Do Schizophrenics Give Rare Word Associations?

AbstractBuilding on the theoretical insights into the socio-cognitive approach to the study of interactions in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF)), this paper reports on the idiosyncratic phenomenon that ELF speakers do not adhere to the norms of native speakers, but instead create their own particular word associations during the course of the interaction. Taking the verbs of speech talk, say, speak, and tell as examples, this study compares word associations from three corpora of native and non-native speakers. The findings of this study reveal that similar word associative patterns are produced and shared by ELF speech communities from different sociocultural backgrounds, and these differ substantially from those used by native English speakers. Idiom-like constructions such as say like, how to say, and speakin are developed and utilized by Asian and European ELF speakers. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that ELF speakers use the prefabricated expressions in the target language system only as references, and try to develop their own word associative patterns in ELF interactions. Moreover, the analysis of the non-literalness/metaphorical word associations of the verbs of speech in the Asian ELF corpus suggests that ELF speakers dynamically co-construct their shared common ground to derive non-literal/metaphorical meaning in actual situational context.

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The Wadden Sea as a National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site: Students’ Word Associations with These Two Conservation Designations

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13148006 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (14) ◽

pp. 8006

Author(s):

Till Schmäing ◽

Norbert Grotjohann

Keyword(s):

National Parks ◽

National Park ◽

Wadden Sea ◽

World Heritage ◽

World Heritage Site ◽

Unesco World Heritage ◽

Word Associations ◽

Heritage Site ◽

Unesco World Heritage Site ◽

Significant Difference

The Wadden Sea ecosystem is unique in many respects from a biological perspective. This is one reason why it is protected by national parks in Germany and by its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In biology didactics, there are only a few studies that focus on the Wadden Sea. This work investigates students’ word associations with the two stimulus words “national park” and “UNESCO World Heritage Site”. The survey was conducted among students living directly at the Wadden Sea and among students from the inland. The analysis of the identified associations (n = 8345) was carried out within the framework of a quantitative content analysis to be able to present and discuss the results on a group level. A statistically significant difference was found between the two groups. Overall, results showed that the students made subject-related associations as well as a large number of associations to both stimulus words that could be judged as non-subject-related. In some cases, a connection with the region of residence could be found, but this was not generally the case. Even students’ immediate residential proximity to the Wadden Sea is no guarantee that they have knowledge of the two considered protection terms.

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Students’ Word Associations with Different Terms Related to the Wadden Sea: Does the Place of Residence (Coast or Inland) Have an Influence?

Education Sciences ◽

10.3390/educsci11060284 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (6) ◽

pp. 284

Author(s):

Till Schmäing ◽

Norbert Grotjohann

Keyword(s):

Wadden Sea ◽

Word Association ◽

Place Of Residence ◽

Word Associations ◽

Quantitative Content ◽

Visitation Frequency ◽

Written Form ◽

Free Word ◽

Different Levels ◽

Out Of School

This paper presents students’ word associations with terms regarding the Wadden Sea. A continuous free word-association method was used in which the students from secondary schools (n = 3119, average age: 13.54 years) reported their associations with the stimulus words Wadden Sea, mudflat hiking tour, and tides in written form. Data were collected from students living close to the Wadden Sea and from students living inland. We performed a quantitative content analysis including the corresponding formation of categories. In addition, students’ school, out-of-school with the class, and private experiences the Wadden Sea ecosystem were recorded. The study shows that not only subject-related concepts should be considered at different levels, but non-subject-related aspects as well. The associations of the inland and non-inland students are statistically significantly different. The Wadden Sea and its biome were found to be completely unknown to some students. Students’ school, out-of-school with the class, and private experiences of the wetlands are also very mixed, regarding their Wadden Sea visitation frequency, and surprisingly cannot be directly derived from their place of residence. This research makes an important contribution towards the design of future biology didactic studies on the Wadden Sea.

