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This paper presents a low-cost, portable, multi-view table tennis umpiring framework, as a viable alternative to the current expensive systems which are almost exclusively restricted to elite professional sports. Table tennis has been selected as the sport to evaluate this framework primarily because it comprises many different complex match elements, including the service, return and rally elements, which are governed by a strict set of regulations which need to be umpired. The aim is to develop novel methods to analyse and judge the legality of such key match facets, with ball detection and tracking in video frames being integral to reliably and accurately determining the ball's position and flight path during rallies. While a low-cost option is attractive and offers several benefits, it is a technically challenging problem due to the small number and generally low-resolution cameras that are used. A novel multi-view camera setup and multi-agent system (MAS) framework is presented, which comprises computationally lightweight agents which detect and track the table tennis ball, create a 3D representation of the flight path of the ball, predict the ball's trajectory, and identify and analyse key facets in a table tennis rally. The MAS correctly detects all state transitions in seven test table tennis sequences with minimal latency and while the processing rate of a standard computer may be unable to analyse long rallies in real time, the potential of running the MAS on a parallel architecture is a propitious alternative. The MAS is also scalable, enabling additional camera pairs to be deployed to achieve enhanced accuracy and coverage. The framework affords the potential to reform the way matches are umpired, especially for amateur players, providing an economic and objective manner of dispute resolution, while the multi-view facility is extendible to other relevant ball-based sports. The ball flight path analysis mechanism can be exploited as a valuable training tool for skill development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces an original theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people's perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person's character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a "retweetability paradox"—in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict by two state-owned Russian news media and two state-owned Ukrainian news media, namely Izvestia, Russia Today, Ukrinform and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. The aim of this investigation is to determine the ideologies embedded in the news reports and discourse structures, and strategies deployed in portraying the conflict actors and their actions. Van Dijk's socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 1998; New(s) racism: A discourse analytical approach, 2000; and Politics, ideology, and discourse, 2006) and Martin and White's Appraisal Framework of attitude and graduation (see The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, 2005) served as the theoretical frameworks. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as the analytical framework, the study examines how attitudinal and evaluative language use are employed to enact ideologies and to portray biased presentations of conflict actors. The findings reveal that the media reports of the Russia–Ukraine conflict are laden with militarism and nationalism. Discourse structures and strategies of emotive verbs, evaluative adjectives, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, national self-glorification, actor description, comparison and number games are powerful tools for enacting ideologies. The media representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict lacked conflict resolution embedded linguistic frames and is rather distorted, stereotypic and conflict-inciting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dependency distance has increasingly become a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus studies from multiple perspectives. Based on a syntactically annotated corpus of 400 PhD dissertation abstracts written by native English (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2) academic writers, the current study investigated the mean dependency distance (MDD) variation across language backgrounds and disciplines, which is followed by a grammatical description based on fine-grained indices related to particular syntactic structures. The findings include: (1) L2 academic writers produce an averagely longer MDD than L1 academic writers because of their heavy use of prepositional phrases; (2) The MDD of the linguistics abstracts is significantly longer than that of the physics & chemistry abstracts because of the relatively higher syntactic complexity of the language of linguistics. The findings suggest that MDD can effectively differentiate academic texts with different language backgrounds and disciplines, that both L1 and L2 academic writers write under the constraint of dependency distance minimization, and that L2 PhD dissertation writers have achieved native-like writing proficiency in extending nominal structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research articles generate and disseminate disciplinary knowledge in a specific field of study. They are expected to be objective, faceless, and free from expressions of emotion. However, linguistic expressions of confusion that signal authors' affective attitude toward the propositional information are not uncommon in research articles. To determine and describe the dynamic changes that occurred in the deployment of such expressions in communicating disciplinary knowledge, this study examined linguistically expressed confusion in a corpus of 160 research articles in applied linguistics that were published in two periods separated by 30 years. Drawing on a frame-based analytical approach, this study revealed that time of publication was a robust predictor of academic authors' overall use of confusion markers and the presence of some subcategories across the four frame elements of the Confusion frame. This study sheds new light on the possibilities of applying frame semantics to academic discourse analysis. More importantly, it has pedagogical implications in terms of helping raise the awareness of novice writers about the necessity of acquiring a time-sensitive repertoire of discursive resources to convey an appropriate authorial identity for effective academic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News video is a complicated medium for journalism students to grasp. It is bounded by its own set of conventions, some of which are drawn from film theory and others from pragmatic considerations in under-resourced newsrooms. Although video production is increasingly a required skill for students graduating from journalism programs, there is a dearth of resources for undergraduate students interested in understanding why certain kinds of videos work better in some settings than others. This paper aims to develop a taxonomy of news video communication designed to help students further their understanding of the nuances, challenges, and strengths of video as a tool for today's multimedia-savvy journalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men's experiences with sexual violence is an understudied topic within sociological literature. Despite the few past research endeavors that have focused on men, little is known regarding the ways that men college students grapple with their lived experiences with sexual violence. Using a sample of 29 active men college students, semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to investigate the ways in which men conceptualize their experiences with sexual violence in their own words. Results indicate that masculinity is intimately connected to sexual violence victimhood, as men can consider themselves victims, but in very distinct ways. Masculinity also acts as a sort of "buffer," in that many men who were interviewed for this research describe their experiences with sexual violence in ways that are similar to women's experiences, but they also express difficulty in accurately framing these experiences using linguistic framing mechanisms. Future directions for research are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book retelling has been frequently used as an indicator of children's reading proficiency. However, how children's performance varies across retelling narrative and expository texts and whether that has different implications for reading proficiency remains understudied. The present study examined 85 high-poverty second- and third-graders' retelling of narrative and expository books. A parallel coding scheme was