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The translation of philosophical works is a topic that merits our attention both in respect of philosophical understanding and linguistic structure, although it is the former rather than the latter that prevails in discussions in Chinese academia. By drawing upon that branch of modern linguistics known as the lexical field theory, this paper attempts to analyze a host of related problems, including the following: readability as a basic requirement of translation, difficulties in translation caused by the syntactic-typological distance of source and target languages, consistency of translated terms in general, consistency of semantically related terms in translation, consistency of translated terms regarding the syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis, the use of monosyllabic, disyllabic, or polysyllabic Chinese terms in translation, translation of long or rare terms into Chinese, the middle way between 'under-translation' and 'over-translation,' identification of lexical fields for the systematic treatment of translated terms, and finally the in-depth understanding of original texts in their source languages as a prerequisite of any serious attempt of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) and the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disseminated widely used lists of drug name pairs involved in wrong-drug errors, for which they recommended tall-man lettering (TML). Linguistic similarity is believed responsible for confusion of these drugs. This study aims to quantify linguistic similarity and other linguistic properties of these generic-generic name pairs. Methods: The FDA's Phonetic and Orthographic Computer Analysis (POCA) software was used to generate numerical similarity scores for the generic-generic name pairs on these lists and to identify conflicts between these names and the names of other marketed products. Within each pair, differences in name length and the number of identical prefix (initial) letters and suffix (final) letters were determined. Results: The selected pairs shared a mean of 2.5 (± 1.8) identical prefix letters and 3.2 (± 2.9) identical suffix letters. The mean POCA score 69.5 (± 9.7), indicated moderate-to-high similarity. POCA scores for individual pairs ranged from 90 (most similar) to 46 (least similar). Individual names averaged 11.2 (± 9.1) high-similarity conflicts with names of other marketed drugs. Conclusions: POCA analysis could be a valuable tool in determining whether linguistic similarity contributes to specific wrong-drug errors. The finding of 11.2 (± 9.1) high-similarity conflicts with names of other marketed drugs is more than for candidate names USAN accepts and suggests the names on the FDA and ISMP lists are linguistically problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem in language comprehension in people with right hemisphere damage (RHD) is more equivocal than people with left hemisphere damage. This study explores the reading and listening comprehension of Cantonese-speaking individuals with RHD, left hemisphere damage, and neurotypical healthy controls using the Cantonese Computerized Revised Token Test (CRTT-Cantonese) adapted from the English CRTT. Eighteen native Cantonese-speaking individuals with RHD, 32 individuals with left hemisphere damage and aphasia (PWA), and 42 healthy controls participated in this study. All the participants completed the Cantonese Aphasia Battery, Hong Kong Oxford Cognitive Screen, the listening comprehension version of CRTT-Cantonese (CRTT-L-Cantonese), and the reading comprehension version of CRTT-Cantonese (CRTT-R-WF-Cantonese) across different sessions. Linear mixed-effect analysis revealed significant differences among the groups in CRTT-Cantonese tests. However, there were no significant difference between CRTT-L-Cantonese and CRTT-R-WF-Cantonese within the PWA, RHD and healthy control groups. Tukey post-hoc pairwise comparisons showed that PWA scored significantly lower than RHD and healthy control groups (p < 0.0001) in both CRTT-L-Cantonese and CRTT-R-WF-Cantonese, and the RHD group scored significantly lower than healthy control group only on the CRTT-R-WF-Cantonese. The results demonstrate that the CRTT-L-Cantonese and CRTT-R-WF-Cantonese differentiate language comprehension abilities among PWA, RHD and healthy control groups. Although the current findings did not show any diversion between reading and listening comprehension in RHD group, this group showed poorer performance in reading comprehension when compared to healthy controls. The latter findings may support the view that the right hemisphere contributes to reading comprehension in Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Deutschstunde(n)" by Heiko Hausendorf examines the readability of literature using examples, including a detailed description of a desk from Georges Perec's work "Still life/style leaf". Hausendorf shows how one can work with a seemingly cumbersome and reader-unfriendly text from a linguistic perspective. He emphasizes the importance of perception and criticizes the preference for narratives over descriptions in literature. The book also includes author names and work titles listed in chapters 3-6, including Georges Perec, Henrik Ibsen, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, and Goethe. The book "Deutschstunde(n). Linguistic analyses of literary texts" by Hausendorf deals with the connection between German lessons, literature, and linguistics. It consists of a preface, a transitional chapter, and a main part. The author describes his experiences in German lessons and emphasizes the importance of a careful linguistic approach to texts. The book aims to encourage students to read more literature and conduct analyses. It includes examples and instructions for analyzing linguistic phenomena in literary texts. [Extracted from the article]

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that the bootstrapping mechanism that children can use to discover numeral meanings might work differently in different languages. Nevertheless, support for this conclusion remains preliminary. The present study explored this hypothesis through an investigation of the possible relations between cardinal number knowledge and quantifier comprehension in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children. Notably, in contrast with previous studies, this study also offered a glimpse into children's receptive vocabulary development and its relation with cardinal number knowledge and quantifier comprehension. Results showed that cardinal number knowledge did not seem to be correlated with quantifier comprehension (both "exact" and "non-exact" quantifiers) when controlling for such covariates as children's age, gender, parent education, and family income. Moreover, children's receptive vocabulary size explained a significant amount of variance in their quantifier knowledge over and above children's age, gender, parent education, and family income, but not in their cardinal number development over and above these covariates. These results provide further evidence for the hypothesis that while the bootstrapping mechanism may facilitate number word learning in children speaking languages like English, it might play a lesser role in children speaking classifier languages such as Mandarin Chinese. Implications for the role that general receptive vocabulary plays in the acquisition of number words and quantifiers are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cue-based retrieval theories of sentence processing posit that long-distance dependency formation is guided by a cue-based retrieval mechanism: dependents are retrieved via retrieval cues associated with a verb. When retrieval cues match multiple similar items in memory, this leads to cue-based retrieval interference. A landmark study by Van Dyke and McElree tested interference from sentence-external items: retrieval cues were manipulated to (mis-)match semantically similar items presented prior to