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How do we feel about borrowed words? Affective and lexico-semantic norms for most frequent unadapted English loanwords in Croatian (ENGRI CROWD)
Abstract
Aims and objectives
English has become the dominant donor language for many languages, including Croatian. Perception of English loanwords has mainly been investigated through corpus-based studies or attitude questionnaires. At the same time, normative data for unadapted English loanwords are still mainly unavailable. This study aims to fill that gap by collecting affective and lexico-semantic norms for unadapted English loanwords in Croatian.
Methodology
Valence, arousal, familiarity, and concreteness ratings for unadapted English loanwords and three types of Croatian equivalents were collected from 565 participants.
Data and analysis
Affective and lexico-semantic norms for each word on the four variables are available in the database. In addition, the relationship between different variables was examined. Finally, the differences between English loanwords and three types of Croatian equivalents (in-context, out-of-context, and adapted forms) are reported.
Findings
Valence ratings for unadapted English loanwords differed from out-of-context equivalents and adapted forms. Unadapted English loanwords were rated as more arousing than Croatian equivalents. Finally, unadapted English loanwords were less familiar and less concrete than in-context and out-of-context equivalents. The findings suggest that Croatian speakers perceive unadapted English loanwords differently on affective and lexico-semantic levels compared with Croatian equivalents.
Originality
This is the first study to provide affective and lexical norms for 391 most frequent unadapted English loanwords in Croatian.
Implications
The reported normative data will contribute to the existing knowledge about the processing of English loanwords by enabling experimental research on this topic.
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Numerous studies have addressed the issue of English words in the context of their adaptation, but there still exists the need for a systematic perspective on English words in terms of their number and frequency of appearance. This article will outline the procedure behind the compilation process of unadapted English words in the Croatian language with a comprehensive description of the final product – an open-access database of single- (SWE) and multi-word (MWE) English expressions extracted from Croatian web corpora (ENGRI and hrWaC) by means of computational-linguistic tools and manual extraction. The final version of the database contains 2,982 English words in their unadapted form (e.g. blockbuster), and 18 words which appear with English orthographic properties in combination with Croatian inflectional affixes (e.g. downloadati). Each SWE and MWE entry in the database is accompanied with frequencies of appearance in both corpora as well as its Croatian equivalent where available (29.58% of all entries are listed without an equivalent). The database serves as the first systematic representation of English words in Croatian and provides an indispensable tool for further research into the phenomenon while at the same time opening the door to a new line of research – cognitive processing of English words in Croatian.
In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion (“pure” emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion (“mixed” emotion words). This study will provide researchers a rich source of information to do research that contributes to expanding the current knowledge on the role of positive emotions in language. The norms are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21533571.v2
The introductory paper to the special issue summarises key aspects of contact-related linguistic dynamics such as the communicative interfaces of modern complex societies, the multi-layered textual and discoursal repertoire of their speaker groups and the role of the speakers’ cognitive mechanisms, social identity, and interactional strategies in settings of language contact. Giving an overview of the contributions, it aims to connect classic topics of language contact research with recent theoretical and methodological approaches investigated in the papers, and to highlight interconnections and interdisciplinary links that can stimulate further research on linguistic variation and change.
Iconic words and signs are characterized by a perceived resemblance between aspects of their form and aspects of their meaning. For example, in English, iconic words include peep and crash, which mimic the sounds they denote, and wiggle and zigzag, which mimic motion. As a semiotic property of words and signs, iconicity has been demonstrated to play a role in word learning, language processing, and language evolution. This paper presents the results of a large-scale norming study for more than 14,000 English words conducted with over 1400 American English speakers. We demonstrate the utility of these ratings by replicating a number of existing findings showing that iconicity ratings are related to age of acquisition, sensory modality, semantic neighborhood density, structural markedness, and playfulness. We discuss possible use cases and limitations of the rating dataset, which is made publicly available.
Kao globalni jezik modernoga doba engleski je postao dominantan jezik
davatelj. Danas se smatra da hrvatski jezik najviše posuđuje upravo iz
engleskoga. Utjecaj engleskoga jezika na hrvatski vidljiv je u različitim
funkcionalnim stilovima te na gotovo svim jezičnim razinama, no najizraženiji
je na leksičkoj razini. U novije vrijeme, posebice u medijima i na društvenim
mrežama, sve se češće javljaju neprilagođene engleske riječi, tj. riječi koje su
zadržale izvorni oblik, a kojima se po potrebi dodaju hrvatski afiksi. Za sada
još uvijek ne postoje konkretni podaci o takvim riječima u hrvatskome jeziku.
U cilju pronalaženja engleskih riječi, u drugim su se jezicima koristile različite
metode, od ručnih klasifikacija i korištenja postojećih jezičnih resursa do
razvoja novih alata i/ili resursa. Međutim, jezične tehnologije za hrvatski
jezik još uvijek su nedostatno razvijene. Stoga je cilj ovoga rada ispitati
mogućnosti nekih od postojećih alata i resursa za crpljenje engleskih riječi i
stvaranje baze engleskih riječi. U tu svrhu pretraživan je mrežni korpus hrvatskog jezika hrWaC pomoću platforme Sketch Engine. Ovom metodom
dobiven je popis od 1217 engleskih riječi. Rezultati su pokazali da se pomoću
dostupnih alata i resursa za hrvatski jezik može izraditi popis engleskih riječi
i njihovih frekvencija, ali i da postoje brojni problemi zbog kojih se rezultati ne
mogu smatrati u potpunosti pouzdanima. Isto tako, sam se postupak i dalje
mora kombinirati s ručnim metodama i klasifikacijama. Zaključujemo da je za
izradu cjelovite baze engleskih riječi u hrvatskome potrebno razviti nove alate
i resurse koji bi omogućili automatsko crpljenje engleskih riječi iz korpusa
hrvatskoga jezika.
Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variety of phenomena in second language (L2) speakers of English. However, these have limitations, as the norms are not provided by the target population (L2 speakers of English) but by native English speakers. In this study, we asked native Spanish L2 speakers of English to provide subjective AoA ratings for 1604 English words, and investigated whether factors related to 14 lexico-semantic and affective variables, both in Spanish and English, and to the speakers’ profile (i.e., sociolinguistic variables and L2 proficiency), were related to the L2 AoA ratings. We used boosted regression trees, an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning and boosting algorithms, to analyse the data. Our results showed that the model accounted for a relevant proportion of deviance (58.56%), with the English AoA provided by native English speakers being the strongest predictor for L2 AoA. Additionally, L2 AoA correlated with L2 reaction times. Our database is a useful tool for the research community running psycholinguistic studies in L2 speakers of English. It adds knowledge about which factors—linked to the characteristics of both the linguistic stimuli and the speakers—affect L2 subjective AoA. The database and the data can be downloaded from: https://osf.io/gr8xd/?view_only=73b01dccbedb4d7897c8d104d3d68c46.
In recent years there has been an increasing awareness that a comprehensive understanding of language, cognitive and affective processes, and social and interpersonal phenomena cannot be achieved without understanding the ways these processes are grounded in bodily states. The term 'embodiment' captures the common denominator of these developments, which come from several disciplinary perspectives ranging from neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology, and affective sciences. For the first time, this volume brings together these varied developments under one umbrella and furnishes a comprehensive overview of this intellectual movement in the cognitive-behavioral sciences. The chapters review current work on relations of the body to thought, language use, emotion and social relationships as presented by internationally recognized experts in these areas.
Over the past decades, research on the linguistic impact of globalization has foregrounded the socio-pragmatic meaning potential and mental categorization of anglicisms, looking for signs of agentivity and contextual sensitivity in the way receptor language users incorporate borrowed English resources into their speech, both in form and in function. This brought attention to understudied phenotypes of contact-induced variation and change that go beyond the borrowing of individual lexical items (loanwords) from English. This paper aims to contribute to this endeavor, illustrating the potential of construction grammar to uncover the integration of borrowed chunks. In focus is the emergence of the verb pimpen “to pimp” in Dutch, a rapid innovation from the English proper name Pimp My Ride . A sample of 4,561 Dutch tweets containing (strings of) pimp posted between January 2007 and April 2020 was coded manually for formal and semantic properties. This allowed us to calculate an aggregate score of “deconstructionalization” both within and outside of the target construction [ pimp POSS N]. Results indeed reveal a gradual blurring of the sharp contours of the construction, but also indicate that this process mainly affects the instantiations closest to the original. Linked up with the mediatized origin of the construction, our results add to our understanding of the relationship between media, language contact, and what is referred to as glocalization.
Many studies have found that the emotional content of words affects visual word recognition. However, most of them have only considered affective valence, finding inconsistencies regarding the direction of the effects, especially in unpleasant words. Recent studies suggest that arousal might explain why not all unpleasant words elicit the same behavior. The aim of the present research was to study the role of arousal in unpleasant word recognition. To do that, we carried out an ERP experiment in which participants performed a lexical decision task that included unpleasant words which could vary across three levels of arousal (intermediate, high, and very high) and words which were neutral in valence and had an intermediate level of arousal. Results showed that, within unpleasant words, those intermediate in arousal evoked smaller LPC amplitudes than words that were high or very high in arousal, indicating that arousal affects unpleasant word recognition. Critically, arousal determined whether the effect of negative valence was found or not. When arousal was not matched between unpleasant and neutral valenced words, the effect of emotionality was weak in the behavioral data and absent in the ERP data. However, when arousal was intermediate in both unpleasant and neutral valenced words, larger EPN amplitudes were reported for the former, pointing to an early allocation of attention. Interestingly, these unpleasant words which had an intermediate level of arousal showed a subsequent inhibitory effect in that they evoked smaller LPC amplitudes and led to slower reaction times and more errors than neutral words. Our results highlight the relevance that the arousal level has for the study of negative valence effects in word recognition.
