Psycholinguistics - Science topic

Self-efficacy essentially means confidence that "I can succeed at this."

A learning mindset, or learning goals, about language or anything else, includes self-efficacy, but also adaptive attributions, and self-regulation. It means that the learner understands that knowledge is not simple and may take extended work to understand, and that knowledge may change over time with new discoveries.

The linked conceptual model summarizes this, as it contrasts with performance goals, and provides a citation to the foundational work of Chin and Brewer.

For suggested books to learn more about psycholinguistics and metalinguistic awareness, you could check out the following.

Conrad, S., Hartig, A., & Santelmann, L. (Eds.). (2020). The Cambridge introduction to applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108658089

Gass, S. M., Behney, J., & Plonsky, L. (2020). Second language acquisition: An introductory course (5^th ed.). https://www.routledge.com/Second-Language-Acquisition-An-Introductory-Course/Gass-Behney-Plonsky/p/book/9781138743427

Padilla, A. M., Chen, X., & Lake, J. (Eds.). (2020). Positive psychology and learning a second or third language. Frontiers Media SA. https://doi.org/10.3389/978-2-88966-279-1

Roehr-Brackin, K. (2018). Metalinguistic awareness and second language acquisition. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Metalinguistic-Awareness-and-Second-Language-Acquisition/Roehr-Brackin/p/book/9781138958876

Good luck,

Thank you. And thanks for adding that English should be the only mother tongue.

Hi, Lieke!

Regarding your question about a quick Spanish placement test, I recommend that you search the following link: https://www.tiatula.com/spanish-placement-tests/

Best luck!

Dear Samaher, your research would need to start from the research question(s) that you want to answer - and not from the research instruments you are using. The instrument itself is only a way to gather data that can help you to answer your question(s). So the simplest idea to help you would be to turn your research back on its feet: Start with want you want to find out about (which usually derives from what is already know/not yet known in your area of research) - and only then pick the scales that are appropriate to measure the student characteristics that you are interested in.

Here are two more PowerPoints related to embodiment and lexical processing. These PowerPoints are based on our two vocabulary books, in which we develop a methodology which is driven by the source, not the target, of the metaphor. We call our book, VOCABULARY PLUS: A SOURCE-BASED APPROACH.

We developed and tested such list with neutral self-referential statements ourselves ( ), but it is worth pointing out that we did not distinguish between different operationalizations of a neutral states, including minimal affective, in-the-middle, deactivated, typical, or indifferent states ).

However, we did not detect any significant advantage of Velten MIPs compared to using verbal instructions to enter the targeted mood. Might have been because we combined each MIP with film clips and music so those MIPs might have reduced any effect of the other MIPs. Therefore, I am inclined to use the simpler instructions to enter the targeted state without Velten statements in the future, but if anyone is interested the neutral self-referential ones are listed in the aforementioned article.

Co-authorship is not a form of reimbursement (in laboratories and research institutes, all co-authors receive a salary or grants, nevertheless...). If a persons has made a creative contributions, then they are a co-authors. If the work is technical - for example, reprinting a text, or measurements (without processing etc.), then - no. There is another form for highline such participation: acknowledgment.

Yes they are.

You will find the latest synthesis on this issue in this paper:

Michaud, A. (2019). The Mechanics of Conceptual Thinking. Creative Education, 10, 353-406. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2019.102028

Republished recently upon invitation with more references added by the editors here:

Michaud, André (2020) Advancement on the Mechanics of Conceptual Thinking. In: Dr. Sachin Kumar Jain & Dr. Alina Georgeta Mag, Editors. New Horizons in Education and Social Studies Vol. 6,, Chapter 4. West Bengal, India: Book Publisher International. 2020

French, Spanish and German translations available here:

Neurolinguistics - Conceptual Thinking - Early Mastery of the Reading Skill.

Best Regards, André

I would love to know the results when you publish the study.

In order to help you, we need to have much more detailed information on your research. "Semantic transparency in Chinese" is, at the same time, vague and complex. What do you mean by "semantic transparency" since semantics deal with language meaning, and in Chinese with the plural meaning of words? Sociolinguistics would be helpful if your research is cored on key Chinese words and dual characters systems, while experimental psychology seems far away from this approach.

There are three conditions that make phonemes easy for children to learn. 1. positioned in the front, not back, of the mouth, 2. total articulation rather than partial articulation, and 3. muscles developed from nursing, etc. This means that /m/ is learned earlier than /n/, which is learned earlier than /ng/ (front of the mouth so baby can see and touch the articulation). It also explains why /t/ is learned before /f/, or /s/ (total articulation). The first word that a child learns is often "mama." (total articulartion in the front of the moth, using nursing muscles, followed by a back vowel (for contrast). Here is a PowerPoint about "Phonetics," and one about "Phonology."

