This is a mixed-methods study investigating the effects of oral repetition tasks on Japanese students' use of lexcial phrases in communicative EFL instruction. The quantitative study showed that oral repetition facilitated the students' short-term memory of target lexical phrases but it did not translate into their long-term memory or use of the phrases. The qualitative study indicated that the participants perceived interpersonal conversations and small-group discussions in English as enjoyable and useful activities. / CITE/Language Arts

The current study investigated the language behaviour of older adults before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Linguistic complexity (LC)—a measure of lexical and morpho-syntactic richness—is an index of both cognitive functioning and creativity. The increased physical and social isolation during the pandemic yielded reports of heightened levels of creativity as well as cognitive decline, bringing forth two counter-directed predictions: (1) given the threat to cognitive functioning posed by the pandemic, LC may steadily decrease following the onset of the pandemic, or; (2) consistent with the creativity boost reported during lockdowns, LC may be greater after the onset of the pandemic. This work analyzed the syntactic and lexical complexity of texts from the CoSoWELL corpus (v1.0), a collection of personal narratives written by 1028 mature adults (55+) collected at five test sessions spanning before (t1) and after (t2-t5) the beginning of the pandemic. Two lexical variables (type-token ratio; noun-verb ratio) and six syntactic variables (two syntactic variants of type-token ratio; embeddedness; D-ratio; longest dependency path; mean length utterance) were used to calculate LC. All measures saw statistically significant gains from t1 to t2, and further increased across subsequent test sessions. These findings confirmed the second hypothesis and, I argue, support a pandemic-related boost to creativity. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / The COVID-19 pandemic has been isolating, and isolation is a mixed bag: being alone promotes self-reflection and overthinking, and doing too much is linked to stress and mental illness. However, more time spent in solitude is also linked to greater creativity. Creativity means more new ideas, which come through as longer, more detailed sentences, with less repetition. This research looked at stories by older adults about their lives, written before and during the pandemic. Surprisingly, the language in the stories became more descriptive and diverse over time—meaning people were being more creative after COVID-19 hit. In the wake of this lonely storm, one silver lining has emerged: whether in spite of or because of this pandemic, creativity is flourishing.

Yes / Pattern-related visual stress (PRVS) is a form of sensory hypersensitivity that some people experience when viewing high contrast repeating patterns, notably alternating dark and light stripes. Those susceptible to PRVS typically have a strong aversion to such stimuli, and this is often accompanied by experiences of visual discomfort and disturbance. The patterns most likely to elicit symptoms of PRVS have a square-wave grating configuration of spatial frequency ~3 cycles/degree. Such stimuli are characteristic of printed text in which lines of words and the spaces between them present a high contrast grating-like stimulus. Consequently, much printed reading material has the potential to elicit PRVS that may impair reading performance, and this problem appears to be common in individuals with reading difficulties including dyslexia. However, the manner in which PRVS affects reading ability is unknown. One possibility is that the early sensory visual stress may interfere with the later cognitive word recognition stage of the reading process, resulting in reading performance that is slower and/or less accurate. To explore the association of PRVS with word recognition ability, lexical decision performance (speed and accuracy) to words and pronounceable non-words was measured in two groups of adults, having low and high susceptibility to PRVS. Results showed that lexical decisions were generally faster but less accurate in high-PRVS, and also that high-PRVS participants made decisions significantly faster for words than for non-words, revealing a strong lexicality effect that was not present in low-PRVS. These findings are novel and, as yet, unconfirmed by other studies.

