From "ecological tourism" to "ecotourism": lexical analysis of an emerging tourism

From ecological tourism to ecotourism: lexical analysis of an emerging tourism. This article deals with the lexicon created in connection with a recent form of tourism: the ecological tourism or ecotourism. The rise of this type of tourism encourages the creation of new concepts and products that are named with new words and expressions with different procedures of formation. From the name itself ecotourism, then expressed as the acronym ecotourism, we analyze the formation of other related words, as well as their formal variation and use. For this, we have worked with a specific corpus of electronic tourist texts and different digital sources and databases.

Improving Readability of Swedish Electronic Health Records through Lexical Simplification : First Results

This paper describes part of an ongoing effort to improve the readability of Swedish electronic health records (EHRs). An EHR contains systematic documentation of a single patient’s medical history across time, entered by healthcare professionals with the purpose of enabling safe and informed care. Linguistically, medical records exemplify a highly specialised domain, which can be superficially characterised as having telegraphic sentences involving displaced or missing words, abundant abbreviations, spelling variations including misspellings, and terminology. We report results on lexical simplification of Swedish EHRs, by which we mean detecting the unknown, out-ofdictionary words and trying to resolve them either as compounded known words, abbreviations or misspellings.

Bilingual Lexical Access in Reading : Analyzing the Effect of Semantic Context on Non-Selective Access in Bilingual Memory

Recent empirical studies about the neurological executive nature of reading in bilinguals differ in their evaluations of the degree of selective manifestation in lexical access as implicated by data from early and late reading measures in the eye-tracking paradigm. Currently two scenarios are plausible: (1) Lexical access in reading is fundamentally language non-selective and top-down effects from semantic context can influence the degree of selectivity in lexical access; (2) Cross-lingual lexical activation is actuated via bottom-up processes without being affected by top-down effects from sentence context. In an attempt to test these hypotheses empirically, this study analyzed reader-text events arising when cognate facilitation and semantic constraint interact in a 22 factorially designed experiment tracking the eye movements of 26 Swedish-English bilinguals reading in their L2. Stimulus conditions consisted of high- and low-constraint sentences embedded with either a cognate or a non-cognate control word. The results showed clear signs of cognate facilitation in both early and late reading measures and in either sentence conditions. This evidence in favour of the non-selective hypothesis indicates that the manifestation of non-selective lexical access in reading is not constrained by top-down effects from semantic context.

Lexical Interference in Semantic Processing of Simple Words: Implications for Brand Names

This study provides evidence for a Stroop-like interference effect in word recognition. Based on phonologic and semantic properties of simple words, participants who performed a same/different word-recognition task exhibited a significant response latency increase when word pairs (e.g., POLL, ROD) featured a comparison word (POLL) that was a homonym of a synonym (pole) of the target word (ROD). These results support a parallel-processing framework of lexical decision making, in which activation of the pathways to word recognition may occur at different levels automatically and in parallel. A subset of simple words that are also brand names was examined and exhibited this same interference. Implications for word recognition theory and practical implications for strategic marketing are discussed.

The role of metalinguistic awareness and of L2 proficiency in positive lexical transfer from English (L2) to German (L3) by French-speaking Quebeckers