Thank you so much, Mr.Nilsen, I just had an overview, it perturbs the logic succinctly.

Play is an extremely important aspect of children's development, and adult development as well. Associated with play is laughter (mainly a public phenomienon), and smililng (mainly an individual phenomenon). Here is a PowerPoint about "Play," one about "Laughter and Smiling," and one about "Humor and Education." Enjoy:

Alleen Nilsen and I have written two books on the subject: A SOURCE BASED APPROACH TO VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION, VOLUME 1 & 2. Here is a link to that book:

Have a look at https://paperswithcode.com/paper/automatic-expansion-of-the-mrc

Interesante instancia para conversar sobre escritura, experimentos, transición laboratorio-sala de clases, estadística, y más.

The syntax-first processing theory has a great deal of behavioral and electrophysiological support. So, you could say that it is one of the major approaches for explaining sentence comprehension. However, it is not the only view. There is a family of models, collectively known as constraint-based models, that pose an alternative view (see Fuster, 1995). In brief, these models propose that syntactic and semantic processes interact during sentence comprehension, rather than syntactic structure first and semantics second.

These models are called "constraint" models because they argue for a probabilistic constraint satisfaction where syntactic knowledge is just one of several constraints on comprehension. For instance, in this approach, it could be that syntax guides the direction of processing when syntactic cues are sufficient for comprehension. However, situations have been found where semantic knowledge influences, and even overrides, syntax.

Here are some papers to check out:

Kim & Osterhout (2005). The independence of combinatory semantic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Kuperberg et al. (2003). Electrophysiological distinctions in processing conceptual relationships within simple sentences.

Hoeks et al. (2004). Seeing words in context: the interaction of lexical and sentence level information during reading.

Request the pertinent permission from its Author or Authors and then make it reliable, validate it, etc. Pisometrically in its new modification and with its own "ad hoc" Normative Groups.

This is really an interesting question that I want to follow. Besides, may you see studies by Best and colleagues in West Sydney University.

Achievement in each activity is determined by at least four groups of factors: 1. abilities; 2. personality traits; 3. motivational factors and 4. physical, physiological, pedagogical-cultural, and social factors. To date, a sufficient number of unambiguous facts have been collected in educational psychology, on the basis of which it can be claimed that achievement in school learning is the result of the combined effect of abilities, personality traits (character traits and temperament traits) and motivation. These determinants explain about 75% of the total success variance (each participating with about 25%). The remaining 25% of the variance is attributed to a large number of other factors: most often physiological factors (such as gender and age), social factors (socioeconomic status, pedagogical and cultural level of the family), then educational factors (forms/types of learning and teaching) and many others factors. This claim is not incorrect, but it is insufficiently elaborated. Namely, at different levels of education and in schools of different profiles, the share of certain factors is somewhat modified. As far as I. Q. is concerned, the participation is around r=+0.50 or slightly lower, for example in higher education, because students as a group are already selected by intelligence. In developmental disorders, achievement largely depends on personality characteristics

Following.

If someone is interested in this topic, I found exactly what I was looking for:

Hi, Milica. Thee is a huge amount of literature and many tools for sample size and power determination. Google "number of cases needed to estimate a parameter." My first hit is a good one: http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704_Power/BS704_Power_print.html

The rule of thumb of 10 cases per parameter is still a pretty good one though, I think. Here is a link that mentions it: https://www.statisticssolutions.com/sample-size-formula/

Incidentally, 15-20 raters "per word per scale" would seem to require a very large number of raters ... and a complicated inter-rater reliability analysis, especially if each rater rated multiple words and you needed to deal with with-in rater variability as well. There are lots of human internet rater services. Maybe you are using one. Good ones probably use advanced analytics to pool rater results, allowing for rater agreemeet variability and other factors.

There is not a single, "best" definition of MR. In fact, my colleagues and I investigated this question for a paper presented at this year's CHI conference. Based on expert interviews and a literature review, what we found were 6 distinct and widely used working definitions:

These can be classified based on a conceptual framework (some would call it a taxonomy) with 7 dimensions:

Hope this helps! :)

follow indeed

The abstract consists of 4 questions? Abstract is in imperfectum.

What did I do?

By means of what did I do this? (fMRI, block design))

What was the result?

To what is this result needed?

Since morphemes such as '-ism', 'un-', 'bi-' stand for semantic concepts, albeit somewhat ambiguously, e.g. 'un-' can mean 'not', or 'reverse (an action)', you should look at Laurence Urdang's two books Prefixes and Other Word-Initial Elements of English and Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English. Both were published by the Gale Research Company, the latter in 1983 and the former in 1984. Both are out of print but secondhand copies are available from ABE Books Secondhand, or possibly from your university library.

