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Stop words are primarily non-significant words used to connect other words in sentence construction. Since these words do not contain specific information about the text, they are typically removed during text processing. Therefore, identifying stop words is an essential operation in text processing. A challenge arises when usually insignificant words can become significant depending on the situation, while words that are typically important can sometimes be classified as stop words. This problem is particularly pronounced in Persian due to the complexities inherent in the language. Recognizing the importance of identifying stop words in Persian, we analyzed and reviewed various approaches, including a dictionary-based approach, POS tagging-based approach, Word2Vec-based approach and FastText-based approach to identify stop words using a corpus of 50.000 Persian sentences from Hamshahri dataset. Our findings indicate that the FastText-based approach outperformed the others with a detection accuracy of 96.98, suggesting that this method can lead to the development of an automatic, reliable, and efficient system.

Textbooks are considered a crucial pedagogical component in foreign language teaching and learning contexts. However, analyses of the representation of prototypical patterns in the vocabulary input contained in English language teaching (ELT) textbooks have been scarce since, to the best of our knowledge, no prototypical word lists have yet been produced. This study is primarily intended to reveal whether word prototypicality is represented in two EFL learners’ ELT textbooks differing in age and course level, focusing on the 50 most frequent content words and then elaborating preliminary prototypical word lists based on the classification used in the semantic approaches proposed by Dixon (2005) and Viberg (1984). The findings revealed evidence of prototypicality in both textbooks despite the differences in their intended ages and course levels. The results also showed that, according to the type of content words found in each ELT material, there were differences and similarities related to the prototypical terms between the two books. Moreover, prototypical content words referring to concrete and abstract nouns and perception verbs were more common than other types of content words. Furthermore, the findings also indicated that verbs were the most prototypical content words found in both ELT textbooks. This research has two main significant educational implications. The first involves studying semantic prototypes in the EFL learners’ ELT textbooks, which would bring novel and more specific insights into the role prototypical words might play in vocabulary learning in formal contexts. The second refers to how word prototypicality in the vocabulary input of ELT textbooks might be analysed with the use of prototypical content word lists.

In the realm of linguistics, the concept of "semanticity" was recently introduced as a novel measure designed to study linguistic networks. In a given text, semanticity is defined as the ratio of the potential number of meanings associated with a word to the number of different words with which it is linguistically linked. This concept provides a quantitative indicator that reflects a word's semantic complexity and its role in a language. In this pilot study, we applied the semanticity measure to the Catalan language, aiming to investigate its effectiveness in automatically distinguishing content words from function words. For this purpose, the measure of semanticity has been applied to a large corpus of texts written in Catalan. We show that the semanticity of words allows us to classify the word classes existing in Catalan in a simple way so that both the semantic and syntactic capacity of each word within a language can be integrated under this parameter. By means of this semanticity measure, it has been observed that adverbs behave like function words in Catalan. This approach offers a quantitative and objective tool for researchers and linguists to gain insights into the structure and dynamics of languages, contributing to a deeper understanding of their underlying principles. The application of semanticity to Catalan is a promising pilot study, with potential applications in other languages, which will allow progress to be made in the field of theoretical linguistics and contribute to the development of automated linguistic tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for Foreign Languages is the property of University of Ljubljana, Faculty of the Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nasleđe is the property of University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To ensure that students can understand the meaning of the English they are learning, knowledge of content and function words are two important aspects that must be possessed. The aim is to avoid misunderstanding in the interpretation process, both in written and oral texts. Nevertheless, this research was made with the aim of knowing types of content words appeared in the lyrics of Selena Gomez's song "Who Says" and the function of the dominant content word in this song. In order to obtain the required data, researchers used a qualitative descriptive method. Meanwhile, the lyrics of the song were analyzed manually by giving the symbols "V", "N", "Adj", and "Adv" according to the word class. With the result that the data could be obtained, they were 83 words of nouns, 74 words of verbs, 32 words of adjectives, and 3 words of adverbs. In addition, of the 83 nouns, there was the word "you're" which was the dominant or most appearing word that could function as a subject as well as an object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the researchers investigated the possible effect of teaching content words through using Concept Mapping (CM) strategy plotted on two cognitive variables: language proficiency and age within some eighty Iranian young and old English language learners with higher and lower proficiency levels (Elementary vs. Intermediate) who were conveniently selected and classified into four classes. Their age range varied from 10 to 25 years old. After five sessions of treatment, the researchers gave the post-test. The results could not identify priority in the predictability power for any of the two age and proficiency variables F (2, 77) = 1.96, p < .15, R2 = .04. The findings can be helpful for English teachers as well as syllabus designers to use CM strategies for teaching vocabulary and including such materials in the sources regarding age and proficiency level as cognitive variables related to CM implementation.

