Universality in eye movements and reading: a trilingual investigation

Universality in language has been a core issue in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics for many years (e.g., Chomsky, 1965). Recently, Frost (2012) has argued that establishing universals of process is critical to the development of meaningful, theoretically motivated, cross-linguistic models of reading. In contrast, other researchers argue that there is no such thing as universals of reading (e.g., Coltheart & Crain, 2012). Reading is a complex, visually mediated psychological process, and eye movements are the behavioural means by which we encode the visual information required for linguistic processing. To investigate universality of representation and process across languages we examined eye movement behaviour during reading of very comparable stimuli in three languages, Chinese, English and Finnish. These languages differ in numerous respects (character based vs. alphabetic, visual density, informational density, word spacing, orthographic depth, agglutination, etc.). We used linear mixed modelling techniques to identify variables that captured common variance across languages. Despite fundamental visual and linguistic differences in the orthographies, statistical models of reading behaviour were strikingly similar in a number of respects, and thus, we argue that their composition might reflect universality of representation and process in reading

The Simple View of Reading Made Complex by Morphological Decoding Fluency in Bilingual Fourth-Grade Readers of English

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordThis study examined the complexity of the Simple View of Reading focusing on morphological decoding fluency in fourth-grade readers of English in Singapore. The participants were three groups of students who all learned to become bilingual and biliterate in the English language (EL) and their respective ethnic language in school but differed in the home language they used. The first group was ethnic Chinese students who used English as the dominant home language (Chinese EL1); the other two groups were ethnic Chinese and Malay students whose dominant home language was not English but Chinese (Chinese EL2) and Malay (Malay EL2), respectively. The measures included pseudo word decoding (phonemic decoding), timed decoding of derivational words (morphological decoding fluency), oral vocabulary, and passage comprehension. Path analysis showed that oral vocabulary significantly predicted reading comprehension across all three groups; yet a significant effect of morphological decoding fluency surfaced in the Chinese EL1 and Malay EL2 groups but not the Chinese EL2 group. Multi-group path analysis and commonality analysis further confirmed that morphological decoding played a larger role in the in the Chinese EL1 and Malay EL2 groups. These findings are discussed in light of the joint influence of target language experience and cross-linguistic influence on second language or bilingual reading development.Office of Education Research, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological Universit

News Translation from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory in China Daily

Nowadays, with the trend of world political multi-polarization and the regional economic integration, international communication has become an essential way for the development of each country. News become indispensable to the public to acquire the information happened domestic and abroad everyday. Thus, accurate news translation based on different language backgrounds has become an important channel to get news. Give a broad overview of the current translation in China’s current situation, the research field has been expanded since the 70s of last century. However, relative researches still have a long way to go. Eugene Nida, a contemporary famous American theorist in the field of translation, his functional equivalence theory becomes a continuous improved theory which has great significance of guiding the news translation practice.This article mainly bases on Nida’s functional equivalence theory and combines with the news language features to analyze China's most representative newspaper- China Daily. By analyzing vocabulary, syntax and discourse, we could explore the application of Nida’s functional equivalence theory in guiding the practice of news translation. The study of Nida’s functional equivalence theory not only guides news translation but also instructs other translation practice. Nida’s functional equivalence theory is worthy of being studied

(Dis)connections between specific language impairment and dyslexia in Chinese

Poster Session: no. 26P.40Specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia describe language-learning impairments that occur in the absence of a sensory, cognitive, or psychosocial impairment. SLI is primarily defined by an impairment in oral language, and dyslexia by a deficit in the reading of written words. SLI and dyslexia co-occur in school-age children learning English, with rates ranging from 17% to 75%. For children learning Chinese, SLI and dyslexia also co-occur. Wong et al. (2010) first reported on the presence of dyslexia in a clinical sample of 6- to 11-year-old school-age children with SLI. The study compared the reading-related cognitive skills of children with SLI and dyslexia (SLI-D) with 2 groups of children …postprin

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Uncovering the myth of learning to read Chinese characters: phonetic, semantic, and orthographic strategies used by Chinese as foreign language learners