Prefixes lists 2860 elements, Suffixes, 1545.

In addition, you could examine C.K. Ogden's 1930 Basic English (Cambridge: The Orthological Institute) which provides a core vocabulary of 850 words. These words overlap to a degree with the 200 concepts listed by Morris Swadesh (1950 and 1971) and Cliff Goddard's Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Google Cliff Goddard or NSM).

Since many artificial languages e.g. Esperanto, Eh May Gee Chah (by Hankes) and Nobel (by Randic) start with a core vocabulary and elements which can modify that vocabulary, it would be worth researching these, too.

For further information, e-mail: I.C.Maun@exeter.ac.uk

For psycholinguistic proofs on part of speech and syntactic position, you can see

1. Cognitive bases of phono-grammar in Russian and Arabic

http://www.udla.edu.co/revistas/index.php/amazonia-investiga/article/viewFile/856/pdf

or

The three-level phono-grammar order and its derivational connecting link: the

elements of language system (on the material of Arabic)

Abstract The paper deals with the progressive levels of phono-grammar and the role of word formation connecting different levels of the Arabic language. The clear selection of minimally significant language elements solves the problem of the linguistic science back-development and contributes to resolving the controversial issues while defining criteria for singling out parts of speech. The phonetic changes of basic elements at the word formation level provide the root with morphonological markers influencing the word declension; as a result the word formation serves as the link connecting all language levels. All these reveal the essence of the progressive inflected language categorization system – the phono-grammar. Key words: root, phono-grammar, elements of language system, parts of speech, morphonology, Arabic

If you are doing a contrastive research on linguistic transfer (English-Spanish), I would recommend typical translation tasks. You will definitely have a large percentage of interference errors, but it is the only (according to my experience) indicator of learnability of structures. I wouldn't go for any communicative-type tasks. Interesting reasearch!

As I understand, you have 2x2, 'doubly' repeated measures (within-subject), i.e. each subject will receive 4 sentence-picture combinations (i guess, in randomized sequences; e.g., for 1 subj.: 1-3-4-2), for a 2nd subj.: 2-4-3-1, etc.):

1) sentence type1 - picture matched

2) sentence type1 - picture mismatched

3) sentence type2 - picture matched

4) sentence type2 - picture mismatched

You further have 4 lists corresponding to a between-subject or group variable.

I would run the mixed design (2x2 within, 4 between) ANOVA. You expect only 1 main effect: picture type (matched vs. mismatched) and no effect of list type, nor of sentence type, nor any interaction (pictureXsentence, pictureXlist, sentenceXlist, pictureXsentenceXlist). I guess you expect the RT to be sign. faster for matched type than for mismatched type. The advantage of running the mixed design is that it replicates 'similar research' and that, if you only have 1 sign. main effect (that of picture type,) your conclusions are better founded. You take the risk of finding another sign. main effect or a 2-way or 3-way interaction, which would be puzzling or complicating.

As someone who's used AJT's in the past, I'd say that the number of filler items required depends very much on the saliency of what you intend to investigate. If, say, you want to study the acceptability of multiple WH-words in one utterance (e.g. who did what to whom?), this is very salient. As soon as participants become aware that this is the focus of your study, they may pay more attention to this particular construction than they'd normally do. So in order to elicit 'natural' AJ's, you would need a substantial set of filler sentences. If, say, you want to investigate the acceptability of non-subjects in sentence initial position, these may not be particularly striking at all, and you hardly need to use any filler sentences at all.

A separate issue is the number of sentences per condition. Personally, I think 3 as a minimum per condition is way too low - unless you expect all items in a condition to elicit near-identical scores because (a) items in a condition are very homogeneous -which is hard to achieve if your stimuli are sentences- and (b) all participants show near identical responses. But then again, as I come from a cognitive/usage-based background, my default expectation is one of variation (e.g. related to frequency of words and word combinations, variation between participants etc).

Good luck!

Dear Monika,

Results in some recent meta-analyses (e.g., by Shaofeng Li) have shown that executive control plays a more significant role in explicit/formal than in implicit/naturalistic L2 learning (SLA). Regarding implicit and explicit brain networks, a similar pattern can be detected, e.g., in the paper by Jing Yang & Ping Li (2012). Brain networks of explicit and implicit learning. PloS One, 7(8), e42993.

Hope this above information helps a bit,

Best,

Edward

thanks for your response. Yes, I have analyzed a large amount of rumors and I have considered features such as uncertainty and anxiety and ambiguity and …, The tips you mentioned were helpful. What is the best way to study the psychological characteristics and sociology of rumors?