a target dependency. The support for interference of this type is weak, and only comes from English object cleft constructions. Our study provides a cross-linguistic investigation of interference from sentence-external items: Three eyetracking studies in English, German and Russian tested interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies under varying task demands. A fourth study attempted to replicate the Van Dyke and McElree study using self-paced reading. Bayes factors analyses show cross-linguistic evidence against interference from sentence-external items. A broader implication from these data is that cue-based retrieval interference is driven by sentence-internal distracting items, suggesting that a cue-based search is restricted to the current linguistic context. • Cross-linguistic study on cue-based interference from sentence-external items. • Three larger-sample eye-tracking studies in English, German and Russian. • A fourth self-paced reading study attempts to replicate the original Van Dyke study. • Data show evidence against interference from sentence-external items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction has been proposed as an overarching principle that explains human information processing in language and beyond. To what degree can processing difficulty in syntactically complex sentences – one of the major concerns of psycholinguistics – be explained by predictability, as estimated using computational language models, and operationalized as surprisal (negative log probability)? A precise, quantitative test of this question requires a much larger scale data collection effort than has been done in the past. We present the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark, a dataset of self-paced reading times from 2000 participants, who read a diverse set of complex English sentences. This dataset makes it possible to measure processing difficulty associated with individual syntactic constructions, and even individual sentences, precisely enough to rigorously test the predictions of computational models of language comprehension. By estimating the function that relates surprisal to reading times from filler items included in the experiment, we find that the predictions of language models with two different architectures sharply diverge from the empirical reading time data, dramatically underpredicting processing difficulty, failing to predict relative difficulty among different syntactic ambiguous constructions, and only partially explaining item-wise variability. These findings suggest that next-word prediction is most likely insufficient on its own to explain human syntactic processing. • We collect a large reading time dataset for English syntactically complex sentences. • We evaluate to what extent surprisal – estimated using neural network language models – can explain processing difficulty. • Surprisal greatly underestimated processing difficulty for most constructions. • It failed to predict relative difficulty among different garden path constructions. • It also failed to predict across-item variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The HOPE Scale by Gowri Anandarajah is a qualitative tool for examining and assessing the spiritual needs of sick people, which can be used by health care professionals, but also other personnel whose purpose is to support the patient during illness. Aim: The aim of this study was the cultural adaptation and validation of a qualitative tool for examining the spiritual needs of patients. Methods: A six-step procedure was adopted with the inclusion of four independent forward and two backward translations and cognitive debriefing of the Polish version with experts (n = 11) and chronically ill patients (n = 15). These methods were used to verify a semantic validation and comprehensibility of the HOPE scale according to the standards of cultural measure validation and adaptation. Bioethics Committee approval No KE-0254/222/2020. Results: No major problems were encountered during the process of straightforward and backward translation, and the suggested minor linguistic corrections were made. The HOPE scale was found to be comprehensible and readable by experts and patients, and the instructions were clear and did not pose any difficulties for the respondents. Following the six steps of the validation, the final Polish version of the HOPE scale was obtained, adapted stylistically and culturally to Polish conditions. Conclusions: The Polish version of the HOPE scale is culturally and linguistically adapted and is ready to be used for assessing patients' spiritual needs. The scale can be used both for research and in practice when working with chronically ill people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word-predictability measures, such as surprisal, have been used to show that linguistic prediction is an essential neural mechanism for successful comprehension. However, the neural dynamic of this mechanism may differ across individuals listening to the same narrative, revealing possible idiosyncrasies. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the ability of the surprisal measure to address the linguistic prediction in terms of the intersubject phase synchronization (ISPS) among healthy volunteers listening to a narrative during continuous functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanning. The data of twenty-seven participants, acquired in a previous study, were re-analyzed to estimate the ISPS associated with an audiobook listening, played forward and backward. Mean ISPS differences between playing conditions were first analyzed across the whole brain. ISPS time-series during the forward condition was explained with both a lexical-only and a semantics-weighted lexical surprisal model of the narrative word series to detect correlations between ISPS and word surprisal values. Compared to the backward condition, mean ISPS was significantly higher during forward condition in a broad network encompassing frontal, temporal, and parietal areas. The lexical-only model disclosed significant negative ISPS-surprisal correlations in the angular gyrus bilaterally, precuneus, left inferior parietal lobule, left middle frontal gyrus, left cerebellum, and left inferior frontal gyrus. The semantics-weighted surprisal model disclosed significant negative ISPS-surprisal correlations in the right angular gyrus, right precuneus, and left inferior frontal gyrus. Besides engaging language-related areas, narrative processing induces significant ISPS levels beyond the language network. The negative ISPS-surprisal correlations observed would signal divergent neural dynamics among individuals, leading to lower group synchronization, when the words to be integrated are characterized by higher surprisal levels. These results provide further support to the use of language models, such as the surprisal, to explain the neural processes of narrative comprehension and additional information into how the human brain exploits predictions during language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants' understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomization) can increase patients' cognitive load when reading text. There is a need to systematically examine the language demands of IC documents, including whether the processes intended to safeguard patients by providing clear information might do the opposite through complex, inaccessible language. Therefore, the goal of this study is to build an open-access corpus of patient information sheets (PIS) and consent forms (CF) and analyze each genre using an interdisciplinary approach to capture multidimensional measures of language quality beyond traditional readability measures. A search of publicly-available online IC documents for UK-based cancer RCTs (2000-17) yielded corpora of 27 PIS and 23 CF. Textual analysis using the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, revealed different linguistic dimensions relating to the complexity of IC documents, particularly low