Learning about the Meanings of Ambiguous Words: Evidence from a Word-Meaning Priming Paradigm with Short Narratives

Fluent language comprehension requires readers and listeners to rapidly select an appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. This meaning selection process is particularly challenging when low-frequency (subordinate) word meanings are used (e.g. the “river bank” meaning of “bank”). Recent word-meaning priming experiments show that recent experience can help to make subordinate word meanings more readily available, and thereby reduce the difficulty in accessing these meanings. One limitation of previous word-meaning priming experiments is that participants encounter the ambiguous words within a list of unconnected single sentences in which each ambiguous word is strongly disambiguated by words within the prime sentence. The current web-based study (N=51) extends this work to replicate word-meaning priming using short 3-sentence narratives as primes in which relatively weak contextual cues in sentence 1 serve to disambiguate a target ambiguous word that occurs in sentence 3. The results from the subsequent word-association test task confirmed that following a short delay (digit span) task the primed (subordinate) meanings were more readily available compared with an unprimed control. This work represents an important first step in moving the word-meaning priming paradigm towards materials that more reflect the varied ways in which ambiguous words are used within natural language.

Out-of-vocabulary but not meaningless: Evidence for semantic-priming effects in pseudoword processing

Non-arbitrary phenomena in language, such as systematic association in the form-meaning interface, have been widely reported in the literature. Exploiting such systematic associations previous studies have demonstrated that pseudowords can be indicative of meaning. However, whether semantic activation from words and pseudowords is supported by the very same processes, activating a common semantic memory system, is currently not known. Here, we take advantage of recent progresses from computational linguistics models allowing to induce meaning representations for out-of-vocabulary strings of letters via domain-general associative-learning mechanisms applied to natural language. We combined these models with data from priming tasks, in which participants are showed two strings of letters presented sequentially one after the other and are then asked to indicate if the latter is a word or a pseudoword. In Experiment 1 we re-analyzed the data of the largest behavioral database on semantic priming, while in Experiment 2 we ran an independent replication on a new language, Italian, controlling for a series of possible confounds. Results were consistent across the two experiments and showed that the prime-word meaning interferes with the semantic pattern elicited by the target pseudoword (i.e., at increasing estimated semantic relatedness between prime word and target pseudoword, participants’ reaction times increased and accuracy decreased). These findings indicate that the same associative mechanisms governing word meaning also subserve the processing of pseudowords, suggesting in turn that human semantic memory can be conceived as a distributional system that builds upon a general-purpose capacity of extracting knowledge from complex statistical patterns.

EXPANSION AS A MEANS OF STRENGTHENING APPELLATIVENESS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNIT IN ADVERTISING