Il a été avancé que des apprenants expérimentés développeraient des niveaux élevés de conscience métalinguistique (MLA), ce qui leur faciliterait l’apprentissage de langues subséquentes (p.ex., Singleton & Aronin, 2007). De plus, des chercheurs dans le domaine de l’acquisition des langues tierces insistent sur les influences positives qu’exercent les langues précédemment apprises sur l’apprentissage formel d’une langue étrangère (p.ex., Cenoz & Gorter, 2015), et proposent de délaisser le regard traditionnel qui mettait l’accent sur l’interférence à l’origine des erreurs des apprenants pour opter pour une vision plus large et positive de l’interaction entre les langues. Il a été démontré que la similarité typologique ainsi que la compétence dans la langue source influence tous les types de transfert (p.ex., Ringbom, 1987, 2007). Cependant, le défi méthodologique de déterminer, à la fois l’usage pertinent d’une langue cible en tant que résultat d’une influence translinguistique (p.ex., Falk & Bardel, 2010) et d’établir le rôle crucial de la MLA dans l’activation consciente de mots ou de constructions reliés à travers différentes langues, demeure. La présente étude avait pour but de relever ce double défi en faisant appel à des protocoles oraux (TAPs) pour examiner le transfert positif de l’anglais (L2) vers l’allemand (L3) chez des Québécois francophones après cinq semaines d’enseignement formel de la L3. Les participants ont été soumis à une tâche de traduction développée aux fins de la présente étude. Les 42 items ont été sélectionnés sur la base de jugements de similarité et d’imagibilité ainsi que de fréquence des mots provenant d’une étude de cognats allemands-anglais (Friel & Kennison, 2001). Les participants devaient réfléchir à voix haute pendant qu’ils traduisaient des mots inconnus de l’allemand (L3) vers le français (L1). Le transfert positif a été opérationnalisé par des traductions correctes qui étaient basées sur un cognat anglais. La MLA a été mesurée par le biais du THAM (Test d’habiletés métalinguistiques) (Pinto & El Euch, 2015) ainsi que par l’analyse des TAPs. Les niveaux de compétence en anglais ont été établis sur la base du Michigan Test (Corrigan et al., 1979), tandis que les niveaux d’exposition ainsi que l’intérêt envers la langue et la culture allemandes ont été mesurés à l’aide d’un questionnaire. Une analyse fine des TAPs a révélé de la variabilité inter- et intra-individuelle dans l’activation consciente du vocabulaire en L2, tout en permettant l’identification de niveaux distincts de prise de conscience. Deux modèles indépendants de régressions logistiques ont permis d’identifier les deux dimensions de MLA comme prédicteurs de transfert positif. Le premier modèle, dans lequel le THAM était la mesure exclusive de MLA, a déterminé cette dimension réflexive comme principal prédicteur, suivie de la compétence en anglais, tandis qu’aucune des autres variables indépendantes pouvait prédire le transfert positif de l’anglais. Dans le second modèle, incluant le THAM ainsi que les TAPs comme mesures complémentaires de MLA, la dimension appliquée de MLA, telle que mesurée par les TAPs, était de loin le prédicteur principal, suivie de la dimension réflexive, telle que mesurée par le THAM, tandis que la compétence en anglais ne figurait plus parmi les facteurs ayant une influence significative sur la variable réponse. Bien que la verbalisation puisse avoir influencé la performance dans une certaine mesure, nos observations mettent en évidence la contribution précieuse de données introspectives comme complément aux résultats basés sur des caractéristiques purement linguistiques du transfert. Nos analyses soulignent la complexité des processus métalinguistiques et des stratégies individuelles, ce qui reflète une perspective dynamique du multilinguisme (p.ex., Jessner, 2008).

Cultural and linguistic context and lexical inferencing in English language learning: A case study

In an increasingly multilingual world, English language has kept a marked predominance as a global language. In many countries, English is the primary choice for foreign language learning. There is a long history of research in English language learning. The same applies for research in reading. A main interest since the 1970s has been the reading strategy defined as inferencing or guessing the meaning of unknown words from context. Inferencing has ben widely researched, however, the results and conclusions seem to be mixed. While some agree that inferencing is a useful strategy, others doubt its usefulness. Nevertheless, most of the research seem to agree that the cultural background affects comprehension and inferencing. While most of these studies have been done with texts and contexts created by the researches, little has been done using natural prose. The present study will attempt to further clarify the process of inferencing and the effects of the text’s cultural context and the linguistic background of the reader using a text that has not been created by the researcher. The participants of the study are 40 international students from Turku, Finland. Their linguistic background was obtained through a questionnaire and proved to be diverse. Think aloud protocols were performed to investigate their inferencing process and find connections between their inferences, comments, the text, and their linguistic background. The results show that: some inferences were made based on the participants’ world knowledge, experience, other languages, and English language knowledge; other inferences and comments were made based on the text, its use of language and vocabulary, and few cues provided by the author. The results from the present study and previous research seem to show that: 1) linguistic background is a source of information for inferencing but is not a major source; 2) the cultural context of the text affected the inferences made by the participants according to their closeness or distance from it.

