Two studies are reported investigating the role of articulation at input on the memory of visually presented sentences. The results of Experiment I indicated that irrelevant articulatory activity caused a decrement for the verbatim recall of both instructive sentences and word lists. However, there was no recall decrement for instructive sentences when the recall task consisted of carrying out the instructions given in the sentence. Experiment II indicated that irrelevant articulatory activity resulted in a decrement for sentence recognition with respect to both meaning and word changes. The results of the two experiments are discussed in terms of a differential need for the articulatory apparatus in the processing of "light" versus "heavy" information loads. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Prior research has considered the sequential order of function words, after the contextual words of the text have been removed, as a stylistic indicator of authorship. This research describes an effort to enhance authorship attribution accuracy based on this same information source with alternate classifiers, alternate n-gram construction methods, and a genetically tuned configuration. The approach is original in that it is the first time that probabilistic versions of Burrows's Delta have been used. Instead of using z-scores as an input for a classifier, the z-scores were converted to probabilistic equivalents (since z-scores cannot be subtracted, added, or divided without the possibility of distorting their probabilistic meaning); this adaptation enhanced accuracy. Multiple versions of Burrows's Delta were evaluated; this includes a hybrid of the Probabilistic Burrows's Delta and the version proposed by Smith & Aldridge (2011); in this case accuracy was enhanced when individual frequent words were evaluated as indicators of style. Other novel aspects include alternate n-gram construction methods; a reconciliation process that allows texts of various lengths from different authors to be compared; and a GA selection process that determines which function (or frequent) words (see Smith & Rickards, 2008; see also Shaker, Corne, & Everson, 2007) may be used in the construction of function word n-grams.

Thesis (M.A.) --University of Limpopo, 2012 / The study dealt with enrichment of Tshivenḓa language through adoption of words from other languages such as English, Afrikaans, Sotho, Tsonga, Zulu and many more. The study discovered that no language can remain static forever and this applies to Tshivenḓa as well. Every successive generation makes its own small contribution to language change and when sufficient time has elapsed the impact of these changes becomes more obvious. It however cautions that borrowing of words should not be overdone as this may lead to the disappearance of Tshivenḓa as we know it.

This study examines the determinants of the use of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-K filings and the effect of these words on analyst forecast attributes. I find that the use of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-K filings is positively (negatively) associated with firm size, volatility of business and operations (firm age and number of business segments). More importantly, after controlling for readability and management tone, I find that the use of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-K filings is associated with greater analyst following, lower forecast dispersion, greater forecast accuracy, and lower uncertainty in analysts’ overall and common information environment. The results of this study provide more insights into why management uses uncertain and weak modal words in 10-K filings and how these words in 10-K filings affect analysts’ behavior and their forecast outcomes.

In this thesis I aim to improve phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) in a number of ways by the use of text harmonization strategies. PBSMT systems are built by training statistical models on large corpora of human translations. This architecture generally performs well for languages with similar structure. If the languages are different for example with respect to word order or morphological complexity, however, the standard methods do not tend to work well. I address this problem through text harmonization, by making texts more similar before training and applying a PBSMT system. I investigate how text harmonization can be used to improve PBSMT with a focus on four areas: compounding, definiteness, word order, and unknown words. For the first three areas, the focus is on linguistic differences between languages, which I address by applying transformation rules, using either rule-based or machine learning-based techniques, to the source or target data. For the last area, unknown words, I harmonize the translation input to the training data by replacing unknown words with known alternatives. I show that translation into languages with closed compounds can be improved by splitting and merging compounds. I develop new merging algorithms that outperform previously suggested algorithms and show how part-of-speech tags can be used to improve the order of compound parts. Scandinavian definite noun phrases are identified as a problem forPBSMT in translation into Scandinavian languages and I propose a preprocessing approach that addresses this problem and gives large improvements over a baseline. Several previous proposals for how to handle differences in reordering exist; I propose two types of extensions, iterating reordering and word alignment and using automatically induced word classes, which allow these methods to be used for less-resourced languages. Finally I identify several ways of replacing unknown words in the translation input, most notably a spell checking-inspired algorithm, which can be trained using character-based PBSMT techniques. Overall I present several approaches for extending PBSMT by the use of pre- and postprocessing techniques for text harmonization, and show experimentally that these methods work. Text harmonization methods are an efficient way to improve statistical machine translation within the phrase-based approach, without resorting to more complex models.