The purpose of the scientific reconnaissanceis the investigation of the influence of the most commonly used but yet insufficiently studied type of phraseological units modification – expansion – on the functioning of phraseological units in an advertising text. Its tasks are to identify the characteristic features of words-expanders, their influence on the semantics of transformed expressions and on the change of their quantitative and qualitative characteristics as compared to the original ones.The tasks fulfillment and the goal achievement became possible owing to the use of the methods relevant for this study: phraseological identification, phraseological description, adequate description of lexicographic type as a sort of component analysis and contextual analysis.This study is based on sampling from advertising texts of popular German-language magazines which contains 75 modified phraseological units including expressions with complicated, but not reinterpreted meaning.The results of the analysis of this material show that phraseological units of advertising text are most commonly expanded by means of adjectives and adverbs. Being in close correlation with the noun of phraseological unit, the expanders-definitions also become its integral part and direct a reader’s attention to the important features of advertised subject. The same function is characteristic of the words-expanders forming attributive compound words with a noun of phraseological unit. The modifiers mentioned above have different influence on denotative and connotative peculiarities of phraseological unit.Unlike expander-definitions, expanders-adverbials are syntactically connected not with one of the components of phraseological unit, but with this unit as an integral whole and thus belong to the nearest surrounding of phraseological unit and not to its composition. The level of emotiveness and expressiveness of modification depends on the characteristics of expander.The number of adverbs-expanders is considerably less as compared to adjectives, they have close syntactic connection with phraseological unit or one of its constituent parts, and most commonly specify or modify its connotative features.Advertisement creators reach the brightest transformations by means of expanding proverbs and adding unexpected continuation to the expressions which are familiar to each representative of linguistic community.The review of the investigated phraseological units in quantitative and qualitative aspects demonstrates, on the one hand, an increase of the number of connotative multipliers in the marginal majority of modifications, which is an indicator of meaning narrowing, and on the other hand, the positive meaning of the most of these multipliers which make a pleasant impression on a recipient, which is an indicator of meaning improvement.Conclusions. The analysis indicates that the expansion of phraseological units changes in a definite way the denotative and connotative characteristics of phraseological units in advertising and significantly enhances the impact on a recipient.Key words: modification, transformation, extension, word-expander, extensional, connotative factor, narrowing of word meaning, improvement of word meaning. Метою наукової розвідки є дослідження впливу найпоширенішого, але недостатньо вивченого виду модифікації фразеологізмів – експансії – на функціонування фразеологічних одиниць у рекламному тексті. Її завдання полягають у виявленні характерних особливостей слів-розширювачів, їх впливу на семантику трансформованих виразів, на зміну їх кількісних та якісних характеристик у порівнянні з вихідними.Виконання завдань та досягнення мети стало можливим завдяки застосуванню релевантних для цього дослідження методів: фразеологічної ідентифікації, фразеологічного опису, адекватного опису лексикографічного типу як різновиду компонентного аналізу та контекстологічного аналізу.Дослідження побудоване на матеріалі вибірки із рекламних текстів популярних німецькомовних журналів, яка складається з 75-ти модифікованих фразеологізмів включно з виразами з ускладненим, але непереосмисленим значенням.Результати аналізу цього матеріалу показують, що фразеологічні одиниці рекламного тексту найчастіше розширюються за допомогою прикметників та прислівників. Маючи тісний зв’язок із іменником фразеологізму, розширювачі-означення теж стають його складовою частиною і скеровують увагу читача на важливі якості рекламованого предмета. Таку ж функцію виконують і розширювачі, які утворюють атрибутивні складні слова з іменником фразеологізму. Названі модифікатори по-різному впливають на денотативні та конотативні особливості фразеологізму.На відміну від розширювачів-означень, розширювачі-обставини синтаксично пов’язані не з однією із складових фразеологічної одиниці, а з цією одиницею як єдиним цілим і тому належать до найближчого оточення фразеологізму, а не до його складу. Ступінь емотивності та експресивності модифікації залежить від особливостей розширювача.Прислівники-розширювачі значно поступаються за своєю чисельністю прикметникам, мають тісний синтаксичний зв’язок із фразеологізмом або з однією з його складових частин і, як правило, уточнюють або модифікують його конотативні особливості.Найбільш яскравих трансформацій автори реклами досягають за допомогою розширення прислів’їв, додаючи до знайомих кожному представникові мовної спільноти виразів неочікуване продовження.Розгляд досліджуваних фразеологізмів у кількісному та якісному аспектах свідчить, з одного боку, про зростання кількості конотативних множників у переважної більшості модифікацій, що є показником звуження значення, а з другого – про позитивне значення більшості цих множників, які справляють приємне враження на реципієнта, що є показником поліпшення значення.Висновки. Проведений аналіз дав можливість переконатися в тому, що експансія певним чином змінює денотативні та конотативні особливості фразеологізмів реклами і значно посилює вплив на реципієнта.Ключові слова: модифікація, трансформація, розширення, слово-розширювач, екстенсіонал, конотативний множник, звуження значення, поліпшення значення.

Semantic representations during language comprehension are affected by context

The meaning of words in natural language depends crucially on context. However, most neuroimaging studies of word meaning use isolated words and isolated sentences with little context. Because the brain may process natural language differently from how it processes simplified stimuli, there is a pressing need to determine whether prior results on word meaning generalize to natural language. We investigated this issue by directly comparing the brain representation of semantic information across four conditions that vary in context. fMRI was used to record human brain activity while four subjects (two female) read words presented in four different conditions: narratives (Narratives), isolated sentences (Sentences), blocks of semantically similar words (Semantic Blocks), and isolated words (Single Words). Using a voxelwise encoding model approach, we find two clear and consistent effects of increasing context. First, stimuli with more context (Narratives, Sentences) evoke brain responses with substantially higher SNR across bilateral visual, temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices compared to stimuli with little context (Semantic Blocks, Single Words). Second, increasing context increases the representation of semantic information across bilateral temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices at the group level. However, in individual subjects, only natural language stimuli (Narratives) consistently evoke widespread representation of semantic information across the cortical surface. These results show that context has large effects on both the quality of neuroimaging data and on the representation of meaning in the brain, and they imply that the results of neuroimaging studies that use stimuli with little context may not generalize well to the natural regime.

“Word Code” by O.O. Suleimenov in Electronic-handwritten and Printed Versions

The article provides a comparative analysis of an electronic manuscript and a printed book by O.O. Suleimenov Word code. Introduction to the Universal Etymological Dictionary 1001 Words. The similarities and differences in semantic and stylistic nominations of titles and paragraphs in the manuscript and in the printed original are considered. Structural and qualitative differences in the content of the new titles of the book, the peculiarities of the semantic advancement in them, which include a brief reflection of the content of the corresponding section of the study, are revealed and analyzed. The analysis and thesis description of new paragraphs, which were introduced by the author after working on the electronic manuscript of the book, are carried out. The main conceptual approach of O.O. Suleimenov to the search for the ancient primary source of the word (etymon) and writing both in the manuscript and in the original of the book, is to consider in unity, in close interconnection, the main five aspects of a scientific problem: figurative image (drawing, hieroglyph), concept, word, meaning, pronunciation linguistic unit in languages, adverbs, dialects, dialects in antiquity and now, their semantic and sound similarities and differences in different regions of the earth. The evolution of the wording of the titles and the semantic and stylistic advancement in them is significant, which is associated either with a slight lexical change in the wording of the title of the paragraph, or with the introduction of a different (updated) title, or with the introduction of a new paragraph into the structure of the book. These innovations of the author contributed to the improvement of the structural and logical-content significance of the book.

METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS OF RUSSIAN-HEBREW BILINGUAL PRESCHOOLERS (BASED ON THE DEFINITION TEST)

Our study of Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschoolers’ metalinguistic awareness is based on the results of the definition test with 56 children. The results uncover six strategies to generate a definition of concrete nouns in two languages. The preschoolers preferred to how an object functions while explaining the word meaning in both languages. References to the category by hypernyms, synonyms or co-hyponyms cover 10% of Russian definitions and 5% of those in Hebrew. The bilinguals often failed to define a noun in Hebrew. They could not find a relevant hypernym, overcoming the difficulty by generating descriptive definitions with a specific qualification of the object. Manipulating the L2 structure, they showed their metalinguistic awareness.

An Analysis on Newly Introduced English Verb in Oxford English Dictionary in 2016-2018: Levin’s Taxonomy of Verb Classification and Verbnet

Levin (1993) argues that the behaviour of verbs is determined by word meaning which is directly linked to the expression and interpretation of its argument. Based on this statement, Levin classified verbs into 48 classes and VerbNet, an English verb lexicon was created based on the extension of Levin’s taxonomy of verb classification (VC). Therefore, this study presents the classification of the updated English verbs of 2016 to 2018 in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to examine the relevance of Levin’s VC and VerbNet in the recently added repertoire of verbs. In Addition, the study seeks to find out the new verb classes introduced in this study. This study uses a mixed-method to identify and classify the verbs. To conclude, this study found that both classifications were applicable and relevant in 14 new main verb classes introduced to classify the verbs that did not belong to Levin’s VC and VerbNet. Hence, this contributes to the body of knowledge as the newly introduced verb classes could be used based on the given semantic and syntactic conditions.

Computerized Dynamic Assessment (C-DA) on Reading Comprehension for L2 Learners of Vocational High Schools

<p><strong>Abstract: </strong>This study focuses on developing a prototype of an assessment program on reading comprehension based on computerized dynamic assessment. The reading skills to be measure include identifying topic, main idea, the detail of the text, logical inference, an assumption, word meaning and synonym, and a conclusion. The assessment consists of two types of tests including multiple choice type and cloze procedures. Those tests contain prompts as the characteristic of dynamic assessment. The participants in this study were 316 eleventh grade students of vocational high schools. The result reveals that the product was positively agreed by most of the subjects despite the fact that they were not familiar with this assessment program. This indicates that the developed product was acceptable by eleventh grade students on vocational high schools.</p><p><strong>Abstrak:</strong> Penelitian ini fokus pada pengembangan prototipe program penilaian pada membaca komprehensif yang berdasarkan pada <em>computerized dynamic assessment</em>. Kemampuan membaca yang akan diukur pada tes ini, meliputi identifikasi topik, ide pokok, informasi rinci dalam teks, referensi, identifikasi anggapan, memahami makna persamaan kata, dan menyimpulkan. Produk asesmen ini terdiri dari dua tipe teS, yaitu pilihan ganda dan <em>cloze procedures</em>. Tes tersebut mengandung petunjuk/saran sebagai karakteristik dari <em>dynamic assessment</em>. Peserta yang terlibat pada penelitian ini terdiri dari 316 siswa kelas sebelas sekolah menengah kejuruan. Hasil dari pengembangan produk program penilaian <em>computerized dynamic assessment</em> sangat diterima dengan baik dan hampir dari seluruh peserta tidak mengenal program penilaian <em>computerized dynamic assessment.</em> Hal ini mengindikasikan bahwa pengembangan produk ini diterima oleh siswa terutama pada sekolah menengah kejuruan. </p>

Naming and Indexicality

How do words stand for things? Taking ideas from philosophical semantics and pragmatics, this book offers a unique, detailed, and critical survey of central debates concerning linguistic reference in the twentieth century. It then uses the survey to identify and argue for a novel version of current 'two-dimensional' theories of meaning, which generalise the context-dependency of indexical expressions. The survey highlights the history of tensions between semantic and epistemic constraints on plausible theories of word meaning, from analytic philosophy and modern truth-conditional semantics, to the Referentialist and Externalist revolutions in theories of meaning, to the more recent reconciliatory ambition of two-dimensionalists. It clearly introduces technical semantical notions, theses, and arguments, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides. Wide-ranging in its scope, yet offering an accessible route into literature that can seem complex and technical, this will be essential reading for advanced students, and academic researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language.

Pidgin and Creole: Concept, Origin, and Evolution

Every language has a history, and, as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the course of the learned transmission of a language from one generation to another. Human culture and animal behavior contain differences. Language changes in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and word meaning (semantic change). These changes are mostly very gradual in their operation becoming noticeable only cumulatively over the course of several generations. Pidgins and creoles (p & c) are not different- They are also undergoing different types of changes. This paper tries to investigate the concepts of p & c by analyzing different linguistic views and tracing back the origin of these contact languages with the help of different theories. This study throws some light on the evolution of p & c and aims at attaching proper value to them.