The diploma thesis Lexicon Evaluation of Preschool Children is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part of this work on speech therapy describes within four chapters the Czech vocabulary, psychological development of children up to the school maturity, speech development also up to the school maturity and finally presents diagnostic materials used in the Czech Republic for school maturity diagnostics and diagnostics of the lexical-semantic speech level. The practical part includes a quantitative research performed on children respondents in preschool classes in maternity schools. The main goal of this speech-therapy research was the modernization and verification of a testing set aimed at active vocabulary. The main reason was the fact that there is a lack of any adequate material for testing vocabulary in the Czech Republic. The new testing set could be also used as a subtest for school maturity diagnostics. The research conclusions were compared with the real situation of the tested children as referred by their teachers. As a part of the practical part there is the establishment of the research aims and hypotheses, and subsequently the research description, verification of the established hypotheses and definition of research conclusions. KEYWORDS Speech development,...

In their book, Fairclough and Fairclough (2013) claim that political leaders’ main role is to make choices in difficult situations. Due to the coronavirus outbreak worldwide, every political leader was called to make difficult decisions and to announce them to their respective public. As a result, there is plenty of new data to be analyzed from a linguistic perspective. The goal of this study is to explore and analyze Boris Johnson’s ten first speeches on Covid-19 addressed to the nation between the 3rd and 23rd March 2020 (from herd immunity policy to strict lockdown). The corpus was examined in terms of lexicon structures (personal pronouns and verbs) and syntax structures (modal verbs), which, according to van Dijk (1997), are persuasive techniques. The findings suggest that the extensive use by Boris Johnson of the personal pronoun ‘we’ (exclusive) as well as the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ show his active involvement in the fight against Covid-19. This involvement is also corroborated through (a) his use of event verbs, which indicate a continuous action; and (b) his selection of modal verbs of obligation, which mostly follow the personal pronouns that refer to the Prime Minister and/or the decision makers. This paper concludes that syntax and lexicon structures were used in Boris Johnson’s speeches as tools of persuasive techniques.

Cross-lingual word embeddings are an increasingly important reseource in cross-lingual methods for NLP, particularly for their role in transfer learning and unsupervised machine translation, purportedly opening up the opportunity for NLP applications for low-resource languages.  However, most research in this area implicitly expects the availablility of vast monolingual corpora for training embeddings, a scenario which is not realistic for many of the world's languages.  Moreover, much of the reporting of the performance of cross-lingual word embeddings is based on a fairly narrow set of mostly European language pairs.  Our study examines the performance of cross-lingual alignment across a more diverse set of language pairs; controls for the effect of the corpus size on which the monolingual embedding spaces are trained; and studies the impact of spectral graph properties of the embedding spsace on alignment.  Through our experiments on a more diverse set of language pairs, we find that performance in bilingual lexicon induction is generally poor in heterogeneous pairs, and that even using a gold or heuristically derived dictionary has little impact on the performance on these pairs of languages.  We also find that the performance for these languages only increases slowly with corpus size.  Finally, we find a moderate correlation between the isospectral difference of the source and target embeddings and the performance of bilingual lexicon induction.  We infer that methods other than cross-lingual alignment may be more appropriate in the case of both low resource languages and heterogeneous language pairs.