This paper tests the idea that the speech rate with which surrounding words are spoken affects the mental representation of words and conditions production of words. This possibility is operationalized by measuring a word's ratio of occurrence in speaker-relative fast speech. Other variables shown in the literature to influence speech rate are controlled for in a 10,000-iteration bootstrapping procedure of a mixed-effect linear regression model. The results of the analysis of 39,397 tokens of content words from 1,232 word types in English display a significant effect for a word's ratio of conditioning in speaker-relative fast speech, although the effect size is small or very small. Other variables shown in the literature to condition speech rate also significantly condition speech rate here. This paper suggests that in addition to other aspects of the context of use of words, contextual speech rate also influences the mental representation of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the realm of linguistics, the concept of “semanticity” was recently introduced as a novel measure designed to study linguistic networks. In a given text, semanticity is defined as the ratio of the potential number of meanings associated with a word to the number of different words with which it is linguistically linked. This concept provides a quantitative indicator that reflects a word’s semantic complexity and its role in a language. In this pilot study, we applied the semanticity measure to the Catalan language, aiming to investigate its effectiveness in automatically distinguishing content words from function words. For this purpose, the measure of semanticity has been applied to a large corpus of texts written in Catalan. We show that the semanticity of words allows us to classify the word classes existing in Catalan in a simple way so that both the semantic and syntactic capacity of each word within a language can be integrated under this parameter. By means of this semanticity measure, it has been observed that adverbs behave like function words in Catalan. This approach offers a quantitative and objective tool for researchers and linguists to gain insights into the structure and dynamics of languages, contributing to a deeper understanding of their underlying principles. The application of semanticity to Catalan is a promising pilot study, with potential applications in other languages, which will allow progress to be made in the field of theoretical linguistics and contribute to the development of automated linguistic tools.

Filled pauses (i.e., gaps in speech production filled with non-lexical vocalizations) have been studied for more than sixty years in different languages. These studies utilize many different approaches to explore the origins, specific patterns, forms, incidents, positions, and functions of filled pauses. The present research examines the presence of filled pauses by considering the adjacent words and silent pauses that define their immediate positions as well as the influence of the immediate position on filled pause duration. The durations of 2450 filled pauses produced in 30 narratives were analyzed in terms of their incidence, immediate positions, neighboring silent pauses, and surrounding word types. The data obtained showed that filled pauses that were attached to a word on one side were the most frequent. Filled pauses occurring within a word and between two silent pauses were the longest of all. Hence, the durations of filled pauses were significantly influenced by the silent pauses occurring in their vicinity. The durations and occurrence of filled pauses did not differ when content or function words preceded the filled pause or followed it. These findings suggest that the incidence and duration of filled pauses as influenced by the neighboring words and silent pauses may be indicative of their information content, which is related to the processes of transforming ideas into grammatical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the researchers investigated the possible effect of teaching content words through using Concept Mapping (CM) strategy plotted on two cognitive variables: language proficiency and age within some eighty Iranian young and old English language learners with higher and lower proficiency levels (Elementary vs. Intermediate) who were conveniently selected and classified into four classes. Their age range varied from 10 to 25 years old. After five sessions of treatment, the researchers gave the post-test. The results could not identify priority in the predictability power for any of the two age and proficiency variables F (2, 77) = 1.96, p < .15, R2 = .04. The findings can be helpful for English teachers as well as syllabus designers to use CM strategies for teaching vocabulary and including such materials in the sources regarding age and proficiency level as cognitive variables related to CM implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the influence of loci of content and function words on stuttering frequency in the speech of Arabic children who stutter. Participants were 85 