This essay treats some of the problems that often arise when a translator translates texts which could be characterized as "culturally coloured" texts. Some people think that these kind of texts are not translatable. We want to show that, on the contrary, they are possible to translate into another language, even if it is not possible to translate them literally, word for word. First we present the material that our own translations are based on, and we discuss different terms relating to "untranslatable" words. Then we analyse and discuss different theories and approaches to translation, approaches that help us to find an acceptable translation of cultural words. Finally we present and analyse words that caused us problems in our efforts to translate from French into Swedish.

The Impact of Leader¡¦s Integrity Character on the Effectiveness of Organization Change --- A Case of Formosa Plastics Corporation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and Macronix International Student : Lai, Shih-Chung Advisor : Dr. Huang , Jason H. National Sun Yat¡V Sen University Department of Business Management Abstract Integrity is one of the key factors to organizational change and it long standing. It is also a highly emphasized issue in corporate governance. Across the world, business misconducts that have caused severe consequences to the economy and society are increasing each day, and the level of trust on the businesses worsens after each event. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of the integrity orientation of the leaders on organizational change, on the innovation which leads to a new stage of growth. The study is conducted through literature review and case analyses. I probe into the factors that impact the effectiveness of organization change. The study focused on the leader's character of integrity. The findings are as follow. 1.Integrity character bears a high degree of influence on the organization change process. The more intense the changes, the more it should be initiated from the top down, and the more important is the leadership. 2.The strength of crisis consciousness drives organization change, and further the demand on leader¡¦s integral character, no matter it's a stable enterprise or the one under change. 3.The best prediction model for the integrity character of leaders is the long term coworker observation. The same model would apply for selecting and fostering successors. 4.By observing the consistency between leader's oral expression and actual behavior is sufficiently indicative of the suitability of the lesders. 5.There are three critical dimensions of the character of integrity, which this study referred to as the three components of integrity, that is, ¡§righteousness and the belief of integrity¡¨,¡§consistency in thought and words¡¨, and ¡§consistency between words and behaviors¡¨. ¡iKeyword¡j¡G Integrity Character, Organizational change, Righteousness , Integrity, Consistency between Thought and Words, Consistency between Words and Behaviors.

The majority of previous studies on cognate words have found a robust cognate facilitation effect in picture naming using alphabetic languages. Research has also identified that if the cognates do not share phonology or meaning (i.e., false cognate inhibition effect), this effect may become inhibitory. These mixed findings seem to suggest that semantics, phonology and orthography may contribute differently to cognate word processing. In this thesis, two effects, the phonological overlap effect and the orthographical overlap effect were examined independently for the first time by testing picture naming in two non-alphabetic languages: Cantonese and Mandarin. Two types of cognate words were included: cognate and semi-cognate words. The orthography of both cognate and semi-cognate words is shared between L1 and L2, but only cognate words share phonology. The thesis study included three experiments. In the preparatory experiment, an on-line rating study was conducted, whereby cognate and semi-cognate words with mono-syllabic or bi-syllabic names in Mandarin and Cantonese were rated on word AOA, frequency, picture complexity, familiarity and image agreement. From the preparatory experiments a pictorial-word corpus was selected to use in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 1, Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals named pictures in the corpus in L1 (Cantonese). By contrasting cognate and semi-cognate word naming latency, the results showed a slowed naming latency for cognate words that was marginally significant. It is argued that this finding reflects a possible inhibitory effect from the difference in stages at which competition occurs and the difference in the cognitive load of that competition for cognate and semi-cognate words. In Experiment 2, Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals named the same pictures in L2 (Mandarin), showing a similar trend of cognate inhibition effect as that found in Experiment 1, albeit with a smaller magnitude of cognate inhibition. Taken together, the cognate inhibition effect can be explained by the different stages of cross-language competition that occur for cognate and semi-cognate words in picture naming. The cognitive load of overcoming that competition is larger for cognate than for semi-cognate words. / published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

Die vorliegende Magisterarbeit ist eine kontrastive Untersuchung und Beschreibung der Flüche und Schimpfwörter in der deutschen und litauischen Jugendsprache. / Šis magistro darbas yra keiksmų ir keiksmažodžių lyginamasis tyrimas ir aprašymas, vokiečių ir lietuvių jaunimo kalbose. / My Master's degree's work is a comparative research and description of swears and curse words in the language of German and Lithuanian teenagers.

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