Dear Dilu,

In principle, there should be no confusion between semantics and pragmatics, which are not exclusive, i.e. semantics is in need of pragmatics and vice versa. Without pragmatics, semantics is decontextualized language that does not make real sense. And without semantics, pragmatics will not have the fodder on which it bases its own meaningful communicative substance. Semantics is the study of the knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and in its patterns for building elaborate constructions and meanings. Pragmatics is the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world to produce meaningful communication in contexts of use. Psychology and socio-cultural considerations definitely impact and interact with pragmatics in the way we express ourselves in our respective languages and cultures.

Dear Hamza,

I have come across some papers that enumerate principles to be followed in interdisciplinary researches. I cannot quite recollect the authors now. But you are looking for this I can later find that out.

If you are looking for didactic advantages in an educational setting in early schooling, I believe it will have adverse effects on clarity of thought. But, at a later stage, interdisciplinary method of teaching might bring in a width of knowledge and allow mobility for the students between disciplines more smoothly.

Psycholinguistics, is basically psychology of language. In this science, and sub discipline of philosophy, we look at, and analyse,psychological and neuro biological factors that enable us as language speaking humans to acquire, apply and understand language.  There are many related disciplines and therefore research in the field of psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary. The subdisciplines include cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. How does the brain process language? What is universal grammar? Do we have a language acquisition device? Or do we use cognition to acquire a language?  if you were on Mars, how would you communicate? Do dolphins have a language? what constitutes a language? Is there a critical period for language acquisition? If so, who determines it?

I would write it this way: I am doing a research project and the question is "Do students' perceptions of the (non)-native-like status of a teacher's accent significantly predict their teacher's credibility evaluations?”

I assume the reference is to an individual teacher, not a group of teachers. If it is more than one teacher, however, the apostrophe would stay after the 's'.

Thanks for being so open about grammar corrections. Glad you found the correct questionnaire, too. Good luck with the project!

I am co-author of a new book called, The Language of Branding (Routledge 2018), which covers this topic. You can find the book on Amazon.

Thank you all very much!

Dear Monika,

I quote here the few pages pages that may be of interest to you of a book published in 1999, now available in eBook formats where I synthesize conclusions that can be reached regarding the function of adjective and nouns in the neocortex verbal areas, that may add to the references provided by Joachim.

They are planned to be part of a paper to be issued sometime coming winter or spring:

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The word “adjective” is the name given to the static characteristics of objects, which are the qualities that we associate with objects, that is, colors, shapes... white, black, round, long, tall, small, etc.

Within the neurolinguistic context that we are exploring, adjectives are, for all intents and purposes, the most important elements of all existing languages since they directly name the non verbal characteristics. They thus constitute the lowest level of the hierarchical infrastructure of links of our neurolinguistic model of reality. In other words, they are the "bridge" between the thinking mode by words association and the thinking mode by images association.

They also describe the characteristics of abstract concepts that also are non verbal, and therefore constitute the lowest level of interconnection between the neurolinguistic model and the virtual world of abstract concepts.

It is also from adjectives that a great number of verbs and adverbs are derived, and for good cause, since these verbs and adverbs exist only to allow us to think and speak about these characteristics.

When we describe something, we metaphorically bring out the list of its qualities, meaning the list of characteristics which are specific to it and which allow us to distinguish it from all other things.

Grammatically speaking, an adjective is defined as a word that is joined to a noun to express a quality of the being or object named.

When we are forced to use many words instead of only one to describe a characteristic, we automatically use what linguists call a "locution".

At the grammatical level, an adjectival locution can be defined as a group of words equivalent to an adjective. This includes locutions that usage has standardized as well as adjectival locutions that we could make on the spur of the moment when we think of the subtleties of characteristics of objects or of abstract concepts that we are "observing".

The later type is very important, because we do not necessary always have at our disposal the exact word which should be used to describe something which we have never thought about previously, or even to describe something that we already know, but the exact word for which momentarily escapes us.

Combinations of words that we assemble "on the fly", so to speak, to describe shades of meaning which we think of for the first time often are our only tool to even think about these particular subtleties as we are trying to be a little more specific about some aspect of what we are describing.

We consequently use adjectival locutions each time that existing adjectives do not allow us to clearly describe a particular subtlety of a characteristic that we observe and want to express.

We have previously talked about the descriptions of characteristics of objects, and of lists of "qualities" of objects. A "name" simply is the "title" of such a list.

A name is the word which we use to identify, to "name", the list of characteristics that belongs to the set of characteristics that we associate with an object, an action, a feeling, a quality, an idea, an abstract concept, etc..., and that allows us to identify it. In short, anything that we care to think about.