children who stutter (24 preschool, 61 school age). The preschool children who stutter were 17 males and 7 females with a mean age of 4.58 ± 0.50 (range: 4-5 years old). The school age children who stutter were 56 males and 5 females with a mean age of 10.64 ± 2.76 (range: 6-16 years old). No significant difference was found between the preschool and school age children who stutter in the mean percentage of stuttering on both content and function words. For school age children who stutter, results showed a significantly higher percentage of stuttering on function words compared to content words in the mild level of stuttering (p = .010). Taking severity as a continuous variable, results indicated a significant positive correlation between scores on the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 (SSI-4) and loci of stuttering on both content and function words. The results also revealed a significant negative correlation between age (as a continuous variable) and loci of stuttering in the category of function words. The findings of the current study provide new information about the impact of word type (function vs. content words) on stuttering in Arabic-speaking children.

Textbooks are the main pedagogical resource used by teachers of English as a foreign language in many countries. Quantitative and qualitative differences in the lexicon and topics covered by ELT textbooks may generate inequalities in an objective diagnostic evaluation. This study examines the content words and topics included in four ELT textbooks in order to determine whether there are convergences or divergences in the learners' input exposure and whether the topics adhere to the educational policies of primary education in Spain. The results showed differences in the amount of vocabulary input and significant variation in textbooks' most frequently-used content words. Likewise, the representation of the topics differed from one textbook to another, and the common topics often differed in focus and, consequently, in the content words used to introduce the theme. The findings have implications for education and research since, depending on the textbook used, learners are exposed not only to a different amount of input but also to a diversity of ideas, facts, and 'worlds' projected by the different content words found in textbooks of the same course level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses studies on language in typical cognitive aging and dementia conducted on English language processing. For the most part, the studies on language in aging and dementia presented in the paper have been done with speakers of English. We describe language comprehension and production of two groups— typically aging individuals and individuals with dementia. We provide between group comparisons with regard to language comprehension and production and point out different levels of impairment affecting comprehension and production. Moreover, taking the findings of the studies into account, which observe language impairments as secondary to motoric, although they may constitute early markers of an undiagnosed condition (Kemper et al. 1995), it is tentatively proposed that content and function words need to be given special attention in analysing language comprehension and language production, respectively. At the same time, cognitive reserve through language learning and in the case of bilingual and multilingual speakers is proposed as a strategy to delay the onset of dementia (De Bot & Maconi, 2005). Finally, we discuss elderspeak and its impact on the quality of life of typically aging individuals and individuals with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filled pauses (i.e., gaps in speech production filled with non-lexical vocalizations) have been studied for more than sixty years in different languages. These studies utilize many different approaches to explore the origins, specific patterns, forms, incidents, positions, and functions of filled pauses. The present research examines the presence of filled pauses by considering the adjacent words and silent pauses that define their immediate positions as well as the influence of the immediate position on filled pause duration. The durations of 2450 filled pauses produced in 30 narratives were analyzed in terms of their incidence, immediate positions, neighboring silent pauses, and surrounding word types. The data obtained showed that filled pauses that were attached to a word on one side were the most frequent. Filled pauses occurring within a word and between two silent pauses were the longest of all. Hence, the durations of filled pauses were significantly influenced by the silent pauses occurring in their vicinity. The durations and occurrence of filled pauses did not differ when content or function words preceded the filled pause or followed it. These findings suggest that the incidence and duration of filled pauses as influenced by the neighboring words and silent pauses may be indicative of their information content, which is related to the processes of transforming ideas into grammatical structures.

