50 research outputs found
The role of typology and proficiency in L2 processing of brazilian portuguese and english verbal morphology: an eye-movement study
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês: Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, Florianópolis, 2015Abstract : The focus of this study is on the role of the first language (L1) typology and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of regular past tense verbs in L2 Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and L2 English. The linguistic processing of intermediate and advanced L2 learners from typologically different L1 and L2 was assessed. Specifically, the verb morphological processing of L2 learners of BP (L1 speakers of English) and L2 learners of English (L1 speakers of BP) at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels in the L2 was compared by means of the eye-movement method. The predictions of two theories in the Second Language Acquisition literature the Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2005) and the Associative-Cognitive CREED (Ellis, 2006a) were considered in order to explain the persistent problems of L2 learners with verbal inflection. Data were collected from a total of 16 participants 4 advanced L2 learners of English, 4 intermediate L2 learners of English, 5 advanced L2 learners of BP and 3 intermediate L2 learners of BP. Participants were divided into two groups: (a) L2BP (L2 learners of BP) and (b) L2EN (L2 learners of English). The following materials were employed in this study: (a) a linguistic background questionnaire; (b) a proficiency assessment test based on the CELPE-Bras writing section for the L2 learners of BP; (c) a proficiency assessment test based on the TOEFL iBT writing section for the L2 learners of English; (d) a Sentence Comprehension Task in BP; (e) a Sentence Comprehension Task in English. The Sentence Comprehension Tasks consisted of grammatical sentences in which the target words were regular past tense verbs in BP and in English. The two groups of bilinguals were asked to perform the Sentence Comprehension Task in both their L1 and L2. Results show that there was no significant difference in language processing between the L2BP group and the L2EN group, which means that the cross-linguistic differences between L2 learners L1 and L2 (i.e., L2 learners L1 typology) did not affect the processing of L2 verbal inflection between the groups. However, the L1 typology might have had an effect on L2 morphological processing of the L2BP group. This influence may be attributed to the fact that English lacks morphosyntactic features existent in BP, resulting in extra processing cost in the Sentence Comprehension Task in BP. As regards the role of proficiency, results indicate that there was no statistically significant correlation between proficiency and the eye-tracking measures for either of the groups. Particularly, the results of the present study demonstrate that L2 learners can process their target language almost indistinguishably from native speakers regardless of their proficiency level and L1 background. Nonetheless, the L2 learners of BP processed their L2 in qualitatively different ways than they processed their L1, indicating that the morphosyntactic differences between BP and English may have played a role in the L2 processing of English-speaking learners of a Romance Language. O foco desta pesquisa está no papel da tipologia da primeira língua (L1) e da proficiência da segunda língua (L2) no processamento de verbos regulares no passado em português brasileiro (PB) e inglês como L2. O processamento linguístico de aprendizes de L2 com diferentes níveis de proficiência, cujas L1 e L2 são tipologicamente diferentes, foi avaliado. Especificamente, o processamento da morfologia verbal em L2 de aprendizes com níveis intermediário e avançado em PB (falantes nativos de inglês) e em inglês (falantes nativos de português) foi comparado através do método de rastreamento ocular. As predições de duas teorias existentes na literatura de Aquisição de Segunda Língua o Modelo Unificado de Competição (MacWhinney, 2005) e a Teoria Associativa-Cognitiva CREED (Ellis, 2006a) foram consideradas para explicar os problemas persistentes de aprendizes de L2 com a flexão verbal. Dados foram coletados de um total de 16 participantes 4 aprendizes avançados de inglês-L2, 4 aprendizes intermediários de inglês-L2, 5 aprendizes avançados de PB-L2 e 3 aprendizes intermediários de PB-L2. Os participantes foram divididos em dois grupos: (a) L2BP (aprendizes PB-L2) e (b) L2EN (aprendizes de inglês-L2). Os seguintes materiais foram utilizados neste estudo: (a) um questionário sobre o perfil linguístico dos participantes; (b) uma avaliação de proficiência baseada na seção de escrita do CELPE-Bras para os aprendizes de PB-L2; (c) uma avaliação de proficiência baseada na seção de escrita do TOEFL iBT para os aprendizes de inglês-L2; (d) uma tarefa de compreensão de sentenças em PB; (e) uma tarefa de compreensão de sentenças em inglês. As tarefas de compreensão de sentença consistiam de frases gramaticais em que as