Consequently, any word can become a name as soon as we attempt to understand the idea that is expressed by this word, that is, as soon as we attempt to identify the set of characteristics that we have associated to it. For mutual intelligibility in communications, of course, the idea expressed by a word is deemed to usually match the definition given in dictionaries.

However, what we must understand of the idea expressed by a name, in relation to the context of the moment, always depends on the specific list of static and dynamic characteristics that become attached to that name in the context within which it is used.

The extent of the meaning of a name strictly depends on the context in which it is used as we speak, write or even when simply thinking. Consequently, no matter what dictionaries may say, the same words used in exactly the same manner, but in different contexts, may mean entirely different things, which could have absolutely nothing to do with the formal meaning of the words. The overall context of their use always determines the precise meaning of words, at the moment of their use.

We have seen that for adjectives, there exists adjectival locutions, and we will see that for other important types of words, such as verbs and adverbs, there also exists locutions. So why shouldn't there exist locutions for names?

What is the definition of a word, in fact, if not the description of that word? We could even go so far as to say that a word is the summary of its own definition. When we think of a new concept, or a new shade of meaning, or of a specific subtlety of a characteristic of an object, there may not even exist a name that could directly describe what we want to emphasize.

In these cases, we have no choice but to think of it using the "definition", so to speak. A striking example of this occurs regarding the expression "indexation infrastructure associative by inclusion", which we could maybe now simplify by naming it “neurolinguistic structure”.

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Abstracted from "The Neurolinguistic Foundation of Intelligence": https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/156882

Hope this helps.

Best Regards

Hi David,

I think your question could be narrowed down to "Why do we often exclude incorrect responses when analyzing response times in psycholinguistics experiments?".

Psycholinguists often use tasks with strong time constraints (let's say, for example, to respond as quickly as possible to whether a sentence is true or not by clicking on a button) in order to study the effect of some variables (let's say, for example, the kind of verb involved in the sentence, or the presence/absence of a certain adverb, or whatever) on the mean reponse time of a given number of subjects. It is more or less explicitly assumed that the longer the response time, the harder the decision to make and, often, the more complex the cognitive process leading to that choice.

As Stephen said, in this kind of experimental set-up, most often the response times for incorrect answers are not to be considered since, simply, only a correct answer allows to assume that the sentence was completely and correctly processed by the subject. The response times for incorrect answers could be influenced by other (and often non controlled for) factors.

As far as I know, there is no reference justifying this choice, since its relevance depends on every single experiment set-up and question of interest.

Best,

Lionel

Dear Ali, In Macedonia' s literature homophones are elaborated in the part that cope with lexical issue. But, one angle of dealing with homophones can be semantics too. It depends on the aspect from which you are approaching,

Kind regrads,

V. Janusheva

Hi Ryan,

if you're looking for an easy to use interface in which you input a word (or multiple words) and it returns the closest N semantic neighbors, then I really recommend using snaut. Additionally, if you already have a list of words, the program can tell you how close they are to one another, or even compare the whole list of primes to the respective targets. I found it very useful, also for finding the semantic neighbors I missed when coming up with a list of stimuli.

Here's the link to the website with the interface and all the resources: http://meshugga.ugent.be/snaut-english/

Hope it helps!

PS: I have to thank researcher Giorgio Arcara for suggesting snaut to me in the first place, check him out for some some cool studies on language processing!

Dear Y. Nazaralian,

Hello. I am a professor of English language and literature from India. Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis are my favourite subjects and I think I can contribute my expertise to your book as one of its editors. If interested, you can contact me by writing an email to maheshdey@gmail.com.

Best wishes and thanks.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mahesh K. Dey

 Thanks a lot Karsten ! 

The link of the paper you sent is really very informative and helpful! I think for my purposes, the acceptable word scoring method would be a good tool since there might be the case the participants may not exactly produce what is needed but something similar. In my case when given the type 1 NP, the participants can produce intransitive/transitive/ditransitive structures but when when given type 2 NP they can only produce the transitive/ditransitive structures. However, my interest lies in what kind of agreement are they producing. As in with which argument does the verb agree in the constructions they produce! So,  a little tweaking of the acceptable word scoring would work in my case i guess.

Please suggest if i am thinking in the right direction!

Once again,thank you for all the help.

 Dear Gasser Saleh,

There is an entire zoo of labels referring to late positive ERP components (often with a posterior scalp distribution).

