induce agreement errors, pictures sometimes mismatched in number. In order to manipulate the likelihood of parallel processing of the objects and to test the hypothesized relationship between parallel processing and the rate of agreement errors, the pictures were either placed close together or far apart. Analyses of the participants' eye movements and speech onset latencies indicated slower processing of the first object and stronger interference from the related (compared to the unrelated) second object in the close than in the far condition. Analyses of the agreement errors yielded an attraction effect, with more errors in mismatching than in matching conditions. However, the magnitude of the attraction effect did not differ across the close and far conditions. Thus, spatial proximity encouraged parallel processing of the pictures, which led to interference of the associated conceptual and/or lexical representation, but, contrary to the prediction, it did not lead to more attraction errors. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  19. Terence's animus: An Analysis of Its Semantic Field

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    Janja Žmavc

    2002-12-01

    Full Text Available Terence's plays are distinguished by their psychologically convincing and insightful portrayals of character, which result from the author's investigation into human mentality. Mentality in its broadest sense is referred to in Latin by the noun animus, which holds a very important place in Terence's Andria. The frequency and variety of its occurrences are evidently due to the author's effort to show the attitudes and frames of mind of his characters as clearly as possible, the emphasis being on characters in love. The lexical meaning of the noun animus can be divided in to three semantic subfields, which denote three different mental capacities: the capacity for thought, emotion, and will. An analysis of its occurrences reveals that the actual value of the noun is determined by its sentential role and contextual complements, which provide an insight in to its characteristics. Terence's concept of human mentality can thus be explored and defined merely by means of grammatical interpretation, the core of this mentality being represented by the noun animus as the centre of consciousness and emotion. It represents a spatial concept, namely a kind of space in a human being, which, although inactive by itself, is the source of all mental and emotional processes, by which every conscious or unconscious action is determined. Everything that Terence's characters think, feel or want is born in their animus. They are undoubtedly aware of this fact, since their endeavours to influence their own emotions or thoughts are always directed towards the spot where they originate. In this light should be understood also Terence's concept of love, which displays no characteristics of an unknown outside force, but is merely a particular frame of mind, a feeling, one of many that are born in the animus. (This is new version of the summary that was published in Keria 5/1/2003

  20. NOMINAL MARKING SYSTEM OF BAHASA MANGGARAI AND ITS INTERRELATION TO NAMING SYSTEM OF ENTITIES: A CULTURAL LINGUISTIC STUDY

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    Kletus Erom

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available This study analyzes the cultural imagery of the Manggaraian SpeechCommunities (MSC in “Nominal Marking System (NMS of Bahasa Manggaraiand Its Interrelation with Naming Systems of Entity (NSE: A CulturalLinguistic Study”. The result of the analysis is useful for both the academic worldand the life of the society, especially the MSC.The study conducted in Manggarai Regency, Flores, East Nusa TenggaraProvince, is qualitative. The data were obtained through observation, elicitation,interview, documentation study, listening, and note taking. For this reason, a numberof questions were prepared in a written form. The data obtained were analyzedthrough steps of selection, listing, translation, and interpretation of the formallinguistic meaning and cultural imagery of the MSC. The result of the data analysisis informally reported and verbally described.To analyze the data, the Cultural Linguistic Theory was applied andsupported by the structural and the dynamic theories. To know the chance and toinspire the study, a number of previous studies were reviewed. To easily understand,direct, and limit the discussion of the study, a number of basic concepts weredefined.Syntactically and semantically, there are four kinds of nominal markers(NMs of BM. NMs in the forms of personal pronouns (PP: hau ‘you SG’, hia/hi‘he/she’, meu ‘you-PLUR’, and ise ‘they’ mark proper nouns (PN as theSubject/Agent or Object/Patient in a clause bearing the meaning of subject or objectposition of a clause and not common nouns (CN. NMs in the forms of de/ di/ disemark the noun (CN/pronoun or PN as the possessor of the possessed noun in aclause bearing the meaning of possession. NMs in the forms of le/ li/ lise mark thenoun (CN/pronoun or PN as the agent diathesis of an action targeted to a noun asthe patient diathesis in a clause bearing the meaning of addition or the target/localityof an action. And NMs in the forms of ge/ gi/ gise mark the noun (CN/pronoun or

  1. Neural differentiation of lexico-syntactic categories or semantic features? event-related potential evidence for both.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kellenbach, Marion L; Wijers, Albertus A; Hovius, Marjolijn; Mulder, Juul; Mulder, Gijsbertus

    2002-05-15

    Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate whether processing differences between nouns and verbs can be accounted for by the differential salience of visual-perceptual and motor attributes in their semantic specifications. Three subclasses of nouns and verbs were selected, which differed in their semantic attribute composition (abstract, high visual, high visual and motor). Single visual word presentation with a recognition memory task was used. While multiple robust and parallel ERP effects were observed for both grammatical class and attribute type, there were no interactions between these. This pattern of effects provides support for lexical-semantic knowledge being organized in a manner that takes account both of category-based (grammatical class) and attribute-based distinctions.

  2. Hemispheric asymmetry of emotion words in a non-native mind: a divided visual field study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jończyk, Rafał

    2015-05-01

    This study investigates hemispheric specialization for emotional words among proficient non-native speakers of English by means of the divided visual field paradigm. The motivation behind the study is to extend the monolingual hemifield research to the non-native context and see how emotion words are processed in a non-native mind. Sixty eight females participated in the study, all highly proficient in English. The stimuli comprised 12 positive nouns, 12 negative nouns, 12 non-emotional nouns and 36 pseudo-words. To examine the lateralization of emotion, stimuli were presented unilaterally in a random fashion for 180 ms in a go/no-go lexical decision task. The perceptual data showed a right hemispheric advantage for processing speed of negative words and a complementary role of the two hemispheres in the recognition accuracy of experimental stimuli. The data indicate that processing of emotion words in non-native language may require greater interhemispheric communication, but at the same time demonstrates a specific role of the right hemisphere in the processing of negative relative to positive valence. The results of the study are discussed in light of the methodological inconsistencies in the hemifield research as well as the non-native context in which the study was conducted.

  3. Lexical and Grammatical Collocations in Writing Production of EFL Learners

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maryam Bahardoust

    2012-05-01

    Full Text Available Lewis (1993 recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was studied. To achieve this goal, 200 Persian EFL learners at BA level were selected. These participants were taking paragraph writing and essay writing courses in two successive semesters. As for the data analysis, mid-term, final exam, and also the assignments of L2 learners were evaluated. Because of the nominal nature of the data, chi-square test was utilized for data analysis. Then, the rate of lexical and grammatical collocations was calculated. Results showed that the lexical collocations outnumbered the grammatical collocations. Different categories of lexical collocations were also compared with regard to their frequencies in EFL writing production. The rate of the verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations appeared to be the highest and noun-verb collocations the lowest. The results also showed that L1 had both positive and negative effect on the occurrence of both grammatical and lexical collocations.

  4. The concreteness effect: evidence for dual coding and context availability.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jessen, F; Heun, R; Erb, M; Granath, D O; Klose, U; Papassotiropoulos, A; Grodd, W

    2000-08-01

    The term concreteness effect refers to the observation that concrete nouns are processed faster and more accurately than abstract nouns in a variety of cognitive tasks. Two models have been proposed to explain the neuronal basis of the concreteness effect. The dual-coding theory attributes the advantage to the access of a right hemisphere image based system in addition to a verbal system by concrete words. The context availability theory argues that concrete words activate a broader contextual verbal support, which results in faster processing, but do not access a distinct image based system. We used event-related fMRI to detect the brain regions that subserve to the concreteness effect. We found greater activation in the lower right and left parietal lobes, in the left inferior frontal lobe and in the precuneus during encoding of concrete compared to abstract nouns. This makes a single exclusive theory unlikely and rather suggests a combination of both models. Superior encoding of concrete words in the present study may result from (1) greater verbal context resources reflected by the activation of left parietal and frontal associative areas, and (2) the additional activation of a non-verbal, perhaps spatial imagery-based system, in the right parietal lobe. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

  5. Planning sentences while doing other things at the same time: effects of concurrent verbal and visuospatial working memory load.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Klaus, Jana; Mädebach, Andreas; Oppermann, Frank; Jescheniak, Jörg D

    2017-04-01

    This study investigated to what extent advance planning during sentence production is affected by a concurrent cognitive load. In two picture-word interference experiments in which participants produced subject-verb-object sentences while ignoring auditory distractor words, we assessed advance planning at a phonological (lexeme) and at an abstract-lexical (lemma) level under visuospatial or verbal working memory (WM) load. At the phonological level, subject and object nouns were found to be activated before speech onset with concurrent visuospatial WM load, but only subject nouns were found to be activated with concurrent verbal WM load, indicating a reduced planning scope as a function of type of WM load (Experiment 1). By contrast, at the abstract-lexical level, subject and object nouns were found to be activated regardless of type of concurrent load (Experiment 2). In both experiments, sentence planning had a more detrimental effect on concurrent verbal WM task performance than on concurrent visuospatial WM task performance. Overall, our results suggest that advance planning at the phonological level is more affected by a concurrently performed verbal WM task than advance planning at the abstract-lexical level. Also, they indicate an overlap of resources allocated to phonological planning in speech production and verbal WM.

  6. MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF THE C'LELA NOUN

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    M A ALIERO

    The indeterminacy/attestation model of metathesis. Language 80.2. Hume, Elizabeth, 2007. The interaction of internal and external factors in metathesis and deletion. Conference on Precedence Relations, CUNY Phonology Forum 9. Hume, Elizabeth and Jeff Mielke, 2001. Consequences of word recognition for metathesis.

  7. Determination of the noun in Biblical Hebrew

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ehrensvärd, Martin Gustaf

    2000-01-01

    The article investigates the claim that the definite article in biblical Hebrew can be unrelated to determination. This claim is found in the standard grammars of Joüon/Muraoka and Gesenius/Kautzsch and in an article by James Barr. Barr argues that it is a diachronic feature, the biblical texts...... showing the use of the article in a process of change during the biblical period, so that only in later times it acquires a close connection with determination. The article argues that this interpretation of the use of the article is based on a misunderstanding, and the instances of article use that might...... seem to be unrelated to determination in fact are perfectly related to determination when analysed carefully....

  8. Noun phrases: with or without an article

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sonia Montero Gálvez

    2014-12-01

    The proposed approaches and suggestions are in line with those proposed in a doctoral thesis that is currently in progress. Therefore, we should take into account that both this didactical proposal as well as the doctoral thesis on which it is based are not legitimised yet by the academic and scientific community. However, we are venturing to share this work because it may be helpful in the teaching and learning of Spanish as a Second Language.

  9. Effects of context and word class on lexical retrieval in Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Law, Sam-Po; Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Lai, Loretta Wing-Shan; Lai, Christy

    2015-01-01

    Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication. Previous investigations comparing retrieval of nouns and verbs in single word production and connected speech have reported either discrepant performance between the two contexts with presence of word class dissociation in picture naming but absence in connected speech, or null effects of word class. In addition, word finding difficulties have been found to be less severe in connected speech than picture naming. However, these studies have failed to match target stimuli of the two word classes and between tasks on psycholinguistic variables known to affect performance in response latency and/or accuracy. The present study compared lexical retrieval of nouns and verbs in picture naming and connected speech from picture description, procedural description, and story-telling among 19 Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia and their age, gender, and education matched healthy controls, to understand the influence of grammatical class on word production across speech contexts when target items were balanced for confounding variables between word classes and tasks. Elicitation of responses followed the protocol of the AphasiaBank consortium (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank/). Target words for confrontation naming were based on well-established naming tests, while those for narrative were drawn from a large database of normal speakers. Selected nouns and verbs in the two contexts were matched for age-of-acquisition (AoA) and familiarity

  10. Des Menschens Genitive Normabweichende Genitiv-Varianten bei schwachen Maskulina

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Wolfgang Krischke

    2012-01-01

    Full Text Available Abstract The genitive singular of the weak masculine nouns appears in three non-standard variations in addition to the standard suffix -(en: one variation is case augmenting (des Bär-en-s, one is stem affixing (des Polizist-s and one lacks a case suffix (des Patient-Ø. Linguists as well as language critics have focussed mainly on the stem affixing genitive while more or less ignor­ing the two other non-standard variations. This paper presents a corpus-based investigation regarding frequency and contexts of all three variations, also considering the diachronic back­ground and the implications the results might have for predicting the further development of the declension class of the weak masculine nouns.