This thesis investigated lexical representations of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) using a duration-blocked gating task. This thesis tested the hypothesis that children who stutter have underspecified phonological representations for words, are less sensitive to incremental and segmental information for lexical items, and therefore require more acoustic-phonetic information to activate words in their lexicon. Pilot data collected from fourteen children (ages 5;6 to 10;1): 7 CWS and 7 CWNS matched on age were included in this thesis. Results showed that children in both talker groups required relatively equal amounts of acoustic-phonetic information to identify target words. A regression model revealed that age in months predicted performance on the gating task for CWNS, but that age in months did not predict performance on the gating task for CWS suggesting a difference in the developmental maturity of lexical representations in CWS. Possible conclusions from these pilot data are presented along with recommendations for future research. / text

Cette thèse s'intéresse au rôle de la cohésion lexicale dans différentes approches de l'analyse du discours. Nous yexplorons deux hypothèses principales:- l'analyse distributionnelle, qui permet de rapprocher des unités lexicales sur la base des contextes syntaxiques qu'ellespartagent, met au jour des relations sémantiques variées pouvant être exploitées pour la détection de la cohésion lexicaledes textes;- les indices lexicaux constituent des éléments de signalisation de l'organisation du discours pouvant être exploités aussibien à un niveau local (identification de relations rhétoriques entre constituants élémentaires du discours) qu'à un niveauglobal (repérage ou caractérisation de segments de niveau supérieur dotés d'une fonction rhétorique et garantissant lacohérence et la lisibilité du texte, par exemple passages à unité thématique).Concernant le premier point, nous montrons la pertinence d'une ressource distributionnelle pour l'appréhension d'une largegamme de relations impliquées dans la cohésion lexicale des textes. Nous présentons les méthodes de projection et defiltrage que nous avons mises en œuvre pour la production de sorties exploitables.Concernant le second point, nous fournissons une série d'éclairages qui montrent l'apport d'une prise en compte réfléchiede la cohésion lexicale pour une grande variété de problématiques liées à l'étude et au repérage automatique del'organisation textuelle: segmentation thématique de textes, caractérisation des structures énumératives, étude de lacorrélation entre lexique et structure rhétorique du discours et enfin détection de réalisations d'une relation de discoursparticulière, la relation d'élaboration. / This thesis considers the role of lexical cohesion in various approaches of discourse analysis. Two main hypotheses arestudied:- distributional analysis, which allows to bring together lexical units based on the syntactic contexts they share, highlightsdiverse semantic relations which can be employed in the detection of lexical cohesion in texts;- lexical cues are involved in discourse signalization and can be used both at a local level (identification of rhetoricalrelations between elementary discourse units) and at a global level (detection or characterization of higher levelsegments).In reference to the first hypothesis, we show that a distributional resource is strongly relevant in the analysis of a widepanel of relations having lexical cohesion roles in texts. We introduce projection and filtering methods for thisdistributional resource.In reference to the second hypothesis, we provide a series of outlooks showing the improvement brought by carefulconsideration of lexical cohesion in a large panel of settings within the study of textual organisation and its automaticdetection: thematic segmentation of texts, enumerative structures characterization, study of the correlation betweenlexicon and the rhetorical structure of discourse, and finally detection of realisations of a specific discourse relation, theElaboration relation.

Cette thèse se propose de spécifier la relation entre les structures motrices et celles du langage en tant que systèmes coopératifs dans la construction du sens. Bien qu'un grand nombre d'études aient mis en évidence que les structures motrices sont impliquées dans le traitement du langage, il est encore difficile de déterminer le rôle de ces structures dans la compréhension. Les théories dites «incarnées» et «désincarnées» débattent de la nature de la représentation du sens des mots en termes de la nécessité des structures motrices pour le langage, en négligeant le fait que les conditions de leur activation n’ont pas été décrites. Des recherches récentes soulignent l’importance de la prise en compte des contextes dans lesquels le langage recrute l'activité motrice. Néanmoins, cette