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Nouns
Kinds of Nouns Selected AbstractsProcessing English Compounds in the First and Second Language: The Influence of the Middle MorphemeLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2010Victoria A. Murphy Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g.,,rat-eater,not,rats-eater) while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g.,,mice-eater) (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has been considered insufficient to explain this dissociation between regular and irregular plurals in compounds because naturally occurring compounds in English rarely have plurals of any type included within them (e.g., Gordon, 1985). However, the constraint on the production of plural inflection in English compounds could be derived from the patterns in which regular plural and possessive morphemes occur in the input. To explore this idea, native adult English speakers and adult Chinese learners of English were asked to process a series of compounds containing different medial morphemes and phonemes. Comparisons were made across compounds with regular and irregular plurals and possessive [-s]. Native speakers (NS) of English processed compounds with medial possessive morphology faster than compounds with medial regular plural morphology. The second language learners did not show the same pattern as the NSs, which could be due to the fact that they had considerably less exposure to the relevant input patterns relative to the NSs. Regular plurals may be excluded before a rightmost noun in English because the pattern "Noun,[-s] morpheme,Noun" is more frequently used for marking possession in English. Irregular plurals do not end in the [-s] morpheme and therefore do not "compete" with the possessive marker and, consequently, may be optionally included in compounds. It is possible, therefore, that the input English learners receive could indeed be sufficient to constrain this aspect of English compound production. [source] Spongelike acquisition of sight vocabulary in beginning readers?JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 1 2000Morag Stuart We report two training studies designed to investigate the relation between phonological awareness, sound-to-letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five-year-old readers. Effects of visual memory and of teaching methods are also explored. In our first study, novice five-year-old readers able to segment initial phonemes and with good knowledge of mappings between sounds and letters learned words more easily from repeated exposure to texts. Results suggested that visual memory influenced word learning in non-segmenting but not in segmenting children. Spelling regularity did not affect ease of learning. Nouns were easier to learn than function words. In the second study, although phonological awareness and sound-to-letter mapping knowledge still exerted a significant influence, all novice five-year-olds were able to learn words more easily if these were taught out-of-context singly on flashcards. Results support the view that mental representations of printed words are more easily formed by beginners who are able to match at least some of the phonological segments detected in the spoken word to letters in the printed word. [source] Mapping Novel Nouns and Verbs Onto Dynamic Action Events: Are Verb Meanings Easier to Learn Than Noun Meanings for Japanese Children?CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2005Mutsumi Imai The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the sameness of the action. Study 4 showed that the difficulty young children experience in learning verbs lies mainly in mapping the appropriate element to a verb rather than in encoding and remembering an action itself. The results of this research are related to a long-debated issue of whether noun learning is privileged over verb learning. [source] Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristicDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 5 2009Krista Byers-Heinlein How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence. [source] The origins and evolution of links between word learning and conceptual organization: new evidence from 11-month-oldsDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2003Sandra Waxman How do infants map words to their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g. noun, adjective) refer to different aspects of the same objects (e.g. category, property)? We have proposed that (1) infants begin with a broad expectation that novel open-class words (both nouns and adjectives) highlight commonalities (both category- and property-based) among objects, and that (2) this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned through linguistic experience. We examine the first part of this proposal, asking whether 11-month-old infants can construe the very same set of objects (e.g. four purple animals) either as members of an object category (e.g. animals) or as embodying a salient object property (e.g. four purple things), and whether naming (with count nouns vs. adjectives) differentially influences their construals. Results support the proposal. Infants treated novel nouns and adjectives identically, mapping both types of words to both category- and property-based commonalities among objects. [source] What and How of North American Lutheran PreachingDIALOG, Issue 4 2004Thomas G. Rogers Abstract:, This article suggests that an emphasis on how to preach, evidenced in the New Homiletic, can assist preachers in struggling with questions of what to preach. The narrative model of "problem","solution","what now?" has potential homiletical ties to Law (2nd use), Gospel, Law (3rd use) theology. Since preaching 3rd use of the Law can lead to a kind of works righteousness for hearers of such sermons, strategies are offered for dealing with preaching challenge. Preachers can put challenge before their hearers as a noun rather than as a verb; they can preach challenge as identification or questioning rather than as something hearers must do of their own accord. [source] Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement in Two Learning Contexts: Study Abroad and At HomeFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 2 2010Christina Isabelli-García Abstract: The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The participants received grammaticality judgment tests coded for morphological class of the modified noun as well as attributive and predicative adjectives. Data were also collected on social behavior and language contact in Spanish and English in order to explain data outcome. The findings suggest that no difference exists between the two learning contexts and that social behavior and language contact abroad have minimal influence on acquisition rate. [source] Processing English Compounds in the First and Second Language: The Influence of the Middle MorphemeLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2010Victoria A. Murphy Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g.,,rat-eater,not,rats-eater) while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g.,,mice-eater) (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has been considered insufficient to explain this dissociation between regular and irregular plurals in compounds because naturally occurring compounds in English rarely have plurals of any type included within them (e.g., Gordon, 1985). However, the constraint on the production of plural inflection in English compounds could be derived from the patterns in which regular plural and possessive morphemes occur in the input. To explore this idea, native adult English speakers and adult Chinese learners of English were asked to process a series of compounds containing different medial morphemes and phonemes. Comparisons were made across compounds with regular and irregular plurals and possessive [-s]. Native speakers (NS) of English processed compounds with medial possessive morphology faster than compounds with medial regular plural morphology. The second language learners did not show the same pattern as the NSs, which could be due to the fact that they had considerably less exposure to the relevant input patterns relative to the NSs. Regular plurals may be excluded before a rightmost noun in English because the pattern "Noun,[-s] morpheme,Noun" is more frequently used for marking possession in English. Irregular plurals do not end in the [-s] morpheme and therefore do not "compete" with the possessive marker and, consequently, may be optionally included in compounds. It is possible, therefore, that the input English learners receive could indeed be sufficient to constrain this aspect of English compound production. [source] Teaching Language Categories and Learning About Language Categories from TeachingLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2010Sachiko Yamahashi Familiar category terms, such as ,noun', ,verb', and ,adjective', are usually used in language classes. However, the application of these labels in the target language is not necessarily intuitive. English learners of Japanese often have problems with: (i) ,deverbal nouns', problems that stem from the ,noun,verb' distinction, and (ii) ,adjectives', which are divided into two types unlike English ,adjectives'. This article builds on these examples toward an analysis of Japanese involving four categories defined by the intersection of the nominative case and tense markers. The moral is that a language could be learned more accurately and readily if categories were based on such salient distinctions in the target language. [source] Subject-Matter Content: How Does It Assist the Interactional and Linguistic Needs of Classroom Language Learners?MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 1 2002Teresa Pica This study focused on the role of subject-matter content in second language (L2) learning. It sought to identify ways in which teachers modified classroom interaction about subject-matter content in order to assist the input, feedback, and production needs of L2 learners, and to promote their attention to developmentally difficult relationships of L2 form and meaning that they had not fully acquired. Data were collected from 6 preacademic English L2 classes whose content consisted of thematic units on film and literature. Each class was composed of 10,15 high intermediate English L2 students and their teachers. Analysis of the data focused on teacher-led discussions, because these were the predominant mode of interaction in each of the classes, and on form-meaning relationships encoded in noun and verb forms for purposes such as reference, retelling, argument, and speculation regarding film and literary content. Results of the study revealed numerous contexts in which the discussion interaction might have been modified for the kinds of input, feedback, or production that could draw students' attention to developmentally difficult form-meaning relationships. However, there were relatively few instances in which this actually occurred. Instead, the teachers and students tended to exchange multiutterance texts, the comprehensibility of which provided little basis for modified interaction and attention to form and meaning. [source] Verb and noun generation tasks in Huntington's diseaseMOVEMENT DISORDERS, Issue 5 2004Patrice Péran MSc Abstract We compared noun- and verb-generation tasks in a demented group (n = 9, Dementia Rating Scale , 129) and in a non-demented group (n = 17, Dementia Rating Scale > 129) of Huntington's disease (HD) patients compared to 26 matched normal subjects. We did not find a specific deficit for verb production in non-demented patients who had a performance similar to but weaker than that of the controls across the four tasks. The profile of results was different in the demented group because, apart from a global deficit whatever the task in comparison with both non-demented and control groups, the demented patients exhibited increased difficulties in the two tasks implying verb production. The deficit of verb production observed in demented HD patients is discussed in relation to the damage to the motor loop in HD patients at later stages of disease. © 2003 Movement Disorder Society [source] Differential integration efforts of mandatory and optional sentence constituentsPSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 5 2006Anat Prior Abstract We investigated the