  11. Grammatical typology and frequency analysis: number availability and number use

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dunstan Brown

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available The Smith-Stark hierarchy, a version of the Animacy Hierarchy, offers a typology of the cross-linguistic availability of number. The hierarchy predicts that the availability of number is not arbitrary. For any language, if the expression of plural is available to a noun, it is available to any noun of a semantic category further to the left of the hierarchy. In this article we move one step further by showing that the structure of the hierarchy can be observed in a statistical model of number use in Russian. We also investigate three co-variates: plural preference, pluralia tantum and irregularity effects; these account for an item's behaviour being different than that solely expected from its animacy position.

  12. Cyclovirus CyCV-VN species distribution is not limited to Vietnam and extends to Africa.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Garigliany, Mutien-Marie; Hagen, Ralf Matthias; Frickmann, Hagen; May, Jürgen; Schwarz, Norbert Georg; Perse, Amanda; Jöst, Hanna; Börstler, Jessica; Shahhosseini, Nariman; Desmecht, Daniel; Mbunkah, Herbert Afegenwi; Daniel, Achukwi Mbunkah; Kingsley, Manchang Tanyi; Campos, Renata de Mendonca; de Paula, Vanessa Salete; Randriamampionona, Njary; Poppert, Sven; Tannich, Egbert; Rakotozandrindrainy, Raphael; Cadar, Daniel; Schmidt-Chanasit, Jonas

    2014-12-18

    Cycloviruses, small ssDNA viruses of the Circoviridae family, have been identified in the cerebrospinal fluid from symptomatic human patients. One of these species, cyclovirus-Vietnam (CyCV-VN), was shown to be restricted to central and southern Vietnam. Here we report the detection of CyCV-VN species in stool samples from pigs and humans from Africa, far beyond their supposed limited geographic distribution.

  13. Substantiva mezi slovesem a jménem\

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Kocková, Jana

    2017-01-01

    Roč. 99, č. 1 (2017), s. 55-64 ISSN 2336-6591 Institutional support: RVO:68378017 Keywords : verbal nouns * event nominals * Czech * Russian Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Specific languages

  14. Information Environment of Tutors in Public Secondary Schools in ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Agriculture, a study centre of the National Open University (NOUN), a State ... to impart knowledge of the various subjects in students. ..... Information-seeking behaviour of International Islamic ... Malaysian Journal of Library & Information.

  15. A whistle-stop tour of statistics

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Everitt, Brian

    2012-01-01

    "Preface according to my Penguin English dictionary, whistle-stop, used before a noun means 'consisting of brief stops in several places' and this whistle-stop tour of statistics does just that, with...

  16. Organic astatine compounds, their preparation and properties

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Vasaros, L; Berei, K

    1985-01-01

    Aromatic astatine compounds of possible medical application were prepared by high energy substitutions, by astatine-halogen, and by electrophil astatine-hydrogen substitutions at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Researches, Dubna. Physico-chemical properties of organic astatine compounds such as boiling point and evaporation heat, and the refraction and dissociation energy of carbon-astatine bonds were determined experimentally by gas chromatography. The results are compared with extrapolated data. (V.N.). 41 refs.; 7 figs.; 5 tables.

  17. Surface structure of VN0.89(100) determined by low-energy electron diffraction

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Gauthier, Y.; Joly, Y.; Rundgren, J.; Johansson, L.I.; Wincott, P.

    1990-01-01

    The structure of the (100) surface of substoichiometric vanadium nitride was studied by low-energy electron diffraction on a VN 0.89 (100) sample. A simple 1x1 (100) diffractogram was observed. To describe the electron scattering in substoichiometric VN we apply the averaged t-matrix approximation to the nitrogen atoms. We find that the best structural model is one having no nitrogen vacancies in the surface region. It turns out that the first layer is rippled with the N atoms displaced 0.17 A above the subplane of V atoms, that the spacing between this subplane and the second layer is 1.92 A, and that the spacing between the second and the third layer is 2.08 A. In relation to the (100) spacing of the bulk, 2.06 A, these spacings are 6.8% contracted and 1% expanded, respectively. The Debye temperature of VN is found to be 660 K in good agreement with a prediction from entropy data and from neutron diffraction and helium-ion channeling experiments

  18. Effects of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Arciuli, Joanne; Cupples, Linda

    2003-01-01

    The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic gram verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically stressed. Experiments 1a and 2a showed that while native speakers classified typically stressed words individual more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during differences reading, there were no overall effects during classification of spoken stimuli. However, a subgroup of native speakers with high error rates did show a significant effect during classification of spoken stimuli. Experiments 1b and 2b showed that non-native speakers classified typically stressed words more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during reading. Typically stressed words were classified more accurately than atypically stressed words when the stimuli were spoken. Importantly, there was a significant relationship between error rates, vocabulary size and the size of the stress typicality effect in each experiment. We conclude that participants use information about lexical stress to help them distinguish between disyllabic nouns and verbs during speeded grammatical classification. This is especially so for individuals with a limited vocabulary who lack other knowledge (e.g., semantic knowledge) about the differences between these grammatical categories.

  19. Turbo-SMT: Parallel Coupled Sparse Matrix-Tensor Factorizations and Applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Papalexakis, Evangelos E.; Faloutsos, Christos; Mitchell, Tom M.; Talukdar, Partha Pratim; Sidiropoulos, Nicholas D.; Murphy, Brian

    2016-01-01

    How can we correlate the neural activity in the human brain as it responds to typed words, with properties of these terms (like ’edible’, ’fits in hand’)? In short, we want to find latent variables, that jointly explain both the brain activity, as well as the behavioral responses. This is one of many settings of the Coupled Matrix-Tensor Factorization (CMTF) problem. Can we enhance any CMTF solver, so that it can operate on potentially very large datasets that may not fit in main memory? We introduce Turbo-SMT, a meta-method capable of doing exactly that: it boosts the performance of any CMTF algorithm, produces sparse and interpretable solutions, and parallelizes any CMTF algorithm, producing sparse and interpretable solutions (up to 65 fold). Additionally, we improve upon ALS, the work-horse algorithm for CMTF, with respect to efficiency and robustness to missing values. We apply Turbo-SMT to BrainQ, a dataset consisting of a (nouns, brain voxels, human subjects) tensor and a (nouns, properties) matrix, with coupling along the nouns dimension. Turbo-SMT is able to find meaningful latent variables, as well as to predict brain activity with competitive accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of Turbo-SMT, by applying it on a Facebook dataset (users, ’friends’, wall-postings); there, Turbo-SMT spots spammer-like anomalies. PMID:27672406

  20. Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nieuwland Mante S

    2007-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun. Results When the message of the preceding discourse was predictive, adjectives with an unexpected gender inflection evoked a negative deflection over right-frontal electrodes between 300 and 600 ms. This effect was not present in the prime control context, indicating that the prediction mismatch does not hinge on word-based priming but is based on the actual message of the discourse. Conclusion When listening to a constraining discourse people rapidly make very specific predictions about the remainder of the story, as the story unfolds. These predictions are not simply based on word-based automatic activation, but take into account the actual message of the discourse.

  1. Toward a Common Ontology of Scaling Up in Development

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    April N. Frake

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available Scaling up development measures to target global food insecurity has a distinctly spatial character and is often cited as a solution to the global hunger crisis. Development does not occur without scaling and consensus on the ontological meaning of scaling up is a vital component to developing sustainable solutions to the global hunger crisis across geographical scales. Yet ‘scaling up’, while frequently used throughout Research and Development (R&D and Natural Resource Management (NRM literature, lacks ontological agreement. We begin by considering the noun, ‘scale’ and existing literature on scaling up, then present a visual analysis of definitions provided for scaling up across development institutions. Our study finds that the organization of terms used across these definitions falls into three distinct categories: Interventions, Mechanisms, and Outcomes. Further, we contend that the continued uncertainty is linked to scale being applied in two fashions: as a noun (outcome and verb (process. Rather than calling for reformed definitions, we argue for precision of definitions. To that end, we present a conceptual framework of scaling up that gives greater emphasis on separating the noun scale, from the verb, to scale. Further, Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E in our model complements scaling efforts beginning with how scaling up is defined by program, through to final evaluation of success.

  2. Les caractéristiques de la terminologie des sciences relatives à la famille du point de vue de l’extraction terminologique

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ágoston Nagy

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available Nagy, Á.: The Characteristics of Terminology of Sciences in relation to Family from point of view of Terminological Extraction According to Eugen Wüster, terms are lexical units that belong to a scientific domain where they are connected to a concept that they denote; therefore, terms have to have a precise definition. In the term extraction process, terms can mainly be recognised by morphosyntactic patterns: for example, noun+noun is a typical term pattern in French (e.g. navigateur web. One of the aims of this article is to find the typical term patterns and their frequency in the domain of social sciences. For this reason, three articles were chosen as corpus in the social sciences domain with the criterion that they include frequently the words famille ’family’ and/or individu ’individual’. In the three articles, all terms were manually annotated. The other aim of this article is to compare the frequencies of the term patterns in social sciences with the results of previous research on terms of a corpus of computer science. The further aim of this analysis is to determine whether an automatic term extractor fine-tuned for texts on computer science could also be used on a corpus of social sciences. In order to achieve this goal, problematic patterns – like adjectives preceding the nominal head in a term – are also examined. The results showed that the IT corpus followed the same tendency as the corpus on human sciences; however, juxtaposed nouns are less frequent in the latter which prefers the noun-adjective sequence. Concerning the problematic patterns, the two corpora did not show important differences: their presence is minimal in both (~7%. So the same rule-based extractor could work well on both corpora; however, psychological and sociological terms are more frequently used in common language, which makes statistical filtering more difficult.

  3. Language lateralization by functional MRI : a comparison with wada test-preliminary results

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Ryoo, Jae Wook; Na, Dong Gyu; Byun, Hong Sik

    1999-01-01

    To evaluate the usefulness of functional MR imaging (fMRI) for the determination of language dominance and to assess differences in language lateralization according to activation task or activated area. Functional maps of the language area were obtained during word generation tasks(noun and verb) and a reading task in ten patients (9 right handed, 1 left handed) who had undergone the Wada test. MR examinations were performed using a 1.5T scanner and the EPI BOLD technique. The SPM program was employed for the postprocessing of images and the threshold for significance was set at p<0.001 or p<0.01. A lateralization index was calculated from the number of activated pixels in three hemispheric regions (whole hemisphere, frontal lobe, and temporoparietal lobe), and the results were compared with those of Wada tests. The results for lateralization of language area were compared among stimulation tasks and regions and used for calculation of lateralization indices. During the Wada test, nine patients were left dominant and one patient was right dominant for language. Language dominance based on activated signals in each hemisphere was consistent with the results of the Wada test in 87.5% (verb and noun generation tasks) and 90% (reading task) of patients. Language dominance determined by activated signals in the frontal lobe was consistent in 87.5%, 75%, and 80% of patients in each stimulation task (verb generation, noun generation, and reading), respectively. The consistency rate of activated signals in the temporoparietal lobe was 87.5%, 87.5% and 80% of patients in each task. the mean value of the lateralization index, calculated on the basis of activated signals in the temporoparietal lobe was higher than that in the hemisphere or frontal lobe. The verb generation task showed a higher lateralization index than the noun generation or reading task. The lateralization index was higher in the verb generation task and in the region of the temporoparietal lobe than in

  4. Language lateralization by functional MRI : a comparison with wada test-preliminary results

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Ryoo, Jae Wook; Na, Dong Gyu; Byun, Hong Sik [Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan Univ. School of Medicine, Seoul (Korea, Republic of)] (and others)

    1999-05-01

    To evaluate the usefulness of functional MR imaging (fMRI) for the determination of language dominance and to assess differences in language lateralization according to activation task or activated area. Functional maps of the language area were obtained during word generation tasks(noun and verb) and a reading task in ten patients (9 right handed, 1 left handed) who had undergone the Wada test. MR examinations were performed using a 1.5T scanner and the EPI BOLD technique. The SPM program was employed for the postprocessing of images and the threshold for significance was set at p<0.001 or p<0.01. A lateralization index was calculated from the number of activated pixels in three hemispheric regions (whole hemisphere, frontal lobe, and temporoparietal lobe), and the results were compared with those of Wada tests. The results for lateralization of language area were compared among stimulation tasks and regions and used for calculation of lateralization indices. During the Wada test, nine patients were left dominant and one patient was right dominant for language. Language dominance based on activated signals in each hemisphere was consistent with the results of the Wada test in 87.5% (verb and noun generation tasks) and 90% (reading task) of patients. Language dominance determined by activated signals in the frontal lobe was consistent in 87.5%, 75%, and 80% of patients in each stimulation task (verb generation, noun generation, and reading), respectively. The consistency rate of activated signals in the temporoparietal lobe was 87.5%, 87.5% and 80% of patients in each task. the mean value of the lateralization index, calculated on the basis of activated signals in the temporoparietal lobe was higher than that in the hemisphere or frontal lobe. The verb generation task showed a higher lateralization index than the noun generation or reading task. The lateralization index was higher in the verb generation task and in the region of the temporoparietal lobe than in

  5. There is plenty of room at the bottom for small linguistic stuff

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Norbert Corver

    language. A nice illustration comes from the grammatical behavior of functional categories in human language. ..... “Second language learners of Dutch often use de (before nouns).” .... Russian case morphology and the syntactic categories.