tendance est en contradiction avec les présomptions implicites dans la recherche sur l’interaction langage-motricité, qui se basent sur le modèle «deux-étapes» du traitement sémantique et sur la perspective du «dictionnaire» de la représentation du sens lexical. Dans ce cadre, le traitement du sens des mots est pris comme un processus modulaire. Ce n'est qu'une fois ce processus accompli que le contexte peut influencer la signification. Ces présomptions ont biaisé le débat sur le rôle de l'activité motrice induite par le langage, qui se réduirait à la question de savoir si l'activation motrice doit être considérée comme faisant partie de l'accès lexico-sémantique ou comme résultat de la construction d’un modèle de situation. Or, un grand nombre de travaux ont mis en évidence que le traitement lexico-sémantique et le contexte sont interdépendants. Cette connaissance provenant de la psycholinguistique doit être explicitement intégrée à la recherche sur le rôle de l'activité motrice induite par le langage. Dans un effort pour porter le débat hors de la discussion «lexical vs. post-lexical», cette thèse vise à déterminer les conditions sous lesquelles les contextes linguistiques déclenchent l'activité motrice. Pour ce faire, nous avons testé un nouvel outil qui analyse en ligne les modulations de la force de préhension pendant que les participants écoutaient des mots cibles intégrés dans différents contextes. Nos résultats montrent que quand le mot cible était un verbe d'action de la main et que la phrase focalisait l'action (« John signe le contrat»), une augmentation de la force de préhension était observée dans la fenêtre temporelle associée à la récupération lexico-sémantique. Aucune augmentation de la force de préhension comparable n’a été détectée lorsque le même mot d'action était intégré dans des phrases négatives («John ne signe pas le contrat») ou dans des phrases dont le focus avait été déplacé vers l'état mental de l'agent («John veut signer le contrat») ... / The present dissertation was conducted in order to specify the relationship between motor and language structures as cooperative systems in lexical meaning construction. Specifically, this thesis aimed at deepening our understanding of how the linguistic context coordinates the recruitment of motor structures during lexical semantic processing. Although the involvement of motor activity in action-related language comprehension is now sufficiently documented, the specific role that motor structures play in action language processing is still unclear. “Embodied” and “disembodied” theories debate the nature of meaning representation in terms of the necessity of motor structures, neglecting the fact that the conditions of their activation during language processing are not well-described. Very recent research has begun to note the necessity of exploring the context under which words trigger modality-specific cortical activity. However, this trend is at odds with implicit theoretical assumptions that have been made in research on motor-language crosstalk, which are based on the “two-step” model of semantic processing and the “dictionary-like” view of lexical meaning representation. Within such framework, word meaning recognition is taken to proceed in a modular fashion. Only after this process has concluded is the context thought to exert its effects. These assumptions have biased the debate on the role of language induced motor activity. The discussion has been centered on whether motor activation should be considered an integral part of the lexical access process or taken as the result of an ensuing “higher order” operation (i.e., situation model construction). A large body of work evidences that lexical semantic processing and semantic context are far more integrated and interdependent. It seems crucial to integrate this knowledge gained from psycholinguistics into the research on the role of language induced motor activity. In an effort to liberate the debate from the “lexical vs. post-lexical” discussion, this thesis aimed at determining the conditions under which language triggers motor activity. To accomplish these objectives, we introduced a novel tool that analyzes on-line modulations of grip-force while participants listened to specific target words embedded within different types of contexts. Our results show that when the target word was a hand action verb and the sentence focus centered on that action (“John signs the contract”), an increase of grip force was observed in the temporal window classically associated with lexical semantic processing. No comparable increase in grip force was detected when the same action word was embedded in negative sentences (“John doesn’t sign the contract”) or in sentences which focus was shifted towards the agent’s mental state (“John wants to sign the contract”). Our results suggest that the presence of an action word in an ...