online sensitivity of the semantic integration system to the different roles played by sentence constituents that are necessary (verbs and nouns) or optional (adjectives) for argument completion. We compared the effect of semantic incongruities introduced in both types of words on the N400 ERP component. Participants read sentences for meaning, half of which were rendered anomalous by an incongruent verb, noun, or an early/late adjective. Incongruent adjectives led to smaller N400 effects than did incongruent nouns and verbs, and the congruity effect for sentence-final adjectives was not significant. All incongruities are therefore not created equal: Incongruent optional sentence constituents create less of an integrative burden than incongruent mandatory sentence constituents, suggesting that online sentence integration processes are sensitive to the distinct roles played by different words in shaping sentence meaning. [source] Substantive unconscious and adjective unconscious: the contribution of Wilfred BionTHE JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2000Ana Maria Andrade de Azevedo The author first provides her readers with a brief summary of some of Freud's ideas, as found throughout his work, on the notion of ,unconscious'. The notion of unconscious as noun is contrasted to the idea of unconscious as adjective, this latter being proposed as a quality, or a state, ever temporary, dynamic, and subject to the constant changes going on in the individual's internal psychic world, as well as to external conditions. After presenting some considerations, the author then contrasts the Kleinian model of the mind to the Freudian, and Wilfred Bion's contribution is discussed at some length. Within Bion's conception of psychic functioning, the model of ,dream' is highlighted and, in this regard, clarifications are sought regarding Bion's view of the unconscious. To conclude, a brief and superficial approximation to the work of Carl Jung is touched upon, although the author admits to knowing little of Jung's positions. [source] Do children with autism spectrum disorders show a shape bias in word learning?AUTISM RESEARCH, Issue 4 2008Saime Tek Abstract Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) acquire a sizeable lexicon. However, these children also seem to understand and/or store the meanings of words differently from typically developing children. One of the mechanisms that helps typically developing children learn novel words is the shape bias, in which the referent of a noun is mapped onto the shape of an object, rather than onto its color, texture, or size. We hypothesized that children with autistic disorder would show reduced or absent shape bias. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm , we compared the performance of young children with ASD and typically developing children (TYP), across four time points, in their use of shape bias. Neither group showed a shape bias at Visit 1, when half of the children in both groups produced fewer than 50 count nouns. Only the TYP group showed a shape bias at Visits 2, 3, and 4. According to the growth curve analyses, the rate of increase in the shape bias scores over time was significant for the TYP children. The fact that the TYP group showed a shape bias at 24 months of age, whereas children with ASD did not demonstrate a shape bias despite a sizeable vocabulary, supports a dissociation between vocabulary size and principles governing acquisition in ASD children from early in language development. [source] Infants' Use of Lexical-Category-to-Meaning Links in Object IndividuationCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2008D. Geoffrey Hall Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the box, their subsequent search behavior was recorded. Twenty-month-olds, but not 16-month-olds, searched significantly longer for a second object inside the box when the labels were both proper names than when they were 1 count noun followed by 1 proper name. The effect was not significant when proper names were replaced by adjectives. Twenty-month-olds' understanding of meaning distinctions among several word categories guided their object individuation. [source] Do Novel Words Facilitate 18-Month-Olds' Spatial Categorization?CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 6 2007Marianella Casasola Eighteen-month-olds' spatial categorization was tested when hearing a novel spatial word. Infants formed an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., placing 1 object on another) when hearing a novel spatial particle during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence. Infants with a productive spatial vocabulary did not discriminate the support relation when hearing the same novel word as a count noun. However, infants who were not yet producing spatial words did attend to the support relation when presented with the novel count noun. The results indicate that 18-month-olds can use a novel particle (possibly assisted by a familiar verb) to facilitate their spatial categorization but that the specificity of this effect varies with infants' acquisition of spatial language. [source] Reorganizing the Lexicon by Learning a New Word: Japanese Children's Interpretation of the Meaning of a New Word for a Familiar ArtifactCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2002Etsuko Haryu This research investigated how children interpret the meaning of a new word associated with a familiar artifact. The existing literature has shown that syntactic form,class information plays an important role in making this kind of inference. However, this information is not available to Japanese children, because Japanese language does not have a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, proper nouns and common nouns, or singular and plural. In Study 1, 12 three,year,old monolingual Japanese children were tested to examine whether they interpreted a new noun associated with a familiar artifact to be a material name or a new label for the object. They interpreted the new word as a new category label for the object, rather than as a name for the material. How children related the new category to the old familiar one was then examined in Studies 2 and 3. The