To my knowledge, the label LPP is primarily used in the context of emotion-related ERP studies (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3287021/). In contrast, the LPC (late positive component or late positive complex) that tends to have a parietal maximum has been observed in a large variety of contexts, often following - or even including - the P3b component thought to reflect working memory updating (or the P600 in language studies, which likely comprises multiple subcomponents). The LPC has been linked to memory, especially recognition and old-new effects, but has also been reported in language studies (especially when the authors found that a "P600" label would be inappropriate, e.g., because they wanted to reserve the P600 label for 'syntactic re-analyses'. (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_positive_component) 

I think that young people are VERY concerned about the possibility that they will be judged as less than perfect, in many parts of their lives, not just language learning.  This is why many language learners are reluctant to speak up in class.  This is true in L2, but some young people will not even ask questions in L1 classes, because "I doing want the other students to think I am dumb."

Hi, we wrote a whole series of papers which investigate this issue, looking at disfluent "er", repetition, and silence (in English).  In brief, "er" and silence increase recognition memory for words which follow disfluencies (Corley, MacGregor, and Donaldson, 2007; MacGregor, Corley, and Donaldson, 2010); repetitions do not (MacGregor, Corley, and Donaldson, 2009).  In the case of "er" and silence, there is an associated attenuation of an N400 ERP effect at the target word, suggesting that people's expectations about what they will hear have been affected.  Importantly, Collard, Corley, MacGregor and Donaldson (2008) use a P300 ERP paradigm to show that this altered expectation is accompanied by an attentional modulation (as you suggest above).

A synthetic view of these studies might be that disfluency is detected when the signal becomes "non-linguistic" (hence not repetitions), and acts as a signal that the speaker is unlikely to utter a predictable word (N400 modulation).  This causes the listener to heighten attention to the signal (reliance on bottom-up information; P300 modulation), resulting in a greater recognition memory for the subsequent (target) word.

Hope that helps!

--MC

Dear Fabio Gasparini,

Generally speaking, color naming , color semantics, color  categorization , and  shape of color space across different languages has long been an area of great interest in bilingual/multilingual studies. Prototypicality norms ( Rosch's model) have also been a matter of importance trying to examine how bilinguals tend to categories the tokens belonging to a given language type. I hope the following links shed more light on what you are looking for.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

McNeill D., 2005, Gesture and thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

McNeill D., 2012, How language began: gesture and speech in human evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Arbib MA., 2012,  How the brain got language: the mirror system hypothesis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

Grice HP., 1989, Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Holler J, Beattie G., 2002, A micro-analytic investigation of how iconic gestures and speech represent core semantic features in talk, Semiotica 142, s. 31–69 (doi:10.1515/semi.2002.077)

Holler J, Beattie G., 2003, How iconic gestures and speech interact in the representation of meaning: are both aspects really integral to the process?, Semiotica 146, 81–116 (doi:10.1515/semi.2003.083)

Holler J, Tutton M, Wilkin K., 2011, Co-speech gestures in the process of meaning coordination. In Proc. 2nd GESPIN—Gesture and Speech in Interaction Conf., Bielefeld, 5–7 September 2011 See http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0012-1BB3-D

Levinson SC., 2000, Presumptive meanings: the theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, UK: MIT Press

Levinson SC. 2013. Recursion in pragmatics, Language 89, s. 149–162 (doi:10.1353/lan.2013.0005)

Levinson SC., 2006, On the human ‘interaction engine’. In Roots of human sociality: culture, cognition and interaction (eds Enfield NJ, Levinson SC, editors. ), s. 39–69 Oxford, UK: Berg

Levinson SC., 2003, Space in language and cognition: explorations in cognitive diversity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Levinson S.C., Holler J.,2014, The origin of human multi-modal communication, Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B. Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0302.

Liberman A.M., Cooper F.S., Shankweiler D.P., Studdert-kennedy M., 1967, Perception of the speech code, Psychological Review 74, s. 431-461.

Orzechowski S., Wacewicz S., Żywiczyński P., 2014, Orofacjal gestures in language evolution. The auditory feedback hypothesis [w:] red. E.S. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. LYN, H. Cornish, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10), Singapore, s. 221-227.

No. It can include "ser" and "estar".

Dear Renato,

Thanks a lot, that is really helpful!

Katrina

We might have some posters that could be interesting, on cross-linguistic priming.

Many  thanks  for  that!

I'll  certainly  look  at  those..

Regards  

I think it probably is.

Dear Bashir Najadat,

Notably, the theoretical development of linguistics through the efforts of Noam Chomsky cannot be denied.  His scholarly work on  Universal Grammar (U.G) culminated in minimalism. However, generative,  formal theories of language, while valuable and insightful, provide an idealized description of what language is and how it works.  It is simply the tip of the iceberg. As such, like professor Di Biase, I also believe that a systemic functional view of language can provide us with a more realistic account of language as a meaning making machine (Halliday, 1980). Under such a perspectivization, the in-built mechanisms of lexico-grammar target the contexts of situation and culture in order to actualize the metafunctions of language; namely, ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions.