  6. Effects of context and word class on lexical retrieval in Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Law, Sam-Po; Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Lai, Loretta Wing-Shan; Lai, Christy

    2014-01-01

    Background Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication. Previous investigations comparing retrieval of nouns and verbs in single word production and connected speech have reported either discrepant performance between the two contexts with presence of word class dissociation in picture naming but absence in connected speech, or null effects of word class. In addition, word finding difficulties have been found to be less severe in connected speech than picture naming. However, these studies have failed to match target stimuli of the two word classes and between tasks on psycholinguistic variables known to affect performance in response latency and/or accuracy. Aims The present study compared lexical retrieval of nouns and verbs in picture naming and connected speech from picture description, procedural description, and story-telling among 19 Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia and their age, gender, and education matched healthy controls, to understand the influence of grammatical class on word production across speech contexts when target items were balanced for confounding variables between word classes and tasks. Methods & Procedures Elicitation of responses followed the protocol of the AphasiaBank consortium (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank/). Target words for confrontation naming were based on well-established naming tests, while those for narrative were drawn from a large database of normal speakers. Selected nouns and verbs in the two contexts were matched for age

  7. Naming abilities: Differentiation between objects and verbs in aphasia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Luisa Carmen Spezzano

    Full Text Available Abstract Cognitive Neuropsychology aims to understand the processing mechanisms of normal and injured brain, by means of functional architectural models of information processing. Naming is one of the most important abilities in linguistic processing. Naming of different semantic and grammatical categories differ in their lexical properties and have distinct neuroanatomical substrates. We reviewed literature data on the differences between nouns and verbs in aphasic subjects reported by scientific publications in the form of indexed articles. Studies on naming abilities tended to emphasize the differentiation between nouns and verbs both in their lexical properties and neuroanatomical substrates. Functional neuroimaging studies have improved the state of knowledge regarding category-specific naming abilities, but further studies on different types of aphasia and the use of naming abilities in different contexts are warranted.

  8. Students' Perception of the National Open University of Nigeria ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Nekky Umera

    Hence the need for distance education (National Open University of Nigeria) ... students was used and with a single hypothesis formulated, a t-test analysis .... whether the students' apprehension to NOUN scheme is influenced by sex.

  9. Limited geographic distribution of the novel cyclovirus CyCV-VN

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Le, Van Tan; de Jong, Menno D.; Nguyen, Van Kinh; Nguyen, Vu Trung; Taylor, Walter; Wertheim, Heiman F. L.; van der Ende, Arie; van der Hoek, Lia; Canuti, Marta; Crusat, Martin; Sona, Soeng; Nguyen, Hanh Uyen; Giri, Abhishek; Nguyen, Thi Thuy Chinh Bkrong; Ho, Dang Trung Nghia; Farrar, Jeremy; Bryant, Juliet E.; Tran, Tinh Hien; Nguyen, Van Vinh Chau; van Doorn, H. Rogier

    2014-01-01

    A novel cyclovirus, CyCV-VN, was recently identified in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from patients with central nervous system (CNS) infections in central and southern Vietnam. To explore the geographic distribution of this novel virus, more than 600 CSF specimens from patients with suspected CNS

  10. Preparation of c-axis perpendicularly oriented ultra-thin L10-FePt films on MgO and VN underlayers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Futamoto, Masaaki; Shimizu, Tomoki; Ohtake, Mitsuru

    2018-05-01

    Ultra-thin L10-FePt films of 2 nm average thickness are prepared on (001) oriented MgO and VN underlayers epitaxially grown on base substrate of SrTiO3(001) single crystal. Detailed cross-sectional structures are observed by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Continuous L10-FePt(001) thin films with very flat surface are prepared on VN(001) underlayer whereas the films prepared on MgO(001) underlayer consist of isolated L10-FePt(001) crystal islands. Presence of misfit dislocation and lattice bending in L10-FePt material is reducing the effective lattice mismatch with respect to the underlayer to be less than 0.5 %. Formation of very flat and continuous FePt layer on VN underlayer is due to the large surface energy of VN material where de-wetting of FePt material at high temperature annealing process is suppressed under a force balance between the surface and interface energies of FePt and VN materials. An employment of underlayer or substrate material with the lattice constant and the surface energy larger than those of L10-FePt is important for the preparation of very thin FePt epitaxial thin continuous film with the c-axis controlled to be perpendicular to the substrate surface.

  11. The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Kate H

    precedes plural nouns significantly more frequently in BSAfE than in Indian English. ... 124) report a 72% acceptance rate of the expression some few among BSAfE ...... most frequent determiner with people, money, women and poverty.

  12. Download this PDF file

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    USER

    for the adoption of cloud computing in NOUN library such as the need to disclose their ... are delivered as a service to external customers using ... cloud deployment (Creeger, 2009), Library .... continuous development that reshape the way.

  13. articles

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    denise

    2011-12-04

    Dec 4, 2011 ... memory, language and sensory perception are most commonly affected by HIV infection. These cognitive .... The short- term memory recall task involves two learning trials of five nouns and delayed recall after approximately 5 ...

  14. Problems of Usage Labelling in English Lexicography*

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    ancies in the contextual usage labelling in the dictionaries were established and are discussed. ..... Likewise, the noun vagrant meaning 'a person who has no job .... tions: Proceedings of the 36th Conference of the American Translators ...

  15. Incorrect Responses to Locative Commands: A Case Study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Duchan, Judith; Siegel, Leo

    1979-01-01

    A six-year-old with a language problem responded consistently to 100 locative commands by putting objects in containers and on flat surfaces regardless of the preposition or order of the nouns in the commands. (Author/CL)

  16. Spatial distance effects on incremental semantic interpretation of abstract sentences: evidence from eye tracking.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guerra, Ernesto; Knoeferle, Pia

    2014-12-01

    A large body of evidence has shown that visual context information can rapidly modulate language comprehension for concrete sentences and when it is mediated by a referential or a lexical-semantic link. What has not yet been examined is whether visual context can also modulate comprehension of abstract sentences incrementally when it is neither referenced by, nor lexically associated with, the sentence. Three eye-tracking reading experiments examined the effects of spatial distance between words (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2 and 3) on participants' reading times for sentences that convey similarity or difference between two abstract nouns (e.g., 'Peace and war are certainly different...'). Before reading the sentence, participants inspected a visual context with two playing cards that moved either far apart or close together. In Experiment 1, the cards turned and showed the first two nouns of the sentence (e.g., 'peace', 'war'). In Experiments 2 and 3, they turned but remained blank. Participants' reading times at the adjective (Experiment 1: first-pass reading time; Experiment 2: total times) and at the second noun phrase (Experiment 3: first-pass times) were faster for sentences that expressed similarity when the preceding words/objects were close together (vs. far apart) and for sentences that expressed dissimilarity when the preceding words/objects were far apart (vs. close together). Thus, spatial distance between words or entirely unrelated objects can rapidly and incrementally modulate the semantic interpretation of abstract sentences. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. DOCUMENT REPRESENTATION FOR CLUSTERING OF SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACTS

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    S. V. Popova

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available The key issue of the present paper is clustering of narrow-domain short texts, such as scientific abstracts. The work is based on the observations made when improving the performance of key phrase extraction algorithm. An extended stop-words list was used that was built automatically for the purposes of key phrase extraction and gave the possibility for a considerable quality enhancement of the phrases extracted from scientific publications. A description of the stop- words list creation procedure is given. The main objective is to investigate the possibilities to increase the performance and/or speed of clustering by the above-mentioned list of stop-words as well as information about lexeme parts of speech. In the latter case a vocabulary is applied for the document representation, which contains not all the words that occurred in the collection, but only nouns and adjectives or their sequences encountered in the documents. Two base clustering algorithms are applied: k-means and hierarchical clustering (average agglomerative method. The results show that the use of an extended stop-words list and adjective-noun document representation makes it possible to improve the performance and speed of k-means clustering. In a similar case for average agglomerative method a decline in performance quality may be observed. It is shown that the use of adjective-noun sequences for document representation lowers the clustering quality for both algorithms and can be justified only when a considerable reduction of feature space dimensionality is necessary.

  18. FUNCTIONAL AND SEMANTIC PROPERTIES OF LOANWORDS IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE (BASED ON HYPERTEXTS

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Novikov Vladimir Borisovich

    2015-06-01

    Full Text Available The author studies functional and semantic properties of foreign-language nouns revealed in the form of the oral written language in computer-mediated communication, taking into account the debatability of issues about the borders of a loanword's notion, about the reasons of penetration of foreign-language words into the Russian language and classification of loanwords, which are used in linguistic literature. The actual material (500 foreign-language nouns was selected by the method of continuous sampling of the online texts posted in social networks, news portals and various forums. It is established that the loanwords used in hypertexts reflect the updating of lexical means by generating the words that refer to the new and current phenomena; penetrate into the Russian language along with the borrowing of thing or notion; generate parallels to the existing names (at this, the ability of forming doublet reflection is eliminated by means of semantic and stylistic differentiation of units – a borrowed one and an existing in the language of the recipient. The analysis of lexical content of loanwords revealed that the most numerous LSG are Technology LSG that unites the names of technical devices; Art and Evaluation LSGs. It is proved in the article that foreign-language nouns are used in hypertexts for communicative, nominative, emotive, and metalinguistic functions. However, such lexemes do not participate in the implementation of regulatory and phatic functions.

  19. The Spec-head vs head-Spec asymmetry: Toward a theory of post ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Mark

    Linearization is the process whereby a two-dimensional .... them is implicit in the terminology: the noun is the controller of agreement on the verb. ...... Reichenbach (1947), the “upper” Tense node instantiates a relationship between S(peech ...

  20. Word classes

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Rijkhoff, Jan

    2007-01-01

    in grammatical descriptions of some 50 languages, which together constitute a representative sample of the world’s languages (Hengeveld et al. 2004: 529). It appears that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between word class systems of individual languages. Whereas some languages employ...... a parts-of-speech system that includes the categories Verb, Noun, Adjective and Adverb, other languages may use only a subset of these four lexical categories. Furthermore, quite a few languages have a major word class whose members cannot be classified in terms of the categories Verb – Noun – Adjective...... – Adverb, because they have properties that are strongly associated with at least two of these four traditional word classes (e.g. Adjective and Adverb). Finally, this article discusses some of the ways in which word class distinctions interact with other grammatical domains, such as syntax and morphology....