results of Study 2, in which 24 three,year,olds participated, showed that children could flexibly shift between two interpretations using shape information. When the named object had a typical shape for the familiar category, they mapped the new word to a subordinate category. In contrast, when the shape of the named object was atypical, they mapped the new word to a new category that was mutually exclusive to the familiar category by excluding the named object from the familiar category. In Study 3, 12 three,year,olds were tested to examine relative importance of shape and functional information in this inference process. The results of the three studies suggest that children flexibly recruit clues from multiple sources, but the clues are weighed in hierarchical order so that they can determine the single most plausible solution in a given situation when different clues suggest different solutions. [source] Developmental Differences in Visual and Auditory Processing of Complex SentencesCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2000James R. Booth Children aged 8 through 11 (N= 250) were given a word-by-word sentence task in both the visual and auditory modes. The sentences included an object relative clause, a subject relative clause, or a conjoined verb phrase. Each sentence was followed by a true,false question, testing the subject of either the first or second verb. Participants were also given two memory span measures: digit span and reading span. High digit span children slowed down more at the transition from the main to the relative clause than did the low digit span children. The findings suggest the presence of a U-shaped learning pattern for on-line processing of restrictive relative clauses. Off-line accuracy scores showed different patterns for good comprehenders and poor comprehenders. Poor comprehenders answered the second verb questions at levels that were consistently below chance. Their answers were based on an incorrect local attachment strategy that treated the second noun as the subject of the second verb. For example, they often answered yes to the question ,The girl chases the policeman' after the object relative sentence ,The boy that the girl sees chases the policeman.' Interestingly, low memory span poor comprehenders used the local attachment strategy less consistently than high memory span poor comprehenders, and all poor comprehenders used this strategy less consistently for harder than for easier sentences. [source] Information Sources for Noun LearningCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005Edward Kako Abstract Why are some words easier to learn than others? And what enables the eventual learning of the more difficult words? These questions were addressed for nouns using a paradigm in which adults were exposed to naturalistic maternal input that was manipulated to simulate access to several different information sources, both alone and in combination: observation of the extralinguistic contexts in which the target word was used, the words that co-occurred with the target word, and the target word's syntactic context. Words that were not accurately identified from observation alone were both abstract (e.g., music) and concrete (e.g., tail). Whether a noun could be learned from observation depended on whether it labeled a basic-level object category (BLOC). However, the difference between BLOC labels and non-BLOC labels was eliminated when observation was supplemented with linguistic context. Thus, although BLOC labels can be learned from observation alone, non-BLOC labels require richer linguistic context. These findings support a model of vocabulary growth in which an important role is played by changes in the information to which learners have access. [source] Teaching Language Categories and Learning About Language Categories from TeachingLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2010Sachiko Yamahashi Familiar category terms, such as ,noun', ,verb', and ,adjective', are usually used in language classes. However, the application of these labels in the target language is not necessarily intuitive. English learners of Japanese often have problems with: (i) ,deverbal nouns', problems that stem from the ,noun,verb' distinction, and (ii) ,adjectives', which are divided into two types unlike English ,adjectives'. This article builds on these examples toward an analysis of Japanese involving four categories defined by the intersection of the nominative case and tense markers. The moral is that a language could be learned more accurately and readily if categories were based on such salient distinctions in the target language. [source] The origins and evolution of links between word learning and conceptual organization: new evidence from 11-month-oldsDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2003Sandra Waxman How do infants map words to their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g. noun, adjective) refer to different aspects of the same objects (e.g. category, property)? We have proposed that (1) infants begin with a broad expectation that novel open-class words (both nouns and adjectives) highlight commonalities (both category- and property-based) among objects, and that (2) this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned through linguistic experience. We examine the first part of this proposal, asking whether 11-month-old infants can construe the very same set of objects (e.g. four purple animals) either as members of an object category (e.g. animals) or as embodying a salient object property (e.g. four purple things), and whether naming (with count nouns vs. adjectives) differentially influences their construals. Results support the proposal. Infants treated novel nouns and adjectives identically, mapping both types of words to both category- and property-based commonalities among objects. [source] How children know the relevant properties for generalizing object namesDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2002Susan S. Jones Young children's novel word extensions indicate that their animal categories, like those of adults, are characterized by multiple similarities among instances; whereas their artifact categories, again like