Arnaldo Antunes, atuante no cenário musical nacional, devotou-se também à produção no campo literário. Sua obra apresenta traços em estilo neoconcreto centrados em experimentações da materialidade visual e sonora da palavra e alia-se ao estilo neobarroco dos excessos de adornos e repetições sonoras e semânticas com efeito de opacidade de sentidos. Um outro aspecto relevante é o diálogo com o estilo neobarroco artístico de certas obras resultante do processo de convergência entre literatura e artes visuais e plásticas. Este trabalho tem como objetivo central analisar as criações expressivas de palavras - neologismos - e as metáforas em obras que apresentam os estilos neobarroco e neoconcreto, verificando como o artista faz escolhas lexicais para manifestar toda a sua criatividade. Estudamos processos de formação tais como a derivação, composição e o cruzamento lexical e a analisamos a criatividade metafórica resultante das combinações de unidades lexicais realizadas de forma expressiva. Os sentidos foram mapeados segundo transformações no campo semântico, observando-se a quebra da isotopia ou da coesão, das metáforas e das mesclagens conceituais. A recolha dos neologismos foi realizada de forma manual, passando pelo critério de exclusão segundo a consulta no Dicionário Houaiss e Villar (2009), ao passo que a seleção das metáforas se pautou na novidade expressiva. O estudo foi organizado segundo os critérios de aspectos de gêneros observados: a primeira dedicada ao estudo das metáforas e mesclagens conceituais em obras que apresentaram o efeito de genericidade de versos livres recolhidas nas obras Psia, Tudos, 2 ou + corpos no mesmo espaço, n.d.a., Agora aqui ninguém precisa de si; a segunda, dedicada às criações lexicais formais e metáforas das obras em gêneros intermidiáticos nas exposições Luzescrita e Palavra em movimento; e a terceira, centrada nas criações lexicais e metáforas em gêneros intermidiáticos impressos nos livros Palavra desordem, As Coisas e Et Eu Tu, resultantes da convergência entre mídias cartazes e poesia, poesia e ilustrações e poesia e fotografia. / Arnaldo Antunes, an active artist in the national music scenery, devoted himself to the production on the literary field. His oeuvre presents traces of neoconcrete style centered in the experimentations on visual and audible materiality of the word, allied with the literary neobarroquism of the excess and repetitions of sounds and meanings with the effect of opacity of meaning. Another relevant aspect is the dialogue with the artistic neobarroque style, in certain works resulted from the process of convergence between literature and visual arts. This research has as main objective to analyse the expressive creation of words or neologism and the metaphors in works that presented the neobarroque and neoconcrete styles verifying how the artist makes lexical choices to express his own creativeness. We studied the processes of word formations as derivation, composition and blends and analyzed the metaphoric creativity result from the combination of lexical units made in an expressive way. The meanings were mapped according to the transformations on the semantic field, observing the break of isotopia and cohesions, the conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends. The neologisms were collected manually, through the criteria of exclusion based on the dictionary Houaiss and Villar (2009), whereas the selection of metaphors was based on the expressive novelty. This study was organized in chapters following the criteria of the genre aspects observed: the first one specifically devoted to the study of the conceptual metaphors and blends found in works that presented the effect of genericity of new free verse collected from his works Psia, Tudos, 2 ou + corpos no mesmo espaço, n.d.a., Agora aqui ninguém precisa de si, ; the second one dedicated to the formal lexical creations and metaphors in the intermedial genres in the expositions Luzescrita and Palavra em movimento; and the final one directed to the lexical creations and metaphors in printed intermedial genre, in the books Palavra desordem, As Coisas and Et Eu Tu resulting respectively from the converging media, banners and poetry, poetry and images, and poetry and photograph.