Background: Verbal communication comprises the retrieval of semantic and syntactic information elicited by various kinds of words (i.e., parts of speech) in a sentence. Content words, such as nouns and verbs, convey essential information about the overall meaning (semantics) of a sentence, whereas function words, such as prepositions and pronouns, carry less meaning and support the syntax of the sentence. Methods: This study aimed to identify neural correlates of the differential information retrieval processes for several parts of speech (i.e., content and function words, nouns and verbs, and objects and subjects) via electroencephalography performed during English spoken-sentence comprehension in thirteen participants with normal hearing. Recently, phoneme-related information has become a potential acoustic feature to investigate human speech processing. Therefore, in this study, we examined the importance of various parts of speech over sentence processing using information about the onset time of phonemes. Results: The distinction in the strength of cortical responses in language-related brain regions provides the neurological evidence that content words, nouns, and objects are dominant compared to function words, verbs, and subjects in spoken sentences, respectively. Conclusions: The findings of this study may provide insights into the different contributions of certain types of words over others to the overall process of sentence understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the corpus-based exploration of the nature of content words used by children with autism in a conversation. It aims to investigate what does the frequency of content words inform about the conceptualization of events and what differences can be seen in the conceptualization of children with severe and mild autism. The theory of embodiment is adopted to analyze the content words related to the conversations regarding birthday and school events. A spoken corpus of the conversation of thirteen children with autism was built for the investigation. The results show the tendency of these children to use nouns and adjectives as compared to verbs in their conversations. Moreover, children with severe autism gave less linguistics responses as compared to children with mild autism. Their distinct sensoryperceptual experiences seem to impact the use of the content words and their conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the beginning of the acquisition of the relative order of function and content words, a fundamental but cross-linguistically highly variable aspect of grammar. A review of the existing empirical literature shows that infants as young as 8 months of age can distinguish between functors and content words, and have a rudimentary knowledge of the order of these two universal lexical categories in their native language. Furthermore, human adults and non-human animals such as rodents process the same linguistic information differently from infants, emphasizing the developmental relevance of bootstrapping function/content word order from surface cues available in the input. We discuss the implications of these findings for a synergistic view of language acquisition, considering how grammar acquisition interacts with word learning. By 7–8 months of age, infants already have a rudimentary but abstract representation of word order, specifically of the relative order of functors and content words in their native language. Moreover, by 8–17 months of age infants are sensitive to all characteristics that universally distinguish between functors and content words, namely their differing prosodic, statistical, distributional, and functional properties. The acquisition of grammar is thus intimately intertwined with lexical acquisition, supporting a model of language growth in which the different levels of language develop synergistically, bootstrapping learning interactively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in nouns in casual Parisian French. Results showed that at least one phoneme was absent in 80.7% of the 291 noun tokens in the dataset, and that the whole cluster was absent (e.g., [mis] for ministre) in no less than 15.5% of the tokens. We demonstrate that phonemes are not always completely absent, but that they may leave traces on neighbouring phonemes. Further, the clusters display undocumented voice assimilation patterns. Statistical modelling showed that a phoneme is most likely to be absent if the following phoneme is also absent. The durations of the phonemes are conditioned particularly by the position of the word in the prosodic phrase. We argue, on the basis of three different types of evidence, that in French word-final OLS clusters, the absence of obstruents is mainly due to gradient reduction processes, whereas the absence of schwa and liquids may also be due to categorical deletion processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Argentinian Journal of Applied Linguistics is the property of Federacion Argentina de Asociaciones de Profesores de Ingles and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Technology & Chinese Language Teaching is the property of Middle Tennessee State University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The resurgence of interest in vocabulary learning in the past two decades and research in Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLS) since Schmitt's 1997 taxonomy have yielded a few other taxonomies and