palavras-alvo eram verbos regulares no passado em PB e em inglês. Os dois grupos de bilíngues executaram a tarefa de compreensão de sentenças em sua língua nativa e em sua L2. Os resultados desta pesquisa demonstram que não houve diferença significativa no processamento das sentenças entre o grupo de L2BP e o grupo de L2EN, o que significa que as diferenças translinguísticas entre a L1 e a L2 dos participantes não tiveram efeito sobre o processamento da flexão verbal em L2 entre os grupos. Todavia, a tipologia da L1 pode ter tido um efeito sobre processamento morfológico do grupo L2BP. Essa influência pode ser atribuída ao fato de que o inglês carece de recursos morfossintáticos existentes no PB, resultando em custo extra de processamento na tarefa de compreensão de sentenças em PB. Quanto ao papel da proficiência, os resultados indicam que não houve correlação estatisticamente significativa entre proficiência e as medidas do rastreador ocular para nenhum dos grupos. Particulamente, os resultados do presente estudo demonstram que os aprendizes de L2 podem processar sua língua-alvo quase indistintamente de falantes nativos, independentemente do seu nível de proficiência e L1. No entanto, os aprendizes de PB-L2 processaram a sua L2 de forma qualitativamente diferente da forma em que eles processaram a sua L1, o que demonstra que as diferenças morfossintáticas entre o PB e o inglês podem ter exercido um efeito sobre o processamento de L2 de falantes nativos de inglês cuja L2 é uma língua românica
Translation shifts from English to Romanian in literary and general informative texts
This thesis asks the question of how English present and past participles are translated to Romanian in literary texts, as well as in general informative texts. Excerpts containing present and past participles are extracted from the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book and Wikipedia texts and compared to their equivalents in Romanian. The theoretical background is based on J.C. Catford’s translation shifts classification. The most frequent changes are level shifts (a grammatical distinction in the source language is expressed by lexical means in the target language), class shifts (English participles are translated to different grammatical items - e.g., an English present participle can be translated to a Romanian gerund, a relative clause, or a noun phrase), or unit shifts (changes that, in this case, occur at the phrase level). The aims of the project include differences in shift patterns depending on the genre (a literary text vs. a general informative text), as well as additional observations that concern miscellaneous cases of translation shifts, and differences between optional and obligatory changes
Lexical selection for machine translation
Current research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tends to exploit corpus resources as a way of overcoming the problem of knowledge acquisition. Statistical analysis of corpora can reveal trends and probabilities of occurrence, which have proved to be helpful in various ways. Machine Translation (MT) is no exception to this trend. Many MT researchers have attempted to extract knowledge from parallel bilingual corpora. The MT problem is generally decomposed into two sub-problems: lexical selection and reordering of the selected words. This research addresses the problem of lexical selection of open-class lexical items in the framework of MT. The work reported in this thesis investigates different methodologies to handle this problem, using a corpus-based approach. The current framework can be applied to any language pair, but we focus on Arabic and English. This is because Arabic words are hugely ambiguous and thus pose a challenge for the current task of lexical selection. We use a challenging Arabic-English parallel corpus, containing many long passages with no punctuation marks to denote sentence boundaries. This points to the robustness of the adopted approach. In our attempt to extract lexical equivalents from the parallel corpus we focus on the co-occurrence relations between words. The current framework adopts a lexicon-free approach towards the selection of lexical equivalents. This has the double advantage of investigating the effectiveness of different techniques without being distracted by the properties of the lexicon and at the same time saving much time and effort, since constructing a lexicon is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Thus, we use as little, if any, hand-coded information as possible. The accuracy score could be improved by adding hand-coded information. The point of the work reported here is to see how well one can do without any such manual intervention. With this goal in mind, we carry out a number of preprocessing steps in our framework. First, we build a lexicon-free Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger for Arabic. This POS tagger uses a combination of rule-based, transformation-based learning (TBL) and probabilistic techniques. Similarly, we use a lexicon-free POS tagger for English. We use the two POS taggers to tag the bi-texts. Second, we