those of adults, are characterized more simply by commonalities among instances in shape. Three experiments shed light on the nature and development of a mechanism that enables children to organize novel lexical categories differently for different kinds of objects. Experiment 1 shows that, by adult judgments, animals and artifacts present different category organizations. Experiment 2 shows relations between both age and the number of nouns young children have acquired, and children's kind-specific generalizations of newly learned nouns. Experiment 3 is a training study in which even younger children show an ability to learn and then generalize highly abstract relations between different contextual cues and different category structures; and importantly, to learn more than one set of such relations at a time. Together, these three findings indicate one way in which children are able to rapidly and accurately form lexical categories that parallel those of adults in their language community. [source] Wittgenstein's Builders and Perry's Objection to Sentence PriorityDIALECTICA, Issue 1 2002Eli Dresner In the first section of this paper I present a view of linguistic meaning that I label 'Sentence Priority'(SP): the position that semantically primitive language-world contact is made at the level of complete sentences (rather than the level of sentence parts). Then, in the main part of the paper, I consider and reject an objection against Sentence Priority raised by John Perry, an objection that appeals to Wittgenstein's builders parable. Perry argues that the builder's utterances (,Slab',,Pillar', etc.) are utterances of self-standing nouns, and that therefore they constitute a counter-example to SP. A sound assessment of Perry's argument, however, depends on a clear distinction between two cases: one in which the four expressions mentioned in Wittgenstein's example exhaust the builders'expressive powers, and one in which they do not. Once these cases are distinguished it can be seen that in neither does Perry's argument go through. [source] A Bridge Too Far?ENGLISH IN EDUCATION, Issue 2 2001Floppy Fail the Apprentice Reader, How Biff, Kipper Abstract This article is the result of a re-examination of reading scheme books. Taking a literary perspective, the implied reader was investigated in the most popular scheme, The Oxford Reading nee, in order to ascertain how the reader is constructed by the text. It is argued that such texts covertly construct a passive, struggling reader. As such, this has important implications for the National Literacy Strategy, particularly in the selection of texts for Guided Reading. Summary Reading scheme books are designed to bridge the gap between the oral language of the child and the literary language of the book. What is considered important is a recognisable primary world. There is little dialogue yet the language is supposed to reflect that of the child. Short simple sentences devoid of cohesive devices are considered easier to read because the apprentice reader is deemed not to have stamina. Key words such as nouns and verbs are emphasised and little attention is paid to rhythm, hence few elisions and much repetition. As such the reading scheme does not reflect the language of the child for there is little colloquial expression and the lack of literary features actually makes the text very difficult to read. Implied is a reader who is going to find the whole process difficult and has little to bring to the text. On the other hand the children's literature analysed enjoys a variety of narratives and subject matter yet all support the apprentice reader. Such literary texts employ cohesive devices, the third person has a sense of telling with echoes of the oral tradition while those in first person offer a sense of a teller close to the reader. Direct speech is used, which acts as a bridge from the oral to the literary world. The reader is being guided and helped and not left to struggle. Ironically, it is the literary text that offers more support than the supposedly carefully constructed reading scheme. Furthermore, it can be seen that the reading scheme examined constructs a passive reader to whom things happen. The construction of childhood itself is without joy, excitement and wonder. There is a dullness in the text and a dullness in the characters and the plot that constructs a negative view of reading and a negative construction of the child. The model in Figure 1 summarises the difference between the two types of text: Clearly this has implications for texts selected for pupils to read in the National Literacy Strategy, particularly for Guided Reading. There is no shortage in the UK of appropriate, well-written and superbly illustrated children's books that challenge, support and create an interest in literature. It remains a mystery why the dull reading scheme still has such a strong place in the primary classroom. [source] Personality terms of abuse in three cultures: type nouns between description and insultEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 2 2005Boele De Raad In this study terms of abuse are investigated in three different cultures. Spontaneous verbal aggression is to a certain extent reminiscent of the values of a certain culture. One hundred and ninety-two male subjects from Spain, Germany and the Netherlands were asked to write down terms of abuse that they would use given a certain stimulus situation, and in addition to give their rating of the offensive character of those terms. A total set of 830 useful expressions was thus collected. The frequencies of the expressions were established, and the total list of expressions was categorized in terms of what they were about. In Spanish abusive language is typically about family and relations, in Germany it is typically about anal aspects, and in the Netherlands it is mainly about genitals. Explanations are provided in terms of dimensions on which the three cultures differ. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Effects of Word and Fragment Writing During L2 Vocabulary LearningFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 4 2007Joe Barcroft This study examined how writing (copying) target words and word fragments affects intentional second language (L2) vocabulary learning. English-speaking first-semester learners ofSpanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns via word-picture repetition in three conditions: (1) word writing, (2) fragment writing, and (3) no writing. After the learning phase, the participants completed productive (picture-to-L2) and recpectively oriented (L2-to-first language) posttests. Vocabulary learning scores in the no-writing condition were higher than in the other two conditions and higher in the word-writing condition than in the fragment-writing condition. These fmdings provide new evidence on how forced Output without access to meaning can detract from early word learning by exhausting processing resources needed to encode new word forms. The pedagogical implications of the study call for language instructors to rethink the practice of encouraging students to write down a word to remember it. [source] The neural response to changing semantic and perceptual complexity during language processingHUMAN BRAIN MAPPING, Issue 3 2010David J. Sharp Abstract Speech comprehension involves processing at different levels of analysis, such as acoustic, phonetic, and lexical. We investigated neural responses to manipulating the difficulty of processing at two of these levels. Twelve subjects underwent positron emission tomographic scanning while making decisions based upon the semantic relatedness between heard nouns. We manipulated perceptual difficulty by presenting either clear or acoustically degraded speech, and semantic difficulty by varying the degree of semantic relatedness between words. Increasing perceptual difficulty was associated with greater activation of the left superior temporal gyrus, an auditory-perceptual region involved in speech processing. Increasing semantic difficulty was associated with reduced activity in both superior temporal gyri and increased activity within the left angular gyrus, a heteromodal region involved in accessing word meaning. Comparing across all the conditions, we also observed increased activation within the left inferior prefrontal cortex as the complexity of language processing increased. These results demonstrate a flexible system for language processing, where activity within distinct parts of the network is modulated as processing demands change. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Control of semantic interference in episodic memory retrieval is associated with an anterior cingulate-prefrontal activation patternHUMAN BRAIN MAPPING, Issue 2 2001Manfred Herrmann Prefrontal activation is a consistent finding in functional neuroimaging studies of episodic memory retrieval. In the present study we aimed at a further analysis of prefrontal neural systems involved in the executive control of context-specific properties in episodic memory retrieval using an event-related fMRI design. Nine subjects were asked to learn two 20-item word lists that consisted of concrete nouns assigned to four semantic categories. Ten items of both word lists referred to the same semantic category. Subjects were instructed to determine whether nouns displayed in random order corresponded to the first 20-item target list. The interference evoked by the retrieval of semantically related items of the second list resulted in significantly longer reaction times compared to the noninterference condition. Contrasting the interference against the noninterference retrieval condition demonstrated an activation pattern that comprised a right anterior cingulate and frontal opercular area and a left-lateralized dorsolateral prefrontal region. Trial averaged time series revealed that the PFC areas were selectively activated at the interference condition and did not respond to the familiarity of learned words. These findings suggest a functionally separable role of prefrontal cortical areas mediating processes associated with the executive control of interfering context information in episodic memory retrieval. Hum. Brain Mapping 13:94,103, 2001. © 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Verbal Artistry in Southern Paiute Narratives: Reduplication as a Stylistic ProcessJOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2002Pamela Bunte This article examines stylistic uses of reduplicated nouns and verbs in Southern Paiute narrative performances. Traditional Paiute storytellers in the San Juan andKaibab communities of north-central Arizona employ reduplication to index simultaneously narrative structure and specific referential meanings. The analysis of this creative and multi-indexical process demonstrates the importance of examining the verbal artistry of devices like reduplication in any language study. [source] English-Arabic proper-noun transliteration-pairs creationJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 10 2008Mohamed Abdel Fattah Proper nouns may be considered the most important query words in information retrieval. If the two languages use the same alphabet, the same proper nouns can be found in either language. However, if the two languages use different alphabets, the names must be transliterated. Short vowels are not usually marked on Arabic words in almost all Arabic documents (except very important documents like the Muslim and Christian holy books). Moreover, most Arabic words have a syllable consisting of a consonant-vowel combination (CV), which means that most Arabic words contain a short or long vowel between two successive consonant letters. That makes it difficult to create English-Arabic transliteration pairs, since some English letters may not be matched with any romanized Arabic letter. In the present study, we present different approaches for extraction of transliteration proper-noun pairs from parallel corpora based on different similarity measures between the English and romanized Arabic proper nouns under consideration. The strength of our new system is that it works well for low-frequency proper noun pairs. We evaluate the new approaches presented using two different English-Arabic parallel corpora. Most of our results outperform previously published results in terms of precision, recall, and F -Measure. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||