strategies to enrich the vocabulary of ESL learners. However, developing a VLS taxonomy or Model in ESP context has not been focused upon though the need for it has been studied and reported. Students from vernacular medium schools in ESL and EFL countries find it difficult to learn the content in colleges due to their limited knowledge of content vocabulary. Hence a new VLS Model for content words has been designed to render linguistic assistance to them. The efficacy of the Model has been tested in the context of Engineering Science. The proposed model is unique and specific for deriving strategies to learn content vocabulary in all branches of Science and Engineering. There is scope for diachronic, synchronic, and scientific study of words through Cognitive and Metacognitive strategies. Activities generated on this Model combine decontextualized Discovery strategy and contextualized Consolidation strategy. Eighty engineering college students in India took part in the study. The experimental group which received intervention based on the VLS Model outperformed the control group in the posttest. Hence this Model is advocated for enhancing the knowledge and use of ESP vocabulary and for helping learners understand their disciplinary field. It is believed that through appropriate VLS, the learners can be empowered to be autonomous in reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, grammatical words such as determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions have been considered marginal for the early stages of syntactic development. Lately the trend has turned, and recently some authors have been arguing for the opposite view, according to which grammatical words or functional words (FWs) have a central role in syntactic development. This special issue is devoted to the hypothesis that FWs bootstrap syntactic development in children. The first article, by Dye et al., sets the background with a thorough literature review. The second article, by Ninio, offers evidence that functional categories (FCs) may be the source of transfer and facilitation of major syntactic principles. The remainder of the special issue is devoted to five studies that offer an empiricist model of learning a vocabulary of FWs and its connection to syntactic structure. The major conclusion is that this interrelated complex system is not innate but learned from the linguistic input. Evidence comes from studies of development of several languages: French (Le Normand), German (Szagun et al.), English, Spanish and Bantu (Demuth); of development in typically and atypically developing child populations (Leonard); and of monolingual as well as bilingual development (Kedar). Each of the studies examines a different aspect of such a learning theory. The special issue provides important theoretical insights into the process of acquisition, and may contribute to various applied uses by serving as the basis for remedial teaching and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study promoted the use of sensory detail chart in collaborative learning as a strategy for more fluent writing. It aimed at investigating how the use of sensory detail chart in collaborative learning could increase the number of content words in students' descriptive writing. There are thirty students participated in a classroom action research (CAR) in two cycles. Students did a pre-test before the implementation and a post-test after each cycle. The tests results showed that number of content words in students' descriptive writing had increased by 62.44% overall. The increase in the second cycle was even higher. The results of the second post-test indicated that the number of content words in students' descriptive writing had increased by 138.17% overall. The researcher concluded that the use of sensory detail chart collaboratively has successfully increased the number of content words in the students' descriptive writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microblogging sites like Twitter have become important sources of real-time information during disaster events. A large amount of valuable situational information is posted in these sites during disasters; however, the information is dispersed among hundreds of thousands of tweets containing sentiments and opinions of the masses. To effectively utilize microblogging sites during disaster events, it is necessary to not only extract the situational information from the large amounts of sentiments and opinions, but also to summarize the large amounts of situational information posted in real-time. During disasters in countries like India, a sizable number of tweets are posted in local resource-poor languages besides the normal English-language tweets. For instance, in the Indian subcontinent, a large number of tweets are posted in Hindi/Devanagari (the national language of India), and some of the information contained in such non-English tweets is not available (or available at a later point of time) through English tweets. In this work, we develop a novel classification-summarization framework which handles tweets in both English and Hindi-we first extract tweets containing situational information, and then summarize this information. Our proposed methodology is developed based on the understanding of how several concepts evolve in Twitter during disaster. This understanding helps us achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art tweet classifiers and summarization approaches on English tweets. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first attempt to extract situational information from non-English tweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this article are to present a review of the literature concerning the use of the Cloze test as a tool to measure reading performance, discussing its limits and possibilities, access the sensibility of the test for linguistic and non linguistic variables, and present a research agenda that considers the use of original qualitative designs to access different aspects of reading. To verify the sensibility of the test, we manipulated the variables word type (function words and content words), text length (short and long) and reading experience (measured in terms of level of schooling). We observed the performance of students from Elementary level and from High School. The results show that Elementary-level students had more difficulty with function words and with long texts, which indicates that the test is sensible to linguistic and non-linguistic factors. From the results and analyses, we draw a discussion of how the cloze test can be useful to evaluate different cognitive processes involved in reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical categories of CDS were examined among 40 Hebrew-speaking parents of infants in early pre-verbal, late-preverbal, single-word and early grammar stages during spontaneous parent–infant interactions. Two hundred utterances from each sample were transcribed, coded for types and tokens, and analyzed. Findings demonstrated a significant growth in types of content words from early to late pre-verbal stages, significant decline at the single-word stage, and an increase at the early grammar stage. Apparently, parents change their use of content words to accommodate their child's linguistic development, attesting to dynamic/reciprocal parent–child interactions. Additionally, findings support that verb use is similar to or higher than noun use by parents at all developmental stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONTENT WORDS IN THE FORMAL ANALYSIS OF LATVIANSummaryTo characterize morphological features of each word in a text, a set of morphological features for Latvian has been defined. It describes grammatical categories and their pos­sible values characteristic of a particular part of speech or a smaller group of words.To define this set it was necessary to clarify several grammatical categories of content words due to fact that their description in the existing grammars of Latvian differs or is not sufficiently explicated.Morphological features of pronouns and verbs are discussed in detail.Regarding pronouns, the main issues are the nominal categories (gender, number and case) and the category of person. A table with a full list of Latvian pronouns and their grammatical categories is offered.Regarding verbs, the problematic categories are tense (for debitive and conditional forms) and person (for debitive, relative and conditional forms), as well as the category of number for the third person verbs.

This corpus-based research focuses on building a corpus of Indonesian children’s storybooks to find the frequent content words in order to identify Indonesian-core vocabulary for teaching English to Indonesian preschool children. The data was gathered from 131 Indo¬nesian children’s storybooks, which resulted in a corpus of 134,320 words. These data were run through a frequency menu in MonoConc Pro, a corpus program. Data analysis was analyzed by selecting the frequent nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs before each of them was lemmatized. The result showed that the children were already exposed to both ordinary and imaginative concepts, antonym in adjective, time reference, and compound nouns. The narrative discourse clearly influenced the kind of verbs the children exposed to

The present paper aims at carrying out structural and lexical analysis of two contrasting plays –Shakespeare´s Hamlet and Sumarokov´s Gamlet- in a specific linguistic domain. In this contribution, we will attempt to gain some insight into two essential content words: vengeance and hono(u)r, their derivatives and related words, through quantitative analysis of these words and qualitative analysis of their collocates and concordances. Collocational approach will be used to analyse and compare the ways the authors perceive the concepts of vengeance and hono(u)r. In general, the findings will indicate important similarities and/or differences between the structures of the plays per acts and both texts´ basic contents in relation to two important topics -vengeance and hono(u)r.El presente artículo tiene como objetivo un análisis estructural y léxico de dos obras contrastivas –Hamlet de Shakespeare y Gamlet de Sumarokov- en un dominio lingüístico específico. En esta contribución, intentaremos adentrarse en el estudio de dos sustantivos: venganza y honor, sus derivados y palabras relacionadas- a través de un análisis cuantitativo de las mismas y el análisis cualitativo de sus colocados y concordancias. El método de los colocados será utilizado para analizar y comparar el modo en que los autores perciben los conceptos de venganza y honor. En general, los resultados van a señalar las similitudes y/o diferencias importantes entre las estructuras de las obras por actos y los contenidos básicos de ambos textos en relación con dos temas importantes, tal como, venganza y honor.