words are typically more difficult to identify than concrete words in lexical-decision, word-naming, and recall tasks. This behavioral advantage, known as the concreteness effect, is often considered as evidence for embodied semantics, which emphasizes the role of sensorimotor experience in the comprehension of word meaning. In this view, online sensorimotor simulations triggered by concrete words, but not by abstract words, facilitate access to word meaning and speed up word identification. To test whether perceptual simulation is the driving force underlying the concreteness effect, we compared data from early-blind and sighted individuals performing an auditory lexical-decision task. Subjects were presented with property words referring to abstract (e.g., "logic"), concrete multimodal (e.g., "spherical"), and concrete unimodal visual concepts (e.g., "blue"). According to the embodied account, the processing advantage for concrete unimodal visual words should disappear in the early blind because they cannot rely on visual experience and simulation during semantics processing (i.e., purely visual words should be abstract for early-blind people). On the contrary, we found that both sighted and blind individuals are faster when processing multimodal and unimodal visual words compared with abstract words. This result suggests that the concreteness effect does not depend on perceptual simulations but might be driven by modality-independent properties of word meaning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
UTJECAJ NOVIH MEDIJA NA JEZIK MLADIH U PISANIM RADOVIMA U ovome se radu željelo istražiti rabe li učenici osmih razreda osnovne škole u svojim radovima pisanim u školi i za školu kao i u njihovo slobodno vrijeme sljedeće elemente jezika novih medija: anglizme, kratice, emotikone, višestruke interpunkcijske znakove i druga gra-fo-stilistička sredstva. Rezultati navedenoga istraživanja pokazali su da učenici osmih razreda vrlo često rabe sve navedene elemente koji predstavljaju karakteristična obilježja jezika novih medija u svojim tekstovima pisanim u slobodno vrijeme dok ih u školskim pisanim radovima gotovo ne rabe. Ključne riječi: jezik novih medija, pisani radovi učenika 8. razreda, anglizmi, kratice, emotikoni In the article, the authors investigate whether eighth-graders use elements of the language of new media in their texts written at school, for school, or in their spare time, such as: angli-cisms, abbreviations, emoticons, multiple punctuation marks, and other graphostylistic devices. Based on the results of the research, it is evident that eighth-graders very often use all the elements that are characteristic features of the language of new media in the texts written in their spare time whereas they hardly use them in their school assignments. Keywords: language of new media, writing of 8th-grade students, anglicisms, abbreviations , emoticons 0 Uvod Od početka trećeg tisućljeća došlo je do brzog širenja računalnih medija, informa-cijske i komunikacijske tehnologije, posebice razvojem Web 2.0 alata i stalnog doda-vanja novih usluga. Medijatizacijom svakodnevnog života nastala je tzv. računalno posredovana komunikacija (CMC) koja je prema Crystalu (2006) dovela do društvene i jezične revolucije. Dostignuća na svim znanstvenim i stručnim područjima nemi-novno utječu i na jezik koji je također podložan promjenama te kao takav nastoji pro-naći način kako nove promjene uklopiti u već postojeći jezični sustav (Ferčec, 2006). Računalno posredovana komunikacija (komunikacija novim medijima) danas pokriva veliki prostor, a čovjek je u mogućnosti odašiljati istu poruku istodobno velikom broju ljudi. Razvoj i širenje novih medija utjecao je, dakle, na organizaciju međuljudskih odnosa, doveo do novih načina komunikacije i uveo promjene u sam jezik te stvorio nove medijske diskurse (Granić, 2006). Slavistična revija (https://srl.si) je ponujena pod licenco Creative Commons, priznanje avtorstva 4.0 international.
The influence of usage frequency, and particularly of linguistic similarity on human linguistic behavior and linguistic change in situations of language contact are well documented in contact linguistics literature. However, a theoretical framework capable of unifying the various explanations, which are usually couched in either structuralist, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic parlance, is still lacking. In this introductory article we argue that a usage-based approach to language organization and linguistic behavior suits this purpose well and that the study of language contact phenomena will benefit from the adoption of this theoretical perspective. The article sketches an outline of usage-based linguistics, proposes ways to analyze language contact phenomena in this framework, and summarizes the major findings of the individual contributions to the special issue, which not only demonstrate that contact phenomena are usefully studied from the usage-based perspective, but document that taking a usage-based approach reveals new aspects of old phenomena.
Psycholinguistic databases containing ratings of concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency are used in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which require words as stimuli. Linguistic characteristics (e.g. word length, corpus frequency) are frequently coded, but word class is seldom systematically treated, although there are indications of its significance for imageability and concreteness. This paper presents the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (CPD; available at: https://doi.org/ 10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb), containing 6000 Croatian nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, rated for concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency. Moreover, we present computationally obtained extrapolations of concreteness and imageability to the remainder of the Croatian lexicon (available at: https://github.com/megahr/lexicon/blob/ master/predictions/hr_c_i.predictions.txt). In the two studies presented here, we explore the significance of word class for concreteness and imageability in human and computationally obtained ratings. The observed correlations in the CPD indicate correspondences between psycholinguistic measures expected from the literature. Word classes exhibit differences in subjective frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, with significant differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the computational study which focused on concreteness and imageability, concreteness obtained higher correlations with human ratings than imageability, and the system underpredicted the concreteness of nouns, and overpredicted the concreteness of adjectives and adverbs. Overall, this suggests that word class contains schematic conceptual and distributional information. Schematic conceptual content seems to be more significant in human ratings of concreteness and less significant in computationally obtained ratings, where distributional information seems to play a more significant role. This suggests that word class differences should be theoretically explored.
Recently, considerable attention has been given to the effect of the age of acquisition (AoA) on learning a second language (L2); however, the scarcity of L2 AoA ratings has limited advancements in this field. We presented the ratings of L2 AoA in late, unbalanced Chinese-English bilingual speakers and collected the familiarity of the L2 and the corresponding Chinese translations of English words. In addition, to promote the cross-language comparison and motivate the AoA research on Chinese two-character words, data on AoA, familiarity, and concreteness of the first language (L1) were also collected from Chinese native speakers. We first reported the reliability of each rated variable. Then, we described the validity by the following three steps: the distributions of each rated variable were described, the correlations between these variables were calculated, and regression analyses were run. The results showed that AoA, familiarity, and concreteness were all significant predictors of lexical decision times. The word database can be used by researchers who are interested in AoA, familiarity, and concreteness in both the L1 and L2 of late, unbalanced Chinese-English bilingual speakers. The full database is freely available for research purposes.
