Use of recurrence quantification analysis to examine associations between changes in text structure across an expressive writing intervention and reductions in distress symptoms in women wth breast cancer

The current study presents an exploratory analysis of using Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) to analyze text data from an Expressive Writing Intervention (EWI) for Danish women treated for Breast Cancer. The analyses are based on the analysis of essays from a subsample with the average age 54.6 years (SD = 9.0), who completed questionnaires for cancer-related distress (IES) and depression symptoms (BDI-SF). The results show a significant association between an increase in recurrent patterns of text structure from first to last writing session and a decrease in cancer-related distress at 3 months post-intervention. Furthermore, the change in structure from first to last essay displayed a moderate, but significant correlation with change in cancer-related distress from baseline to 9 months post-intervention. The results suggest that changes in recurrence patterns of text structure might be an indicator of cognitive restructuring that leads to amelioration of cancer-specific distress

Anaphoric resolution of zero pronouns in Chinese in translation and reading comprehension

The primary aim of the thesis is to investigate some of the processes of reading Chinese text by means of comparing and analysing approximately 100 parallel translations of four texts from Chinese to English. The translations are answers to A Level examination questions. The focus of the investigation is interpretation of the zero pronoun, a common phenomenon in Chinese, which often requires explicitation when translated into English. The secondary aim is to show how translation gives evidence of comprehension, as shown by the variation in interpretation of zero pronouns. The thesis reviews relevant psycholinguistic research into reading, particularly reading of Chinese text. This is followed by reviews of relevant research into translation as a reading activity, and a discussion of its role in language teaching and testing.The core of the thesis is the discussion of the zero pronoun in Chinese, including discussion of anaphoric choice - the writer's decision on when to use zero in preference to an explicit anaphoric form - and of anaphoric resolution - how a reader decides what a zero pronoun refers to. Anaphoric resolution may be problematic for less experienced readers of Chinese owing to its lack of rich morphological inflection which, in other languages, provides the reader with information. Some of the key ideas on anaphoric choice and resolution are then applied to the analysis of the data in the parallel translations. It would appear that factors in Chinese texts which have an effect on comprehending zero pronouns are antecedent distance, topic persistence, abstraction, multiplicity of arguments and the meaning of the verb. Characteristics of the reader which may affect comprehension of the zero pronoun include personal schemata which may lead to elaborative inferences. On the basis of the data I suggest that mark schemes could be devised on a scalar system encompassing optimal solution, proximal solution and nonsolution, which might help to solve the problem of variability in marking translation.A by-product of the thesis, and an avenue for further research, is the apparent close relationship between idea units, clause length, punctuation breaks and antecedent distance in Chinese texts and saccade length and working memory capacity in the reader of Chinese

Katsed demonstratiivpronoomenite ja demonstratiivadverbidega

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneDemonstratiivid – sõnad nagu see ja too ning siin ja seal – saavad oma tähenduse kontekstis. Maailma keeltes on ruumilises kontekstis ehk ruumis viitamisel peamiseks demonstratiivide valikut mõjutavaks teguriks peetud referendi kaugust kõnelejast. Eesti keele demonstratiivide kasutust on ruumilises kontekstis aga vähe käsitletud. Siinse doktoritöö eesmärgiks on uurida, kas eesti keeles mõjutavad demonstratiivide valikut peale kauguse ka teised tegurid. Lisaks vaadeldakse, kuidas nende tegurite mõju erineb eesti, vene ja soome keele demonstratiivide kasutusest ning kuidas on demonstratiivid seotud teiste viitevahendite (nt noomenifraaside ja personaalpronoomenite) kasutusega. Tööst selgub, et eesti keele demonstratiivide valikut mõjutavad referendi kaugus kõnelejast, referendi eristatavus ja kontrastiivne olukord. Mida kaugemal on referent, seda rohkem kasutatakse demonstratiive too ja seal, mida lähemal on referent, seda rohkem demonstratiive see ja siin. Referendi eristatavuse mõju ei avaldu mitte selles, kas kõneleja valib raskesti eristatavale referendile viidates demonstratiivi see või too, vaid selles, kuidas kasutatakse demonstratiivi seal. Kui referenti on keeruline märgata, alustatakse lauset demonstratiiviga seal, millele lisatakse seejärel täpsem referendi kirjeldus, nt sealt kolmesest rühmast kõige parempoolne klots. Kontrasti mõju ilmnemiseks peavad omavahel võrreldavad referendid aga asuma nii kõneleja kui üksteise suhtes kaugel. Kauguse ja kontrasti mõju osas sarnaneb eesti keel vene ja soome keelega, kuid kõik need keeled erinevad üksteisest teiste viitevahendite kasutamise poolest. Soome keeles eelistatakse demonstratiive, vene keeles noomenifraase ja personaalpronoomeneid. Eesti keel jääb viitevahendite kasutuse poolest nende kahe keele vahele. Doktoritööst järeldub, et eesti keeles mõjutab demonstratiivide valikut eelkõige kaugus. Teiste viitavahendite kasutust mõjutab aga demonstratiivide arv keeles. Mida rohkem on keeles demonstratiive, seda rohkem funktsioone nad täidavad ning seda vähem läheb vaja teisi viitevahendeid.Demonstratives, words like this and there, get their meaning from context. In spatial reference, i.e., indicating referents in physical space, the distance of the referent from the speaker has been considered the main factor that influences the choice of demonstratives in the world’s languages. In Estonian, however, the use of demonstratives in spatial context has had little research attention. The aim of this thesis is to study the factors that influence the choice of Estonian demonstratives in spatial reference and to explore how these factors differ in the use of Estonian, Russian and Finnish demonstratives. In addition, the study investigates how the use of demonstratives is linked to the use of other referential devices (e.g., bare NPs and personal pronouns). The findings suggest that the choice of Estonian demonstratives is influenced by the distance of the referent, the visual salience of the referent and the need for contrast. The farther the referent is, the more demonstratives too and seal are used, the closer the referent is, the more demonstratives, see and siin are used. The impact of visual salience is manifested in the use of the demonstrative adverb seal, i.e., when a distant referent is hard to detect for the addressee, the speaker starts the utterance with seal after which s/he adds a more detailed description of the referent. For the effects of contrast to occur, the referents have to be far from the speaker and from each other. In terms of distance and contrast effects, the results of Estonian, Russian and Finnish are similar, however these languages differ in their use of other referential devices. In Finnish, demonstratives are preferred, whereas Russian speakers tend to use personal pronouns and bare NPs. Estonian lies between these two languages in terms of its use of other referential devices. To conclude, from the tested factors distance has the strongest effect on the choice of Estonian demonstratives. The use of other referential devices is influenced by the number of demonstrative pronouns that a language has and the functions that these demonstratives fulfil.https://www.ester.ee/record=b522969