The goal of the study was to examine whether the ‘noun-bias’ phenomenon, which exists in the lexicon of Hebrew-speaking children, also exists in Hebrew child-directed speech (CDS) as well as in Hebrew adult-directed speech (ADS). In addition, we aimed to describe the use of the different classes of content words in the speech of Hebrew-speaking parents to their children at different ages compared to the speech of parents to adults (ADS). Thirty infants (age range 8:5–33 months) were divided into three stages according to age: pre-lexical, single-word, and early grammar. The ADS corpus included 18 Hebrew-speaking parents of children at the same three stages of language development as in the CDS corpus. The CDS corpus was collected from parent–child dyads during naturalistic activities at home: mealtime, bathing, and play. The ADS corpus was collected from parent–experimenter interactions including the parent watching a video and then being interviewed by the experimenter. 200 utterances of each sample were transcribed, coded for types and tokens and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results show that in CDS, when speaking to infants of all ages, parents’ use of types and tokens of verbs and nouns was similar and significantly higher than their use of adjectives or adverbs. In ADS, however, verbs were the main lexical category used by Hebrew-speaking parents in both types and tokens. It seems that both the properties of the input language (e.g. the pro-drop parameter) and the interactional styles of the caregivers are important factors that may influence the high presence of verbs in Hebrew-speaking parents’ ADS and CDS. The negative correlation between the widespread use of verbs in the speech of parents to their infants and the ‘noun-bias’ phenomenon in the Hebrew-child lexicon will be discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigated whether phonetic complexity affected stuttering rate in Jordanian Arabic speakers. Speakers were assigned to three age groups (6-11, 12-17 and 18+ years). An Arabic index of phonetic complexity (AIPC) was developed. Each word was given a score based on the number of complex phonetic properties out of a total of nine that it contained in the AIPC. The results showed that stuttering on function words for Jordanian Arabic did not correlate significantly with the AIPC score for any age group. The AIPC scores of content and function-content words correlated positively with stuttering rate for the 6-11 age group alone with the function-content words affecting fluency more severely than did the content words. The AIPC scores of stuttered function, content and stuttered function-content words were higher than those of fluent words. The non-stuttered words had lower AIPC scores than the stuttered corresponding classes. This showed that the higher the AIPC score on stuttered words, the greater the chance for these word categories to be stuttered. The AIPC factors that most affected fluency in Jordanian Arabic were place of articulation, manner of articulation, word length, word shape and consonant length. We conclude that Arabic is similar to other languages with regard to the loci of stuttering, their phonetic complexity and AIPC factors affecting stuttering most. The correlation between phonetic complexity and the order of the AIPC factors are different between Arabic and other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the exchange of disfluencies from function words to content words with age in Brazilian Portuguese speakers who do and do not stutter. Ninety stuttering individuals and 90 controls, native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were divided into three age groups (children, adolescents and adults). The study method involved analyzing the occurrence of stuttering on content and function words based on spontaneous speech samples. Results indicated that children tend to be more disfluent on function words. With the increase in age, teenagers and adults who stutter presented a higher number of disfluencies on content words. These findings support the current literature, indicating that with the aging process, there is an exchange of disfluencies from function to content words. This shift in the disfluency pattern may account for a more advanced type of stuttering. The study also demonstrated that disfluencies in Portuguese speakers follow the same pattern of shifting from function to content words with age as for English speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study which focuses on building a corpus of storybooks for Indonesian children to determine Indonesian-core vocabulary for teaching English to Indonesian preschool children. It says that the data collected from 131 Indonesian children's storybooks were run through a MonoConc Pro, which is a corpus program. The study used data analysis by selecting the verbs, adverbs, and nouns. Results show that the children were exposed to imaginative concepts and compound noun.