  1. Selective impairment of masculine gender processing: evidence from a German aphasic.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Seyboth, Margret; Blanken, Gerhard; Ehmann, Daniela; Schwarz, Falke; Bormann, Tobias

    2011-12-01

    The present single case study describes the performance of the German aphasic E.M. who exhibited a severe impairment of grammatical gender processing in masculine nouns but relatively spared performance regarding feminine and neuter ones. This error pattern was assessed with tests of gender assignment to orally or visually presented words, with oral or written responses, and with tests of gender congruency decision on noun phrases. The pattern occurred across tasks and modalities, thus suggesting a gender-specific impairment at a modality-independent level of processing. It was sensitive to frequency, thus supporting the assumption that access to gender features as part of grammatical processing is frequency sensitive. Besides being the first description of a gender-specific impairment in an aphasic subject, the data therefore have implications regarding the modelling of representation and processing of grammatical gender information within the mental lexicon.

  2. Featuring animacy

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Elizabeth Ritter

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available Algonquian languages are famous for their animacy-based grammatical properties—an animacy based noun classification system and direct/inverse system which gives rise to animacy hierarchy effects in the determination of verb agreement. In this paper I provide new evidence for the proposal that the distinctive properties of these languages is due to the use of participant-based features, rather than spatio-temporal ones, for both nominal and verbal functional categories (Ritter & Wiltschko 2009, 2014. Building on Wiltschko (2012, I develop a formal treatment of the Blackfoot aspectual system that assumes a category Inner Aspect (cf. MacDonald 2008, Travis 1991, 2010. Focusing on lexical aspect in Blackfoot, I demonstrate that the classification of both nouns (Seinsarten and verbs (Aktionsarten is based on animacy, rather than boundedness, resulting in a strikingly different aspectual system for both categories. 

  3. Terror Operations: Case Studies in Terrorism (U.S. Army TRADOC G2 Handbook No. 1.01)

    Science.gov (United States)

    2007-07-25

    terrorism topics. Unless stated otherwise, masculine nouns or pronouns do not refer exclusively to men. Proponent Statement. Headquarters, U.S. Army...Economic and political disruptions can have profound global consequences. Sources of instability within the region include hegemony , terrorism

  4. CODE: EB10

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Philippe

    the field of education including non-formal education, it sounds a wakeup call .... Specifically, Bantu languages use noun classes which go by pairs marked by .... there is a need for one‟s energy conservation which characterizes humanity in ...

  5. Cognate effects in sentence context depend on word class, L2 proficiency, and task

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Bultena, S.S.; Dijkstra, A.F.J.; Hell, J.G. van

    2014-01-01

    Noun translation equivalents that share orthographic and semantic features, called "cognates", are generally recognized faster than translation equivalents without such overlap. This cognate effect, which has also been obtained when cognates and noncognates were embedded in a sentence context,

  6. Indian accent text-to-speech system for web browsing

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    R. Narasimhan (Krishtel eMaging) 1461 1996 Oct 15 13:05:22

    In fact, this itself is a strong motivation for using 'Indian. English', rather ... Currently, we are making a statistical analysis of letter clusters present in ... This, coupled with grammatical validity check for noun, will improve this decision in future.

  7. $D^{0}$ meson $v_{n}$ harmonics in PbPb collisions at $5.02~\\mathrm{TeV}$

    CERN Document Server

    CMS Collaboration

    2016-01-01

    The Fourier coefficients $v_{2}$ and $v_{3}$, which reflect the azimuthal anisotropy of $D^0$ meson, is measured with scalar-product method in PbPb collisions at $\\sqrt{s_\\mathrm{NN}} = 5.02~\\mathrm{TeV}$ with CMS. The measurement is done in a wide $p_T$ range up to $40~\\mathrm{GeV}/c$, for centrality classes 0-10$\\%$, 10-30$\\%$ and 30-50$\\%$. It is the first measurement on $D^0$ $v_{3}$ and the uncertainties on $D^0$ $v_{2}$ are significantly improved compared with previous measurements. The measured $D^0$ $v_{n}$ (n = 2, 3) is consistent with charged particle $v_{n}$ in central collisions, and begins to be lower than charged particles $v_{n}$ in $p_T$ range 1 to $6~\\mathrm{GeV}/c$ for more peripheral collisions. In high $p_T$ range, non-zero $D^0$ $v_{2}$ is also observed, which indicates the path length dependent energy loss of charm quark.

  8. Cataphora processing in agrammatic aphasia: Eye movement evidence for integration deficits

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Chien-Ju Hsu

    2014-04-01

    These findings indicate that the patients exhibited similar eye-movement patterns to that of the controls when processing definitional-gender nouns. However, unlike controls, they failed to use contextual gender information to revise gender stereotypes. These patterns support the LIDH.

  9. Research Article Special Issue

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    pc

    2017-10-17

    Oct 17, 2017 ... Noun Phrase (NP) based TF-IDF weighting scheme in order to empowe ... Text similarity is the measure used to determine the key point in text ..... with emphasis on concept extraction from text in concept-level text analysis.

  10. Nástroje a pomůcky na počítačích autorů ESSČ

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Lehečka, Boris; Voleková, Kateřina

    2011-01-01

    Roč. 48, 1/2 (2011), s. 35-39 ISSN 1212-5326 R&D Projects: GA ČR GAP406/10/1153 Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z90610518 Keywords : Old Czech * lexicography * abstract noun Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics

  11. FRASA BAHASA ACEH

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mohammad Rizqi

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available The study aims to describe the structure and the constituents of phrases, to describe the types of phrases, to explain the sense relation of the phrase constituents, and to illustrate the possibility of the Acehnese phrases to be placed in each syntactic function. This research is a qualitative descriptive research that focuses on phrase study on Acehnese. The written data is taken from primary school books, the spoken data is taken from local news of RRI Banda Aceh and folklore. The results show that there are uniqueness of the constituents which form the coordinative phrase constructions in which they are always related by conjunctions. Numeral phrases which are formed by numeral and noun always use classifier. The structure of noun phrases which is formed of noun and noun is permanent. It means that the position of the modifier is always behind main constituents. The structure of verbal phrases, adjectival phrases, numeral phrases, and pronominal phrases are not permanent. It means that the constituent that become a modifier can be placed before or after the main constituent. The prepositional phrase has a permanent structure.   ABSTRAK Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memerikan struktur dan unsur pembentuk frasa, mendeskripsikan jenis frasa, menjelaskan hubungan makna antarunsur pembentuk frasa, dan menggambarkan kemungkinan frasa dalam bahasa Aceh untuk dapat menduduki setiap fungsi sintaksis. Penelitian ini termasuk dalam penelitian linguistik deskriptif kualitatif dengan memusatkan perhatiannya pada telaah frasa dalam bahasa Aceh. Sumber data tulis dalam penelitian ini berupa buku pelajaran tingkat sekolah dasar, sedangkan data lisan diambil dari berita daerah RRI stasiun Banda Aceh dan data dari cerita rakyat. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa ada keunikan dari unsur-unsur yang membentuk konstruksi frasa koordinatif, yaitu selalu dihubungkan oleh konjungsi. Frasa numeralia yang terbentuk atas konstituen numeralia dan nomina selalu

  12. Journal for Language Teaching - Vol 39, No 1 (2005)

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Noun classification and congruence in German and Zulu – a contrastive analysis · EMAIL FULL TEXT EMAIL FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT. Anne Baker, 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v39i1.6047 ...

  13. The subject marker in Bantu as an antifocus marker*

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    KATEVG

    I argue that the class 5 subject noun phrase ikati ("cat") and the ...... that its key mechanism is a well-established phenomenon in the syntax of natural .... If head movement is subject to the familiar extraction constraints, it should not be possible ...

  14. Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    R.B. Ruthven

    data of the corpus and includes more formal audio material (lectures, TV and ... meticulous word-class tagging of nouns, adjectives, verbs etc., this book is not limited to word ... Fréquences d'utilisation des mots en français écrit contemporain.

  15. A family tree in every gene

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Unknown

    any special claim on our attention? There are ... Certain skin colours tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses .... the next, dividing and mixing in unpredictable combina- tions. .... I merely note that no other noun seems to do the job that 'race'.

  16. Psaní velkých písmen v tzv. druhové složce pojmenování

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Beneš, Martin

    2012-01-01

    Roč. 95, č. 4 (2012), s. 169-180 ISSN 0027-8203 R&D Projects: GA ČR GAP406/11/2017 Institutional support: RVO:68378092 Keywords : capital letter * generic component of naming item * common noun * orthography * codification Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics

  17. Semantique et psychologie (Semantics and Psychology)

    Science.gov (United States)

    Le Ny, Jean-Francois

    1975-01-01

    Semantic activities constitute a sub-class of psychological activities; from this point of departure the article discusses such topics as: idiosyncrasies, meaning and causality, internal determinants, neo-associationism, componential theories, noun- and verb-formation, sentences and propositions, semantics and cognition, mnemesic compontents, and…

  18. Air and Missile Defense Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (AMD IPB)

    Science.gov (United States)

    2016-03-31

    Unless this publication states otherwise, masculine nouns and pronouns do not refer exclusively to men . The proponent for this publication is the United...United States Army Reserve: Distributed in electronic media only (EMO). ATP 3-01.16 31 March 2016 PIN: 106211-000

  19. Strong systematicity through sensorimotor conceptual grounding: an unsupervised, developmental approach to connectionist sentence processing

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jansen, Peter A.; Watter, Scott

    2012-03-01

    Connectionist language modelling typically has difficulty with syntactic systematicity, or the ability to generalise language learning to untrained sentences. This work develops an unsupervised connectionist model of infant grammar learning. Following the semantic boostrapping hypothesis, the network distils word category using a developmentally plausible infant-scale database of grounded sensorimotor conceptual representations, as well as a biologically plausible semantic co-occurrence activation function. The network then uses this knowledge to acquire an early benchmark clausal grammar using correlational learning, and further acquires separate conceptual and grammatical category representations. The network displays strongly systematic behaviour indicative of the general acquisition of the combinatorial systematicity present in the grounded infant-scale language stream, outperforms previous contemporary models that contain primarily noun and verb word categories, and successfully generalises broadly to novel untrained sensorimotor grounded sentences composed of unfamiliar nouns and verbs. Limitations as well as implications to later grammar learning are discussed.

  20. Prediction in a visual language: real-time sentence processing in American Sign Language across development.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lieberman, Amy M; Borovsky, Arielle; Mayberry, Rachel I

    2018-01-01

    Prediction during sign language comprehension may enable signers to integrate linguistic and non-linguistic information within the visual modality. In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated American Sign language (ASL) semantic prediction in deaf adults and children (aged 4-8 years). Participants viewed ASL sentences in a visual world paradigm in which the sentence-initial verb was either neutral or constrained relative to the sentence-final target noun. Adults and children made anticipatory looks to the target picture before the onset of the target noun in the constrained condition only, showing evidence for semantic prediction. Crucially, signers alternated gaze between the stimulus sign and the target picture only when the sentential object could be predicted from the verb. Signers therefore engage in prediction by optimizing visual attention between divided linguistic and referential signals. These patterns suggest that prediction is a modality-independent process, and theoretical implications are discussed.

  1. The forgotten grammatical category: Adjective use in agrammatic aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Meltzer-Asscher, Aya; Thompson, Cynthia K

    2014-07-01

    In contrast to nouns and verbs, the use of adjectives in agrammatic aphasia has not been systematically studied. However, because of the linguistic and psycholinguistic attributes of adjectives, some of which overlap with nouns and some with verbs, analysis of adjective production is important for testing theories of word class production deficits in agrammatism. The objective of the current study was to compare adjective use in agrammatic and healthy individuals, focusing on three factors: overall adjective production rate, production of predicative and attributive adjectives, and production of adjectives with complex argument structure. Narratives elicited from 14 agrammatic and 14 control participants were coded for open class grammatical category production (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives), with each adjective also coded for its syntactic environment (attributive/predicative) and argument structure. Overall, agrammatic speakers used adjectives in proportions similar to that of cognitively healthy speakers. However, they exhibited a greater proportion of predicative adjectives and a lesser proportion of attributive adjectives, compared to controls. Additionally, agrammatic participants produced adjectives with less complex argument structure than controls. The overall normal-like frequency of adjectives produced by agrammatic speakers suggests that agrammatism does not involve an inherent difficulty with adjectives as a word class or with predication, or that it entails a deficit in processing low imageability words. However, agrammatic individuals' reduced production of attributive adjectives and adjectives with complements extends previous findings of an adjunction deficit and of impairment in complex argument structure processing, respectively, to the adjectival domain. The results suggest that these deficits are not tied to a specific grammatical category.