The topic of non-native language processing has been of steady interest in past decades. Yet, conclusions about the emotional responses in L2 have been highly variable. We conducted a large-scale rating study to explicitly measure how non-native readers of English respond to the valence and arousal of 2,628 English words. We investigated how the effect of a rater's L2 proficiency, length of time in Canada, and the semantic category of the word affects how L2 readers experience and rate that word. L2 speakers who had a longer time lived in Canada, and reported higher English proficiency, showed emotional responses that were more similar to those of L1 speakers of English. Additionally, valence differences between L1 and L2 raters were greater in words that L2 raters do not typically use in English. These findings highlight the importance of behavioural ecology in language learning, particularly as it applies to emotional word processing. 3
In the study, Anglicisms are presented by a brief analysis of their adaptation to the Czech and Slovak orthographic, phonological and morphological systems as well as their semantic peculiarities. The individual areas of interest in Anglicisms, including their linguistic background and basic information on taking over new lexical items, are also reflected in the paper. The trend to adopt Anglicisms has been continuing up to the present day and concerns all areas of social life, mainly because English serves as a global lingua franca.
Citation: ENTLOVÁ, Gabriela a Eva MALÁ. The occurrence of anglicisms in the Czech and Slovak lexicons. X Linguae. Slovenská republika, 2020, roč. 2020, Issue 2 (April) Volume 13, s. 140-148, 8 s. ISSN 1337-8384. Dostupné z: https://dx.doi.org/10.18355/XL.2020.13.02.11.
Početkom
se 21. stoljeća u Hrvatskoj zamjećuje promjena diskursa – ne govori se više o
posuđivanju iz engleskoga već o prodiranju toga jezika u hrvatski. Doba
interneta i elektroničkih medija omogućilo je da govornici hrvatskoga dolaze u
kontakt s riječima iz engleskoga jezika neposrednije i mnogo brže nego prije te
da engleske riječi brzo uključuju u svoju komunikaciju. Dio je jezikoslovaca
ali i drugih stručnjaka podigao uzbunu da je hrvatski jezik pod opsadom
engleskoga te su kao jedan vid obrane počeli nuditi zamjenske, hrvatske riječi
za anglizme. Cilj je ovoga rada istražiti stavove govornika hrvatskoga jezika
spram anglizama i pripadajućih prevedenica. U radu se stoga na temelju mrežnoga
upitnika koji je ispunilo 1340 sudionika sagledava prihvatljivost određenoga
broja hrvatskih zamjena za anglizme. Analiziraju se usto i razlozi sudionika za
uporabu anglizma naspram prevedenica te obratno. Kvantitativna je i
kvalitativna analiza pokazala da postoje razlike u prihvatljivosti pojedinih
zamjenskih riječi za anglizme te da govornici imaju različite razloge zašto
prednost daju engleskoj odnosno hrvatskoj inačici. Zaključuje sa da pri osmišljavanju
prevedenica anglizama i oblikovanju hrvatske jezične politike u obzir svakako
treba uzeti stavove govornika kao jedan od važnih čimbenika.
Background
Recent data suggest that both word valence and arousal modulate subsequent cognitive processing. However, whether valence or arousal makes a stronger contribution to cognitive processing is less understood.
Methods
The present study performed three experiments that varied the valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low) of prime-target word pairs in a lexical decision-priming task. Affective priming was derived from pure valence (Experiment 1), pure arousal (Experiment 2), or a combination of valence and arousal (Experiment 3).
Results
By comparing three types of priming effects, we found an effect of valence on affective priming was obvious regardless of whether the relationship of the prime-target varied with valence, arousal, or the combination of valence and arousal. In contrast, an effect of arousal on affective priming only appeared in the condition that based on the arousal relationship of the prime-target pair. Moreover, the valence-driven priming effect, arousal-driven priming effect, and emotional-driven priming effect were modulated by valence type but not by arousal level of word stimuli.
Conclusion
The present results revealed a pattern of valence and arousal in semantic networks, indicating that the valence information of emotional words tends to be more stable than arousal information within the semantic system, at least in the present lexical decision-priming task.
We used delayed sentence–picture verification tasks to investigate multilingual perceptual representations. In experiment 1, participants listened to sentences with implied shapes. After a 10-min interval, they judged whether pictures had been mentioned in the preceding sentences or not. Results in experiment 1 showed significant match effect in L1, but not in high proficient L2 or low proficient L3. In experiment 2, Participants listened to one language block, then immediately judged one picture block, totally three language–picture blocks. Results in experiment 2 were parallel to results in experiment 1. Our study supports the view of distributed conception: L2 and L3 are associated with less perceptual symbols than L1, indicating great impact of acquisition styles on perceptual representations. Our results show little impact of language proficiency levels on perceptual representations in delayed tasks.