Best regards,

R. Biria 

Dear Muna h. hwayed,

Generally speaking, there are fixed patterns  used in all religions to make invocations to God . As you have rightly observed, it would be practical to learn about the repertoire of rules employed for this particular speech function.  From a discourse analysis point of view, you can utilize a religious text addressing invocations, and by applying a discourse analysis approach , you can find the patterns. For instance, the link  below can  provide you with a purposive content with clear examples of making invocations, which you may identify and explain the rules therein.

Best regards,

R. Biria

The book _Natural Language Processing: A Paninian Perspective_ by Bharati et al. has a good overview of the issues.  You can find a review of it in the CL journal, Sept. 1995.

For languages with complex inflections and a relatively free word order, dependency grammars are usually better than methods designed for English. You might search for "Hindi dependency grammar".

For the "word hash" that Google translate generates from Latin, see slide 27 of htp://www.jfsowa.com/talks/nlu.pdf .

I think, depending on the type of context you are looking at, you will end up in very different areas of research. You have a least, 3 different types of context for a word. NLP, to my knowledge, is at best looking at 2 of them:

1) word-context, meaning words surrounding your target word

2) supra-sentential context: what has been encoded in sentences prior to the one you're looking at but which may bear on the meaning of your target word (that's where the terms of Dhanji above are coming into play)

3) conversational context: This refers to stuff where the primary locus of language is seen as the person-to-person face-to-face conversation where stuff that I'm saying will sometimes refer to stuff that you're saying and vice versa. Also important here is what is not being said at all or might be hinted at by the strategic use of pauses and `filler' non-words.  Other important issues here are common ground - what do I know that you know - which will determine how I shape my sentences and non-linguistic communication via gestures, body postures, etc..

As far as I know, only contexts 1) and 2) are touched upon by NLP. If you're looking at context 3, you're in the realm of pragmatics and conversation analysis, the former of which kind of is done by linguists, whereas the latter comes from sociology.

The methods there are very different from the one employed by NLP.

Thank you both, that was really helpful!

Dear Hamza Ben,

Viewing psycholinguistic and cognitive intersections dominating simultaneous interpretation, as you have rightly observed, involves an admixture of neuro-cognitive mechanisms such as memory, lexicon, and bilingualism. As such, the bulk of related  research has fixated its focus on the role of working memory, levels of experience and expertise, language competence, as well as the strategies utilized during the translation process. For more information, I refer you to the following links, which hopefully satisfy the intent of your question.

Dear David,

very intresting question (when reading Jyh's answer I ask myself whether I actually understand the question correctly :)).

Anyway, you might find some hints when following Jan De Houwers work. For instance,:

Mitchell, C. J., De Houwer, J., & Lovibond, P. F. (2009). The propositional nature of human associative learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(02), 183-198.

On page 190 there is a section called 'Verbal Instructions'. And I also remember attending a talk of his where he was speaking about equivalence and consequence in associative learning.

Although this does not really answer your question how to 'assess' or 'determine' 'how'  the type of instruction influences actual learning, but maybe this is a start :)

Best, René

This is a good idea however it needs a lot of work, Firstly, we can employ computer vision to identify objects and in a simple case just convert object names into speech. In summary, the components of such a system are available namely; a module for object identification in images and speaking words module. Just integration is needed if not done somewhere.

This book may help you. Free pages are accessible through Google Books

Thank you for your responses.

I also agree that there the difference between simultaneous and sequential is not clear-cut. For that matter, a great many things regarding languages are not clear-cut, which I believe to be the fundamental flaw in attempting empirical research in applied linguistics. Nonetheless, I think research is necessary, but such blurred distinctions need to be taken into account.

In response to Yakobo Mutiti, I believe Vivian Cook suggested that taking a multicompetence approach, the input as well as resulting grammar knowledge would pass 'bilingually' through the LAD, allowing for a single bilingual grammar. However, as Chomsky's monolingual-centered theories and Cook's adaptations are still very opaque, I would like to return to my original question of how processing may be different.

In a sense, my question may be: is bilingualism cognitively the same for everyone, thus making acquisition of a third language the same across different 'types' of bilinguals?

As an additional suggestion, I strongly encourage you to do some descriptive analysis of your data! Overall your sample is a bit small for use of inferential modeling alone, and it generally helps to see descriptive analysis even in cases where a sample is somewhat larger. Presenting some contingency tables to complement your ANOVA tables should do the trick. Also, if your outcome measures weren't continuous you will likely fare better with the McNemar test of significance for between-group comparison tests.