develop lexicon-free shallow parsers for Arabic and English. The two parsers are then used to label the parallel corpus with dependency relations (DRs) for some critical constructions. Third, we develop stemmers for Arabic and English, adopting the same knowledge -free approach. These preprocessing steps pave the way for the main system (or proposer) whose task is to extract translational equivalents from the parallel corpus. The framework starts with automatically extracting a bilingual lexicon using unsupervised statistical techniques which exploit the notion of co-occurrence patterns in the parallel corpus. We then choose the target word that has the highest frequency of occurrence from among a number of translational candidates in the extracted lexicon in order to aid the selection of the contextually correct translational equivalent. These experiments are carried out on either raw or POS-tagged texts. Having labelled the bi-texts with DRs, we use them to extract a number of translation seeds to start a number of bootstrapping techniques to improve the proposer. These seeds are used as anchor points to resegment the parallel corpus and start the selection process once again. The final F-score for the selection process is 0.701. We have also written an algorithm for detecting ambiguous words in a translation lexicon and obtained a precision score of 0.89.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEgyptian GovernmentGBUnited Kingdo
The lexical interface: closed class items in south Slavic and English
This thesis argues for a minimalist theory of dual lexicalization. It presents a unified analysis of South Slavic and English auxiliaries and accounts for the distribution of South Slavic clitic clusters. The analysis moves much minor cross-linguistic variation out of the syntax into the lexicon and the level of Phonological Form. Following a critique of various approaches to lexical insertion in Chomskyan models, we adapt Emonds' (1994, 1997) theory of syntactic and phonological lexicalization for a model employing bare phrase structure. We redefine 'extended projection' in this theory, and revise the mechanism of 'Alternative Realization', whereby formal features associated with (possibly null) XP may be realised on another node. Pronominal clitics are one example of Alternative Realization. We claim that the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian clitic cluster is phonologically lexicalized on the highest head in the extended projection. The clitic auxiliaries in SCB are not auxiliaries, but the altemative realization of features in 1º without categorial specification, hence the distribution of the clitic cluster as a whole. We show how a verb's extended projection may be extended by 'restructuring' verbs, allowing clitic climbing. In Bulgarian/Macedonian, the clausal clitic cluster appears on the highest [+V] head in the extended projection, determined by the categorial specifications of the auxiliaries. In the DP, the possessive dative clitic forms a clitic cluster with the determmer, its distribution determined by the realization of the Dº feature. SCB and Bulgarian clitic clusters require a phonological host in the domain of lexicalization: phonological lexicalization into the Wackemagel Position occurs as a 'last resort'. The treatment of auxiliaries and restructuring verbs m English and South Slavic derives from their lexical entries. Dual lexicalization and bracketing of features in the lexicon allows variation in trace licensing, optional word orders, and minor language-specific phonological idiosyncrasies
Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics
" The Siouan family comprises some twenty languages, historically spoken across a broad swath of the central North American plains and woodlands, as well as in parts of the southeastern United States. In spite of its geographical extent and diversity, and the size and importance of several Siouan-speaking tribes, this family has received relatively little attention in the linguistic literature and many of the individual Siouan languages are severely understudied. This volume aims to make work on Siouan languages more broadly available and to encourage deeper investigation of the myriad typological, theoretical, descriptive, and pedagogical issues they raise.
The 17 chapters in this volume present a broad range of current Siouan research, focusing on various Siouan languages, from a variety of linguistic perspectives: historical-genetic, philological, applied, descriptive, formal/generative, and comparative/typological. The editors' preface summarizes characteristic features of the Siouan family, including head-final and ""verb-centered"" syntax, a complex system of verbal affixes including applicatives and subject-possessives, head-internal relative clauses, gendered speech markers, stop-systems including ejectives, and a preference for certain prosodic and phonotactic patterns.
The volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Robert L. Rankin, a towering figure in Siouan linguistics throughout his long career, who passed away in February of 2014.