word concreteness for PIS and low referential and deep cohesion for CF, although both had high narrativity. Key part-of-speech analyses using Wmatrix corpus software revealed a contrast between the overrepresentation of the pronoun 'you' plus modal verbs in PIS and 'I' in CF, exposing the contradiction inherent in conveying uncertainty to patients using tentative language in PIS while making them affirm certainty in their understanding in CF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readability is a well-defined notion that researchers and scholars started to focus on in the beginning of the twentieth century. Readability means automatically estimating the ease or difficulty of a particular text or written material by means of the linguistic characteristics of that text. According to Guo, Zhang, and Zhai (2011) readability is the ease or difficulty with which written material is read or comprehended by the readers. The present research has tried to assess the writings of Pakistani learners on the Flesch Kincaid formula with reference to text readability and grade level to mark the suitability of grade level and readability. Then, at the second level, it judges the texts of Pakistani learners on the Coh-metrix L2 Reading Scale so as to see the standard and depth of writing. The results show a significant correlation between reading easability and grade level but the L2 reading scale shows, somehow, below the required standard of writing. The learners generate text that is simpler semantically and syntactically which clues to highly coherent text but at the same time, this shows limited choice of type token ratio which might be due to inadequate linguistic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing debate exists regarding the role of production-based versus comprehension-based training for L2 learning. However, recent research suggests an advantage for production training due to benefits stemming from the opportunity to compare generated output with feedback and from the memory mechanisms associated with language production. Based on recent findings with an artificial language paradigm, we investigated the effects of production-based and comprehension-based training for learning grammatical gender among beginning L2 German learners. Participants received production-based or comprehension-based training on grammatical gender assignment and gender agreement between determiners, adjectives, and 15 German nouns, followed by four tasks targeting the comprehension and production of the target nouns and their corresponding gender marking on determiners and adjectives. Both groups were equally accurate in comprehending and producing the nouns. For tasks requiring knowledge of grammatical gender, the production-based group outperformed the comprehension-based group on both comprehension and production tests. These findings demonstrate the importance of language production for creating robust linguistic representations and have important implications for classroom instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Low literacy skills impact important aspects of communication, including health-related information exchanges. Unsuccessful communication on the part of physician or patient contributes to lower quality of care, is associated with poorer chronic disease control, jeopardizes patient safety and can lead to unfavorable healthcare utilization patterns. To date, very little research has focused on digital communication between physicians and patients, such as secure messages sent via electronic patient portals. Method: The purpose of the current study is to develop an automated readability formula to better understand what elements of physicians' digital messages make them more or less difficult to understand. The formula is developed using advanced natural language processing (NLP) to predict human ratings of physician text difficulty. Results: The results indicate that NLP indices that capture a diverse set of linguistic features predict the difficulty of physician messages better than classic readability tools such as Flesch Kincaid Grade Level. Our results also provide information about the textual features that best explain text readability. Conclusion: Implications for how the readability formula could provide feedback to physicians to improve digital health communication by promoting linguistic concordance between physician and patient are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Narrative interventions are a class of language interventions that involve the use of telling or retelling stories. Narrative intervention can be an efficient and versatile means of promoting a large array of academically and socially important language targets that improve children's access to general education curriculum and enhance their peer relations. The purpose of this tutorial is to supply foundational information about the importance of narratives and to offer recommendations about how to maximize the potential of narrative interventions in school-based clinical practice. Method: Drawing from decades of cognitive and linguistic research, a tutorial on narratives and narrative language is presented first. Ten principles that support the design and implementation of narrative interventions are described. Results: Clinicians can use narrative intervention to teach story grammar, complex language, vocabulary, inferencing, and social pragmatics. Storytelling, as an active intervention ingredient, promotes the comprehension and production of complex language. Conclusion: When narrative intervention is implemented following a set of principles drawn from research and extensive clinical experience, speech-language pathologists can efficiently and effectively teach a broad set of academically and socially meaningful skills to diverse students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently proposed Reusing Inhibition for Negation (RIN) hypothesis posits that the inhibitory control mechanism is reused to understand sentential negation. The RIN hypothesis has only been tested in alphabetic languages, and its novelty requires additional support from non-alphabetic languages, like logographic non-Indo-European languages. This study examined the RIN hypothesis in the context of Mandarin, which has unique linguistic features and neural underpinnings. Participants read either affirmative or negative action-related sentences while performing an embedded Go/NoGo task. Reduced inhibition-related N2 was detected in NoGo-negative compared to NoGo-affirmative condition. Brain source estimation of the N2 interaction effect revealed strongest activation in the right inferior parietal lobule, a typical inhibition-related brain region. These results confirm the generalizability of the RIN hypothesis, suggesting that comprehension of negation in logographic Mandarin also recruits the inhibitory control mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This clinical focus article will highlight the importance and role of morphological awareness (MA) across orthographies, in particular, the role it plays in reading development, specifically with bilingual populations. MA supports reading acquisition and development beyond other predictors of reading, such as phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and rapid automatic naming to name a few. While MA aids in the development of decoding fluency, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension, explicit morphological instruction does not occur regularly in reading intervention. For English learners (ELs), instruction should focus on improving MA, semantic awareness, and orthographic processing, which in turn would exert a positive influence on reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. This clinical focus article aims to provide speech-language pathologists with applicable tasks to measure MA and strategies to guide explicit morphological instruction. Method: The role of MA in reading development will be described with regard to its importance beyond other