Oral Session - 6A: Lexical modeling: no. 6A.3Chinese is considered to be one of the most challenging orthographies to be learned by non-native speakers, in particular, the character. Chinese character is the basic reading unit that converges sound, form and meaning. The predominant type of Chinese character is semantic-phonetic compound that is composed of phonetic and semantic radicals, giving the clues of the sound and meaning, respectively. Over the last two decades, psycholinguistic research has made significant progress in specifying the roles of phonetic and semantic radicals in character processing among native Chinese speakers …postprin

Cross-Linguistic Comparison of the Pitch and Temporal Profiles between L1 and Chinese L2 Speakers of Spanish

Cross-linguistic studies between intonational languages suggest that there is a universal trend during the L2 learning process regarding pitch and temporal characteristics. We extend these hypotheses to Chinese learners of Peninsular Spanish-a new pairing of tone and non-tone languages. Using six pitch and temporal metrics, we examine how Chinese learners’ pitch and temporal profiles deviated from those of L1 native speakers and explore the factors that may contribute to L2 speech deviations. The Discourse Completion Task was conducted to elicit five question types produced by 37 participants, who were divided into three language groups. Consistent with previous literature, our study shows that Chinese L2 learners had a compression of pitch span (at both the utterance and syllable levels) and pitch variability, as well as a strong reduction of pitch change rate, speech rate, and articulation rate compared to L1 Spanish speakers. Most pitch and temporal deviations in L2 Spanish intonation are closely linked to psychological and cognitive attributes rather than being determined by physiological factors or L1 tonal transfer. Moreover, the lack of prosodic knowledge of the target intonation patterns concerning the different question types may also hinder L2 learners from approaching a native-like pitch and temporal profile.Algunos estudios interlingüísticos entre lenguas entonativas sugieren que puede existir una tendencia universal durante el proceso de aprendizaje de la L2 con respecto a las características tonales y temporales. Extendemos estas hipótesis a los aprendices chinos de español peninsular -una nueva combinación lingüística entre lenguas tonales y entonativas. Usando seis métricas tonales y temporales, pretendemos examinar cómo los aprendices chinos se desvían de los hablantes nativos en los perfiles tonales y temporales, y explorar los factores que contribuyen a las desviaciones en el habla de la L2. Se ha realizado la Tarea de Finalización del Discurso para elicitar cinco tipos de preguntas producidas por los 37 participantes divididos en tres grupos lingüísticos. En línea con la bibliografía anterior, nuestro estudio muestra que los aprendices chinos presentaban una compresión de rango tonal (tanto a nivel oracional como a nivel silábico) y variación tonal, así como una reducción significativa en la tasa del cambio tonal, la velocidad del habla y la tasa de articulación en comparación con los hablantes nativos de español. La mayoría de las desviaciones tonales y temporales en la entonación de la L2 están estrechamente relacionadas con atributos psicológicos y cognitivos más que con factores fisiológicos o con la transferencia tonal de la L1. Además, la falta de conocimiento prosódico de los patrones entonativos relativos a los diferentes tipos de preguntas en la lengua meta también impide que los aprendices de L2 se asimilen a un perfil tonal y temporal similar a los nativos

Coherence in Machine Translation

Coherence ensures individual sentences work together to form a meaningful document. When properly translated, a coherent document in one language should result in a coherent document in another language. In Machine Translation, however, due to reasons of modeling and computational complexity, sentences are pieced together from words or phrases based on short context windows and with no access to extra-sentential context. In this thesis I propose ways to automatically assess the coherence of machine translation output. The work is structured around three dimensions: entity-based coherence, coherence as evidenced via syntactic patterns, and coherence as evidenced via discourse relations. For the first time, I evaluate existing monolingual coherence models on this new task, identifying issues and challenges that are specific to the machine translation setting. In order to address these issues, I adapted a state-of-the-art syntax model, which also resulted in improved performance for the monolingual task. The results clearly indicate how much more difficult the new task is than the task of detecting shuffled texts. I proposed a new coherence model, exploring the crosslingual transfer of discourse relations in machine translation. This model is novel in that it measures the correctness of the discourse relation by comparison to the source text rather than to a reference translation. I identified patterns of incoherence common across different language pairs, and created a corpus of machine translated output annotated with coherence errors for evaluation purposes. I then examined lexical coherence in a multilingual context, as a preliminary study for crosslingual transfer. Finally, I determine how the new and adapted models correlate with human judgements of translation quality and suggest that improvements in general evaluation within machine translation would benefit from having a coherence component that evaluated the translation output with respect to the source text

