Tonal Adaptation of Loanwords in Mandarin: Phonology and Beyond

This study examines the tonal adaptation of English and Japanese loanwords in Mandarin, and considers data collected from different types of sources. The purpose overall is to identify the mechanisms underlying the adaptation processes by which tone is assigned, and to check if the same mechanisms are invoked regardless of donor languages and source types. Both corpus and experimental methods were utilized to survey a broad sampling of borrowings and a wide array of syllable types that target specific phonetic properties. To maximally rule out the effect of semantic tingeing, this study examined English place names that were extracted from a dictionary and from online travel blogs. And to explore how semantic association might interfere with the adaptation processes, this study also investigated a separate corpus of Japanese manga role names and brand names. Revisiting discussions in previous studies about how phonetic properties of the source form might affect tonal assignments in the adapted forms, this study also included an expanded reanalysis of adaptations elicited in an experimental setting. Observations made in the study suggest that the primary mechanisms behind tonal assignments for loanwords in Mandarin operate at a level beyond any usual phonological concerns: the adaptation processes are heavily reliant on factors that are inherent to Mandarin lexical distributions, such as tone probability and character frequency. Adapters apparently utilize their tacit knowledge about such distributional properties when assigning tones. Also crucial to the tonal assignment mechanism is the seeking of appropriate characters based on their meanings, either to avoid unintended readings of loanwords or to form desired interpretations. Such adaptation mechanisms are mainly attributable to the morpho-syllabic nature of the Chinese writing system, the language’s high productivity of compound words, and its high incidence of homophony. Also noted in the study is the influence of prescriptive conventions formulated for formally established loanwords. Research findings reported in this study highlight such non-phonological aspects of loanword adaptation, especially the role of the writing system, that have been underestimated to date in the field of loanword phonology and cross-linguistic studies of loanword typology

Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture

This open access volume reveals the hidden power of the script we read in and how it shapes and drives our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures. Expanding on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (i.e., the idea that language affects the way we think), this volume proposes the “Script Relativity Hypothesis” (i.e., the idea that the script in which we read affects the way we think) by offering a unique perspective on the effect of script (alphabets, morphosyllabaries, or multi-scripts) on our attention, perception, and problem-solving. Once we become literate, fundamental changes occur in our brain circuitry to accommodate the new demand for resources. The powerful effects of literacy have been demonstrated by research on literate versus illiterate individuals, as well as cross-scriptal transfer, indicating that literate brain networks function differently, depending on the script being read. This book identifies the locus of differences between the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, and between the East and the West, as the neural underpinnings of literacy. To support the “Script Relativity Hypothesis”, it reviews a vast corpus of empirical studies, including anthropological accounts of human civilization, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, applied linguistics, second language studies, and cross-cultural communication. It also discusses the impact of reading from screens in the digital age, as well as the impact of bi-script or multi-script use, which is a growing trend around the globe. As a result, our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures are now growing closer together, not farther apart. ; Examines the origin, emergence, and co-evolution of written language, the human mind, and culture within the purview of script effects Investigates how the scripts we read over time shape our cognition, mind, and thought patterns Provides a new outlook on the four representative writing systems of the world Discusses the consequences of literacy for the functioning of the min

Acoustic Modelling for Under-Resourced Languages

Automatic speech recognition systems have so far been developed only for very few languages out of the 4,000-7,000 existing ones. In this thesis we examine methods to rapidly create acoustic models in new, possibly under-resourced languages, in a time and cost effective manner. For this we examine the use of multilingual models, the application of articulatory features across languages, and the automatic discovery of word-like units in unwritten languages

Methods for Efficient Ontology Lexicalization for Non-Indo-European Languages: The Case of Japanese