predictors and the role it plays in theoretical models of reading development. Then, MA will be described across orthographies, with a focus on cross-linguistic influences. Finally, measurement tasks will be described, and clinical implications will be discussed in terms of using different strategies and tools to explicitly address MA. Conclusion: Clinical implications of morphological instruction should be further explored and incorporated in current practices. With regard to ELs, it is important that we provide effective and specific instruction to better bridge the academic achievement gaps and increase overall language and literacy skills. Morphological instruction should be explicit and provided in conjunction with other domains of language. Equally important is leveraging families of ELs to promote their children's oral language and literacy in their first language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines first-year undergraduate admissions materials from 325 bachelor-degree granting U.S. institutions, closely analyzing the English-language readability and Spanish-language readability and translation of these materials. Via Yosso's linguistic capital, the results reveal 4.9% of first-year undergraduate admissions materials had been translated into Spanish, 4% of institutional admissions websites embed translation widgets, and the average readability of English-language content is above the 13th-grade reading level. Implications for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This trial aimed to measure the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on users' comprehension of health information provided in adapted written "easy read" material. Method: Sixty adults with intellectual disabilities undertook The Easy Read Task, randomly allocated with stratification by reading ability to one of four conditions (with and without simplified language/with and without mediation). Results: Neither linguistic complexity of the text nor mediation independently or combined made a significant difference to the understanding of information. Post hoc testing revealed that the group who received simplified language with mediation performed significantly better than the group that had complex text with mediation. None of the other differences between the remaining groups were significant. Conclusions: Constructing meaning needs to extend beyond a consideration of form as found in "easy read" documents to recognize the role of individual capacity for language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world with different readers with varying needs, the idea that readers might be given the option of text formatting their own text in advance seems very appealing. In this research, differences between reading speed, reading comprehension, and reading comfort were compared with the pre-set and self-set texts. The respondents read paragraphs and identified illogical words contained therein, while reading two comparable blocks of self-set and pre-set texts. The differences in the number of paragraphs read and the mistakes made in a limited timeframe were compared using a web test that was based on the Tinker's test. The results showed that the respondents encounter different difficulties while reading digital text. We statistically proved that people with dyslexia chose larger type sizes more frequently than people without dyslexia, whereas no such statistically significant trend was observed for all other variables (typeface, tracking, and leading). We did not observe any significant differences between the reading speed associated with pre-set and self-set texts; however, the reading speed was higher in the group of people without dyslexia. A significant difference was observed in reading comprehension, because reading comprehension was better in the case of self-set text used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before infants produce words, they can discriminate changes in motion event components such as manner (how an action is performed) and path (trajectory of an action). Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization are related to children's later verb comprehension (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). We asked: (a) Do infants learning Turkish, a verb-framed language, attend to both manner and path changes in motion events? (b) Is early detection of path and manner related to children's later verb comprehension and (c) how they describe motion events? Thirty-two Turkish-reared children were tested at three time points. At Time 1, infants (Mage = 14.5months) were tested on their detection of changes in path and manner using the Preferential Looking Paradigm. At Time 2, children were tested on their receptive language skills (Mage = 22.07months). At Time 3, children performed 3 tasks (Mage = 35.05months): a verb comprehension task, an event description task depicting motion events with different path and manner combinations, and an expressive language task. The ability to detect changes in event components at Time 1 predicted verb comprehension abilities at Time 3, beyond general receptive and expressive vocabulary skills at Times 2 and 3. Infants who noticed changes in path and manner at Time 1 used fewer manner-only descriptions and more path-any descriptions (i.e., descriptions that included a path component with or without manner) in their speech at Time 3. These findings suggest that early detection of event components is associated not only with verb comprehension, but also with how children lexicalize event components in line with their native language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We investigated the relationships between text reading comprehension and oral idiom comprehension in adolescents. We also examined the more specific relationships between inference in text comprehension and inference in idiom comprehension. Method: We selected participants from an initial sample of 140 students aged 13-15 years to form 2 groups, according to their decoding and reading comprehension abilities: 1 group of good comprehenders/good decoders (n = 49) and 1 group of less skilled comprehenders but with adequate decoding skills (n = 20). The reading comprehension task comprised both literal and inferential (text-based and knowledge-based) questions. These 2 groups were then compared on an idiom comprehension task. In this task, idioms were presented orally, and students were placed in a situation that simulated a real-life oral interaction. The idioms were novel for the students (translated from a foreign language), either transparent or opaque, and presented either with a supportive context or without any context. Results: Good reading comprehenders outperformed less skilled ones on the idiom task. Both groups benefited from the supportive context, especially the good comprehenders. Knowledge-based inferences in written text comprehension were related to contextual inferences for opaque idioms, while semantic inferences for transparent idioms were related to literal text comprehension, but not to textconnecting inferences. Conclusion: These results are discussed both theoretically, in terms of cross-modal comprehension processes, and practically, in terms of implications for remediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of a study on whether writing-intensive learning techniques can assist beginner students in learning linguistic argumentation. The analysis is based on student submissions (eighty submissions from twenty students, 22,328 words) from a typical Introduction to Linguistics course, which were analyzed with the Coh-Metrix tool (McNamara et al. 2014), a suite of tests that measures cohesion of the linguistic formulation of the text and coherence of the mental representation. The essays show improvement in descriptive measures (lexical diversity, use of content words) and greater simplicity in terms of readability, suggesting a growth in the sophistication of the students' argumentation and disciplinary knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Speakers reliably repeat structures they heard used to describe particular pictures. • This reflects durable associations between event content and syntactic structure. • This process could reflect how we learn the meanings conveyed by syntactic structure. Syntactic structures can convey certain (subtle) emergent properties of events. For example, the double-object dative ("the doctor is giving a patient pills") can convey the successful transfer of possession, whereas its syntactic alternative, the prepositional dative ("the doctor is giving pills to a patient"), conveys just a transfer to a location. Four experiments explore how syntactic structures may become associated with particular semantic content – such as these emergent properties of events. Experiment 1 provides evidence that speakers form associations between syntactic structures and particular event depictions. Experiment 2 shows that these associations also hold for different depictions of the same events. Experiments 3 and 4 implicate representations of the semantic features of events in these associations. Taken together, these results reveal an effect we term syntactic entrainment that is well positioned to reflect the recalibration of the strength of the mappings or associations that allow syntactic structures to convey emergent properties of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the reasons behind the limited dissemination of Adamczewski's Metaoperational approach to language beyond the French academic sphere. The theory, which developed in and by contrastivity between 1976 and 2005, is built on the basic assumption that utterances exhibit on their surface observable traces of the utterer's invisible structuring activity. It is initially derived from a corpus-based approach to English and applied to languages as different as French, Arabic, Turkish, Madagascan, and Kwa languages. The theory's visibility is investigated primarily in relation to its readability and translatability.The findings suggest that visibility retarders and obstructers are more associated with a general context of global scientific publication marked by the hegemony of English as the language of science than with the theoretical framework itself. However, if the model's body of knowledge and conceptual apparatus lend themselves to smooth interlingual transfer, as shown in books of Metaoperational inspirations in Spanish (Matte Bon (1992)), Italian (Gagliardelli (1999)), English (Adamczewski (2002)), and Arabic (Kahlaoui (2010)), the theory's high degree of formalism and its dense metalinguistic description are in some didactic contexts generative of reader frustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined eye movements and comprehension of temporary syntactic ambiguities in individuals with dyslexia, as few studies have focused on sentence-level comprehension in dyslexia. We tested 50 participants with dyslexia and 50 typically developing controls, in order to investigate (a) whether dyslexics have difficulty revising temporary syntactic misinterpretations and (b) underlying cognitive factors (i.e., working memory and processing speed) associated with eye movement differences and comprehension failures. In the sentence comprehension task, participants read subordinate-main structures that were either ambiguous or unambiguous, and we also manipulated the type of verb contained in the subordinate clause (i.e., reflexive or optionally transitive). Results showed a main effect of group on comprehension, in which individuals with dyslexia showed poorer comprehension than typically developing readers. In addition, participants with dyslexia showed longer total reading times on the disambiguating region of syntactically ambiguous sentences. With respect to cognitive factors, working memory was more associated with group differences than was processing speed. Conclusions focus on sentence-level syntactic processing issues in dyslexia (a previously under-researched area) and the relationship between online and offline measures of syntactic ambiguity resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, language processing has been studied in tightly controlled experimental designs. However, in addition to raising questions about the generalisability of results to natural language use, these designs impose limitations on the types of research questions that can be examined. Accordingly, an increasing number of groups are now exploring new methodological approaches for studying language in rich contextual settings. This special issue aims to deliver an overview of the possibilities that are opened up by the use of context and naturalistic experimental designs. These include the ability to examine various - and hitherto understudied - populations, or linguistic phenomena on different levels (e.g. word, sentence, discourse) in the same naturalistic stimulus such as a story. Other special issue contributions focus on addressing the methodological challenges inherent to naturalistic experiments. Additionally, we stress the importance of interdisciplinary work and open sharing of data from naturalistic experiments in the neurobiology of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing methods for readability assessment usually construct inductive classification models to assess the readability of singular text documents based on extracted features, which have been demonstrated to be effective. However, they rarely make use of the interrelationship among documents on readability, which can help increase the accuracy of readability assessment. In this article, we adopt a graph‐based classification method to model and utilize the relationship among documents using the coupled bag‐of‐words model. We propose a word coupling method to build the coupled bag‐of‐words model by estimating the correlation between words on reading difficulty. In addition, we propose a two‐view graph propagation method to make use of both the coupled bag‐of‐words model and the linguistic features. Our method employs a graph merging operation to combine graphs built according to different views, and improves the label propagation by incorporating the ordinal relation among reading levels. Experiments were conducted on both English and Chinese data sets, and the results demonstrate both effectiveness and potential of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Objective: Authors in the health sciences are encouraged to write in the active voice in the belief that this enhances comprehensibility. Hence, the purpose of this study was to compare objectively measured and subjectively perceived comprehensibility of texts in which one voice or the other was highly prevalent. Methods: Objectively rated comprehensibility was obtained by presenting 161 2nd-year chiropractic students with questions pertaining to 2 methods sections of biomedical articles, each presented in its original form with high prevalence of the passive voice, and in a manipulated form with all main verbs in the active voice. The difficulties and sensitivities of questions were compared for the 2 forms of each text. Comprehensibility was obtained by asking students to rate the comprehensibility of authentic sentences from biomedical manuscripts and matched manipulated form in which the voice of the main verb had been changed. Differences in comprehensibility between the 2 texts were assessed with a dependent t test. Results: There were no significant differences in the difficulties or sensitivities of questions pertaining to the 2 original texts written in the passive voice versus the active voice (p > .35 for all comparisons). Students rated sentences written in the passive voice as marginally more comprehensible than sentences written in the active voice (p=.003 per 2-tailed paired t test). Conclusion: The texts written in the active voice were not more comprehensible than texts written in the passive voice. The results of this study do not support editorial guidelines that favor active voice over passive voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processing fluency (the inferred subjective ease with which people process information) has been a topic of increasing research attention in the field of psychology over the past decade. We examined the effect of improving written materials in terms of processing fluency with regard to encouragement for obtaining breast and cervical cancer screening. We randomly assigned 670 women to intervention or control conditions; the 215 who mailed back distributed questionnaires were the study participants. A standard leaflet for cancer screening was mailed to the control group, while the materials mailed to the intervention group were improved in terms of perceptual fluency (e.g., legibility), linguistic fluency (e.g., readability), retrieval fluency (e.g., reducing amount of information) and imagery fluency (having recipients imagine future behavior and events). The screening rate of the intervention group was significantly higher than that of the control group (29.4% vs. 14.2%, χ2 = 7.275, df = 1, p = .007, φ = .184). Improving the processing fluency of written materials may be useful for encouraging individuals to obtain breast and cervical cancer screening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acquired language disorders after stroke are strongly associated with left hemisphere damage. When language difficulties are observed in the context of right hemisphere strokes, patients are usually considered to have atypical functional anatomy. By systematically integrating behavioural and lesion data from brain damaged patients with functional MRI data from neurologically normal participants, we investigated when and why right hemisphere strokes cause language disorders. Experiment 1 studied right-handed patients with unilateral strokes that damaged the right (n = 109) or left (n = 369) hemispheres. The most frequently impaired language task was: auditory sentence-to-picture matching after right hemisphere strokes; and spoken picture description after left hemisphere strokes. For those with auditory sentence-to-picture matching impairments after right hemisphere strokes, the majority (n = 9) had normal performance on tests of perceptual (visual or auditory) and linguistic (semantic, phonological or syntactic) processing. Experiment 2 found that these nine patients had significantly more damage to dorsal parts of the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the right inferior frontal sulcus compared to 75 other patients who also had right hemisphere strokes but were not impaired on the auditory sentence-to-picture matching task. Damage to these right hemisphere regions caused long-term speech comprehension difficulties in 67% of patients. Experiments 3 and 4 used functional MRI in two groups of 25 neurologically normal individuals to show that within the regions identified by Experiment 2, the right inferior frontal sulcus was normally activated by (i) auditory sentence-to-picture matching; and (ii) one-back matching when the demands on linguistic and non-linguistic working memory were high. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the right inferior frontal cortex contributes to linguistic and non-linguistic working memory capacity (executive function) that is needed for normal speech comprehension. Our results link previously unrelated literatures on the role of the right inferior frontal cortex in executive processing and the role of executive processing in sentence comprehension; which in turn helps to explain why right inferior frontal activity has previously been reported to increase during recovery of language function after left hemisphere stroke. The clinical relevance of our findings is that the detrimental effect of right hemisphere strokes on language is (i) much greater than expected; (ii) frequently observed after damage to the right inferior frontal sulcus; (iii) task dependent; (iv) different to the type of impairments observed after left hemisphere strokes; and (v) can result in long-lasting deficits that are (vi) not the consequence of atypical language lateralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the author examined potential mediators of the negative relationship between the absolute difference in items’ lengths and their inter-item correlation size. Fifty-two randomly ordered items from five personality scales were administered to 622 university students, and 46 respondents from a survey website rated the items’ readability, clarity, and generality. Based on prior research, the author hypothesized that the difference in mean ratings of item pairs’ generality, but not readability or clarity, would mediate the negative relationship between the difference in the item pairs’ lengths and their inter-item correlation size. In pairs of items, difference in item length was negatively correlated with inter-item correlation size. However, only difference in ratings of generality, not readability or clarity, was associated with correlation size, and as predicted, it mediated the relationship between item length and correlation size. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines thesentence processing ability of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subtypes. In addition to standard MCI neuropsychological tests, an experimental approach was applied to assess language. 133 people (93 MCI/40 controls) participated in novel computerized sentence processing tasks. Results presented statistically significant differences between MCI/controls andMCI subtypes (ANOVA):(a) duration F(2,92) = 19.259,p < .001) in sentence construction; (b) correct answers (F(2, 89) = 8.560,p < .001) and duration (F2,89) = 15.525,p < .001)in text comprehension; (c) correct answers (F(2, 92) = 8.975,p < .001) andduration (F(2, 92) = 4.360,p = .016) in metaphoric sentences comprehension; (d) correct answers (F(2, 92) = 12.836,p < .001) andduration (F(2, 92) = 10.974,p < .001) in verb form generation. Subtle changes in MCIsubtypes could affect sentence processing and provide useful information for cognitive decline risk estimation and screening purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Patient information leaflet (PIL) which accompanies medicinal products and informs patients about dosage, side effects, etc., is known as a tool which empowers patients to be more involved in making decisions related to their medications and health. In recent years, policy makers have paid much attention to PIL and its lay-friendliness i.e. being clear,explicit, and easy to read and understand. In various countries, PIL is known as a legal genre and must be prepared in understandable language. The present study aimed to situate PIL within its institutional context and investigate the importance is given to the lay-friendliness of PIL in Iran. Methods: In this observational study, official website of Food and Drug Administration of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IFDA) was consulted. Iran's rules and regulations, legal requirements,linked to PIL production and translation were introduced and discussed in relation to lay-friendliness.. Results: Limited legislation relevant for the production and translation of lay-friendly PIL was found. The IFDA has not issued any documents or guidelines which exclusively concern lay- friendliness of PIL. Any methods which can assess lay-friendliness in original and translated PILs were not observed. Conclusion: The IFDA, the authoritative body in charge of legislation concerning PIL, has given limited importance to the language used in PIL and its lay-friendliness, witnessed by the limited legislation which is relevant for the production and translation of easy-to-understand PIL. It is not clear that how the IFDA assesses quality and lay-friendliness of original and translated PILs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehenders' perception of the world is mediated by the mental models they construct. During discourse processing, incoming information allows comprehenders to update their model of the events