  2. Prūsų kalbos pirminių vardažodžių morfemų akcentinė galia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vytautas Rinkevičius

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available THE ACCENTUAL POWER OF OLD PRUSSIAN PRIMARY NOMINAL MORPHEMESSummaryThe article presents the first attempt to describe the Old Prussian accentuation system based on the main principles of morphological accentology. It aims to distinguish accentual properties of morphemes that determine the placement of stress in primary (non-derived Old Prussian nouns. At least one accentual property of morphemes (roots and inflexions, i.e. accentual power (strong vs. weak, could be distinguished. Strong root morphemes are roots that remain stressed in all forms of a paradigm, while the weak ones are those that lack stress in at least one form. Thus nouns with strong roots (eg. grīkai, kaulei, crixtiānimans, rūkai, wijrai (wijrimans; kīrki, kurpi, mūti, rīki, tapali; most probably also uremmans, wirdemmans; also possibly kaāubri, strigli belong to the constant stem-stress class, while nouns with weak roots (eg. gallū, gennāmans, mensā, mergūmans, widdewū; semmē; also possibly waikammans, kermenes belong to the mobile stress class. Strong inflexional morphemes are those that are stressed in position after weak roots (eg. nom. sg. fem. -ā (-ū, -ē; nom. pl. masc. ai; dat. pl. -āmans (-ūmans, -amans, while the weak ones are never stressed (eg. acc. sg. -an, -in; -ans, -ins; also possibly nom. pl. of ā-, ē-, i-, u-stems, acc. pl. and dat. sg. of all flexional types and gen. sg. of ā-stem.

  3. Preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading for older adults.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rawson, Katherine A; Touron, Dayna R

    2015-12-01

    Concerning age-related effects on cognitive skill acquisition, the modal finding is that older adults do not benefit from practice to the same extent as younger adults in tasks that afford a shift from slower algorithmic processing to faster memory-based processing. In contrast, Rawson and Touron (2009) demonstrated a relatively rapid shift to memory-based processing in the context of a reading task. The current research extended beyond this initial study to provide more definitive evidence for relative preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading tasks for older adults. Younger and older adults read short stories containing unfamiliar noun phrases (e.g., skunk mud) followed by disambiguating information indicating the combination's meaning (either the normatively dominant meaning or an alternative subordinate meaning). Stories were repeated across practice blocks, and then the noun phrases were presented in novel sentence frames in a transfer task. Both age groups shifted from computation to retrieval after relatively few practice trials (as evidenced by convergence of reading times for dominant and subordinate items). Most important, both age groups showed strong evidence for memory-based processing of the noun phrases in the transfer task. In contrast, older adults showed minimal shifting to retrieval in an alphabet arithmetic task, indicating that the preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading was task-specific. Discussion focuses on important implications for theories of memory-based automaticity in general and for specific theoretical accounts of age effects on memory-based automaticity, as well as fruitful directions for future research. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

  4. The Impact of Sound Structure on Morphology

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Laaha, Sabine; Kjærbæk, Laila; Basbøll, Hans

    2011-01-01

    This study examines the impact of sound structure on children’s acquisition of noun plural morphology, focussing on stem change. For this purpose, a threelevel classification of stem change properties according to sound structure is presented, with increasing opacity of the plural stem: no change...

  5. The processing of free and bound gender-marked morphemes in speech production: Evidence from Dutch

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Lemhöfer, K.M.L.; Schriefers, H.J.; Jescheniak, J.D.

    2006-01-01

    In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as

  6. Flexible word classes in linguistic typology and grammatical theory

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    van Lier, Eva; Rijkhoff, Jan

    2013-01-01

    Currently one of the most controversial topics in linguistic typology and grammatical theory concerns the existence of FLEXIBLE LANGUAGES, i.e. languages with a word class whose members cover functions that are typically associated with two or more of the traditional word classes (verb, noun...

  7. Maternal Label and Gesture Use Affects Acquisition of Specific Object Names

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zammit, Maria; Schafer, Graham

    2011-01-01

    Ten mothers were observed prospectively, interacting with their infants aged 0 ; 10 in two contexts (picture description and noun description). Maternal communicative behaviours were coded for volubility, gestural production and labelling style. Verbal labelling events were categorized into three exclusive categories: label only; label plus…

  8. The role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Unsworth, S.; Argyri, F.; Cornips, L.; Hulk, A.; Sorace, A.; Tsimpli, I.

    2014-01-01

    The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the

  9. Frequency and Informativeness of Gestural Cues Accompanying Generic and Particular Reference

    Science.gov (United States)

    Meyer, Meredith; Gelman, Susan A.; Stilwell, Sarah M.

    2015-01-01

    Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). Study 1 investigated how parents use gestures in association with generic versus particular reference during naturalistic interactions with their 2- and 3-year-old children. Parents provided…

  10. Personal Attribute Nominals in Akan: A Constructionist Perspective1 ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Construction Morphology (CxM) is a theory of linguistic morphology which aims to provide ... relation between the adjectives (left column) and the nouns (right column) in ..... much semantic information anyway, its formal reduction does not cause any ..... Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.

  11. Doubling in RSL and NGT: a pragmatic account

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Kimmelman, V.

    2013-01-01

    In this paper, doubling in Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands is discussed. In both sign languages different constituents (including verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and whole clauses) can be doubled. It is shown that doubling in both languages has common functions and

  12. A Video-Based CALL Program for Proficient and Less-Proficient L2 Learners' Comprehension Ability, Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lin, Lu-Fang

    2010-01-01

    This study investigates first whether news video in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program can foster second language (L2) comprehension and incidental acquisition of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Second, this study examines the relationship between the participants' vocabulary acquisition and their video comprehension. The…

  13. Heutiges Russisch (Contemporary Russian)

    Science.gov (United States)

    Russisch, 1976

    1976-01-01

    For the purpose of supplying information on actual contemporary Russian usage, this article excerpts sections on noun usage and variations of the genitive ending in the masculine singular from "Stilistik der russischen Sprache" (Russian Language Style) by D. Rosental and M. Telenkowa. (Text is in German.) (FB)

  14. Perceptual Learning Style Matching and L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tight, Daniel G.

    2010-01-01

    This study explored learning and retention of concrete nouns in second language Spanish by first language English undergraduates (N = 128). Each completed a learning style (visual, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic, mixed) assessment, took a vocabulary pretest, and then studied 12 words each through three conditions (matching, mismatching, mixed…

  15. Restrictions of frequent frames as cues to categories: the case of Dutch

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Erkelens, M.A.; Chan, H.; Kapia, E.; Jacob, H.

    2008-01-01

    Why Dutch 12-month-old infants do not use frequent frames in early categorization Mintz (2003) proposes that very local distributional contexts of words in the input-so-called 'frequent frames'-function as reliable cues for categories corresponding to the adult verb and noun. He shows that

  16. Number in Dinka

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Andersen, Torben

    2014-01-01

    had a marked singular and an unmarked plural. Synchronically, however, the singular is arguably the basic member of the number category as revealed by the use of the two numbers. In addition, some nouns have a collective form, which is grammatically singular. Number also plays a role...

  17. Anaphoric Reference to Instances, Instantiated and Non-Instantiated Categories: A Reading Time Study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Garnham, Alan

    1981-01-01

    Experiments using memory paradigms have shown that general terms receive context-dependent encodings. This experiment investigates the encoding of category and instance nouns. The results indicate that representations set up during reading are the product of both the linguistic input and of general knowledge. (Author/KC)

  18. Gender and Number Agreement in the Oral Production of Arabic Heritage Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Albirini, Abdulkafi; Benmamoun, Elabbas; Chakrani, Brahim

    2013-01-01

    Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic heritage speakers' knowledge of subject-verb agreement versus noun-adjective agreement with the…

  19. USAGE ON ADVERBS WITH +lA SUFFIX / ESKI TÜRKIYE TÜRKÇESI DEVRESINDE +lA EKLI ZARFLARIN KULLANIMI ÜZERINE

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Prof. Dr. Musa DUMAN

    2008-08-01

    Full Text Available In this article it will be mentioned usage of suffix +lA as anadverb that used with noun and adjective. This suffix is different from“ile” particle not only origin but also function. We will explainhistorical dialect studies affect on Old Türkiye Turkish.

  20. Research Article Special Issue

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    pc

    2017-10-17

    Oct 17, 2017 ... ent, Faculty of Art, Computing and Creative Industry, Universiti ... INTRODUCTION ... employed in software application for various purposes, ranging from ... forms, encoding text in a particular pattern for development motives and .... This research focused on the identification of a noun structure of a given ...

  1. Pointing As a Socio-Pragmatic Cue to Particular vs.Generic Reference

    Science.gov (United States)

    Meyer, Meredith; Baldwin, Dare A.

    2013-01-01

    Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract kind categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). How do children distinguish these distinct kinds of reference? We examined the role of one socio-pragmatic cue, namely pointing, in producing and comprehending generic versus particular…

  2. Nominalizations in Spanish. Studies in Linguistics and Language Learning, Volume V.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Falk, Julia Sableski

    Using methods developed in transformational generative grammar, three types of nominal constructions in Spanish are treated in this paper: Fact nominalizations ("[El] Escribir es agradable"), Manner nominalizations ("El tocar [de la mujer] es agradable"), and Abstract noun nominalizations ("La construccion rapida de esta escuela es dudosa"). While…

  3. Prompt $D^0$ meson $v_n$ harmonics in PbPb collisions at 5.02 TeV

    CERN Document Server

    Sun, Jian

    2016-01-01

    Because of their large mass, heavy quarks are produced primarily at early stages of heavy-ion collisions, and therefore experience the full evolution of the system and carry information about the extent of thermalization of the QGP. Azimuthal anisotropy parameters ($v_n$) of charm and bottom hadrons provide unique information about the path length dependent interactions between heavy quarks and the medium. To what extent heavy quarks at low $p_T$ flow with the medium is a good measure of the interaction strength. At high $p_T$, $v_2$ and $v_3$ from path length dependent energy loss provide a powerful tool to study heavy quark energy loss mechanisms. With the large PbPb data sample at 5.02 TeV collected by the CMS detector during the 2015 LHC run, azimuthal anisotropy $v_2$ and $v_3$ of D0 meson is measured over a wide $p_T$ range and at different centralities. In this talk, new results of D0 meson $v_n$ parameters are presented, and compared to the charged hadron $v_n$ at the same energy and the latest theore...

  4. Selected Topics from LVCSR Research for Asian Languages at Tokyo Tech

    Science.gov (United States)

    Furui, Sadaoki

    This paper presents our recent work in regard to building Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems for the Thai, Indonesian, and Chinese languages. For Thai, since there is no word boundary in the written form, we have proposed a new method for automatically creating word-like units from a text corpus, and applied topic and speaking style adaptation to the language model to recognize spoken-style utterances. For Indonesian, we have applied proper noun-specific adaptation to acoustic modeling, and rule-based English-to-Indonesian phoneme mapping to solve the problem of large variation in proper noun and English word pronunciation in a spoken-query information retrieval system. In spoken Chinese, long organization names are frequently abbreviated, and abbreviated utterances cannot be recognized if the abbreviations are not included in the dictionary. We have proposed a new method for automatically generating Chinese abbreviations, and by expanding the vocabulary using the generated abbreviations, we have significantly improved the performance of spoken query-based search.