Quichua-Spanish language contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: revisiting media lengua syncretic language practices

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. Overall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. Overall, 58% of the content words, 39% of the basic vocabulary, and 50% of the subject pronouns in the Salcedo corpus were derived from Spanish. When compared to Muysken’s description of highlander Quichua in the 1970’s, Spanish loanwords have more than doubled in each category. The overall level of Spanish loanwords in Salcedo Quichua has grown to a level between highlander Quichua in the 1970’s and Media Lengua. Similar to Spanish’s lexical influence in Media Lengua, the increase of Spanish borrowings in today’s rural Quichua can be seen in non-basic and basic vocabularies as well as the subject pronoun system. Significantly, most of the growth has occurred through forms of adlexification i.e., doublets, well-established borrowings, and cultural borrowings, suggesting that ‘ordinary’ lexical borrowing is also capable of producing Media Lengua-type sentences. I approach the second objective by investigating two separate phenomena related to structural convergence. The first examines the complex verbal constructions that have developed in Quichua through Spanish loan translations while the second describes the type of Quichua particles that are attached to Spanish lexemes while speaking Spanish. The calquing of the complex verbal constructions from Spanish were employed when speaking standard Quichua. Since this standard form is typically used by language purists, I argue that their use of calques is a strategy of exploiting the full range of expression from Spanish without incorporating any of the Spanish lexemes which would give the appearance of ‘contamination’. The use of Quichua particles in local varieties of Spanish is a defining characteristic of Quichuacized Spanish, spoken most frequently by women and young children in the community. Although the use of Quichua particles was probably not the main catalyst engendering Media Lengua, I argue that its contribution as a source language to other ‘mixed’ varieties, such as Media Lengua, needs to be accounted for in descriptions of BML genesis. Contrary to Muysken’s representation of relatively ‘unmixed’ Spanish and Quichua as the two source languages of Media Lengua, I propose that local varieties of Spanish might have already been ‘mixed’ to a large degree before Media Lengua was created. The third objective attempts to draw a relationship between particular social variables and the use of Spanish loanwords. Whisker Boxplots and ANOVAs were used to determine which social group, if any, have been introducing new Spanish borrowings into the bilingual communities in Salcedo. Specifically, I controlled for age, education, native language, urban migration, and gender. The results indicate that none of the groups in each of the five social variables indicate higher or lower loanword use. The implication of these results are twofold: (a) when lexical borrowing occurs, it is immediately adopted as the community-wide norm and spoken by members from different backgrounds and generations, or (b) this level of Spanish borrowing (58%) is not a recent phenomenon. The fourth and final objective draws on my ethnographic research that addresses the attitudes of syncretic language use. I observed that Quichuacized Spanish and Hispanicized Quichua are highly stigmatized varieties spoken by the country’s most marginalized populations and families, yet within the community, syncretic ways of speaking are in fact the norm. It was shown that there exists a range of different linguistic definitions for ‘Chaupi Lengua’ and other syncretic language practices as well as many contrasting connotations, most of which were negative. One theme that emerged from the interviews was that speaking syncretic varieties of Quichua weakened the consultant’s claim to an indigenous identity. The linguistic and social data presented in this dissertation supports an alternative view to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis, one that has the advantage of operating with well-precedented linguistic processes and which is actually observable in the present-day Salcedo area. The results from the study on lexical borrowing are significant because they demonstrate how a dynamic bilingual speech community has gradually diversified their Quichua lexicon under intense pressure to shift toward Spanish. They also show that Hispanicized Quichua (Quichua with heavy lexical borrowing) clearly arose from adlexification and prolonged lexical borrowing, and is one of at least six identifiable speech styles found in Salcedo. These results challenge particular interpretations of language contact outcomes, such as, ones that depict sources languages as discrete and ‘unmixed.’ The bilingual continuum presented in this thesis shows on the one hand, the range of speech styles that are accessible to different speakers, and on the other hand, the overlapping, syncretic features that are shared among the different registers and language varieties. It was observed that syncretic speech styles in Salcedo are employed by different consultants in varied interactional contexts, and in turn, produce different evaluations by other fellow community members. In the current dissertation, I challenge the claim that relexification and Media Lengua-type sentences develop in isolation and without the influence of other bilingual phenomena. Based on Muysken's Media Lengua example sentences and the speech styles from the Salcedo corpus, I argue that Media Lengua may have arisen as an institutionalized variant of the highly mixed "middle ground" within the range of the Salcedo bilingual continuum discussed above. Such syncretic forms of Spanish and Quichua strongly resemble Media Lengua sentences in Muysken’s research, and therefore demonstrate how its development could have occurred through several different language contact processes and not only through relexification.

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).

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

350 p.