The present study combined dimensional and categorical approaches to emotion to develop normative ratings for a large set of Turkish words on two major dimensions of emotion: arousal and valence, as well as on five basic emotion categories of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. A set of 2031 Turkish words obtained by translating Affective Norms for English Words to Turkish and pooling from the Turkish Word Norms were rated by a large sample of 1685 participants. This is the first comprehensive and standardized word set in Turkish offering discrete emotional ratings in addition to dimensional ratings along with concreteness judgments. Consistent with Affective Norms for English Words and word databases in several other languages, arousal increased as valence became more positive or more negative. As expected, negative emotions (anger, sadness, fear, and disgust) were positively correlated with each other, whereas the positive emotion, happiness, was negatively correlated with the negative emotion categories. Data further showed that the valence dimension was strongly correlated with happiness, and the arousal dimension was mostly correlated with fear. These findings show highly similar and consistent patterns with word sets provided in other languages in terms of the relationships between arousal and valence dimensions, relationships between dimensions and specific emotion categories, relationships among specific emotions, and further support the stability of the relationship between basic discrete emotions at the word level across different cultures.
In this study we examined the level of English proficiency children can obtain through out-of-school exposure in informal contexts prior to English classroom instruction. The second aim was to determine the input types that fuel children's informal language acquisition. Language learning was investigated in 780 Dutch-speaking children (aged 10-12), who were tested on their English receptive vocabulary knowledge, listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Information about learner characteristics and out-of-school English exposure was gathered using questionnaires. The results show large language gains for a substantial number of children but also considerable individual differences. The most beneficial types of input were gaming, use of social media and speaking. These input types are interactive and multimodal and they involve language production. We also found that the various language tests largely measure the same proficiency component.
The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultaneously providing norms across a substantial number of lexical dimensions. Second, for any given subset of words, the same participants provided ratings across all nine dimensions (33 participants/word, on average). Third, two novel dimensions—semantic size and gender association—are included. Finally, the corpus contains a set of 379 ambiguous words that are presented either alone (e.g., toast) or with information that selects an alternative sense (e.g., toast (bread), toast (speech)). The relationships between the dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were initially investigated by assessing their correlations. In addition, a principal component analysis revealed four main factors, accounting for 82% of the variance (Visualization, Emotion, Salience, and Exposure). The validity of the Glasgow Norms was established via comparisons of our ratings to 18 different sets of current psycholinguistic norms. The dimension of size was tested with megastudy data, confirming findings from past studies that have explicitly examined this variable. Alternative senses of ambiguous words (i.e., disambiguated forms), when discordant on a given dimension, seemingly led to appropriately distinct ratings. Informal comparisons between the ratings of ambiguous words and of their alternative senses showed different patterns that likely depended on several factors (the number of senses, their relative strengths, and the rating scales themselves). Overall, the Glasgow Norms provide a valuable resource—in particular, for researchers investigating the role of word recognition in language comprehension.
Imageability and subjective frequency of the 500 rated nouns in the Croatian Lexical Database Properties such as word class, length, phonological and morphological complexity, concre-teness, frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability have to be controlled in research and clinical practice, since they strongly affect the speed and accuracy of language processing by monolinguals and bilinguals as well as by speakers with language disorders. The purpose of this paper is to present the online Croatian Lexical Database (Cro. Hrvatska leksi~ka baza [HLB], http://polin-hlb.erf.hr/) that contains different (psycho)linguistic word properties, and to use the HLB to provide the first analyses about (1) the relationship between frequency and imageability for the rated 500 nouns, and (2) the influence of raters' age, gender and education on their judgement. The results indicate a significant positive correlation between noun frequency and imageability, but no significant influence of the three non-linguistic rater factors on judgements about (psycho)linguistic property.
This questionnaire study investigates South Korean students’ attitudes towards English loanwords and their use. Even though English enjoys high prestige in Korean society and is considered a requirement for personal and professional advancement, usage of English loanwords is evaluated predominantly negatively or with mixed feelings. For loanwords that semantically deviate from standard English meanings and thus demonstrate Korean identity (i.e., Konglish loanwords), the evaluations turn even more to the negative. Nevertheless, participants also posit positive aspects of general English and Konglish loanword use and, additionally, put forward a variety of perceived reasons for using English words. This study shows that general positive attitudes related to a language can be reversed or at least modified when it comes to the combination of the prestigious language with the native language.
Much emotion research has focused on the end result of the emotion process, categorical emotions, as reported by the protagonist or diagnosed by the researcher, with the aim of differentiating these discrete states. In contrast, this review concentrates on the emotion process itself by examining how (a) elicitation, or the appraisal of events, leads to (b) differentiation, in particular, action tendencies accompanied by physiological responses and manifested in facial, vocal, and gestural expressions, before (c) conscious representation or experience of these changes (feeling) and (d) categorizing and labeling these changes according to the semantic profiles of emotion words. The review focuses on empirical, particularly experimental, studies from emotion research and neighboring domains that contribute to a better understanding of the unfolding emotion process and the underlying mechanisms, including the interactions among emotion components. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 70 is January 4, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
The aim of this study is to investigate (1) how often Flemish English-as-a-foreign language learners are exposed to English language media outside of the classroom, (2) whether current out-of-class exposure to English language media is related to learners’ vocabulary knowledge, and (3) whether length of instruction (three or six years), gender, and out-of-class exposure to English language media affect Flemish learners’ vocabulary. Data were collected with 79 English-as-a-foreign language learners. They were administered a frequency-based vocabulary test and a questionnaire. The findings of this study show that Flemish English-as-a-foreign language learners are frequently exposed to English language media. The results also indicate a positive relationship between learners’ vocabulary knowledge and exposure to non-subtitled TV programs and movies, the Internet, and written print (books, magazines). Finally, both length of instruction and current out-of-class exposure to English language media had an effect on learners’ vocabulary knowledge, but out-of-class exposure had a larger effect than length of instruction.
