АВСТРІАЦИЗМИ У МОВІ СУЧАСНОЇ АВСТРІЙСЬКОЇ ПРЕСИ

The proposed study is aimed at confirming the hypothesis that there exist two opposing trends in media discourse. On the one hand, there is a tendency to globalization; on the other hand, linguocultural communities are quite determined to preserve their culture and identity. To prove this hypothesis we analyzed a corpus of newspaper texts published over several years. Namely, we studied 1483 Austriacisms recorded by the dictionary Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen. The objective was to discover the frequency in the use of certain Austriacisms and their Teutonic equivalents in Austrian newspaper Die Presse to identify convergent or divergent processes in the development trends of the German language in Austrian media discourse. The research showed that only 453 lexical units dominated in newspaper articles; it made 30% of 1483 codified Austriacisms. We found that 71 lexemes showed tendency to the parallel use in forms of Austriacisms and Teutonisms which makes less than 5 % of the total number of the lexical units. Such terms have predominantly similar pronunciation hence we can draw a conclusion that such phonemic similarity facilitates equal use of these Austriacisms and Teutonisms in newspapers and stipulates their convergence. These lexical units are not marked by any particular ethnocultural specificity. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the word stock denoting Austrian culture, traditions, and realia of daily life.

Phonemic Comparison of English and Punjabi

English and Punjabi are languages which do not belong to the same families of languages. English is one of the West Germanic languages whereas; Punjabi is a part of the Indo-Aryan family. Punjabi is spoken by various nations on the globe, especially Pakistan and its province Punjab as well as in Indian Panjab. Both English and Punjabi manifest themselves through various dialects on the basis of diversified geographical areas. English is used as the first language by 379,007,140 speakers and further 753,359,540 speakers use it as a second language in more than 104 nations. So, the total speakers of English around the globe are 1,132,366,680 (Ethnologue, 2019). The importance of Punjabi cannot be denied being the 10th most widely used language on the globe (Ghai & Singh, 2013). According to Ethnologue (2019), the total number of Punjabi speakers is 125,326,840. In Pakistan, it is the language of the majority of the people residing in the most populous province of Pakistan, Punjab. It is among twenty-two languages that have obtained official status. Unfortunately, no considerable work has been done on its phonology. This study is an attempt to describe the phonemic differences between English and Punjabi by using the theoretical framework of the Levenshtein algorithm. The index of differences and similarities is determined through the inventories of both languages. The inventories are used as data in this research paper. The Levenshtein algorithm (Levenshtein, 1965) is used to analyse the inventories to calculate the ratio of differences and similarities. The outcome of the current research shows that both English and Punjabi have a phonemic similarity level of 56.25% whereas the index of difference is 43.75%.

Phonological Feature Repetition Suppression in the Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus

Models of speech production posit a role for the motor system, predominantly the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, in encoding complex phonological representations for speech production, at the phonemic, syllable, and word levels [Roelofs, A. A dorsal-pathway account of aphasic language production: The WEAVER++/ARC model. Cortex, 59(Suppl. C), 33–48, 2014; Hickok, G. Computational neuroanatomy of speech production. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13, 135–145, 2012; Guenther, F. H. Cortical interactions underlying the production of speech sounds. Journal of Communication Disorders, 39, 350–365, 2006]. However, phonological theory posits subphonemic units of representation, namely phonological features [Chomsky, N., & Halle, M. The sound pattern of English, 1968; Jakobson, R., Fant, G., & Halle, M. Preliminaries to speech analysis. The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1951], that specify independent articulatory parameters of speech sounds, such as place and manner of articulation. Therefore, motor brain systems may also incorporate phonological features into speech production planning units. Here, we add support for such a role with an fMRI experiment of word sequence production using a phonemic similarity manipulation. We adapted and modified the experimental paradigm of Oppenheim and Dell [Oppenheim, G. M., & Dell, G. S. Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect. Cognition, 106, 528–537, 2008; Oppenheim, G. M., & Dell, G. S. Motor movement matters: The flexible abstractness of inner speech. Memory & Cognition, 38, 1147–1160, 2010]. Participants silently articulated words cued by sequential visual presentation that varied in degree of phonological feature overlap in consonant onset position: high overlap (two shared phonological features; e.g., /r/ and /l/) or low overlap (one shared phonological feature, e.g., /r/ and /b/). We found a significant repetition suppression effect in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus, with increased activation for phonologically dissimilar words compared with similar words. These results suggest that phonemes, particularly phonological features, are part of the planning units of the motor speech system.

Temporal Grouping Effects in Immediate Recall: A Working Memory Analysis

The presence of temporal pauses during list presentation can markedly improve immediate memory for a sequence of verbal items. A series of experiments analysed this effect using Baddeley's (1986) model of working memory. Experiment 1 showed that the effect of temporal grouping on memory for visual sequences was removed by either articulatory suppression or reciting random digits. Experiment 2 indicated that effects of temporal grouping were insensitive to the word length of the items. Experiment 3 showed that articulatory suppression did not remove the temporal grouping effect for auditory lists. Experiment 4 showed that the temporal grouping effect was insensitive to the phonemic similarity of the items. The effects of concurrent articulation suggest that grouping influences the phonological loop component of working memory. However, the working memory model is insufficiently well specified to account for the insensitivity of grouping effects to word length and phonemic similarity. The main findings could be simulated by a connectionist model of the phonological loop, which invokes a context timing signal (Burgess & Hitch, 1992, in press), This assumed that pauses during list presentation affect the timing signal in a similar way to the pause before list presentation and made some novel predictions.