Parsing, Generation and Grammar

Humans use their grammatical knowledge in more than one way. On one hand, they use it to understand what others say. On the other hand, they use it to say what they want to convey to others (or to themselves). In either case, they need to assemble the structure of sentences in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of their language. Despite the fact that the structures that comprehenders and speakers assemble are systematic in an identical fashion (i.e., obey the same grammatical constraints), the two ‘modes’ of assembling sentence structures might or might not be performed by the same cognitive mechanisms. Currently, the field of psycholinguistics implicitly adopts the position that they are supported by different cognitive mechanisms, as evident from the fact that most psycholinguistic models seek to explain either comprehension or production phenomena. The potential existence of two independent cognitive systems underlying linguistic performance doubles the problem of linking the theory of linguistic knowledge and the theory of linguistic performance, making the integration of linguistics and psycholinguistic harder. This thesis thus aims to unify the structure building system in comprehension, i.e., parser, and the structure building system in production, i.e., generator, into one, so that the linking theory between knowledge and performance can also be unified into one. I will discuss and unify both existing and new data pertaining to how structures are assembled in understanding and speaking, and attempt to show that the unification between parsing and generation is at least a plausible research enterprise. In Chapter 1, I will discuss the previous and current views on how parsing and generation are related to each other. I will outline the challenges for the current view that the parser and the generator are the same cognitive mechanism. This single system view is discussed and evaluated in the rest of the chapters. In Chapter 2, I will present new experimental evidence suggesting that the grain size of the pre-compiled structural units (henceforth simply structural units) is rather small, contrary to some models of sentence production. In particular, I will show that the internal structure of the verb phrase in a ditransitive sentence (e.g., The chef is donating the book to the monk) is not specified at the onset of speech, but is specified before the first internal argument (the book) needs to be uttered. I will also show that this timing of structural processes with respect to the verb phrase structure is earlier than the lexical processes of verb internal arguments. These two results in concert show that the size of structure building units in sentence production is rather small, contrary to some models of sentence production, yet structural processes still precede lexical processes. I argue that this view of generation resembles the widely accepted model of parsing that utilizes both top-down and bottom-up structure building procedures. In Chapter 3, I will present new experimental evidence suggesting that the structural representation strongly constrains the subsequent lexical processes. In particular, I will show that conceptually similar lexical items interfere with each other only when they share the same syntactic category in sentence production. The mechanism that I call syntactic gating, will be proposed, and this mechanism characterizes how the structural and lexical processes interact in generation. I will present two Event Related Potential (ERP) experiments that show that the lexical retrieval in (predictive) comprehension is also constrained by syntactic categories. I will argue that the syntactic gating mechanism is operative both in parsing and generation, and that the interaction between structural and lexical processes in both parsing and generation can be characterized in the same fashion. In Chapter 4, I will present a series of experiments examining the timing at which verbs’ lexical representations are planned in sentence production. It will be shown that verbs are planned before the articulation of their internal arguments, regardless of the target language (Japanese or English) and regardless of the sentence type (active object-initial sentence in Japanese, passive sentences in English, and unaccusative sentences in English). I will discuss how this result sheds light on the notion of incrementality in generation. In Chapter 5, I will synthesize the experimental findings presented in this thesis and in previous research to address the challenges to the single system view I outlined in Chapter 1. I will then conclude by presenting a preliminary single system model that can potentially capture both the key sentence comprehension and sentence production data without assuming distinct mechanisms for each.

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.

Shopper Centric Category Management in Convenience Stores: a Qualitative Study

The literature shows that category management is an important concept and tool for retailers and suppliers, but that there is a trend to move to a more shopper-centric category management approach, linked to the shoppermarketing approach. However, the knowledge on this issue is scarce on some retailing sectors, like convenience stores. The present study is focused on convenience stores, with the main purpose of finding out to what extent non-major food retailers successfully adopt a shopper-centric category management. The study is relevant in order to evaluate if a more shopper-centric approach is adequate to smaller companies/stores. To accomplish that goal, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted among convenience store retailers and suppliers. Six semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with Commercial Directors and Trade Marketing Managers. This data was complemented with thirteen interviews with shopper marketing experts. The data was analyzed using thematic content analysis technique, identifying themes, categories, subcategories, units of meaning and relations. The results revealed that convenience store retailers use some of the principles and techniques of the shopper-marketing and shopper-centric category management approaches, which they do in a non-standardized and non-formal approach or process. Their suppliers (the manufacturers) do it in a more formal and structured manner, probably as a result of previous interaction with major supermarkets chains. Both direct and indirect evidences of a shopper-centric approach were found, which, however, were slight, discrete and not formal.