Abstract: The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the relation between utterance complexity and utterance position and the tendency to stutter on function words in preschool-age children who stutter (CWS). Two separate studies involving two different groups of participants (Study 1, n =30; Study 2, n =30) were conducted. Participants were preschool-age CWS between the age of 3, 0 and 5, 11 who engaged in 15–20min parent–child conversational interactions. From audio–video recordings of each interaction, every child utterance of each parent–child sample was transcribed. From these transcripts, for each participant, measures of language (e.g., length and complexity) and measures of stuttering (e.g., word type and utterance position) were obtained. Results of Study 1 indicated that children stuttered more frequently on function words, but that this tendency was not greater for complex than simple utterances. Results of Study 2, involving the assessment of utterance position and MLU quartile, indicated that that stuttering was more likely to occur with increasing sentence length, and that stuttering tended to occur at the utterance-initial position, the position where function words were also more likely to occur. Findings were taken to suggest that, although word-level influences cannot be discounted, utterance-level influences contribute to the loci of stuttering in preschool-age children, and may help account for developmental changes in the loci of stuttering. Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to: (a) describe the influence of word type (function versus content words), and grammatical complexity, on disfluent speech; (b) compare the effect of stuttering frequency based on the position of the word in the utterance; (c) discuss the contribution of utterance position on the frequency of stuttering on function words; and (d) explain possible reasons why preschoolers stutter more frequently on function words than content words. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The purpose of this study was to test whether the content and function word dichotomy of speech disfluency found in English-speaking adults who stutter (AWS) was evident in a language other than English. A group of adult Arabic-speaking AWS were sampled across spontaneous speaking, oral reading, and single-word naming tasks. Moments of disfluency were identified and examined in regard to lexical category. Results indicated no significant differences in the amount of disfluency occurring on content and function words. The production of combined content-function words, a unique feature of the Arabic language, was associated with a high level of disfluency. The linguistic bases of stuttering are discussed in regard to language-specific influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims at carrying out structural and lexical analysis of two contrasting plays -Shakespeare' Hamlet and Sumarokov' Gamlet- in a specific linguistic domain. In this contribution, we will attempt to gain some insight into two essential content words: vengeance and hono(u)r, their derivatives and related words, through quantitative analysis of these words and qualitative analysis of their collocates and concordances. Collocational approach will be used to analyse and compare the ways the authors perceive the concepts of vengeance and hono(u)r. In general, the findings will indicate important similarities and/or differences between the structures of the plays per acts and both texts' basic contents in relation to two important topics -vengeance and hono(u)r. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In a regression study of conversational speech, we show that frequency, contextual predictability, and repetition have separate contributions to word duration, despite their substantial correlations. We also found that content- and function-word durations are affected differently by their frequency and predictability. Content words are shorter when more frequent, and shorter when repeated, while function words are not so affected. Function words have shorter pronunciations, after controlling for frequency and predictability. While both content and function words are strongly affected by predictability from the word following them, sensitivity to predictability from the preceding word is largely limited to very frequent function words. The results support the view that content and function words are accessed differently in production. We suggest a lexical-access-based model of our results, in which frequency or repetition leads to shorter or longer word durations by causing faster or slower lexical access, mediated by a general mechanism that coordinates the pace of higher-level planning and the execution of the articulatory plan. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The temporal course of the neural activity associated with Chinese content and function words was investigated, using 64-channel event-related potential (ERP) recording. Seventeen undergraduates were asked to read 144 declarative sentences and average ERPs were computed as a function of vocabulary class. After the early visual components, there were two main features of the ERP profiles generated by function words and content words. The function words elicited an early negative component between 200 and 350ms, and a slow negative component from 350 to 550ms. Both the early negativity and the slow wave had a predominantly anterior distribution. The content words only generated one negativity within the time window of 200–550ms, which was smaller than the negativities elicited by the function words. These findings indicate that distinct neural correlates may be involved in processing these two word classes in the Chinese language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]