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The Rare Word Issue in Natural Language Generation: A Character-Based Solution

Informatics ◽

10.3390/informatics8010020 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 20

Author(s):

Giovanni Bonetta ◽

Marco Roberti ◽

Rossella Cancelliere ◽

Patrick Gallinari

Keyword(s):

Natural Language ◽

Error Probability ◽

Essential Feature ◽

Proper Names ◽

Neural Model ◽

Natural Language Generation ◽

Training Phase ◽

Tabular Data ◽

Rare Word ◽

Language Generation

In this paper, we analyze the problem of generating fluent English utterances from tabular data, focusing on the development of a sequence-to-sequence neural model which shows two major features: the ability to read and generate character-wise, and the ability to switch between generating and copying characters from the input: an essential feature when inputs contain rare words like proper names, telephone numbers, or foreign words. Working with characters instead of words is a challenge that can bring problems such as increasing the difficulty of the training phase and a bigger error probability during inference. Nevertheless, our work shows that these issues can be solved and efforts are repaid by the creation of a fully end-to-end system, whose inputs and outputs are not constrained to be part of a predefined vocabulary, like in word-based models. Furthermore, our copying technique is integrated with an innovative shift mechanism, which enhances the ability to produce outputs directly from inputs. We assess performance on the E2E dataset, the benchmark used for the E2E NLG challenge, and on a modified version of it, created to highlight the rare word copying capabilities of our model. The results demonstrate clear improvements over the baseline and promising performance compared to recent techniques in the literature.

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The end of ‘Welcome Culture’? How the Cologne assaults reframed Germany’s immigration discourse

European Journal of Communication ◽

10.1177/02673231211012173 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 026732312110121

Author(s):

Iris Wigger ◽

Alexander Yendell ◽

David Herbert

Keyword(s):

Sexual Harassment ◽

Multidimensional Scaling ◽

News Media ◽

Moral Panic ◽

Media Framing ◽

Refugee Crisis ◽

National Belonging ◽

Word Associations ◽

History Of ◽

New Year’S Eve

Controversy over immigration and integration intensified in German news media following Chancellor Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis of 2015. Using multidimensional scaling of word associations in reporting across four national news publications in conjunction with key event, moral panic and framing theories, we argue that reporting of events at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve 2015–2016 reframed debate away from terror-related concerns and towards anxieties about the sexual predation of dark-skinned males, thus racializing immigration coverage and resonating with a long history of Orientalist stereotyping. We further identify an increased clustering of ‘race’, gender, religion, crowd-threat and national belonging terms in reporting on sexual harassment incidents following Cologne, suggesting an increased criminalization of immigration discourse. The article provides new empirically based insights into the dynamics of news media reporting on migrants in Germany and contributes to scholarly debates on media framing of migrants, sexuality and crime.

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Do word associations assess word knowledge? A comparison of L1 and L2, child and adult word associations

International Journal of Bilingualism ◽

10.1177/1367006910381189 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 187-204 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Marjolein Cremer ◽

Daphne Dingshoff ◽

Meike de Beer ◽

Rob Schoonen

Keyword(s):

Conceptual Development ◽

Assessment Tool ◽

Word Association ◽

Word Knowledge ◽

Word Associations ◽

Bilingual Speakers ◽

Association Behavior ◽

Log Linear ◽

L1 And L2 ◽

Free Word

Differences in word associations between monolingual and bilingual speakers of Dutch can reflect differences in how well seemingly familiar words are known. In this (exploratory) study mono-and bilingual, child and adult free word associations were compared. Responses of children and of monolingual speakers were found to be more dispersed across response categories than responses of adults and of L2 speakers, respectively. Log linear analyses show that the distributional patterns of association responses differ among the groups. Age has the largest effect on association responses. Adults give more meaning-related responses than children. Child L1 speakers give more meaning-related responses than child L2 speakers. Form-based and ‘Other’ associations were mostly given by (L2) children. The different findings for mono- and bilingual children and for mono- and bilingual adults show the influence of bilingualism on the development of word associations. The prominent effect of age emphasizes the role of conceptual development in word association behavior, and makes free word association tasks less suitable as an assessment tool for word knowledge.

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