O desenvolvimento lexical como potenciador do processo de aquisição da leitura em contexto do 1º. Ciclo do Ensino Básico

Trabalho de Projeto apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências da Educação: área de especialização em Animação da Leitura.

Effects of efficient fronto-temporal circuitry on lexical ambiguity resolution: converging evidence from cross-age comparisons in eye-tracking and ERP data

Eye-tracking was used to examine how younger and older adults use syntactic and semantic information to disambiguate noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). We find that young adults exhibit inflated first fixations to NV-homographs when only syntactic cues are available for disambiguation (i.e., in syntactic prose). This effect is eliminated with the addition of disambiguating semantic information. Older adults (60+) as a group fail to show the first fixation effect in syntactic prose; they instead reread NV homographs longer. This pattern mirrors that in prior event-related potential work (Lee & Federmeier, 2009, 2011), which reported a sustained frontal negativity to NV-homographs in syntactic prose for young adults, which was eliminated by semantic constraints. The frontal negativity was not observed in older adults as a group, although older adults with high verbal fluency showed the young-like pattern. Analyses of individual differences in eye-tracking patterns revealed a similar effect of verbal fluency in both young and older adults: high verbal fluency groups of both ages show larger first fixation effects, while low verbal fluency groups show larger downstream costs (rereading and/or refixating NV homographs). Jointly, the eye-tracking and ERP data suggest that effortful meaning selection recruits frontal brain areas important for suppressing contextually inappropriate meanings, which also slows eye movements. Efficacy of fronto-temporal circuitry, as captured by verbal fluency, predicts the success of engaging these mechanisms in both young and older adults. Failure to recruit these processes requires compensatory rereading or leads to comprehension failures (Lee & Federmeier, in press).

A negação nos provérbios: uma abordagem na aula de português

Com a presente dissertação pretendemos demonstrar que a abordagem da negação, enquanto processo linguístico, deverá contemplar a amplitude das suas realizações sintáticas, morfológicas, lexicais e enunciativas. Pela sua preponderância na interação discursiva, consideramos fundamental sistematizar os mecanismos através dos quais este sistema se realiza na norma do português europeu e demonstrar a sua ocorrência num corpus amplo, autêntico e facilmente reconhecido pela maioria dos falantes do português. Entendendo os provérbios portugueses como documentos de elevado interesse cultural e linguístico, examinamos os diversos processos que, num conjunto selecionado de textos, permitem marcar os valores negativos. Neste estudo, é possível observar que as construções que compõem os textos proverbiais portugueses possuem um enorme potencial enunciativo que se manifesta, sobretudo, ao nível da interpretação, da inferência e da argumentação. Seguidamente, com o intuito de ajudar a promover as competências comunicativas dos alunos, perspetivamos uma abordagem destas temáticas ao longo da escolaridade obrigatória, assente nas orientações que emanam do Programa e das Metas Curriculares de Português, atualmente, em vigor. Os exercícios propostos e aplicados são meramente ilustrativos, todavia as conclusões decorrentes podem ser um indicador válido para futuras atuações.

Cross-linguistic influences in the phonetic and lexical component in English, Baque and Spanish: Contextual and individual factors in language acquisition and attrition.

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Carbon reduction activism in the UK: lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change

This article examines discourses associated with a new environmental movement, “Carbon Rationing Action Groups” (CRAGs). This case study is intended to contribute to a wider investigation of the emergence of a new type of language used to debate climate change mitigation. Advice on how to reduce one's “carbon footprint,” for example, is provided almost daily. Much of this advice is framed by the use of metaphors and “carbon compounds”—lexical combinations of at least two roots—such as “carbon finance” or “low carbon diet.” The study uses a combination of tools from frame analysis and lexical pragmatics within the general framework of ecolinguistics to compare and contrast language use on the CRAGs' website with press coverage reporting on them. The analysis shows how the use of such lexical carbon compounds enables and facilitates different types of metaphorical frames such as dieting, finance and tax paying, war time rationing, and religious imperatives in the two corpora.