Dear Brooke,

There aren't many psycholinguistic data around for Vietnamese. John Ingram (together with T. Nguyen) investigated tonal processing in Vietnamese some time ago and more recently extended that work to Vietnamese - English bilinguals. Other than that, I am not aware of any work.

Vietnamese is an understudied language from a psycholinguistic point of view. 90% of all psycholinguistic studies published in the last 15 years are on no more than 10 different languages, most of them of Indo-European origin. It is time that we broaden our scope to other languages including Vietnamese.

Hi Ana. We are studying small animal phobias. Basically, in the first stage of the project we expose the subjects to phobic and non phobic stimulus (videos or virtual reality of cockoroaches, lizards or spiders) in the magnetic resonance machine (two groups phobic and non phobic subjects). In a second phase we apply a cognitve-behavioral therapy program to the phobic persons, after which they are exposed again to phobic and non phobic stimulus in the machine. We hope to publish a paper shortly with the first outcomes. Best regards

Your intuition seems plausible, but it's flawed.

There are phonemes that are considered common, based on their frequency in languages around the world (see http://wals.info/chapter/18 for a discussion of languages that lack common consonants, consonants in the classes of fricatives, bilabials, and nasals - like your examples of /m/ and /n/.). The hypothesis that common phonemes, or at least consonants, are easier to articulate (the Theoretical Issues section in this discussion: http://wals.info/chapter/1).

Vowels are harder to define, and more subject to change, but there are far more types of consonants than vowels (7 is considered a large vowel inventory while the average number of consonants is 22). Languages with small vowel inventories usually include /a/, along with /i/ and /u/ (http://wals.info/chapter/2).

But, if we accept the hypothesis that easier-to-articulate phonemes are less likely to change than phonemes that require complex articulation, we still have to remember that phonemes that are easy to articulate are members of a class of phonemes. As members of a class, what impediments would there be for one easily articulated phoneme to change into another? /m/ and /n/ are both common nasal phonemes with similar articulation, so what would prevent /m/ from changing into /n/?

Then there is the question of origin. Why do phonemes with complex articulation exist at all? The number of consonants in a language ranges from 6 to 120 or so; vowels from 2 to somewhere in the 20s. There is a general inverse correlation between vowels and consonants, languages that have few of one tend to have many of the other, but there is a strong tendency toward the "average" amounts or consonants in the 20s and vowels close to 10. But what reason is there for the outliers on the high end of either type of phoneme? If phonemes that are difficult to articulate tend to change more than those easier to articulate, there should be a trend where phonemes that are difficult to articulate disappear. But after many thousands of years of language use, they persist in many languages.

The sense that they "persist" is also a problem. The implication is that, the earlier you go back in human history, the more complex the inventory of phonemes was. What would be the reason for this? The alternative, though, is that languages developed phonemes that are more complex in articulation from an inventory of easier-to-articulate phonemes.

Complexity of articulation is also a difficult to define, as it often depends on what other phonemes exist in a language. If language users are comfortable with an articulation pattern based on one phoneme, minor variations on that pattern should be relatively easy to adopt.

But this isn't necessarily true, and has an impact on the hypothesis that ease of articulation should influence the presence of a phoneme (if a phoneme is more resistant to change, it is more likely to be present at any particular time of measurement). Languages tend to "skip" similar phonemes that other languages use. There is very little difference in articulation of an aspirated stop consonant and the non-aspirated version, so little that languages may contain both sounds but not consider them phonemic, but allophones. English has an aspirated /p/ and a non-aspirated /p/. The /p/ in "pit" is aspirated, the /p/ in "spit" isn't. So why doesn't English take the easy route and use these sounds that already exist as phonemes, and maintain them as comparatively easy to produce? Hindi does. But it has its own quirks.

The issue is complex, and I haven't investigated it, but have thought about it. There are real problems with the hypothesis. There's no reason for one easy-to-articulate phoneme to not change into another easy-to-articulate phoneme. Difficult to articulate phonemes should disappear over time - but they seemingly shouldn't exist in the first place. Languages don't use "easy" sound variations that already exist in the language as phonemes, while other languages do use them.

Language sampling is a good way to measure language. Using a standardized elicitation protocol, you ask the subject to tell the story of a wordless picture book such as Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). You record their story and then transcribe the language sample into the software program. The software that I used is called SALT (Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts). You use the same story pre and post. This software uses a scoring method called the Narrative Scoring Scheme. Here is an article that explains it better than I am: Heilmann, Miller, Nockerts & Dunaway (2010). Properties of the Narrative Scoring Scheme Using Narrative Retells in Young School-Age Children, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 19, 154-166. File is attached.