[pt] O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar subsídios para a elaboração automática, a partir de corpus, de ontologias específicas quanto ao domínio. Para tanto, assumo que determinadas relações semânticas, como a hiperonímia, podem estar sistematicamente expressas em textos por meio de determinados padrões léxico-sintáticos. Tomando como ponto de partida alguns desses padrões, descritos originalmente em Hearst (1992, 1998), (i) identifico novos padrões para a expressão da relação de hiperonímia; (ii) adapto e refino três padrões já existentes (Hearst, 1992), tendo em vista especificidades da língua portuguesa; (iii) faço um cruzamento entre as informações extraídas com os padrões, a fim de gerar inferências. A perspectiva teórica subjacente é inspirada por reflexões wittgensteinianas sobre o significado, e se mostrou produtiva na medida em que legitima os dados vindos do corpus e as relações de significado que nele aparecem. O modelo de ontologia proposto caracteriza-se principalmente por: (i) não conter categorias pré-definidas, já que categorias são construtos humanos, abstrações que refletem uma perspectiva particular do mundo. A idéia de sustentar a ontologia em corpus busca deslocar o espaço de discussão sobre quais seriam as categorias relevantes de um domínio: as categorias que emergem do corpus refletiriam o conhecimento implícito do domínio em questão; (ii) não conter definições criadas a priori, sendo o significado de cada item decorrente das relações entre as palavras. A metodologia - extração das relações por meio de regras e posterior cruzamento para a realização de inferências - foi aplicada em um corpus do domínio saúde e um corpus genérico. Os resultados positivos indicam que sua utilização pode ser uma importante aliada na elaboração de ontologias e, também, uma ferramenta de auxílio a lexicógrafos e a sistemas de classificação semântica de nomes próprios. Em termos gerais, a metodologia apresenta como principais vantagens (i) a facilidade na automação do processo, minimizando a intervenção humana; (ii) facilidade na categorização de domínios especializados; (iii) maior dinamicidade, pois o fato de o corpus poder ser constantemente atualizado faz com que esteja menos sujeito a falhas. / [en] The main goal of this work is to present an automated method for building domain-specific corpus-based ontologies. The assumption is that semantic relationships, such as hypernym, can be systematically expressed through lexicalsyntactic patterns. Starting with some of these patterns, originally described in Hearst (1992), I (i) identify new patterns that express hypernym; (ii) adapt three other patterns (Hearst, 1992), considering specificities of the Portuguese language; and (iii) intersect these results, in order to produce inferences. The theoretical approach is inspired by the wittgensteinian ideas about meaning. The resulting ontology´s most prominent features are: (i) the fact that it does not have a priori categories, since categories are human constructs, abstractions that reflect a particular world view. Instead of discussing what should be the main categories in a domain, sustaining the ontology on corpora assumes that the corpus reflects the implicit knowledge of a given domain; and (ii) the fact that it does not have a priori definitions: the meaning of a word is derived from its relations with other words. The method - automatic extraction of semantic relations through rules, and the intersection of this information in order to produce inferences - was applied to two corpora: a health domain corpus and a generic corpus. The positive results show that the method can be very useful in ontology building and it can also be a valuable tool for lexicographers and named entity recognition systems. The main advantages of the method are (i) the simplicity of automating the process of ontology building; (ii) the ease of categorizing specialized domains, and (iii) its dynamicity, since the possibility of constantly updating the corpus makes it less subject to errors.

Dedicado a investigar o léxico dos moradores do Distrito Nossa Senhora da Guia a partir das lexias bamburro, tacuru e bateia registradas na fala dos idosos na pesquisa desenvolvida em 2007, esta tese busca elementos que contribuam para a identificação e justificativa do movimento da língua na localidade, trazendo subsídios para a verificação de manutenção, mudança e/ou variação semântico-lexical. Para tanto, a pesquisa se utiliza do instrumento da coleta in loco, com aplicação de questionário para as três categorias estabelecidas de sujeitos de pesquisa, constituídas a partir das bases teórico-metodológicas apresentadas pelo Atlas Linguístico do Brasil (ALiB) e dos resultados já obtidos em Bertoldo (2007). Neste estudo, considerando as variáveis sexo, profissão e grau de instrução, são delimitados como sujeitos de pesquisa: 1. Moradores com idade igual ou superior a 60 anos; 2. Moradores na faixa etária de 30 a 59 anos e; 3. Moradores com idade entre 19 e 29 anos. Pretende-se, com os resultados alcançados, acrescentar novos dados às análises e hipóteses levantadas em Bertoldo (2007) e, dessa maneira, contribuir com os trabalhos de campo e estudos que visam determinar as características e isoglossas das variedades do português falado no Brasil. / Dedicated to investigate the lexicon of the residents of Nossa Senhora da Guia District from the bamburro, tacuru and bateia lexias registered in the speech of the elderly in research conducted in 2007, this thesis aims elements that contribute to the identification and justification of the movement of the language in that locality, providing subsidies for the maintenance check, change and /or lexical-semantic variation. To this end, the research uses the collection in loco instrument with a questionnaire for the three established categories of research subjects, constituted from the theoretical and methodological basis presented by Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (ALiB) and from the results already obtained in Berthold (2007). In this study, considering the sex, occupation and education level variables, are defined as research subjects: 1. Residents aged 60 years or over, 2. Residents aged from 30 to 59 years and 3. People aged from 19 to 29 years. It is intended, with the reached results, add new data to the analyzes and hypotheses collected in Bertoldo (2007) and, thus, contribute to the fieldwork and studies aimed at determining the characteristics and isoglosses of varieties of Portuguese spoken in Brazil.