A longitudinal study on the lexical sophistication and sentence length in Finnish upper secondary school students’ English compositions.

The aim of the present study was to find out the level of lexical sophistication and the mean length of sentences used in compositions written by Finnish upper secondary school students of English. In addition, the present study investigated the possible relationship between the two abovementioned variables. The study at hand was longitudinal: as data, a set of 50 compositions were collected in 2014 from the same writers both in the first and the final year of upper secondary school, 25 in the first year and 25 in the final year. In the analysis, an internet-based program called VocabProfile was utilized in order to find out the lexical sophistication of the investigated students. To find out the mean length of sentence and the relationship between these two, I used Microsoft Excel. Findings of the present study include a minor decrease in the use of less frequent vocabulary and a slight increase in the use of the two most frequently appearing thousand words of English: both of these changes were 1.99 percentage points. As for the mean length of sentence, it grew by 1.28 words during upper secondary school. As for the relationship between the two variables, no clear correlations could be found. It became, however, relatively clear that the topic of the composition might have an effect on the results. Thus more research is needed to fully see the effect of lexical sophistication and mean length of sentence on one another. In addition, future research would benefit greatly if all investigated students wrote on the same topic.

Determinar os níveis de conhecimento linguístico-lexical à entrada e saída do 1º ano de escolaridade e a sua influência na aprendizagem da leitura e escrita

Esta tese, elaborada a partir do nosso interesse em determinar os níveis de conhecimento linguístico das crianças à entrada e saída do primeiro ano de escolaridade, teve como objetivo verificar de que forma esse conhecimento influencia a aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita. Para tal, realizámos parte de dois testes que permitem avaliar as competências linguísticas de crianças que possuem o Português como Língua Materna, o Teste de Identificação de Competências Linguísticas (TICL), de Fernanda Leopoldina Viana (2004) e o Teste de Avaliação da Linguagem Oral (TALO), de Inês Sim-Sim (2003) numa turma a iniciar e a concluir o primeiro ano de escolaridade. Com a análise de dados almejamos concluir que os alunos que apresentam um capital lexical mais variado à entrada no primeiro Ciclo do Ensino Básico apresentam melhores resultados na aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita.

Um sistema para a inferência de variáveis usando redes neurais artificiais

This work aims to obtain a low-cost virtual sensor to estimate the quality of LPG. For the acquisition of data from a distillation tower, software HYSYS ® was used to simulate chemical processes. These data will be used for training and validation of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). This network will aim to estimate from available simulated variables such as temperature, pressure and discharge flow of a distillation tower, the mole fraction of pentane present in LPG. Thus, allowing a better control of product quality

VARIAÇÃO LEXICAL: UM OLHAR PARA A FORMAÇÃO CULTURAL DO FALANTE

O Oeste paranaense, última área do Estado do Paraná a ser colonizada, teve na sua história a presença de grupos distintos que povoaram as localidades em diferentes momentos e, por isso, esta região pode ser descrita pelo seu polimorfismo linguístico. Esses distintos momentos do povoamento da região culminaram, de acordo com Busse (2010), na transferência, na troca e na adoção de elementos da cultura e também da língua dos diferentes grupos que aqui se reuniram. A investigação sobre as variantes lexicais podem fornecer uma percepção do percurso da história das variantes lexicais selecionadas, buscando definir quais as variantes trazidas pelos grupos de origem e quais as variantes trazidas pelos grupos que migraram para essa região recentemente encontram-se mais preservadas, considerando que as variantes trazidas pelos primeiros migrantes (sulistas) são as mais prestigiadas e aquelas trazidas pelos migrantes mais recentes (paulistas e mineiros) são as formas menos prestigiadas (inovadoras) da língua e assim, por meio da descrição das variantes semântico-lexicais, identificaremos qual a geração, a faixa etária e o sexo do grupo que preserva as formas dos grupos de origem.