At present, news channels are using social media to disseminate news to a large audience. These news channels try to convey the news in such a way that attracts more user interaction in the form of views, likes, comments, and shares. In online news, one of the important factors in getting higher user interaction is to recommend the top news articles that would attract more number of users to give opinion, especially in the form of comments. When a news article starts getting many comments, it automatically attracts other readers to participate in the discussion. We say that a news article has “high-arousal” content if it can attract more number of comments from users. When a new news article is written it has no user interaction information, such as number of views, likes, shares or comments. In this paper, our aim is to predict news articles which have higher potential to generate high-arousal. In other words, they would attract a large number of users to give opinion in the form of comments. Unlike previous studies, we predict the arousal of news articles prior to their release, which brings the possibility of appropriate decision making to modify the article content or its ranking in audience newsfeed. We generate multiple features from the content of news articles and show that our best set of features can predict the arousal with an accuracy of 81%. We perform our experiments on social media page of CNN news channel, containing four years of data with 33,324 news articles and 226.83 million reactions.
We investigated grapheme--colour synaesthesia and found that: (1) The induced colours led to perceptual grouping and pop-out, (2) a grapheme rendered invisible through `crowding' or lateral masking induced synaesthetic colours --- a form of blindsight --- and (3) peripherally presented graphemes did not induce colours even when they were clearly visible. Taken collectively, these and other experiments prove conclusively that synaesthesia is a genuine perceptual phenomenon, not an effect based on memory associations from childhood or on vague metaphorical speech. We identify different subtypes of number--colour synaesthesia and propose that they are caused by hyperconnectivity between colour and number areas at different stages in processing; lower synaesthetes may have cross-wiring (or cross-activation) within the fusiform gyrus, whereas higher synaesthetes may have cross-activation in the angular gyrus. This hyperconnectivity might be caused by a genetic mutation that causes defective pruning of connections between brain maps. The mutation may further be expressed selectively (due to transcription factors) in the fusiform or angular gyri, and this may explain the existence of different forms of synaesthesia. If expressed very diffusely, there may be extensive cross-wiring between brain regions that represent abstract concepts, which would explain the link between creativity, metaphor and synaesthesia (and the higher incidence of synaesthesia among artists and poets). Also, hyperconnectivity between the sensory cortex and amygdala would explain the heightened aversion synaesthetes experience when seeing numbers printed in the `wrong' colour. Lastly, kindling (induced hyperconnectivity in the temporal lobes of temporal lobe epilepsy [TLE] patients) may explain the purp...
Spanish is one of the languages where the presence of English borrowing is remarkable. Many studies have dealt with Anglicisms in Spanish, not only in the general lexicon (Rodríguez González & Lillo Buades, 1997; Pratt, 1980), but also in specialized areas (Balteiro, 2014; Laviosa, 2006; López Zurita, 2005). However, despite the growing number of English loanwords incorporated on a daily basis into the Spanish register of photography, no attention has, to our knowledge, been paid to this jargon so far. Thus, the present study analyzes the semantic changes and phonetic and morphological adaptations of Anglicisms in the Spanish register of photography. For these purposes, a sample of blogs on photography in Spanish, counting around 50,000 words, was compiled. The results show a great number and variety in English borrowings, which sometimes keep their English-looking form (selfie, catchlight, flash), or appear disguised through adaptations and calques (cámara réflex, megapíxeles, clave alta, doble exposición, fotoperiodismo), or as semantic loans (disparar, ruido, quemar).
Words are frequently used as stimuli in cognitive psychology experiments, for example, in recognition memory studies. In these experiments, it is often desirable to control for the words’ psycholinguistic properties because differences in such properties across experimental conditions might introduce undesirable confounds. In order to avoid confounds, studies typically check to see if various affective and lexico-semantic properties are matched across experimental conditions, and so databases that contain values for these properties are needed. While word ratings for these variables exist in English and other European languages, ratings for Chinese words are not comprehensive. In particular, while ratings for single characters exist, ratings for two-character words—which often have different meanings than their constituent characters, are scarce. In this study, ratings for 292 two-character Chinese nouns were obtained from Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Affective variables, including valence and arousal, and lexico-semantic variables, including familiarity, concreteness, and imageability, were rated in the study. The words were selected from a film subtitle database containing word frequency information that could be extracted and listed alongside the resulting ratings. Overall, the subjective ratings showed good reliability across all rated dimensions, as well as good reliability within and between the different groups of participants who each rated a subset of the words. Moreover, several well-established relationships between the variables found consistently in other languages were also observed in this study, demonstrating that the ratings are valid. The resulting word database can be used in studies where control for the above psycholinguistic variables is critical to the research design.
In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging.
The authors first look into the current status of the English language in the world and in Croatia. Starting from the fact that, in contrast to other foreign languages taught in Croatia, English distinguishes itself by the amount of exposure in everyday life, they carried out a study to see whether this exposure facilitates incidental vocabulary acquisition.
This companion volume to the Dictionary of European Anglicisms and English in Europe (also edited by Professor Görlach) provides a critical bibliography of works concerned with the import of English words and phrases into sixteen European languages. The book covers an international range of foreign-word dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, and general dictionaries; books and articles devoted to the influence of English on the language in question; works restricted to individual levels of influence (e.g. phonology, morphology, etc.); works dealing with the English influence in specific fields, in individual styles, regions, or social classes; corpus-oriented studies; and major works documenting earlier influences of English.