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В магистерской диссертации исследуются тексты песен Ивана Алексеева – лидера одной из популярных рок-рэп-групп. Целевая установка исследования, связанная с выявлением аксиологических и стилистических особенностей текстов песен И. Алексеева, последовательно реализуется во введении и двух основных главах. В первой главе проанализированы определения поэтического языка; изучены труды по стилистике и лингвоаксиологии; систематизированы опорные понятия лингвоаксиологии, позволяющие осмыслить авторскую стратегию, ориентированную на целевого коллективного адресата. Во второй главе выявлены векторы влияния текстов на целевую молодежную аудиторию; реализован опыт системно-смыслового анализа отдельного текста; отмечены эстетически и аксиологически значимые речевые единицы; описаны тропы и фигуры; сконструирован фрагмент аксиологического лексикона популярной группы; установлены аксиологические предпочтения автора, отстаивающего константы национальной культуры, отвергающего главенство утилитарных ценностей. / The master’s thesis explores the lyrics of Ivan Alekseev – the leader of one of the popular rock-rap groups. The study aims at identifying the axiological and stylistic features of I. Alekseev’s lyrics. This purpose is consistently realized in the introduction and two chapters. In the first chapter, the definitions of poetic language are analyzed; works on stylistics and linguoaxiology are studied; the basic concepts of linguoaxiology, allowing to understand the author’s strategy focused on the target audience, are systematized. In the second chapter, the vectors of the influence of texts on the target youth audience are identified; the systematic semantic text analysis is carried out; aesthetically and axiologically significant speech units are found out; figures of speech are described; a fragment of the axiological lexicon of the popular group is constructed. There are also distinguished the author’s axiological preferences: he defends the constants of national culture and rejects the primacy of utilitarian values.

The study explores the degree to which readers can use their previous linguistic knowledge, which goes beyond the immediate evidence in the input, to create mental representations of new words and how the employment of this knowledge may reduce the fuzziness of the new representations. Using self-paced reading, initial representations of novel identical forms with different grammatical functions were compared in native German speakers and advanced L2 German learners with L1 Czech. The results reveal that although both groups can employ general knowledge about German grammar when establishing new representations, the L1 native speakers outperform the L2 learners: Their new representations have more precise structure and are better differentiated from related representations with respect to their grammatical information. Modeling consequences of these findings are discussed in the context of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation and the Fuzzy Lexical Representation Hypothesis.

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The use of artificial intelligence (AI), especially ChatGPT, has increased exponentially in the past years, and it can be seen how AI-based tools are being used in several fields, including education. The literature on AI on education (AIEd), how it has been used, its potential uses, opportunities and challenges were reviewed as well as the literature on sentiment analysis on social media to evaluate the best approach. Since education might face notorious changes due to this technology, assessing how people feel about this potential change in the paradigm is essential. Sentiment analysis on YouTube comments of videos related to ChatGPT, the most popular AI tool for education across learners and educators, was performed. It was found that 62.1% of thes ample had a positive feeling regarding this technology for educational purposes, whereas 19.4% had a negative sentiment and 18.5% were neutral. To contribute to the literature on sentiment analysis of YouTube comments, the two most used and best-performing algorithms were used for this task: Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine. The results show that the first algorithm had a 61.30% accuracy, whereas SVM had a 71.79%.

Die verhandeling ondersoek die taalbeheersing van studente wat Afrikaans as tweede addisionele taal neem en meer spesifiek, die woordeskatkennis van die ondersoekgroep, naamlik swart addisioneletaalleerders in die Limpopo-provinsie in Graad 11 en 12. Dit is duidelik dat een van die probleme wat aanleerders het, ‘n gebrekkige woordeskat is. Dit beïnvloed hulle begrip van Afrikaans sowel as hulle produksie (skriftelik en ook mondeling). Een van die redes hiervoor is dat daar nie op ‘n sistematiese manier aandag gegee word aan óf woordeskatverwerwing (of –aanleer) óf die onderrig van woordeskat in die kurrikulum en sillabus nie. Hierdie navorsing se doelwitte is om die stand van die woordeskatkennis van Graad 11- en 12-leerders te bepaal en tweedens om met behulp van insigte oor die aanleer en/of verwerwing van leksikonitems die sukses van bepaalde strategieë te bepaal. Navorsingsvrae is die volgende: Wat is die stand van woordeskatonderrig vandag wêreldwyd? Wat is die stand van woordeskatonderrig in die Suid-Afrikaanse sillabus? Hoe goed is Graad 11 en 12 leerderders se kennis van die Afrikaanse woordeskat? Wat is Graad11- en 12 leerders se houding teenoor Afrikaans? Hoe kan mens hierdie houding(s) verklaar? Watter rol speel (intrinsieke) motivering en houdings teenoor Afrikaans? Watter metodes en tegnieke kan gebruik word om leerders se woordeskat te verbeter? / Dissertation (MA (Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Afrikaans / unrestricted