The Terminology of Artificial Sentience

We consider the terminology used to describe artificial entities and how this terminology may affect the moral consideration of artificial entities. Different combinations of terms variously emphasize the entity's role, material features, psychological features, and different research perspectives. The ideal term may vary across context, but we favor “artificial sentience” in general, in part because “artificial” is more common in relevant contexts than its near-synonyms, such as “synthetic” and “digital,” and to emphasize the sentient artificial entities who deserve moral consideration. The terms used to define and refer to these entities often take a human perspective by focusing on the benefits and drawbacks to humans. Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of the terminology to the moral consideration of artificial entities may help to clarify emerging research, improve its impact, and align the interests of sentient artificial entities with the study of artificial intelligence (AI), especially research on AI ethics.

Plesionyms as a Vocabulary Teaching Tool: The Case of Estonian EFL Learners

Summary The present study investigated the effectiveness of using plesionyms, or near-synonyms, as a vocabulary teaching tool in the English as a foreign language classroom and attempted to determine at what level of proficiency this technique could be incorporated. 40 Estonian university students who were enrolled in three different ESP courses participated in the study. The students were divided into 4 groups according to their level of proficiency: one experimental and one control group consisted of B1 level students; and one experimental and one control group consisted of B2 level students. The experimental groups learned the vocabulary in plesionymic pairs by discussing the differences as well as the similarities between near-synonyms. Meanwhile, the control groups learned the same words non-adjacently, meaning that the words were taught independently and neither differences nor similarities between words were discussed. Based on the findings, it was concluded that teaching vocabulary through plesionymic pairs facilitates immediate recall and long term memory retention among B2 level students. This vocabulary teaching method could be considered more effective at more advanced levels of proficiency.

Lexical Errors Produced by High And Low Proficiency Learners of Writing 2 Classes

This study was conducted to find out the types of lexical errors that high and low proficiency learners produced in their writing, and find the differences and similarities from the production of the two groups. To answer the research questions, the writers used the theory by James (2013) about lexical error classification. This study was a qualitative study. The sources of the data of this study were the lexical errors from 32 writing drafts. The writers divided the students into two groups: eight students from high proficiency level and eight students from low proficiency level. The findings showed that the high proficiency learners produced five types of formal errors and four types of semantic errors, while the low proficiency learners produced two types of formal errors and six types of semantic errors. In conclusion, the high and the low proficiency learners’ lexical error productions are due to the learners’ lack of knowledge in sense relation and collocation, and the learners’ wrong terms of near-synonyms production.Keywords: lexical errors, high proficiency learners, low proficiency learners, error analysis

EXPLORING SEMANTIC PROSODIC AWARENESS LEVELS OF EFL LEARNERS THROUGH NEAR-SYNONYM WORDS

Near-synonyms are semantically similar words, but they are not always interchangeable, having a variety of collocational and semantic behaviours. Tertiary level EFL learners’ use of near synonyms demonstrates significant differences in terms of word choices. This article investigates (1) the level of semantic prosodic (SP) awareness in EFL learners, (2) the correlation between their SP awareness and English proficiency levels, (3) the ways EFL learners use semantic prosodic features in their speech and written productions and how they cope with challenges in SP and (4) the factors affecting their SP knowledge. The data were analysed quantitively and qualitatively. A proficiency test, a semantic prosody test, an open-ended questionnaire and a structured interview were used respectively. The findings reveal that learners’ SP knowledge correlates with language proficiency, but their awareness levels have little to do with the proficiency. One implication for the curriculum developers is that they should consider including relevant content related to the semantic prosody in syllabi so that the students will be able to create semantically relevant sentences like their native counterparts. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0798/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Effectiveness of Corpus in Distinguishing Two Near-Synonymous Verbs: Damage and Destroy

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair damage and destroy commonly misused by Chinese-speaking learners of English in terms of frequencies, genre distribution, colligation and collocation, differences in meanings and uses. It is found that damage and destroy are near-synonyms because they are relevant words and share most collocates but they are not fully intersubstitutable for certain contexts. Some words related to the human body or physical health are more collocated with damage and some such as military affairs and one&rsquo;s thought or belief more with destroy. In addition, the core meaning of damage gives more emphasis on something that can be recovered but does not work well as before, while destroy offers more senses for something that no longer exists. Furthermore, the British tend to collocate the two near-synonyms with the same word to create a build-up, because destroy is endowed with a stronger degree of destruction than damage. The study ends by suggesting corpus-based analysis should be promoted in language teaching and learning to improve the accurate use of English vocabulary by language learners.