Politeness research has shown that L2 users of English differ from L1 users in that they underuse politeness markers to modify their requests. The purpose of the current study was to investigate if variations in politeness modifications in English email requests by L1 versus L2 writers are evaluated differently by L1 and L2 readers. In an experimental study with a 2 (sender: Dutch English/L1 English) × 2 (politeness: less/more) design, 120 Dutch and 131 British participants evaluated one of four emails in which the politeness and the sender of the email were systematically varied. Results showed that senders were perceived as more bossy when the email contained less politeness modification than when the email contained more politeness modification. L2 writers were evaluated as being more authoritative and readers were more willing to comply with the request in L2 emails with less politeness modification than in emails with more politeness modification. An L1 English writer of an email with less politeness modification was seen as less competent than an L1 English writer of an email with more politeness modification. Thus, undermodification of requests may have a limited but important impact on how L1 and L2 email writers are evaluated.
Previous studies analysing the differences in emotionality in first and second language suggest that affective content of lexical items is modulated in certain contexts. This paper investigates the differences in valence and arousal ratings for 300 early words, in both oral and written modalities, through speakers’ subjective appraisal of words given by two immersion groups of Spanish late bilinguals (Chinese and European) compared with a group of native speakers. The main goal of our study is to identify the lexical areas where variability occurs, regarding to a set of affective (emotional charge and intensity), grammatical (nouns, adjectives and verbs) and semantic (concreteness) features of words. Our results show that valence is the dimension where the greatest variability is observed between native and bilinguals, although the influence of the independent factors differs considerably. Besides, arousal yields illuminating data regarding the grammatical category of words and differentiation between the groups of participants.
This study examines the distinction between knowing the meaning of a word and experiencing the feelings associated with it. We collected affective ratings for a set of emotional and neutral English words from a group of English native speakers and a group of European Portuguese–English bilinguals. Half of the emotional words named emotions (emotion words) and the other half did not name emotions but could provoke them (emotion-laden words). Some participants were asked to focus on the meaning of words while others were asked to focus on the feeling produced by the words. Native speakers of English produced more intense affective ratings that Portuguese–English bilinguals. Such difference was larger when participants focused on their feelings than when they focused on the words’ meaning. Accordingly, such distinction should be considered in the study of bilingual affective language processing. Finally, the type of emotional word (emotion vs. emotion-laden) had only modest effects.
Semantically ambiguous and emotional words occur frequently in language, and the different meanings of ambiguous words can sometimes have different emotional loads. For example, the Spanish word heroína (heroin/heroine) can refer to a drug or to a woman who performs a heroic act. Because both ambiguity and emotionality affect word processing, there is a need for normative databases that include data on the emotionality of the different meanings of such words. Thus far, no bases of this type are available in Spanish. With this in mind, the current study will present meaning-dependent affective (valence) ratings for 252 Spanish ambiguous words. The analyses performed show that (a) among ambiguous words, those words with meanings that have distinct affective valence are quite frequent, (b) ambiguous words rated as neutral in isolation can have meanings of opposite valence (i.e., negative-positive or positive-negative), and (c) the valence estimated for ambiguous words in isolation is better explained by the weighted average of the valence of their meanings by dominance. A database of this kind can be useful both for basic research (e.g., relationship between emotion and language and ambiguity processing) and for applied research (e.g., cognitive and emotional biases in emotional disorders and second language learning).
The superiority of the subjective frequency measure over objective corpus frequency measures in L1 lexical research has long been debated, but a systematic investigation into this issue in the L2 context is still lacking. To bridge the gap, the present study explored the relations between six typical English corpus frequency norms and subjective frequency ratings collected from L2 English learners, and assessed their predictive power on L2 English lexical-decision data. The results revealed that despite strong correlations between the two types of frequency measures, larger discrepancies were detected in the lower frequency range, and that in general the subjective measure explained extra variance of L2 lexical processing data, especially for low-frequency words. But for high-frequency words, some corpus frequency norms (e.g.,SUBTLEX-US) also showed equally good predictive power. Methodological implications for the selection of frequency measures in L2 research are discussed.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102738
This study presents subjective ratings for 3, 022 Croatian words, which were evaluated on two affective dimensions (valence and arousal), and one lexico- semantic variable (concreteness). A sample of 933 Croatian native speakers rated the words online. Ratings showed high reliabilities for all three variables, as well as significant correlations with ratings from databases available in Spanish and English. A quadratic relation between valence and arousal was observed, with a tendency for arousal to increase for negative and positive words, and neutral words having the lowest arousal ratings. In addition, significant correlations were found between affective dimensions and word concreteness, suggesting that abstract words have a tendency to be more arousing and emotional than concrete words. The present database will allow experimental research in Croatian, a language with a considerable lack of psycholinguistic norms, by providing researchers with a useful tool in the investigation of the relationship between language and emotion for the South-Slavic group of languages.