being described. At the same time, comprehenders use these models to generate expectations about who or what will be mentioned next. The temporal dynamics of this interdependence between language processing and mental event representation has been difficult to disentangle. The present visual world eye-tracking experiment measures listeners' coreference expectations during an intersentential pause between a sentence about a transfer-of-possession event and a continuation mentioning either its Source or Goal. We found a temporally dispersed but sustained preference for fixating the Goal that was significantly greater when the event was described as completed rather than incomplete (passed versus was passing). This aligns with reported offline sensitivity to event structure, as conveyed via verb aspect, and provides new evidence that our mental model of an event leads to early and, crucially, proactive expectations about subsequent mention in the upcoming discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person's gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of sentences with varying word order and pronoun resolution by means of self-paced reading and an antecedent choice task, respectively. Our results show that linguistic as well as visual salience cues immediately speeded up reading times of sentences mentioning the salient referent first. In contrast, for pronoun resolution, linguistic and visual cues modulated antecedent choice preferences less congruently. In sum, our findings speak in favour of a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, substantiating that salient information delivered via language as well as the visual environment is integrated in the current mental representation of the discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentences such as "The girls read a book" can lead to multiple interpretations: They could be reading the same book (collective) or they could each be reading their own book (distributive). In ambiguous contexts, adults prefer the collective interpretation, and preschool children show a slight bias for a distributive interpretation. The current research investigated whether conceptual factors (number of actors) influences interpretations of these kinds of predicates. The data with children show a stronger collective bias when there are four actors compared to two actors. This may be because children are more likely to conceptualize groups of four (vs. two) as sets rather than collections of individuals. These data are discussed with reference to research on visual and conceptual integration abilities, showing that children lag behind in their ability to combine components into a whole in comparison to parsing objects into their component parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three eye movement experiments investigated the processing of the syntactic ambiguity in strings such as the information that the health department provided , where the that -clause can be either a relative clause (RC) or the start of a nominal complement clause (CC; the information that the health department provided a cure ). The experiments tested the prediction that comprehenders should avoid the RC analysis because it involves an unforced filler-gap dependency. Readers showed difficulty upon disambiguation toward the RC analysis, and showed facilitated processing of the ambiguous material itself when the CC analysis was available; both patterns suggest rapid initial adoption of the CC analysis in preference to the RC analysis. The strength of the bias of a specific head noun (e.g., information ) to appear with a CC did not modulate these effects, nor were these effects reliably modulated by the tendency of an ambiguous string to be completed off-line as a CC or an RC. These results add to the evidence that structural principles guide the processing of filler-gap dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to determine whether cumulative structural priming effects and trial-to-trial lexically-mediated priming effects are produced by the same mechanism in comprehension. Participants took part in a five-session eye tracking study where they read reduced-relative prime-target pairs with the same initial verb. Half of the verbs in these sentences were repeated across the five sessions and half were novel to each session. Total fixation times on the syntactically challenging parts of prime sentences decreased across sessions, suggesting participants implicitly learned the structure. Additional priming was also observed at the critical regions of the target sentences, and the magnitude of this effect did not change over the five sessions. These finding suggests long-lived adaptation to structure and short-lived lexically-mediated priming effects are caused by separate mechanisms in comprehension. A dual mechanism account of syntactic priming effects can best reconcile these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical decision-making capacity ( MDC) is known to decline in individuals with Alzheimer's disease ( AD). The vignette method uses hypothetical information as a prerequisite for measuring the capacity to make well-informed decisions to clinical trials. Our aim was to investigate if adapted vignettes can help individuals with mild AD to assimilate information, make decisions and express them in an understandable way, compared to corresponding decisions based on linguistically more demanding vignettes, as measured by the Swedish Linguistic Instrument for Medical Decision-making ( LIMD). Two vignettes from LIMD were altered linguistically with the aim to facilitate understanding for individuals with AD. An experimental within-subject design was used to study the influence on MDC of readability (original/adapted vignettes) and content (two different clinical trials). We included 24 patients with mild AD in this prospective study, which read all four vignettes along with a few other tests. This allowed us to investigate the association between MDC and cognitive function. Adapted vignettes did not yield significant differences regarding MDC as compared with original vignettes using a two-way repeated measures analysis of variance. A difference was found between the two clinical trials where LIMD score was significantly higher for Kidney disease than hypertension vignettes. Our results indicate that adapted vignettes may not improve MDC for individuals with mild AD. MDC was affected by which clinical trial the vignettes regarded, which implies that other factors affecting MDC need to be investigated, like length of text and vocabulary used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plural predications (e.g., "the boxes are heavy") are common sources of ambiguity in everyday language, allowing both distributive and collective interpretations (e.g., the boxes each are heavy vs. the boxes together are heavy). This paper investigates the role of context in the disambiguation of plural predication. We address the key phenomenon of "stubborn distributivity," whereby certain predicates (e.g., big, tall) are claimed to lack collective interpretations altogether. We first validate a new methodology for measuring the interpretation of plural predications. Using this method, we then analyze naturally-occurring plural predications from corpora. We find a role of context, but no evidence of a distinct class of predicates that resists collective interpretations. We further explore the role of context in our final experiments, showing that both the predictability of properties and the knowledgeability of the speaker affect disambiguation. This suggests a pragmatic account of how ambiguous plural predications are interpreted. In particular, stubbornly distributive predicates are so because the collective properties they name are unpredictable, or unstable, in most contexts; this unpredictability results in a noisy collective interpretation, something speakers and listeners recognize as ineffective for communicating efficiently about their world. We formalize the pragmatics