developed to evaluate children's performance on retelling fluency, content, and language complexity. Children's retelling performance was compared across text types and analyzed in relation to reading proficiency. Findings revealed similarities and differences in retelling across text types, with narrative retelling containing a higher proportion of content-matched T-units, whereas expository retelling contained a higher proportion of inference generation and more complex syntactic structures. Moreover, indicators of reading proficiency were found to vary across text types. Findings highlight the distinct cognitive and linguistic demands posed by reading narrative and expository texts and provide implications for effective instruction and assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the common nouns their complements. This article aims to find out which of the two basic syntactic operations, complementation or adjunct attribution, children learn when they master determiner–noun combinations in their early speech. Pearson correlations of determiner–nominal combinations with verb–noun combinations and attributive adjective–noun combinations were computed in early two-word-long sentences of a large sample of young English-speaking children. Determiner–nominal combinations were very highly correlated with verb–noun sentences, whereas the correlation with adjective–noun combinations was much lower. It appears that determiner–noun combinations are a type of complementation. When children learn them early, they apparently learn the syntactic principle underlying such combinations which then can be transferred to other syntactic constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are studies that describe early syntactic development, less research has focused on oral syntactic development in Spanish throughout schooling according to text structure. This article describes syntactic patterns in Chilean school age students and compares the differences between narrative and expository discourse. The oral production of 462 students aged 5–18 years old from eight schools in a central Chilean region was analysed. Their oral productions were transcribed and segmented at clause and clause package levels;clause package length, clause package densityand theclause densitywere calculated. Results show that students are more productive and construct more complex syntactical discourse as they advance through their education. The results also suggest that syntactic development patterns function differently in narrative and expository discourses. This indicates that students firstly master their syntactic resources before producing narratives. In addition, the implications of using different syntactic measures to describe syntactic development by text structure are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most significant recent advances in the study of semantic processing is the advent of models based on text and other corpora. In this study, we address what impact both the quantitative and qualitative properties of corpora have on mental representations derived from them. More precisely, we evaluate models with different linguistic and mental constraints on their ability to predict semantic relatedness between items from a vast range of domains and categories. We find that a model based on syntactic dependency relations captures significantly less of the variability for all kinds of words, regardless of the semantic relation between them or their abstractness. The largest difference was found for concrete nouns, which are commonly used to assess semantic processing. For both models we find that limited amounts of data suffice in order to obtain reliable predictions. Together, these findings suggest new constraints for the construction of mental models from corpora, both in terms of the corpus size and in terms of the linguistic properties that contribute to mental representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present data from a research project on reading in German as a foreign language. The main research focus of the project was the relevance and the difficulty of understanding certain grammatical structures of German. Our data provide a good basis for new insights into the question whether, how and when contrastivity and transfer of syntactic structures across languages influence in any significant way the acquisition of receptive competences in a foreign language. The results show that foreign language readers with a Romance L1 do not necessarily have problems in understanding German sentences containing contrastive structures, that is, structures that do not exist in their L1. A comparison of semantically equivalent sentences containing either contrastive or non-contrastive structures showed that only three out of seven contrastive structures are more difficult than their non-contrastive counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analysed how syntactic flexibility influences sentence production in two different languages-- English and Russian. In Experiment 1, speakers were instructed to produce as many structurally differ-ent descriptions of transitive-event pictures as possible. Consistent with the syntactically more flexible Russian grammar, Russian participants produced more descriptions and used a greater variety of struc-tures than their English counterparts. In Experiment 2, a different sample of participants provided single-sentence descriptions of the same picture materials while their eye movements were recorded. In this task, English and Russian participants almost exclusively produced canonical subject-verb-- object active-voice structures. However, Russian participants took longer to plan their sentences, as reflected in longer sentence onset latencies and eye-voice spans for the sentence-initial subject noun. This cross-linguistic difference in processing load diminished toward the end of the sentence. Stepwise generalized linear model analyses showed that the greater sentence-initial processing load registered in Experiment 2 corresponded to the greater amount of syntactic competition from available alternatives (Experiment 1), suggesting that syntactic flexibility is costly regardless of the language in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the extent to which pre-schoolers’ picture books can be viewed as a form of enriched linguistic input. Twenty best-selling picture books were analysed in terms of syntactic constructions and compared with a sample of Child Directed Speech. The findings of the study demonstrate the prevalence of canonical utterances (i.e. those displaying Subject-Verb (Object) ordering) and Complex constructions within the book sample, both types of which occur with very low frequency in everyday Child Directed Speech. It is concluded that the linguistic content of young children’s books has the potential to play an important role in children’s grammatical development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Language has been argued to exhibit a complex system behavior. In our approach, the syntactic relations of dependency between words have been represented as networks. In a previous study, two English infants’ corpora of utterances were analyzed longitudinally, offering a view of the ontogeny of syntax. Abrupt changes were detected in the growth pattern of the Giant Connected Component – the largest connected set of nodes in a graph. In the present study, we have further analyzed and compared three more infants, from the CHILDES database, learning three different languages: Dutch, German and Spanish. Our results show, along with previous work with English-speaking infants, that all three infants’ syntactic networks change their topology in a similar way, from tree-like networks to small-world networks. This change happens at a similar period in all three infants (between ∼700 and ∼800 days), regardless of the language they acquire. Our study also shows that the hubs – the most connected nodes in these small-world networks – are always the so-called functional words, which, according to linguistic theory, just contribute to the syntactic structure of human language. The emergence of these hubs happens abruptly, following a logarithmic growth pattern. This developmental pattern challenges usage-based theories of language acquisition and suggests that syntactic development is driven by the growth of the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on several meetings and conferences organized by the organization Experimental Psychology Society held in January 2012 to July 2012. It informs about the meetings that were focused on various topics related to human psychology including face perception, syntactic processing in French language and morphsyntactic processes processing.