  5. On the Categorial Ambivalence of un montón and Other Similar Quantifiers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Javier San Julián Solana

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available Owing to their ability to express indefinite (superlative quantification, units like montón, porrón or barbaridad (~ bestialidad ~ burrada ~ brutalidad are often included among quantifying nouns. But along with a series of clearly nominal features, they have other features which are typical of adverbs. The aim of this paper is precisely to provide a reasonable explanation for this categorial hybridism. Applying the theoretical and methodological principles of the Functional Grammar of Spanish, we try to demonstrate that they are not “amphibious” units. On the contrary, we argue that, from a synchronic point of view, two sets of signs should be distinguished, which are functionally and lexically different but have “clonal” signifiers: a nouns –with designative meaning– montón/es, porrón/es, barbaridad/es, and b adverbial phrases un montón, un porrón, una barbaridad, which are pure quantifiers, according to their lexeme.

  6. Grammatical constraints on phonological encoding in speech production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Heller, Jordana R; Goldrick, Matthew

    2014-12-01

    To better understand the influence of grammatical encoding on the retrieval and encoding of phonological word-form information during speech production, we examine how grammatical class constraints influence the activation of phonological neighbors (words phonologically related to the target--e.g., MOON, TWO for target TUNE). Specifically, we compare how neighbors that share a target's grammatical category (here, nouns) influence its planning and retrieval, assessed by picture naming latencies, and phonetic encoding, assessed by word productions in picture names, when grammatical constraints are strong (in sentence contexts) versus weak (bare naming). Within-category (noun) neighbors influenced planning time and phonetic encoding more strongly in sentence contexts. This suggests that grammatical encoding constrains phonological processing; the influence of phonological neighbors is grammatically dependent. Moreover, effects on planning times could not fully account for phonetic effects, suggesting that phonological interaction affects articulation after speech onset. These results support production theories integrating grammatical, phonological, and phonetic processes.

  7. Blindness to background: an inbuilt bias for visual objects.

    Science.gov (United States)

    O'Hanlon, Catherine G; Read, Jenny C A

    2017-09-01

    Sixty-eight 2- to 12-year-olds and 30 adults were shown colorful displays on a touchscreen monitor and trained to point to the location of a named color. Participants located targets near-perfectly when presented with four abutting colored patches. When presented with three colored patches on a colored background, toddlers failed to locate targets in the background. Eye tracking demonstrated that the effect was partially mediated by a tendency not to fixate the background. However, the effect was abolished when the targets were named as nouns, whilst the change to nouns had little impact on eye movement patterns. Our results imply a powerful, inbuilt tendency to attend to objects, which may slow the development of color concepts and acquisition of color words. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/TKO1BPeAiOI. [Correction added on 27 January 2017, after first online publication: The video abstract link was added.]. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  8. Danger and usefulness: an alternative framework for understanding rapid evaluation effects in perception?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wurm, Lee H

    2007-12-01

    Previous studies have shown effects of rated danger and usefulness on lexical access. All of them have used stimuli selected for connotations of danger and/or usefulness. Stimuli for the present lexical decision study were all of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the Balota et al. (2002) English Lexicon Project (subject to constraints relating to experimental control; none had anything to do with danger or usefulness). The interaction between danger and usefulness ratings previously demonstrated (Wurm & Vakoch, 2000; Wurm, Vakoch, Seaman, & Buchanan, 2004; Wurm, Whitman, Seaman, Hill, & Ulstad, 2007) was found for nouns, even when age of acquisition was controlled. It was also found for verbs and adjectives. The interaction is believed to reflect competing pressures to (1) avoid dangerous objects/events and (2) approach valuable resources. It may be a manifestation of the rapid evaluation effects pervasive in the literature. Post hoc analyses showed that danger and usefulness explain as much variance as valence and arousal, or evaluation, potency, and activity.

  9. Object attraction effects during subject-verb agreement in Persian.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Feiz, Aazam; Cowles, Wind

    2018-04-01

    Subject-verb agreement provides insight into how grammatical and semantic features interact during sentence production, and prior studies have found attraction errors when an intervening local noun is grammatically part of the subject. Two major types of theories have emerged from these studies: control based and competition-based. The current study used an subject-object-verb language with optional subject-verb agreement, Persian, to test the competition-based hypothesis that intervening object nouns may also cause attraction effects, even though objects are not part of the syntactic relationship between the subject and verb. Our results, which did not require speakers to make grammatical errors, show that objects can be attractors for agreement, but this effect appears to be dependent on the type of plural marker on the object. These results support competition-based theories of agreement production, in which agreement may be influenced by attractors that are outside the scope of the subject-verb relationship.

  10. The effects of bilingual status on lexical comprehension and production in Maltese five-year-old children: A LITMUS-CLT study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gatt, Daniela; Attard, Donna; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Haman, Ewa

    2017-01-01

    This article investigates whether the bilingual status of 56 typically developing children aged 60-69 months influenced their lexical abilities. The participants were identified as Maltese-dominant (Me) (n = 21), English-dominant (Em) (n = 15) and balanced bilingual (ME) (n = 20) on the basis of language exposure and proficiency, as reported by their parents. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were measured using Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT) in Maltese (CLT-MT) and British English (CLT-EN). Significant effects of bilingual group were identified for performance on lexical comprehension. For production, consistent bilingual group effects resulted when accurate concepts lexicalised in the test language were scored. Lexical mixing was more pronounced when children were tested in their non-dominant language. Maltese noun production elicited the highest levels of mixing across all groups. Findings point towards the need to consider specific exposure dynamics to each language within a single language pair when assessing children's bilingual lexical skills.

  11. Distinctiveness and encoding effects in online sentence comprehension

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Philip eHofmeister

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available In explicit memory recall and recognition tasks, elaboration and contextual isolation both facilitate memory performance. Here, we investigate these effects in the context of sentence processing: targets for retrieval during online sentence processing of English object relative clause constructions differ in the amount of elaboration associated with the target noun phrase, or the homogeneity of superficial features (text color. Experiment 1 shows that greater elaboration for targets during the encoding phase reduces reading times at retrieval sites, but elaboration of non-targets has considerably weaker effects. Experiment 2 illustrates that processing isolated superficial features of target noun phrases --- here, a green word in a sentence with words colored white --- does not lead to enhanced memory performance, despite triggering longer encoding times. These results are interpreted in the light of the memory models of Nairne 1990, 2001, 2006, which state that encoding remnants contribute to the set of retrieval cues that provide the basis for similarity-based interference effects.

  12. Probabilistically-Cued Patterns Trump Perfect Cues in Statistical Language Learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lany, Jill; Gómez, Rebecca L

    2013-01-01

    Probabilistically-cued co-occurrence relationships between word categories are common in natural languages but difficult to acquire. For example, in English, determiner-noun and auxiliary-verb dependencies both involve co-occurrence relationships, but determiner-noun relationships are more reliably marked by correlated distributional and phonological cues, and appear to be learned more readily. We tested whether experience with co-occurrence relationships that are more reliable promotes learning those that are less reliable using an artificial language paradigm. Prior experience with deterministically-cued contingencies did not promote learning of less reliably-cued structure, nor did prior experience with relationships instantiated in the same vocabulary. In contrast, prior experience with probabilistically-cued co-occurrence relationships instantiated in different vocabulary did enhance learning. Thus, experience with co-occurrence relationships sharing underlying structure but not vocabulary may be an important factor in learning grammatical patterns. Furthermore, experience with probabilistically-cued co-occurrence relationships, despite their difficultly for naïve learners, lays an important foundation for learning novel probabilistic structure.

  13. Tracking sentence planning and production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kemper, Susan; Bontempo, Daniel; McKedy, Whitney; Schmalzried, RaLynn; Tagliaferri, Bruno; Kieweg, Doug

    2011-03-01

    To assess age differences in the costs of language planning and production. A controlled sentence production task was combined with digital pursuit rotor tracking. Participants were asked to track a moving target while formulating a sentence using specified nouns and verbs and to continue to track the moving target while producing their response. The length of the critical noun phrase (NP) as well as the type of verb provided were manipulated. The analysis indicated that sentence planning was more costly than sentence production, and sentence planning costs increased when participants had to incorporate a long NP into their sentence. The long NPs also tended to be shifted to the end of the sentence, whereas short NPs tended to be positioned after the verb. Planning or producing responses with long NPs was especially difficult for older adults, although verb type and NP shift had similar costs for young and older adults. Pursuit rotor tracking during controlled sentence production reveals the effects of aging on sentence planning and production.

  14. Annotated corpus and the empirical evaluation of probability estimates of grammatical forms

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ševa Nada

    2003-01-01

    Full Text Available The aim of the present study is to demonstrate the usage of an annotated corpus in the field of experimental psycholinguistics. Specifically, we demonstrate how the manually annotated Corpus of Serbian Language (Kostić, Đ. 2001 can be used for probability estimates of grammatical forms, which allow the control of independent variables in psycholinguistic experiments. We address the issue of processing Serbian inflected forms within two subparadigms of feminine nouns. In regression analysis, almost all processing variability of inflected forms has been accounted for by the amount of information (i.e. bits carried by the presented forms. In spite of the fact that probability distributions of inflected forms for the two paradigms differ, it was shown that the best prediction of processing variability is obtained by the probabilities derived from the predominant subparadigm which encompasses about 80% of feminine nouns. The relevance of annotated corpora in experimental psycholinguistics is discussed more in detail .

  15. Manipulability impairs association-memory: revisiting effects of incidental motor processing on verbal paired-associates.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Madan, Christopher R

    2014-06-01

    Imageability is known to enhance association-memory for verbal paired-associates. High-imageability words can be further subdivided by manipulability, the ease by which the named object can be functionally interacted with. Prior studies suggest that motor processing enhances item-memory, but impairs association-memory. However, these studies used action verbs and concrete nouns as the high- and low-manipulability words, respectively, confounding manipulability with word class. Recent findings demonstrated that nouns can serve as both high- and low-manipulability words (e.g., CAMERA and TABLE, respectively), allowing us to avoid this confound. Here participants studied pairs of words that consisted of all possible pairings of high- and low-manipulability words and were tested with immediate cued recall. Recall was worse for pairs that contained high-manipulability words. In free recall, participants recalled more high- than low-manipulability words. Our results provide further evidence that manipulability influences memory, likely occurring through automatic motor imagery. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  16. Quantitative and qualitative differences in the lexical knowledge of monolingual and bilingual children on the LITMUS-CLT task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Altman, Carmit; Goldstein, Tamara; Armon-Lotem, Sharon

    2017-01-01

    While bilingual children follow the same milestones of language acquisition as monolingual children do in learning the syntactic patterns of their second language (L2), their vocabulary size in L2 often lags behind compared to monolinguals. The present study explores the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in Hebrew, by two groups of 5- to 6-year olds with typical language development: monolingual Hebrew speakers (N = 26), and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals (N = 27). Analyses not only show quantitative gaps between comprehension and production and between nouns and verbs, with a bilingual effect in both, but also a qualitative difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their production errors: monolinguals' errors reveal knowledge of the language rules despite temporary access difficulties, while bilinguals' errors reflect gaps in their knowledge of Hebrew (L2). The nature of Hebrew as a Semitic language allows one to explore this qualitative difference in the semantic and morphological level.

  17. Archaisms and innovations

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hansen, Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard

    He dived or he dove. He dreamed or he dreamt. Most of us can probably come to think of a word that may be declined in more than one way or that used to be declined in one way but is now declined differently; undoubtedly many people also have an opinion about that phenomenon. But considerably fewer...... Sandgaard Hansen advances a range of criteria as to how one can tell apart archaic word forms from more recent ones only by analysing the shape of different types of nouns; in other words, how one can distinguish between forms that can be traced more than 5,000 years back in time to the Indo-European proto...... of two hitherto unknown patterns of regular sound change, i.e. soundlaws, that happened in the developmental process from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic and that support the methods mentioned above of evaluating the originality of certain types of nouns based on their shape and appearance....