of utterance disambiguation within the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research documents impaired language among children with prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) relative to nondrug exposed (NDE) children, suggesting that cocaine alters development of neurobiological systems that support language. The current study examines behavioral and neural (electrophysiological) indices of language function in older adolescents. Specifically, we compare performance of PCE (N = 59) and NDE (N = 51) adolescents on a battery of cognitive and linguistic assessments that tap word reading, reading comprehension, semantic and grammatical processing, and IQ. In addition, we examine event related potential (ERP) responses in in a subset of these children across three experimental tasks that examine word level phonological processing (rhyme priming), word level semantic processing (semantic priming), and sentence level semantic processing (semantic anomaly). Findings reveal deficits across a number of reading and language assessments, after controlling for socioeconomic status and exposure to other substances. Additionally, ERP data reveal atypical orthography to phonology mapping (reduced N1/P2 response) and atypical rhyme and semantic processing (N400 response). These findings suggest that PCE continues to impact language and reading skills into the late teenage years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sentences that involve two or more plural expressions, such as numerical expressions, give rise to systematic ambiguities. For example, the sentence Two boys have three balloons can either mean that there are two boys who, between them, have three balloons ( cumulative reading ) or that there are two boys who each have three balloons ( distributive reading ). In this paper, we report the results of three experiments which show that the distributive/cumulative ambiguity can give rise to priming effects . That is, when subjects perform a sentence-picture matching task which creates a strong bias towards one of the two types of readings, they are more likely to access the very same type of interpretation when subsequently presented with a different sentence-picture pair which does not create the same bias. This finding suggests that the abstract constructs that linguists posit to account for different types of readings describe some real features of mental representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second language learners of English occasionally establish gender agreement between a possessive determiner and the local noun that follows it, rather than with its target antecedent (*“Maryi loves hisi brother”). The production and comprehension profiles of adult Mandarin second language learners of English and monolingual English-speaking children were examined to establish (a) if such errors result from an inherent tendency to establish agreement locally within the noun phrase or rather from transfer of first language agreement procedures, and (b) if these errors are production specific or rather reflect nontarget grammatical representations, thus also affecting comprehension. The results of the elicited production portion of the study support the hypothesis that gender agreement errors in learners’ production of possessives result from a generalized tendency to establish local agreement. The results of the comprehension portion of the study suggest that the observed tendency for local agreement within the noun phrase is production specific and does not characterize learners’ grammatical representations as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Psycholinguistic research has shown that sentence processing is incremental (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999). In Japanese, a verb-final language, native speakers use case markers to incrementally assign thematic roles and predictively activate a structural representation of upcoming linguistic items. This study examined whether second-language learners of Japanese, guided by case markers, generate predictions as to whether the upcoming verb involves the active or passive voice. The results show that the native speakers made predictive eye movements before the verb, but the learners did not; the learners were less efficient in using case-marker cues than the native speakers and relied more on verb morphology information. These results suggest that case markers guide thematic role assignments, expediting the processing for Japanese native speakers. Learners may depend more on information from the verb to compensate for the inefficiency in case-marker-driven predictive processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perspective is a crucial feature for communicating about events. Yet it is unclear how linguistically encoded perspective relates to cognitive perspective taking. Here, we tested the effect of perspective taking with short literary stories. Participants listened to stories with 1st or 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist, while undergoing fMRI. When comparing action events with 1st and 3rd person pronouns, we found no evidence for a neural dissociation depending on the pronoun. A split sample approach based on the self-reported experience of perspective taking revealed 3 comprehension preferences. One group showed a strong 1st person preference, another a strong 3rd person preference, while a third group engaged in 1st and 3rd person perspective taking simultaneously. Comparing brain activations of the groups revealed different neural networks. Our results suggest that comprehension is perspective dependent, but not on the perspective suggested by the text, but on the reader's (situational) preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although benign, rolandic epilepsy (RE) or benign childhood epilepsy with centro-temporal spikes is often associated with language impairment. Recently, fronto-rolandic EEG abnormalities have been described in children with developmental dysphasia (DD), suggesting an interaction between language impairment and interictal epileptiform discharges. To investigate if a behavioral-linguistic continuum between RE and DD exists, a clinical prospective study was carried out to evaluate the language profile of 15 children with RE and 22 children with DD. Language skills were assessed using an extensive, standardized test battery. Language was found to be impaired in both study groups, however RE and DD were associated with distinct language impairment profiles. Children with RE had difficulties with sentence comprehension, semantic verbal fluency and auditory short-term memory, which are unrelated to age of epilepsy onset and laterality of epileptic focus. In children with DD, sentence comprehension and verbal fluency were among their relative strengths, whereas sentence and lexical production constituted relative weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that communicative-pragmatic ability, as well as executive functions (EF) and Theory of Mind (ToM), may be impaired in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, the role of such cognitive deficits in explaining communicative-pragmatic difficulty in TBI has still not been fully investigated. The study examined the relationship between EF (working memory, planning and flexibility) and ToM and communicative-pragmatic impairment in patients with TBI. 30 individuals with TBI and 30 healthy controls were assessed using the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo), and a set of cognitive, EF and ToM, tasks. The results showed that TBI participants performed poorly in comprehension and production tasks in the ABaCo, using both linguistic and extralinguistic means of expression, and that they were impaired in EF and ToM abilities. Cognitive difficulties were able to predict the pragmatic performance of TBI individuals, with both executive functions and ToM contributing to explaining patients' scores on the ABaCo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]