Aspect and Meaning in the Russian Future Tense: Corpus and Experimental Investigations
This dissertation is a study of the Russian future tense within the framework of cognitive linguistics. In this dissertation I focus on the distribution of the perfective and imperfective future forms, their future and non-future meanings, and the use of the future tense verb forms by both native and non-native speakers. In the Russian tense-aspect system, it is reasonable to operate with markedness on a local level of tense, rather than the level of the verb. Via local markedness it is possible to see that the perfective future is the unmarked member of the opposition, and the imperfective future is the marked one. The perfective future tense forms are approximately fourteen times more frequent than imperfective future tense forms in the Russian National Corpus. Both perfective and imperfective future tense forms express not only future meanings but also gnomic, directive etc. The (non-)future meanings form a radial category with the future meaning as a prototype and other meanings as extensions. Native speakers operate with frequency when they use future tense forms. Non-native speakers are not sensitive to frequency, and instruction in the use of the future tense forms in Russian could be improved
Personal Practical Knowledge of Graduate Spanish-Teaching Assistants: An Issue of Experience
The significant role of Graduate Spanish-Teaching Assistants (GSTAs) in Spanish as a foreign language programs at North American universities has not been matched by the development and support efforts of those programs. That is, GSTAs are at the forefront of the introductory and intermediate Spanish courses while receiving very limited support. At the same time, and in spite numerous research focused on graduate teaching assistants, efforts to explore what these novice teachers know, the sources of their knowledge, and how such knowledge may be informing their teaching practices, have been minimal. The purpose of the present study was, therefore, to gain further understanding of the personal practical knowledge (PPK) of inexperienced GSTAs as compared to that of experienced GSTAs. The categories of PPK found in the data were: knowledge of self, knowledge of students, knowledge of instruction, knowledge of subject matter, knowledge of purpose, and knowledge of context. The project consisted of eight case studies (four experienced GSTAs and four inexperienced GSTAs), with a qualitative approach to the collection of data. The sources of data were: semi structured interviews, classroom observations, reflective journals, and stimulated recall. Findings revealed that the PPK of experienced and inexperienced GSTAs is complex, contextual, interconnected, experiential, and constantly evolving. Knowledge of students was consistently the most salient and influential area of the PPK of all participants, and it informed more pedagogical choices than the remaining areas. The knowledge of instruction of the experienced GSTAs was found to be more developed than that of the inexperienced group, and they also relied more on experience than their new counterparts. However, the first-time GSTAs were able to work collaborative and thus accelerated the development of their knowledge of instruction while aiding their teaching practice
Recommended from our members
The Representation of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, and Computational Evidence from the English Stress System
This dissertation investigates the cognitive mechanism underlying language users\u27 ability to generalize probabilistic phonological patterns in their lexicon to novel words. Specifically, do speakers represent probabilistic patterns using abstract grammatical constraints? If so, this system of constraints would, like categorical phonological generalizations (a) be limited in the space of possible generalizations it can represent, and (b) apply to known and novel words alike without reference to specific known words. I examine these two predictions, comparing them to the predictions of alternative models. Analogical models are specifically considered. In chapter 3 I examine speakers\u27 productions of novel words without near lexical neighbors. Speakers\u27 productions of these novel words are compared to actual (relatively distant) words which could serve as an analogical base. Participants successfully extended a probabilistic trend in the lexicon to novel words, and did not use the analogical bases to do so: the contents of an analogical base for a given nonword did not predict participants\u27 behavior on that nonword. In chapter 4 I discuss a case of mismatch with the lexicon - participants extend a near-categorical trend in the lexicon to novel words, but they undermatch the distribution found in the lexicon. This undermatching would not be predicted if learners could induce arbitrarily complex constraints. I argue instead that the trend is represented grammatically, and that the mismatch arises because of a bias for simpler constraints either in learning or in the structure of the grammar itself. If probabilistic phonological generalizations are represented abstractly, how do they interact with the lexicon of stored word forms? I address this issue in chapter 2 by looking at the perception of known and novel forms. ERP data demonstrates that a productive probabilistic trend influences the early stages of the lexical access process, specifically in known words. I consider two possible mechanisms for this: (1) that the lexical entries of known exceptional forms differ from known trend-observing forms, or (2) that the process of accessing an exceptional form involves a violation of expectations imposed by the grammar, and thus requires more processing power than the process of accessing a trend-observing form