Search results for "linguistics and language"
showing 10 items of 3037 documents
Procedural semantics, metarepresentation, and some particles in Behdini Kurdish
2012
Contemporary studies in the linguistic semantics of particles have been greatly influenced by two ideas: that these items trigger pragmatic processing procedures rather than provide purely conceptual content, and that the procedures that some of them trigger relate to the recovery of metarepresentations. Recent developments in the theory of procedural semantics have introduced some refinements, notably the claim that these procedures may not all relate primarily to comprehension per se but may also relate to the epistemic assessment of communicated claims. This paper discusses three particles in Behdini Kurdish in the light of these theoretical developments: the speech-act particle ka often…
Anaphor Processing During Reading Comprehension in Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder
2021
With the purpose of promoting academic inclusion, it is essential for educators to understand the nature underlying poor reading comprehension in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In th...
Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension
2009
Abstract Psycholinguistic theorising has long been shaped by the assumption that the processing system endeavours to minimise structures/relations during online comprehension. Within the scope of a recent cross-linguistic, neurocognitive model of sentence comprehension (Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006), we also proposed that the assumption of a very general ‘Minimality’ principle can account for a variety of psycholinguistic findings from a range of languages. In the present paper, we review empirical evidence for this notion of Minimality, before going on to discuss its limitations. On the basis of this discussion, we propose that, rather than constituting an independent processing princi…
Influence of Background Knowledge and Language Proficiency on Comprehension of Domain-Specific Texts by University Students
2019
This paper presents the results of a quantitative study that explores two factors contributing to reading comprehension of domain specific texts, namely level of language proficiency and background knowledge. Overall, 32 students participated in the study by taking two custom-designed reading comprehension tests. The test scores were further analyzed using SPSS statistical software. The results of statistical tests revealed the differences between study groups as well as the effects of compensation. More precisely, the most proficient group scored higher on almost all tests and completed the tests more quickly than the remaining groups. The statistical tools used to test the data showed th…
The Role of Prominence Information in the Real-Time Comprehension of Transitive Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Approach
2008
Approaches to language processing have traditionally been formulated with reference to general cognitive concepts (e.g. working memory limitations) or have based their representational assumptions on concepts from generative linguistic theory (e.g. structure determines interpretation). Thus, many well-established generalisations about language that have emerged from cross-linguistic/typological research have not as yet had a major influence in shaping ideas about online processing. Here, we examine the viability of using typologically motivated concepts to account for phenomena in online language comprehension. In particular, we focus on the comprehension of simple transitive sentences (i.e…
Conceptual spaces for computer vision representations
2001
A framework for high-level representations in computer vision architectures is described. The framework is based on the notion of conceptual space. This approach allows us to define a conceptual semantics for the symbolic representations of the vision system. In this way, the semantics of the symbols can be grounded to the data coming from the sensors. In addition, the proposed approach generalizes the most popular frameworks adopted in computer vision.
ANALISI PROSODICO DELL’ITALIANO PARLATO PER SPAGNOLI: IL CASO DELLE INTERROGATIVE POLARI
2011
[EN] In this work we propose to present the prosodic features characteristic of the interrogatives yes/no of the spanish who learned italian as a foreign language. The two varieties considered for evaluation are the Italian variety of Venice, Madrid and the Spanish variety. Both have already been studied in the past, however, as far as I know, this is the first study that systematically puts compared in a comprehensive way. This description of the transfer is strongest fundamental in education for the teachers involved in teaching Italian as a foreign language are aware of the fact that the L1 prosodic features are very strong and difficult subject to conscious control of the speaker. In th…
The neural basis of sublexical speech and corresponding nonspeech processing: a combined EEG-MEG study.
2014
Abstract We addressed the neural organization of speech versus nonspeech sound processing by investigating preattentive cortical auditory processing of changes in five features of a consonant–vowel syllable (consonant, vowel, sound duration, frequency, and intensity) and their acoustically matched nonspeech counterparts in a simultaneous EEG–MEG recording of mismatch negativity (MMN/MMNm). Overall, speech–sound processing was enhanced compared to nonspeech sound processing. This effect was strongest for changes which affect word meaning (consonant, vowel, and vowel duration) in the left and for the vowel identity change in the right hemisphere also. Furthermore, in the right hemisphere, spe…
Beyond alphabetic orthographies: The role of form and phonology in transposition effects in Katakana
2008
In the past years, there has been growing interest in how the order of letters is attained in visual word recognition. Two critical issues are: (1) whether the front-end of the recently proposed models of letter position encoding can be generalised to non-alphabetic scripts, and (2) whether phonology plays an important role in the process of letter position encoding. In the present masked priming lexical decision experiments, we employed a syllabic/moraic script (Katakana), which allows disentangling form and phonology. In Experiment 1, we found a robust masked transposed-mora priming effect: the prime a.ri.me.ka facilitates the processing of the word a.me.ri.ka relative to a double-substit…
Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?
2020
AbstractPrior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target…