A presente pesquisa tem como foco a análise dos efeitos produzidos pela instrução implícita e pela instrução explícita na aquisição-aprendizagem lexical por parte de aprendizes brasileiros de italiano, realizada comparando dados coletados em três momentos: antes, logo depois e um mês depois da intervenção didática. No primeiro tipo de instrução, a implícita, a atenção dos aprendizes não foi direcionada para o elemento lexical. Após a leitura dos textos input, foram realizadas atividades comunicativas, cujas características foram a interação e a negociação de sentido (SWAIN, 1985, 2005; LONG, 1996). Para a instrução explícita, após a leitura dos mesmos textos input, foram realizadas atividades com foco no léxico (LEWIS, 1993, 1997; PARIBAKHT; WESCHE, 1996; SÖKMEN, 1997). O experimento didático teve oito horas de duração, distribuídas em quatro encontros, para os quais foram selecionadas 10 palavras-alvo a partir dos textos input. Participaram desse experimento 27 aprendizes, dos quais 16 fizeram parte do grupo que realizou atividades com instrução implícita e 11 do grupo que teve atividades com instrução explícita. Antes das atividades didáticas, os aprendizes dos dois grupos realizaram um pré-teste receptivo, tendo como modelo a Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) de Paribakht e Wesche (1996), e um pré-teste produtivo de descrição de imagens. Após a intervenção didática e um mês depois da intervenção, a VKS foi aplicada novamente com mais dois pós-testes produtivos. Os resultados foram analisados à luz dos estudos de aquisição-aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras e da Pragmática lexical e apontaram para uma vantagem da instrução explícita em relação ao conhecimento receptivo de curto prazo. Em relação aos efeitos a longo prazo, na instrução implícita foram obtidos resultados mais significativos, já que foram mantidos os mesmos níveis constatados nos pós-testes, enquanto na explícita houve uma diminuição de 21%. No que se refere ao aspecto produtivo e à variação lexical, nos dois tipos de instrução não foram constatadas diferenças significativas. / The present research focuses on the effects of implicit and explicit instruction in lexical acquisition-learning by Brazilian learners of Italian, comparing data collected in three moments: before, immediately after and one month after the didactic intervention. In the first type of instruction, the implicit, the attention of learners was not directed to the lexical element. After reading the input texts, communicative activities, whose characteristics were interaction and negotiation of meaning (SWAIN, 1985, 2005; LONG, 1996), were carried out. For the explicit instruction, after reading the same input texts, were made activities focusing on lexicon (LEWIS, 1993, 1997; PARIBAKHT; WESCHE, 1996; SÖKMEN, 1997). The didactic experiment lasted eight hours, distributed in four meetings, for which 10 target words were selected from the input texts. Twenty-seven learners participated in this experiment, of which 16 were part of the group that performed activities with implicit instruction, and 11 of the group that had activities with explicit instruction. Before the didactic activities, the learners of the two groups performed a receptive pre-test, taking as a model the Parabakht and Wesche Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) (1996), and a productive pre-test of image description. After the didactic intervention and one month after the intervention, the VKS was applied again with two more productive post-tests. The results were analyzed starting from the acquisition-learning studies of foreign languages and the lexical Pragmatics and pointed to an advantage of explicit instruction in relation to short-term receptive knowledge. Regarding the long-term effects, more significant results were obtained in the implicit instruction, since the same levels observed in the post-tests were maintained, while in the explicit one there was a decrease of 21%. Regarding the productive aspect and the lexical variation, in both types of instruction no significant differences were found.