This article proposes a flexible typology of syntactic frames (e.g., “X not Y,” “either X or Y”) which can act independently or cooperatively as triggers for noncanonical oppositions that co-occur in those frames. The provisional categories are based on Jones’s quantitative study of syntactic frames for housing co-occurring canonical (conventional) antonyms (e.g., “war” / “peace”) but are substantially revised to account for a broadening of the definition of opposition. These revisions also take into consideration how syntactic frames overlap and interact in context, making qualitative analyses necessary. Data are taken from U.K. newspaper reports of two major protest marches in London. Here, the use of common syntactic frames that house co-occurring canonical oppositions trigger a range of noncanonical examples, which contribute to a binary representation of people, groups, events, ideas, and processes. The typology proposed in this article can open up new ground for locating and investigating the ideological influence of oppositions in discourse in disciplines such as critical discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the ongoing philosophical debate over the origins and nature of lexical concepts stemming from the work of Fodor (1970, 1998, 2000, 2008), the potential of first language acquisition studies as a source of evidence has been somewhat overlooked. At the lexical interface with syntax, a restricted set of lexical conceptual elements can be shown to play a pivotal role in the generation of syntactic representations, and patterns of syntactic development can elucidate the nature of such elements. An experiment is described which reveals mature knowledge of interface principles in this domain in early syntactic production. It is argued that first language research of this type can provide much-needed observable evidence for lexical semantic decomposition and against radical concept nativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French–English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective–noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the two experiments reported here, we uncovered evidence for shared structural representations between arithmetic and language. Specifically, we primed subjects using mathematical equations either with or without parenthetical groupings, such as 80 − (9 + 1) × 5 or 80 − 9 + 1 × 5, and then presented a target sentence fragment, such as “The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that . . .,” which subjects had to complete. When the mathematical equations were solved correctly, their structure influenced the noun phrase—for example, either “the bells of the church” or “the church,” respectively—that subjects chose to attach their sentence completion to. These experiments provide the first demonstration of cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language. They highlight the importance of global structural representations at a very high level of abstraction and have potentially far-reaching implications regarding the domain generality of structural representations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We describe a study of syntactic intervention administered to a 12;2-year-old individual with syntactic SLI, who had difficulties in the comprehension and production of structures containing syntactic movement such as relative clauses, object questions, topicalization sentences, and sentences with verb movement. The intervention, comprised of 16 sessions, was based on syntactic theory and included explicit teaching of syntactic movement, relying on a type of syntactic knowledge that was intact - the argument structure of the verb. The participant's performance was assessed before and after treatment, and for some of the tests also during the treatment and 10 months later. The performance was assessed using various tasks that targeted comprehension, repetition and elicitation of semantically reversible sentences. Following treatment, the participant's performance on all structures with syntactic movement showed substantial improvement compared with baseline, in many of the tasks reaching the performance of the age-matched control group. Treatment of phrasal movement resulted not only in improvement in treated structures, but also in generalization to untrained structures: although phrasal movement was only treated directly for relative clauses and topicalization structures, the comprehension of object Wh-questions, which also include phrasal movement, improved as well. The high performance level was maintained 10 months after the treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contact between languages usually leads to linguistic changes. Both social and structural factors are claimed to influence this process. This study analyzes word order in Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish). Turkish is an OV language but also allows other word order patterns (including VO) in certain pragmatic contexts. Dutch, on the other hand, is VO in main clauses. Due to contact, Turkish may be expected to increase its use of VO. From a comparison with Turkish as spoken in Turkey (TR-Turkish), it appeared that there is no increase of VO in NL-Turkish. However, we did find some deviations in the information structure characteristics of VO structures and sometimes these seem to be due to Dutch influence. On the other hand, TR-Turkish data also contained certain types of VO structures that further caution against hasty contact conclusions. We conclude that contact situations need to be intense for sweeping syntactic change to occur, and that such change starts with changes in individual semilexical constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the existence of syntactic computation in an ambiguous sentence fragment in Japanese. Use of automated, word-by-word visual presentations with a lexical decision task; Usage of the information from surface case marking; Incorporation of the constituents into the existing structure.