Lanser B. Methods for Efficient Ontology Lexicalization for Non-Indo-European Languages: The Case of Japanese. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2017.In order to make the growing amount of conceptual knowledge available through ontologies and datasets accessible to humans, NLP applications need access to information on how this knowledge can be verbalized in natural language. One way to provide this kind of information are ontology lexicons, which apart from the actual verbalizations in a given target language can provide further, rich linguistic information about them. Compiling such lexicons manually is a very time-consuming task and requires expertise both in Semantic Web technologies and lexicon engineering, as well as a very good knowledge of the target language at hand. In this thesis we present two alternative approaches to generating ontology lexicons by means of crowdsourcing on the one hand and through the framework M-ATOLL on the other hand. So far, M-ATOLL has been used with a number of Indo-European languages that share a large set of common characteristics. Therefore, another focus of this work will be the generation of ontology lexicons specifically for Non-Indo-European languages. In order to explore these two topics, we use both approaches to generate Japanese ontology lexicons for the DBpedia ontology: First, we use CrowdFlower to generate a small Japanese ontology lexicon for ten exemplary ontology elements according to a two-stage workflow, the main underlying idea of which is to turn the task of generating lexicon entries into a translation task; the starting point of this translation task is a manually created English lexicon for DBpedia. Next, we adapt M-ATOLL's corpus-based approach to being used with Japanese, and use the adapted system to generate two lexicons for five example properties, respectively. Aspects of the DBpedia system that require modifications for being used with Japanese include the dependency patterns employed by M-ATOLL to extract candidate verbalizations from corpus data, and the templates used to generate the actual lexicon entries. Comparison of the lexicons generated by both approaches to manually created gold standards shows that both approaches are viable options for the generation of ontology lexicons also for Non-Indo-European languages

Machine transliteration of proper names between English and Persian

Machine transliteration is the process of automatically transforming a word from a source language to a target language while preserving pronunciation. The transliterated words in the target language are called out-of-dictionary, or sometimes out-of-vocabulary, meaning that they have been borrowed from other languages with a change of script. When a whole text is being translated, for example, then proper nouns and technical terms are subject to transliteration. Machine translation, and other applications which make use of this technology, such as cross-lingual information retrieval and cross-language question answering, deal with the problem of transliteration. Since proper nouns and technical terms - which need phonetical translation - are part of most text documents, transliteration is an important problem to study. We explore the problem of English to Persian and Persian to English transliteration using methods that work based on the grapheme of the source word. One major problem in handling Persian text is its lack of written short vowels. When transliterating Persian words to English, we need to develop a method of inserting vowels to make them pronounceable. Many different approaches using n-grams are explored and compared in this thesis, and we propose language-specific transliteration methods that improved transliteration accuracy. Our novel approaches use consonant-vowel sequences, and show significant improvements over baseline systems. We also develop a new alignment algorithm, and examine novel techniques to combine systems; approaches which improve the effectiveness of the systems. We also investigate the properties of bilingual corpora that affect transliteration accuracy. Our experiments suggest that the origin of the source words has a strong effect on the performance of transliteration systems. From the careful analysis of the corpus construction process, we conclude that at least five human transliterators are needed to construct a representative bilingual corpus that is used for the training and testing of transliteration systems

Acquired dyslexia in Japanese : implications for reading theory

Acquired dyslexia research has been conducted mainly on English neurological patients. A limited number of dyslexia studies on non-alphabetic orthographies are available. Classical case studies for acquired dyslexia in Japanese, which has two distinctive scripts (morphographic Kanji and phonographic Kana), reported 'script-dependent' dyslexia patterns. Although recent case studies showed 'script-independent' dyslexia patterns for surface and phonological dyslexia, a 'script-independent' deep dyslexia pattern in Japanese has not yet been reported. This study examined four Japanese aphasic patients, using psycholinguistically well-manipulated reading stimuli for both Kanji and Kana strings. YT, with phonological impairment, demonstrated the same effects of psycholinguistic variables as observed in English deep dyslexia, but semantic errors rarely occurred in Kana word reading. YT's concomitant deep dyslexia for Kanji, and phonological dyslexia for Kana fit the phonological impairment hypothesis, and this can be treated as a unique characteristic of Japanese deep dyslexia. HW, with semantic impairment, demonstrated a 'script-independent' surface dyslexia pattern. SO, with severe semantic impairment, demonstrated a surface dyslexia pattern in Kanji word reading, but showed substantial difficulty with Kanji nonword reading. ME, with phonological impairment and a visuo-spatial deficit, showed both lexicality and length effects on reading aloud Kana strings, thus suggesting phonological dyslexia for Kana. That is, the double dissociation between Kanji and Kana nonword reading was observed in SO and ME. These results suggest that Japanese acquired dyslexia patterns are not dependent on script-type, but are also not totally independent of script-type. These outcomes of this study are discussed in terms of universality and orthographic-specificity in acquired dyslexia. Moreover, possible workings of the Japanese version of the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the triangle model Plaut, et al., 1996; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) are presented in order to explain acquired dyslexia patterns in Japanese.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Acquired Dyslexia in Japanese: Implications for Reading Theory