A Data-driven Approach to the Semantics of Iconicity in American Sign Language and English

A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has a greater number of regions of semantic space with concentrations of highly iconic vocabulary. There was an overall negative relationship between semantic density and the iconicity of both English words and ASL signs. This negative relationship disappeared for highly iconic signs, suggesting that iconic forms may be more easily discriminable in ASL than in English. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed picture of how iconicity is distributed across different languages

Linguistic Structure in Statistical Machine Translation

This thesis investigates the influence of linguistic structure in statistical machine translation. We develop a word reordering model based on syntactic parse trees and address the issues of pronouns and morphological agreement with a source discriminative word lexicon predicting the translation for individual words using structural features. When used in phrase-based machine translation, the models improve the translation for language pairs with different word order and morphological variation

Exploring the adaptive structure of the mental lexicon

The mental lexicon is a complex structure organised in terms of phonology, semantics and syntax, among other levels. In this thesis I propose that this structure can be explained in terms of the pressures acting on it: every aspect of the organisation of the lexicon is an adaptation ultimately related to the function of language as a tool for human communication, or to the fact that language has to be learned by subsequent generations of people. A collection of methods, most of which are applied to a Spanish speech corpus, reveal structure at different levels of the lexicon.• The patterns of intra-word distribution of phonological information may be a consequence of pressures for optimal representation of the lexicon in the brain, and of the pressure to facilitate speech segmentation.• An analysis of perceived phonological similarity between words shows that the sharing of different aspects of phonological similarity is related to different functions. Phonological similarity perception sometimes relates to morphology (the stressed final vowel determines verb tense and person) and at other times shows processing biases (similarity in the word initial and final segments is more readily perceived than in word-internal segments).• Another similarity analysis focuses on cooccurrence in speech to create a representation of the lexicon where the position of a word is determined by the words that tend to occur in its close vicinity. Variations of context-based lexical space naturally categorise words syntactically and semantically.• A higher level of lexicon structure is revealed by examining the relationships between the phonological and the cooccurrence similarity spaces. A study in Spanish supports the universality of the small but significant correlation between these two spaces found in English by Shillcock, Kirby, McDonald and Brew (2001). This systematicity across levels of representation adds an extra layer of structure that may help lexical acquisition and recognition. I apply it to a new paradigm to determine the function of parameters of phonological similarity based on their relationships with the syntacticsemantic level. I find that while some aspects of a language's phonology maintain systematicity, others work against it, perhaps responding to the opposed pressure for word identification.This thesis is an exploratory approach to the study of the mental lexicon structure that uses existing and new methodology to deepen our understanding of the relationships between language use and language structure

Prediction of Alzheimer's disease and semantic dementia from scene description: toward better language and topic generalization

La segmentation des données par la langue et le thème des tests psycholinguistiques devient de plus en plus un obstacle important à la généralisation des modèles de prédiction. Cela limite notre capacité à comprendre le cœur du dysfonctionnement linguistique et cognitif, car les modèles sont surajustés pour les détails d'une langue ou d'un sujet particulier. Dans ce travail, nous étudions les approches potentielles pour surmonter ces limitations. Nous discutons des propriétés de divers modèles de plonjement de mots FastText pour l'anglais et le français et proposons un ensemble des caractéristiques, dérivées de ces propriétés. Nous montrons que malgré les différences dans les langues et les algorithmes de plonjement, un ensemble universel de caractéristiques de vecteurs de mots indépendantes de la langage est capable de capturer le dysfonctionnement cognitif. Nous soutenons que dans le contexte de données rares, les caractéristiques de vecteur de mots fabriquées à la main sont une alternative raisonnable pour l'apprentissage des caractéristiques, ce qui nous permet de généraliser sur les limites de la langue et du sujet.Data segmentation by the language and the topic of psycholinguistic tests increasingly becomes a significant obstacle for generalization of predicting models. It limits our ability to understand the core of linguistic and cognitive dysfunction because the models overfit the details of a particular language or topic. In this work, we study potential approaches to overcome such limitations. We discuss the properties of various FastText word embedding models for English and French and propose a set of features derived from these properties. We show that despite the differences in the languages and the embedding algorithms, a universal language-agnostic set of word-vector features can capture cognitive dysfunction. We argue that in the context of scarce data, the hand-crafted word-vector features is a reasonable alternative for feature learning, which allows us to generalize over the language and topic boundaries