Three experiments are reported that showed effects of "structure priming," the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across successive sentences. These effects were demonstrated in a previously untested language, Dutch. Because experimental investigations of sentence production often use picture materials, the first possible locus of effects on sentence structure lies in the visual characteristics of pictures: size of agent and patient, position of agent, and direction of action are determinants of syntactic structure in picture descriptions. Evidence for syntactic persistence also comes from more naturalistic observations.

Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. Focus and other aspects of information structure can be marked in various ways. In English, as in many other languages, a very important way is via intonation. A pitch accent is often used to signal focus.

The article focuses on syntactic and strategic aspects of the comprehensions of indirect and direct object constructions by children. It has been fashionable to assert that native language acquisition is essentially accomplished by the end of the fourth year of life. Some recent work, however, suggests that certain quite important linguistic facilities are not attained much before puberty. In a recent review, researchers D.S. Palermo and D.L. Molfese surveyed many of the aspects of language, which are still unmastered by children aged 5 and older. In the present study, one such skill is investigated: the comprehension of sentences having double object predicate constructions.

In a sentence comprehension task subjects had to select a correct picture from an array of four presented immediately after hearing a relevant sentence. Sentences were representative of twelve different grammatical structures and were eight words in length. Comprehension of a sentence cannot be regarded as a unitary phenomenon. Comprehension may be complete or it may be partial. It can be erroneous or it can be completely absent. Examination of protocols of immediate recall of sentences suggests that subjects who fail to repeat a sentence in its entirety appear to be employing different strategies.

In most studies of the effect of syntactic structure on the handling of sentences, the strategy has been to investigate the problem from the stand-point of storage. Whether the analysis of sentence-structure has been conducted in terms of the number and nature of the transformational steps which separate the deep and surface structures of a sentence, or in terms of it computational depth, the experimental approach has usually been to compare one sentence with another by a technique which requires the subject to memorize the various sentences. In the present study an attempt has been made to approach the handling of sentences from a somewhat different starting-point.

Focuses on the spectrographically derived measurements of the durations of the components sections of different vocalic nuclei in the /h-d/ frame. Estimation of the roles of linguistic, individual and physiological forces in the division of the nucleus; Articulatory structures from initial consonant through the vowel to the final consonant; Durations of the syllabic nuclei.

An experiment was designed to investigate the effects of some aspects of phonological and syntactic structure of verbal material on recall in normal and autistic children. One of the most important features in the clinical description of autistic children is abnormality of language. In addition to this, deviations in speech patterns have been observed. Children learning to speak show structural peculiarities of language in a consistent pattern. They "reduce" English sentences in a systematic way, as in "telegraphic English." In this abbreviation keywords are retained and connecting words are omitted.