ALTERNATION ON LEXICAL ITEMS OF THE BRASILDEUTSCH

Nowadays, studies about the Brasildeutsch still bring into question a lot of controversial discussions concerning to the use of German-speaking in inter-ethnic communities. In our country, mostly in the south, but especially in the community of Marechal Cândido Rondon, Paraná, we still have, in the dialogues of German immigrant speakers and their descendents, the use of Brasildeutsch lexicon-phonemics neologisms, which appears in verbal interactions of lexical alternations by means of German formal speaking juxtaposition with regional/local dialects of the mother tongue and the Brazilian-Portuguese speaking. In this way, we aim to discuss the Brasildeutsch term and the use of lexical items on musical instruments in the situations of verbal interactions of these German immigrants.

O COMPORTAMENTO SEMÂNTICO DO PREFIXO "DES-": QUESTÕES DE POLISSEMIA E PRODUTIVIDADE LEXICAL

Este artigo desenvolve uma discussão acerca da semântica dos itens lexicais. Mais exatamente, o objetivo aqui é apresentar alguns resultados obtidos com o desenvolvimento de pesquisa com base no comportamento semântico do prefixo des-. São observados não apenas os vários sentidos admitidos pelo morfema, mas também a questão da sua produtividade lexical. As análises realizadas tomam por referência teórica tanto autores consagrados no âmbito das gramáticas tradicionais como estudos desenvolvidos pela Linguística Teórica. Fez-se um levantamento dos valores semânticos atribuídos ao prefixo des- a fim de que se possam considerar esses teores e propor uma nova sistematização de possibilidades semânticas para o morfema pesquisado. O material utilizado para as análises foi o jornal Observatório da Imprensa em versão online. Vale lembrar que se consideram, neste estudo, uma discussão sobre os significados da base, o significado que o prefixo des- empresta à base com a qual se coliga e o ambiente de ocorrência da palavra prefixada.

O Campo Lexical Meios de Transporte na Libras

Resumo: Ao se organizar dicionários bilíngues, uma das dificuldades é a não equivalência dos itens lexicais das línguas com relação ao processo de formação lexical porque as perspectivas culturais interferem na relação linguagem-pensamento que moldam as relações fono-morfossintático-discursiva de cada língua. Refletindo sobre essa questão como relação a línguas de modalidades diferentes, como a Libras e a Língua Portuguesa, é possível constatar que nem sempre é possível estabelecer uma equivalência entre os seus itens léxicas porque eles podem se materializar como lexia simples ou composta, mas podem ser expressões lexicalizadas. Por isso, nesse artigo, pretendo refletir sobre a possibilidade de certas configurações de mãos serem lexemas que podem se constituir como radicais ou como classificadores em de itens lexicais e em expressões lexicalizadas que podem ser agrupados em um determinado campo léxico-semântico. A partir desse enfoque, será realizada uma análise do conjunto de lexias para meios de transportes na Libras, disponibilizado no link ASSUNTO do Dicionário da Língua Brasileira de Sinais - INES.