Reading in Kapampangan, Filipino, and English: A Look at Multilingual Children in an Economically Challenging Philippine Community

The present studies advance current understanding of the skills and processes involved in multilingual reading, especially in less researched alphabetic languages. These studies examined whether the dominant models in reading in English can explain the reading processes involved among low-income multilingual speakers of Kapampangan (L1), Filipino (L2), and English (L3) in the Philippines, a developing country. Kapampangan and Filipino use the same Roman alphabet that English uses. However, these two languages have transparent orthographies while English has an opaque orthography. Study 1 examined the psycholinguistic grain size theory within the context of multilingual reading. There were three hundred twenty-six children aged 8 to 15 years old who were individually tested on phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and word reading fluency in their three languages (Kapampangan, Filipino, and English), as well as on non-verbal intelligence and rapid automatized naming (RAN). It was hypothesized that 1) phonological awareness would be related to word reading fluency in each language (no matter the transparency/depth of its orthography), and 2) phonological awareness (PA) in the three languages would make unique and shared contributions to word reading fluency in each language. As expected, hierarchical regression analyses showed that PA was significantly related to word reading fluency in each language. The relationship was stronger in opaque English than in the two transparent local languages. Vocabulary made a significant contribution to English word reading fluency, but not to Kapampangan and Filipino word reading fluency. English PA and vocabulary were related to L1 and L2 word reading fluency as well. RAN was a robust predictor of word reading fluency in the three languages. As predicted, commonality analyses showed that PA in the three languages made unique and shared contributions to word reading fluency in each language. English PA yielded the highest unique contribution to word reading fluency in all languages, larger than the common variance shared by PA in the three languages. Study 2 examined a modified simple view of reading (SVR) within the context of multilingual reading. There were two hundred twelve children aged 8 to 13 years old who were individually assessed on word reading fluency and vocabulary and group tested on reading comprehension in their three languages (Kapampangan, Filipino, and English). It was hypothesized that 1) word reading fluency (proxy for decoding) and vocabulary (proxy for linguistic comprehension) would make unique contributions to reading comprehension in each language, and 2) the product of word reading fluency and vocabulary would significantly contribute to reading comprehension over and above their own unique contributions. Contrary to expectations, hierarchical regression analyses showed that the predictors contributed unique variance in reading comprehension only in English. Word reading fluency and vocabulary, as well as the product of word reading fluency and vocabulary, significantly predicted reading comprehension even after the other variables were controlled for. Grade level, a control variable, contributed unique variance in reading comprehension in Filipino, over and above the contributions of the other predictors. The findings suggest that a modified SVR is insufficient for understanding reading among multilingual readers in socio-economically and educationally challenging contexts. Aside from cognitive-linguistic factors, ecological factors matter in reading. Study 3 examined the longitudinal relationship between vocabulary and word reading fluency in multilingual Kapampangan-Filipino-English speakers. There were two hundred children aged 8 to 13 years old who were individually tested on vocabulary and word reading fluency in the three languages across three time points that were six months apart. To determine the nature of this relationship, a three-wave cross-lagged panel analysis was conducted for each language (with rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness as control variables in the first time point). As predicted, the best-fitting model for the data indicated a similar pattern of relations between vocabulary and word reading fluency over time across the three alphabetic languages (though the strength of the associations varied). Results showed a relative weakness in vocabulary, as well as the absence of significant relations to word reading fluency in all three languages. Overall, the autoregressive, concurrent, and cross-lagged relations of vocabulary and word reading fluency suggest a unidirectional relationship from word reading fluency to vocabulary