Acquired dyslexia research has been conducted mainly on English neurological patients. A limited number of dyslexia studies on non-alphabetic orthographies are available. Classical case studies for acquired dyslexia in Japanese, which has two distinctive scripts (morphographic Kanji and phonographic Kana), reported 'script-dependent' dyslexia patterns. Although recent case studies showed 'script-independent' dyslexia patterns for surface and phonological dyslexia, a 'script-independent' deep dyslexia pattern in Japanese has not yet been reported. This study examined four Japanese aphasic patients, using psycholinguistically well-manipulated reading stimuli for both Kanji and Kana strings. YT, with phonological impairment, demonstrated the same effects of psycholinguistic variables as observed in English deep dyslexia, but semantic errors rarely occurred in Kana word reading. YT's concomitant deep dyslexia for Kanji, and phonological dyslexia for Kana fit the phonological impairment hypothesis, and this can be treated as a unique characteristic of Japanese deep dyslexia. HW, with semantic impairment, demonstrated a 'script-independent' surface dyslexia pattern. SO, with severe semantic impairment, demonstrated a surface dyslexia pattern in Kanji word reading, but showed substantial difficulty with Kanji nonword reading. ME, with phonological impairment and a visuo-spatial deficit, showed both lexicality and length effects on reading aloud Kana strings, thus suggesting phonological dyslexia for Kana. That is, the double dissociation between Kanji and Kana nonword reading was observed in SO and ME. These results suggest that Japanese acquired dyslexia patterns are not dependent on script-type, but are also not totally independent of script-type. These outcomes of this study are discussed in terms of universality and orthographic-specificity in acquired dyslexia. Moreover, possible workings of the Japanese version of the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the triangle model Plaut, et al., 1996; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) are presented in order to explain acquired dyslexia patterns in Japanese

Investigating Multilingual, Multi-script Support in Lucene/Solr Library Applications

Yale has developed over many years a highly-structured, high-quality multilingual catalog of bibliographic data. Almost 50% of the collection represents non-English materials in over 650 languages, and includes many different non-Roman scripts. Faculty, students, researchers, and staff would like to make full use of this original script content for resource discovery. While the underlying textual data are in place, effective indexing, retrieval and display functionality for the non-Roman script content is not available within our bibliographic discovery applications, Orbis and Yufind. Opportunities now exist in the Unicode, Lucene/Solr computing environment to bridge the functionality gap and achieve internationalization of the Yale Library catalog. While most parts of this study focus on the Yale environment, in the absence of other such studies it is hoped that the findings will be of interest to a much larger community.Arcadia Foundatio

Neuromagnetische Korrelate der Plastizität im auditorischen Kortex aufgrund von Diskriminationslernen

In dieser Dissertation wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob intensives Diskriminationslernen plastische Veränderungen im auditorischen Kortex bewirkt. Im 1. Experiment wurde daher die Wirkung eines dreiwöchigen Frequenzdiskrimi-nationstrainings untersucht. Zwei magnetoenzephalographische (MEG) Messungen definierten die ?normalen? MMN-Amplituden, eine Messung während, am Ende des Trainings und 3 Wochen danach wurden damit korreliert. Im Laufe des Trainings verbesserte sich die gerade noch unterscheidbare Frequenzdifferenz deutlich und erhöhten sich die Amplituden der N1m und des MMF bis zum Ende des Trainings und fielen 3 Wochen danach leicht ab. Im 2. Experiment wurden die neuronalen ?Spuren? des Lernens von nicht-nativem Mora-timing untersucht. Deutsche Probanden lernten in 10 Trainingseinheiten von 1 1/2 Stunden japanische Wortpaare zu diskriminieren, die sich in mehreren Stufen durch die Länge eines Mora unterschieden. Ein deutlicher Anstieg der Diskriminationsleistung korrelierte signifikant mit der MMF-Amplitude und mit der Abnahme der Reaktionszeiten im Training und der Latenzen der MMF. Im 3. Experiment wurden japanische Probanden als Muttersprachler mit dem gleichen Paradigma auf Kurzzeitplastizität untersucht. Im Vergleich zu den deutschen Probanden zeigte sich eine erhöhte Sensitivität des MMF für kleinere Unterschiede auf dem ?anni?- und ?kiyo?-Kontinuum vor dem Training. Es konnte erstmalig gezeigt werden, dass intensives Diskriminationslernen zu plastischen Veränderungen im menschlichen Gehirn führen, wie sie in neuromagnetischen Antworten gezeigt wurden. Muttersprachler weisen dafür eine erhöhte Sensitivität, jedoch keine Kurzzeitplastizität auf