  18. Scientific and technical reports how to write and illustrate

    CERN Document Server

    Sharma, B C

    2014-01-01

    Scientific and technical reports: How to Write and Illustrate provides step-by-step advice on tackling various tasks associated with report writing like gathering information, analyzing information, preparing an outline, writing a rough draft and revising. Many examples illustrate the processes involved at various steps. A stepwise approach to computer-assisted preparation of tables and various types of figures like line drawings, bar charts, histograms, flowcharts, etc., is provided. Also presented are suggestions about how to use commonly available computer programs to give visual shape to ideas, concepts, processes and cause and effect relations described in the text. Use of readability tests is explained as a screening system for checking comprehensibility of language used. Readers are alerted to some of the common pitfalls in science writing like redundancy, overuse of nouns, noun chains, excessive use of passive voice, use of overlong sentences and ambiguity. Checklist at the end of each chapter sums up...

  19. Descriptive Metaphysics, Natural Language Metaphysics, Sapir-Whorf, and All That Stuff: Evidence from the Mass-Count Distinction

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Francis Jeffry Pelletier

    2010-12-01

    Full Text Available Strawson (1959 described ‘descriptive metaphysics’, Bach (1986a described ‘natural language metaphysics’, Sapir (1929 and Whorf (1940a,b, 1941 describe, well, Sapir-Whorfianism. And there are other views concerning the relation between correct semantic analysis of linguistic phenomena and the “reality” that is supposed to be thereby described. I think some considerations from the analyses of the mass-count distinction can shed some light on that very dark topic.ReferencesBach, Emmon. 1986a. ‘Natural Language Metaphysics’. In Ruth Barcan Marcus, G.J.W. Dorn & Paul Weingartner (eds. ‘Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, VII’, 573–595. Amsterdam: North Holland.Bach, Emmon. 1986b. ‘The Algebra of Events’. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 5–16.Berger, Peter & Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.Boroditsky, Lera, Schmidt, Lauren & Phillips, Webb. 2003. ‘Sex, Syntax, and Semantics’. In Dedre Gentner & Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds. ‘Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition’, 59–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Cheng, L. & Sybesma, R. 1999. ‘Bare and Not-So-Bare Nouns and the structure of NP’. Linguistic Inquiry 30: 509–542.http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438999554192Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998a. ‘Reference to Kinds across Languages’. Natural Language Semantics 6: 339–405.http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1008324218506Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998b. ‘Plurality of Mass Nouns and the Notion of ‘Semantic Parameter’ ’. In S. Rothstein (ed. ‘Events and Grammar’, 53–103. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Chierchia, Gennaro. 2010. ‘Mass Nouns, Vagueness and Semantic Variation’. Synthèse 174: 99–149.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9686-6Doetjes, Jenny. 1997. Quantifiers and Selection: On the Distribution of Quantifying Expressions in French, Dutch and English. Ph.D. thesis, University of Leiden, Holland

  20. The Dangling model in the construction of compound sentences with regard to verb tenses

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mahmoud Mehravaran

    2016-02-01

    the mistakes of some of the grammars. This research project has for the first time introduced constructive models of compound sentences in a comprehensive research taking in to account the tense of the verbs. The primary question in this research project is which kind of sentences can be considered as compound and what is the constructive of such a sentence? When defining a compound sentences, grammarians either shave the same beliefs or differ in their ideas. But all grammarians agree to the fact that a compound sentences has more than one verb. Different definitions are due to different criteria adapted in constructing a compound sentences. To construct a noun, and adjective, a verb and a sentence we should take similar and precise criteria to our consideration. In the grammatical units of noun, adjectives, and verbs construction means connecting two or more parts that can convey one similar meaning and its parts are dependent upon one another.  In the construction of compound sentences there must be the same criteria so that its applications can be truly recognized and identified just like the previously mentioned grammatical units. The first step to arrive at a criterion in defining and identifying compound sentences, is to separate this discussion from connective sentences that are relate to each other with connectives are called connective sentences. But sentences which are constructed with dependent making connectives and their parts are dependent upon one another are called compound sentences. Therefore the signs of compound sentences with regard to constructions and the meaning of criterion are as follows: 1 They have more than one verb. 2 The consistence of two or more dependent phrases. 3 Phrases construct a complete sentences all together and convey one similar message. 4 One of the phrases is the main clause and the other one is the subordinate one. 5 The phrases or subordinate clauses can be related to one of the major parts and they can take a

  1. The Effects of Orthographic Transparency and Familiarity on Reading Hebrew Words in Adults with and without Dyslexia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yael, Weiss; Tami, Katzir; Tali, Bitan

    2015-01-01

    The current study examined the effects of transparency and familiarity on word recognition in adult Hebrew dyslexic readers with a phonological processing deficit as compared to typical readers. We measured oral reading response time and accuracy of single nouns in several conditions: diacritics that provide transparent but less familiar…

  2. A new taxonomy of Dutch personality traits based on a comprehensive and unrestricted list of descriptors

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    De Raad, B.; Barelds, D.P.H.

    A list of 2,365 personality descriptive items was selected from a computerized database of the Dutch language. The list included terms from various word classes, such as trait adjectives, trait nouns, and trait verbs, and from expressions in which the meaning was drawn from a combination of words.

  3. Concreteness and Imagery Effects in the Written Composition of Definitions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sadoski, Mark; Kealy, William A.; Goetz, Ernest T.; Paivio, Allan

    1997-01-01

    In two experiments, undergraduates (n=48 and n=50) composed written definitions of concrete and abstract nouns that were matched for frequency of use and meaningfulness. Results support previous research suggesting that common cognitive mechanisms underlie production of spoken and written language as explained by dual coding theory. (SLD)

  4. West African Journal of Industrial and Academic Research - Vol 11 ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Machine translation of noun phrases from English to Igala using the rule-based approach · EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ... A model of virtual organization for corporate visibility and competitiveness · EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD FULL ...

  5. Heutiges Russisch (Schluss) (Contemporary Russian [Conclusion])

    Science.gov (United States)

    Russisch, 1976

    1976-01-01

    Considers two aspects of contemporary Russian language usage: (1) synonymity of prepositions, and (2) semantic and stylistic differences arising when certain verbs govern nouns in different cases. Material is excerpted from "Stilistik der russischen Sprache" (Russian Language Style) by Rosental and M. Telenkowa. (Text is in German.) (FB)

  6. Who dunnit. A crash course in style for Sandia authors

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Lopez, L.S.

    1980-07-01

    This report presents a short course for the busy engineer-scientist who wants to write reports that meet minimum standards of modern technical writing. The text stresses some cardinal rules of good writing: personal pronouns, strong verbs, active voice, clear expression, and avoidance of jargon and noun modifiers.

  7. Gender and Agreement Processing in Children with Developmental Language Disorder

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rakhlin, Natalia; Kornilov, Sergey A.; Grigorenko, Elena L.

    2014-01-01

    Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

  8. Anticipating Syntax during Reading: Evidence from the Boundary Change Paradigm

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brothers, Trevor; Traxler, Matthew J.

    2016-01-01

    Previous evidence suggests that grammatical constraints have a rapid influence during language comprehension, particularly at the level of word categories (noun, verb, preposition). These findings are in conflict with a recent study from Angele, Laishley, Rayner, and Liversedge (2014), in which sentential fit had no early influence on word…

  9. Attentional Requirements for the Selection of Words from Different Grammatical Categories

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ayora, Pauline; Janssen, Niels; Dell'Acqua, Roberto; Alario, F.-Xavier

    2009-01-01

    Two grammatical classes are commonly distinguished in psycholinguistic research. The open-class includes content words such as nouns, whereas the closed-class includes function words such as determiners. A standing issue is to identify whether these words are retrieved through similar or distinct selection mechanisms. We report a comparative…

  10. Role of grammatical gender and semantics in German word production

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Vigliocco, G.; Vinson, D.P.; Indefrey, P.; Levelt, W.J.M.; Hellwig, F.

    2004-01-01

    Semantic substitution errors (e.g., saying "arm" when "leg" is intended) are among the most common types of errors occurring during spontaneous speech. It has been shown that grammatical gender of German target nouns is preserved in the errors ( E. Marx, 1999). In 3 experiments, the authors explored

  11. Polish dictionaries and the treatment of verbal aspect

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Genis, R.; Genis, R.; de Haard, E.; Kalsbeek, J.; Keizer, E.; Stelleman, J.

    2012-01-01

    In good dictionaries of Slavic languages verbal aspect is generally indicated in the same way as the gender of nouns: (usually) labels or such like provide the information whether a verb is perfective or imperfective and especially nowadays also whether two verbs with the same lexical meaning that

  12. Translation Ambiguity but Not Word Class Predicts Translation Performance

    Science.gov (United States)

    Prior, Anat; Kroll, Judith F.; Macwhinney, Brian

    2013-01-01

    We investigated the influence of word class and translation ambiguity on cross-linguistic representation and processing. Bilingual speakers of English and Spanish performed translation production and translation recognition tasks on nouns and verbs in both languages. Words either had a single translation or more than one translation. Translation…

  13. Quantification Scope Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Persian and English

    Science.gov (United States)

    Asadollahfam, Hassan; Lotfi, Ahmad Reza

    2010-01-01

    This study investigates the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing noun phrases with double quantified constituents from a processing perspective. The questions this study tried to answer were: whether or not the preferred interpretation for doubly quantified ambiguous sentences in English was influenced by English learners' L1…

  14. Constraints on the Acquisition of Social Category Concepts

    Science.gov (United States)

    Baron, Andrew Scott; Dunham, Yarrow; Banaji, Mahzarin; Carey, Susan

    2014-01-01

    Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning…

  15. The Influence of Gender on Junior Secondary School Students ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    DrNneka

    ... to the Students' perception of Mathematics as a difficult subject (Iloputaife & Nworgu, 2003) ... low standard of science education in Nigeria of which Mathematics is a key part. ... Studies on students' attitude towards the teaching of mathematics are ... Ordinarily, gender is and English word for classifying nouns into male,.

  16. High Neuromagnetic Activation in the Left Prefrontal and Frontal Cortices Correlates with Better Memory Performance for Abstract Words

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Tzu-Ching; Lin, Yung-Yang

    2012-01-01

    The present study aimed to clarify the spatiotemporal characteristics of memory processing for abstract and concrete words. Neuromagnetic responses to memory encoding and recognition tasks of abstract and concrete nouns were obtained in 18 healthy adults using a whole-head neuromagnetometer. During memory encoding, abstract words elicited larger…

  17. The effectiveness of using a bilingualized dictionary for determining ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    This article discusses the use of a bilingualized dictionary, namely Oxford Advanced Learner's English–Chinese Dictionary 8 (OALECD8), by advanced Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learn-ers in the determination of noun countability and associated article use. A homogenous group of 30 English majors in a local university ...

  18. Advance Planning of Form Properties in the Written Production of Single and Multiple Words

    Science.gov (United States)

    Damian, Markus F.; Stadthagen-Gonzalez, Hans

    2009-01-01

    Three experiments investigated the scope of advance planning in written production. Experiment 1 manipulated phonological factors in single word written production, and Experiments 2 and 3 did the same in the production of adjective-noun utterances. In all three experiments, effects on latencies were found which mirrored those previously…

  19. Forum: The Lecture and Student Learning. The Lecture's Absent Audience

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sciullo, Nick J.

    2017-01-01

    According to the "Oxford English Dictionary" ("OED"), the noun "lecture" dates from the 14th century and means the "action of reading, perusal. Also, that which is read or perused." This definition, while accurate and resonates today in many college classrooms, ignores a key feature of any lecture. The…

  20. Widening Access through Openness in Higher Education in the Developing World: A Bourdieusian Field Analysis of Experiences from the National Open University of Nigeria

    Science.gov (United States)

    Olakulehin, Felix Kayode; Singh, Gurmit

    2013-01-01

    Bourdieu has argued that higher education is a field that reproduces social inequality, thus complicating how openness widens access to higher education in the developing world. Drawing on the experiences of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), this paper critically analyses and evaluates the rationale, approach, difficulties,…

  1. Exploiting prior knowledge of English, Mathematics and Chemistry ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    This paper explores prior knowledge with the view to enhancing the study of French. Juxtaposing sentences in French and English to underscore syntactic differences and similarities, the paper attributes numerical values to nouns and adjectives in French in order to demonstrate the mathematical imbalance and lack of ...

