Search results for "Natural language"
showing 10 items of 650 documents
How Idioms Are Recognized when Individuals Are “Thrown Off the Track”, “Off the Rack” or “Off the Path”: A Decision Time Experiment in Healthy Volunt…
2021
Figurative elements in language have their own particularities, including words that deviate from their generally accepted definition to amplify our language or to paraphrase an issue. It is still unclear how individuals process idioms that are figurative or ambiguous, especially when they additionally become distracted by modified idioms that are similar in appearance. In our study, 47 healthy adults (mean age of 27.3 years, SD = 2.9) participated in a decision time experiment to determine how participants recognize well-formed, genuine German idioms alongside certain idiom modifications. All participants were initially exposed to a prime on a screen. Then, they had to detect the target id…
Comparing speaking situations in three different language tests
2013
The purpose of this study was to compare learner outcome when five similar speaking situations were offered in the speaking subtest in Finnish, Swedish and English intermediate level tests in the Finnish National Certificates language testing system. The overall aim was to investigate the tasks by comparing learner outcomes across the three tests and to seek explanations for the outcome in the learners’ selfreported demographic, language, educational and professional background.The speaking situations were selected from the NC item bank meaning that they have undergone the Item Response Theory based analyses which indicate that the tasks function well in all tests. More information was need…
Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech
2017
Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers tr…
The exploitation of distributional information in syllable processing
2004
There is now growing evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical regularities embedded into linguistic utterances, but the exact nature of the distributional information to which human performance is sensitive is an issue that has been surprisingly neglected as yet. In order to address this issue, we first propose an overview of some basic measures of association, going from the simple co-occurrence frequency to the normative measure of contingency, rw: We then report an experiment collecting judgments of word-likeness as a function of the relationship between the phonemes composing the rimes (VC). The contingency between Vs and Cs, as assessed by rw; was the best predictor of chi…
Abstract Syntax as Interlingua: Scaling Up the Grammatical Framework from Controlled Languages to Robust Pipelines
2020
Abstract syntax is an interlingual representation used in compilers. Grammatical Framework (GF) applies the abstract syntax idea to natural languages. The development of GF started in 1998, first as a tool for controlled language implementations, where it has gained an established position in both academic and commercial projects. GF provides grammar resources for over 40 languages, enabling accurate generation and translation, as well as grammar engineering tools and components for mobile and Web applications. On the research side, the focus in the last ten years has been on scaling up GF to wide-coverage language processing. The concept of abstract syntax offers a unified view on many oth…
L'auxiliation en Italien
1997
This article is based on the results of a study dealing with the various classes of Italian verbs (modals, aspectuels, verbs of movement, progressives, avere da + infinitive) that attract the clitic pronouns from their base position. Their "climbing" is accounted for by excluding any sentence boundary in the domain of the clitic movement. Since this is exactly the traditional structure of the verb-auxiliary relationship, the following hypothesis is made: the verb phrases of a single sentence comprise, in addition to the main verb, an indefinite number of complementary verbs (the ones listed above plus the temporal/aspectual and passive auxiliaries). As a result, their distribution becomes u…
Contrasting the form and use of reformulation markers
2007
This article deals with the form and use of reformulation markers in research papers written in English, Spanish and Catalan. Considering the form and frequency of the markers, English papers tend to prefer simple fixed markers and include fewer reformulators than Spanish and Catalan. On the contrary, formal Catalan and Spanish papers include more markers, some of which are complex and allow for some structural variability. As for use, reformulation markers establish dynamic relationships between portions of discourse which can be identified in our corpus with expansion, reduction and permutation. The analysis of the corpus shows that English authors usually reformulate to add more informa…
Visualization of Jacques Lacan’s Registers of the Psychoanalytic Field, and Discovery of Metaphor and of Metonymy. Analytical Case Study of Edgar All…
2017
International audience; We start with a description of Lacan’s work that we then take into our analytics methodology. In a first investigation, a Lacan-motivated template of the Poe story is fitted to the data. A segmentation of the storyline is used in order to map out the diachrony. Based on this, it will be shown how synchronous aspects, potentially related to Lacanian registers, can be sought. This demonstrates the effectiveness of an approach based on a model template of the storyline narrative. In a second and more comprehensive investigation, we develop an approach for revealing, that is, uncovering, Lacanian register relationships. Objectives of this work include the wide and genera…
On-line assessment of comprehension processes
2009
In this paper we describe a new version of a former paper-and-pencil standardized comprehension test called Test of Comprehension Processes (Vidal-Abarca, Gilabert, Martínez, & Sellés, 2007). The new version has been adapted to a computer-based environment based on the moving window technique. It can be used to assess comprehension strategies of students from fifth to tenth grades (11 to 16 years old). Comprehension strategies are registered on-line using reading times and visits to relevant sections of the text during the question-answering process. Data show that the computerbased version draws similar results to those provided by the paper-and-pencil version. In addition, we identify the…
Sense Activation Triggering in English Epistentials: Attention Distribution, Contextual Modulation of Meaning, and Categorization Issues
2015
Drawing on Talmy’s forthcoming The Attention System of Language and elaborating on a series of previous studies, this paper addresses the interrelation of attention distribution, contextual modulation of meaning, and categorization issues in the area of evidentiality and epistemic modality Adopting a corpus-based approach, it will investigate how the default salience levels of evidential and epistemic semantic components in so-called epistentials (linguistic items that syncretistically represent evidential and epistemic components) can be raised, lowered, or even inhibited under the impact of immediately adjacent items that themselves associate evidential or epistemic semantic components (i…