Peer to peer English/Chinese cross-language information retrieval

Peer to peer systems have been widely used in the internet. However, most of the peer to peer information systems are still missing some of the important features, for example cross-language IR (Information Retrieval) and collection selection / fusion features. Cross-language IR is the state-of-art research area in IR research community. It has not been used in any real world IR systems yet. Cross-language IR has the ability to issue a query in one language and receive documents in other languages. In typical peer to peer environment, users are from multiple countries. Their collections are definitely in multiple languages. Cross-language IR can help users to find documents more easily. E.g. many Chinese researchers will search research papers in both Chinese and English. With Cross-language IR, they can do one query in Chinese and get documents in two languages. The Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) problem is one of the key research areas in crosslanguage information retrieval. In recent years, web mining was shown to be one of the effective approaches to solving this problem. However, how to extract Multiword Lexical Units (MLUs) from the web content and how to select the correct translations from the extracted candidate MLUs are still two difficult problems in web mining based automated translation approaches. Discovering resource descriptions and merging results obtained from remote search engines are two key issues in distributed information retrieval studies. In uncooperative environments, query-based sampling and normalized-score based merging strategies are well-known approaches to solve such problems. However, such approaches only consider the content of the remote database but do not consider the retrieval performance of the remote search engine. This thesis presents research on building a peer to peer IR system with crosslanguage IR and advance collection profiling technique for fusion features. Particularly, this thesis first presents a new Chinese term measurement and new Chinese MLU extraction process that works well on small corpora. An approach to selection of MLUs in a more accurate manner is also presented. After that, this thesis proposes a collection profiling strategy which can discover not only collection content but also retrieval performance of the remote search engine. Based on collection profiling, a web-based query classification method and two collection fusion approaches are developed and presented in this thesis. Our experiments show that the proposed strategies are effective in merging results in uncooperative peer to peer environments. Here, an uncooperative environment is defined as each peer in the system is autonomous. Peer like to share documents but they do not share collection statistics. This environment is a typical peer to peer IR environment. Finally, all those approaches are grouped together to build up a secure peer to peer multilingual IR system that cooperates through X.509 and email system.

Neurolinguistic contributions to understanding the bilingual mental lexicon

Introduction Many bilinguals will have had the experience of unintentionally reading something in a language other than the intended one (e.g. MUG to mean mosquito in Dutch rather than a receptacle for a hot drink, as one of the possible intended English meanings), of finding themselves blocked on a word for which many alternatives suggest themselves (but, somewhat annoyingly, not in the right language), of their accent changing when stressed or tired and, occasionally, of starting to speak in a language that is not understood by those around them. These instances where lexical access appears compromised and control over language behavior is reduced hint at the intricate structure of the bilingual lexical architecture and the complexity of the processes by which knowledge is accessed and retrieved. While bilinguals might tend to blame word finding and other language problems on their bilinguality, these difficulties per se are not unique to the bilingual population. However, what is unique, and yet far more common than is appreciated by monolinguals, is the cognitive architecture that subserves bilingual language processing. With bilingualism (and multilingualism) the rule rather than the exception (Grosjean, 1982), this architecture may well be the default structure of the language processing system. As such, it is critical that we understand more fully not only how the processing of more than one language is subserved by the brain, but also how this understanding furthers our knowledge of the cognitive architecture that encapsulates the bilingual mental lexicon. The neurolinguistic approach to bilingualism focuses on determining the manner in which the two (or more) languages are stored in the brain and how they are differentially (or similarly) processed. The underlying assumption is that the acquisition of more than one language requires at the very least a change to or expansion of the existing lexicon, if not the formation of language-specific components, and this is likely to manifest in some way at the physiological level. There are many sources of information, ranging from data on bilingual aphasic patients (Paradis, 1977, 1985, 1997) to lateralization (Vaid, 1983; see Hull & Vaid, 2006, for a review), recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs) (e.g. Ardal et al., 1990; Phillips et al., 2006), and positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of neurologically intact bilinguals (see Indefrey, 2006; Vaid & Hull, 2002, for reviews). Following the consideration of methodological issues and interpretative limitations that characterize these approaches, the chapter focuses on how the application of these approaches has furthered our understanding of (1) selectivity of bilingual lexical access, (2) distinctions between word types in the bilingual lexicon and (3) control processes that enable language selection.

Thai word segmentation with hidden Markov Model and decision tree

The Thai written language is one of the languages that does not have word boundaries. In order to discover the meaning of the document, all texts must be separated into syllables, words, sentences, and paragraphs. This paper develops a novel method to segment the Thai text by combining a non-dictionary based technique with a dictionary-based technique. This method first applies the Thai language grammar rules to the text for identifying syllables. The hidden Markov model is then used for merging possible syllables into words. The identified words are verified with a lexical dictionary and a decision tree is employed to discover the words unidentified by the lexical dictionary. Documents used in the litigation process of Thai court proceedings have been used in experiments. The results which are segmented words, obtained by the proposed method outperform the results obtained by other existing methods.