  2. Introduction (of 'The Noun Phrase in Functional Discourse Grammar')

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    García Velasco, Daniel; Rijkhoff, Jan

    2008-01-01

    ).    In order to contextualize the papers in the present volume, we will first lay out the main differences between FG and FDG and explain why some FG scholars felt that a general reorganization of the model was necessary. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the history of the way NPs have been analysed in F....... This study contains several new facts and ideas, which made it an interesting challenge to investigate to what extent the proposals he put forward could or should be integrated into the new FDG model (see also Rijkhoff this volume). All in all, the time seemed ripe for a detailed investigation of the way NPs...

  3. some remarks on nouns' participation in Bantu languages syntactic

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    is 6 and in it we sum up the main arguments of the entire paper1. 2.0 Revisiting the basic ... unique linguistic baggage – in particular its definition in lexicographic studies, its classification ...... Bosch (1985) as quoted by Canonici (1995:13) gives the ...... “A Lexical Mapping Theory Account of the Applicative and Causative ...

  4. Peculiarities of Grammatical Properties in Nominal Word Combinations

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Irina B. Klienkova

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available The article examines some peculiarities if grammatical properties of nominal word combinations based on the study of German-speaking Swiss press. The accumulated experience of linguists is analyzed and certain factors influencing the choice of syntactic relations in nominal word combinations with quantitative meaning are researched. It has been established that the choice of syntactic relations in such word combinations is determined by functional style, semantics and grammatical features of nouns - first or second components in a word combination. The aforementioned factors influencing the choice of syntactic relations in quantitative nominal word combinations are studied on the material of Germanspeaking Swiss press. The research revealed a number of peculiarities. First of all, German-speaking Swiss press uses such syntactic relation as genitive subordination quite often, not only on "special occasion" and unlike its use in Germany does not produce a magniloquent, pompous impression. Secondly, it has been established that the choice of syntactic relations in word combinations of the above-mentioned type of word combinations greatly depends on the semantic meaning of the noun - the first component of the word combination - and does not always coincide with the grammatical properties in nominal combinations in Germany. Thirdly, a clear dependence of syntactic relations choice is observed. Moreover, the article highlights the importance of grammatical features of the second component. These are such features as gender, number, case accompanied by noun declension. All the afore-mentioned features help to define the type of syntactic relations, which nominal quantitative word combinations may be connected by. The results of the comparisons of grammatical properties of quantitative nominal word combinations in German and Swiss press are demonstrated in a table below.

  5. Object-action dissociation: A voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping study on 102 patients after glioma removal

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alberto Pisoni

    Full Text Available Data concerning the neural basis of noun and verb processing are inconsistent. Some authors assume that action-verb processing is based on frontal areas while nouns processing relies on temporal regions; others argue that the circuits processing verbs and nouns are closely interconnected in a predominantly left-lateralized fronto-temporal-parietal network; yet, other researchers consider that the primary motor cortex plays a crucial role in processing action verbs. In the present study, one hundred and two patients with a tumour either in the right or left hemisphere were submitted to picture naming of objects and actions before and after surgery. To test the effect of specific brain regions in object and action naming, patients' lesions were mapped and voxel-lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM was computed. Behavioural results showed that left-brain damaged patients were significantly more impaired than right brain-damaged patients. The VLSM showed that these two grammatical classes are segregated in the left hemisphere. In particular, scores in naming of objects correlated with damage to the anterior temporal region, while scores in naming of actions correlated with lesions in the parietal areas and in the posterior temporal cortex. In addition, VLSM analyses carried out on non-linguistic tasks were not significant, confirming that the regions associated with deficits in object and action naming were not generally engaged in all cognitive tasks. Finally, the involvement of subcortical pathways was investigated and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus proved to play a role in object naming, while no specific bundle was identified for actions. Keywords: Object action dissociation, Temporal lesion, Frontal lesion, Voxel-based lesion symptom mapping

  6. Syntactic flexibility and planning scope: The effect of verb bias on advance planning during sentence recall

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maartje evan de Velde

    2014-10-01

    Full Text Available In sentence production, grammatical advance planning scope depends on contextual factors (e.g., time pressure, linguistic factors (e.g., ease of structural processing, and cognitive factors (e.g., production speed. The present study tests the influence of the availability of multiple syntactic alternatives (i.e., syntactic flexibility on the scope of advance planning during the recall of Dutch dative phrases. We manipulated syntactic flexibility by using verbs with a strong bias or a weak bias towards one structural alternative in sentence frames accepting both verbs (e.g., strong/weak bias: De ober schotelt/serveert de klant de maaltijd [voor] 'The waiter dishes out/serves the customer the meal'. To assess lexical planning scope, we varied the frequency of the first post-verbal noun (N1, Experiment 1 or the second post-verbal noun (N2, Experiment 2. In each experiment, 36 speakers produced the verb phrases in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP paradigm. On each trial, they read a sentence presented one word at a time, performed a short distractor task, and then saw a sentence preamble (e.g., De ober… which they had to complete to form the presented sentence. Onset latencies were compared using linear mixed effects models. N1 frequency did not produce any effects. N2 frequency only affected sentence onsets in the weak verb bias condition and especially in slow speakers. These findings highlight the dependency of planning scope during sentence recall on the grammatical properties of the verb and the frequency of post-verbal nouns. Implications for utterance planning in everyday speech are discussed.

  7. Grammatical encoding in bilingual language production: A focus on code switching

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    MEHDI ePURMOHAMMAD

    2015-11-01

    Full Text Available I report three experiments that examined whether words from one language of bilinguals can use the syntactic features form the other language and how such syntactic co-activation might influence syntactic processing. In other words, I examined whether there are any cases in which a lexical item inhibits its inherent syntactic feature and uses the syntactic feature(s that belongs to the other language, instead. In the non-switch condition in experiment 1 and 2, Persian-English bilinguals described pictures using an adjective-noun string from the same language requested. In the switch condition, they used the nouns and adjectives from the other language. In Experiment 3, in the switch condition participants used only the adjectives of noun phrases from the other language. The results showed that bilinguals may inhibit the activation of a word’s syntactic feature and use the syntactic property from the other language instead (e.g., pirāhane (N black. As the combinatorial node (the node that specify different kinds of syntactic structures in which a word can be used of a used adjective retains activation at least temporarily, bilinguals are more likely to use the same combinatorial node even for an adjective from the other language. Using the syntactic features from the other language increased in the switch conditions. Moreover, more inappropriate responses observed when switching from bilinguals’ L2 to L1. The results also revealed that different experimental contexts may lead to different patterns of the control mechanism. The results will be interpreted in terms of Hartsuiker and Pickering’s (2008 model of syntactic representation

  8. Review Article: Second Language Acquisition of Bantu Languages--A (Mostly) Untapped Research Opportunity

    Science.gov (United States)

    Spinner, Patti

    2011-01-01

    This review article presents a summary of research on the second language acquisition of Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa and Lingala. Although second language (L2) research on these languages is currently very limited, work in morphosyntax and phonology suggests promising directions for future study, particularly on noun class,…

  9. Learning a Novel Pattern through Balanced and Skewed Input

    Science.gov (United States)

    McDonough, Kim; Trofimovich, Pavel

    2013-01-01

    This study compared the effectiveness of balanced and skewed input at facilitating the acquisition of the transitive construction in Esperanto, characterized by the accusative suffix "-n" and variable word order (SVO, OVS). Thai university students (N = 98) listened to 24 sentences under skewed (one noun with high token frequency) or…

  10. The Recipe for Success: Syntactic Features of "la chronique gastronomique."

    Science.gov (United States)

    Engel, Dulcie M.

    1997-01-01

    Analyzes the syntactic structure of noun phrases and verb phrases in recipes and cookery articles in the French press and argues that the complexity of writing about cooking parallels the complexity of the cooking process itself, demonstrating how syntax can reflect function and meaning in a restricted text-type. (Author/MSE)

  11. Juegos, Canciones, Poemas y Adivinanzas (Games, Songs, Poems and Riddles).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Toro, Leonor; And Others

    Printed in Spanish, this booklet contains games, songs, poems, riddles, and sayings for use with Puerto Rican migrant children. Eleven matching exercises present Spanish vocabulary related to clothing, food, and musical instruments. Eleven word search games teach Spanish names for body parts, masculine and feminine nouns, famous names, fruits and…

  12. Input Variability Facilitates Unguided Subcategory Learning in Adults

    Science.gov (United States)

    Eidsvåg, Sunniva Sørhus; Austad, Margit; Plante, Elena; Asbjørnsen, Arve E.

    2015-01-01

    Purpose: This experiment investigated whether input variability would affect initial learning of noun gender subcategories in an unfamiliar, natural language (Russian), as it is known to assist learning of other grammatical forms. Method: Forty adults (20 men, 20 women) were familiarized with examples of masculine and feminine Russian words. Half…

  13. Improved Vocabulary Production after Naming Therapy in Aphasia: Can Gains in Picture Naming Generalise to Connected Speech?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Conroy, Paul; Sage, Karen; Ralph, Matt Lambon

    2009-01-01

    Background: Naming accuracy for nouns and verbs in aphasia can vary across different elicitation contexts, for example, simple picture naming, composite picture description, narratives, and conversation. For some people with aphasia, naming may be more accurate to simple pictures as opposed to naming in spontaneous, connected speech; for others,…

  14. A Descriptive Enquiry into Subject-Verb Concord in English Existential Constructions

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tsuchida, Takehiro

    2011-01-01

    Subject-verb concord in English existential constructions is often viewed as problematic from both prescriptive and descriptive approaches to grammar and causes considerable confusion among teachers and learners of English as a second language (ESL). This paper aims to disentangle debates over the curious usage of the "there" + plural noun phrase…

  15. Rethinking and Restructuring an Assessment System via Effective Deployment of Technology

    Science.gov (United States)

    Okonkwo, Charity

    2010-01-01

    Every instructional process involves a strategic assessment system for a complete teaching-learning circle. Assessment system which is seriously challenged calls for a change in the approach. The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) assessment system at present is challenged. The large number of students and numerous courses offered by NOUN…

  16. Characteristics of Syntactic Comprehension Deficits Following Closed Head Injury versus Left Cerebrovascular Accident.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Butler-Hinz, Susan; And Others

    1990-01-01

    Two studies examined the ability to assign thematic roles and to coindex referentially dependent noun phrases in closed head injured adults (N=20), adult stroke patients (N=20), and normal adults (N=20). Results suggested that syntactic comprehension disturbances are similar following left cerebral hemisphere infarction and closed head injury.…

  17. Environmental Correlates of Individual Differences in Language Acquisition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Furrow, David; Nelson, Katherine

    1984-01-01

    Reports on a study of mothers' uses of nouns and pronouns and their references to objects and persons as environmental variables which might relate to children's nominal preferences. Findings suggest that environmental factors do contribute to stylistic differences in language acquisition and that the communicative functions of language are an…

  18. Contact-induced change or dialectal relic in heritage American-Danish? The use of the indefinite article in copula clauses with person-identifying subject predicate

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Heegård, Jan

    2018-01-01

    The article analyses the use and non-use of the indefinite article in the identifying copula construction with bare noun as the subject predicate in American Danish. With a point of departure in the semantics associated with use and non-use of the indefinite article in Standard Danish and Danish ...

  19. The Role of Developmental Levels in Examining the Effect of Subject Types on the Production of Auxiliary "Is" in Young English-Speaking Children

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guo, Ling-Yu; Van Horne, Amanda J. Owen; Tomblin, J. Bruce

    2011-01-01

    Purpose: Prior work (Guo, Owen, & Tomblin, 2010) has shown that at the group level, auxiliary "is" production by young English-speaking children was symmetrical across lexical noun and pronominal subjects. Individual data did not uniformly reflect these patterns. On the basis of the framework of the gradual morphosyntactic learning (GML)…

  20. Steps along a Continuum of Word Knowledge: Later Lexical Development through the Lens of Receptive Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ameel, Eef; Malt, Barbara C.; Storms, Gert

    2014-01-01

    Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…