The construction Beste boek ooit (‘Best book ever!’) comes in different forms in Dutch. Variation is not only attested in the absence or presence of determiners and postmodifiers, but also in code choice: English, Dutch and hybrid (Beste boek ever!) variants occur. This article investigates differentiation between instances with ooit and instances with ever. To ensure sufficient signal, we adopt a bird's eye perspective, analyzing over 100,000 observations from a Twitter corpus from the Low Countries (period 2011–2016). Our results reveal that (1) the two constructional variants increase in frequency in the time period under study, (2) this increase is more pronounced for the ooit-variant; (3) the ever-variant undergoes specialization towards a pragmatically marked form. Overall, our account complements anglicism research (Andersen 2014) in four ways. First, we foreground constructional borrowing instead of single-word borrowing. Second, in working with Twitter data, we break with the tradition of print media corpora. Third, we explore NLP based methods for large datasets sampled from big data collections in a field of research that has mainly relied on manual coding of small-scale datasets. Finally, we illustrate how matter and pattern replication can go hand in hand in contact-induced change.
Extant research has compared the processing of affectively laden words between L1 and L2. However, most studies used verbal stimuli that were validated for a single language or for both languages but using independent samples. We systematically compared ratings of valence, emotional intensity and subjective familiarity of negative, neutral, positive and taboo words, presented in L1 (European-Portuguese) and their equivalent in L2 (English), produced by the same individual. All participants (n = 230) were native European Portuguese speakers that self-reported being fluent in English (M Age of acquisition = 8.62 years old, SD = 2.94). Most participants (55.1%) reported having learned English in a formal context (i.e. school). As expected, words in L1 (vs. L2) were rated as more familiar and extreme in valence. Surprisingly, higher emotional intensity ratings in L1 (vs. L2) were only observed for taboo words. These findings contribute for the bilingualism research by emphasizing that differences in the affective processing of different languages may be more noticeable in specific evaluative dimensions (e.g. valence) or specific word types (e.g. taboo words). Subjective norms for the full set of 640 words (evaluated by a sample ranging from 26 to 32 participants) are available at https://osf.io/va2tj/ ARTICLE HISTORY
The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion context, and who still live in such a context, performed an affective decision task (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision task (Experiment 2) in both Catalan and Spanish. A different set of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, who were proficient in English and who learned English after early childhood in an instructional setting, performed a lexical decision task in both Spanish and English (Experiment 3). In both tasks administered throughout the experiments, the experimental stimuli were concrete and abstract words that varied in their emotional connotation (i.e. positive, negative and neutral words) and were presented in the two languages involved. In the affective decision task, participants decided if the words had emotional content or not, and in the lexical decision task they decided if the strings of letters were real words or not. The three experiments also included an unexpected free recall task. Results showed that the emotional content of words affected bilinguals’ performance in all three tasks. In particular, there was a disadvantage in processing for negative words in both the affective and lexical decision tasks, and an advantage for positive words in the lexical decision and free recall tasks. Importantly, language only interacted with the other variables in Experiment 3, suggesting that language status is a relevant factor in determining the extent to which emotional processing has the same characteristics in the two languages.
Bilinguals experience emotions differently depending on which language they are speaking. Emotionally loaded words were expected to be appraised differently in the first versus the second language in Spanish–English bilinguals. Three categories of words (positive, negative, and taboo) were appraised in both languages in the visual and auditory sensory modalities. Positive word ratings were more positive in English than in Spanish. Negative words were judged as more negative in English than in Spanish. Taboo words were rated as more negative in Spanish than in English. Significant regression models were obtained for the visual and auditory positive words and auditory negative words with English and Spanish proficiency as the most significant predictors. Results support the view that there are differences in the appraisal of emotions in the two languages spoken by bilinguals; the direction of the difference depends on the emotion category of words, and it is influenced by language proficiency.
The age of acquisition (AoA) effect in first/monolingual language processing has received much attention in psycholinguistic research. However, AoA effects in second language processing were only investigated rarely. In the current study, we investigated first (L1) and second language (L2) AoA effects in a combined eye tracking and mega study approach. We analyzed data of a corpus of eye movements to assess the time course of AoA effects on bilingual reading. We found an effect of L2 AoA in both early and late measures of L2 reading: fixation times were faster for words that were learned earlier in L2. This suggests that the L2 AoA effect has an influence throughout the entire L2 reading process, analogous to the L1 AoA effect. However, we are also the first to find an early effect of L1 AoA on L2 processing: if the L1 translation of the L2 word was learned earlier, the L2 word was also read faster. We discuss the implications of these findings for two important hypotheses that offer an explanation for the AoA effect: the mapping and semantic hypothesis. We propose that the current results suggest an integration between these accounts.
The article focuses on the incorporation of discourse-pragmatic features from English into Serbian, proposing the term 'pragmatic Anglicisms' to denote a range of directly or indirectly borrowed forms from English with pragmatic functions. The article offers a descriptive and taxonomic framework for the study of pragmatic Anglicisms in Serbian and analyzes their formal and functional characteristics, as well as sociolinguistic, sociopragmatic and sociocultural aspects of their use, related to the users, registers, stylistic and communicative markedness, motivational factors, perception and evaluation by Serbian native speakers, post hoc effects, and cultural influences.Apart from the commonly identified classes, such as interjections and discourse markers, the article recognizes the use of (calqued) discourse formulas from English in situations where there are either existing Serbian ones or a discourse 'gap' (i.e. when both the previously non-existent communicative act and the formulaic expression are adopted from English). This subclass is particularly interesting since it is not only a novel linguistic element that is thus introduced, but a novel communication and cultural pattern from the Anglo-American globalizing culture that gets adopted through new discourse formulas.