Journal articles on the topic 'English language Orthography and Spelling Data processing'

Developing literacy in two languages can be challenging for young bilingual children. This longitudinal study investigates the effects of bilingualism in the spelling strategies of English-Portuguese speaking children. A total of 88 six-to-seven-year-old bilinguals and monolinguals were followed during one academic year and data gathered on a range of verbal and written language skills and non-verbal measures while controlling for SES. For both bilinguals and monolinguals letter knowledge, phonological awareness and word concept were significant predictors of spelling. However, non-verbal reasoning played an increasing role in explaining spelling variance for bilinguals, suggesting that learning to spell in two alphabetic languages places more demands on non-verbal processing skills. Spelling error analyses further revealed that bilinguals when compared to monolinguals showed more reliance on phonological strategies, less compliance with the L1 orthographic system and at times transference from L2. The results suggest important implications for our understanding of spelling acquisition and the development of effective intervention practices for bilingual children.

Abstract Orthographic depth, the degree of spelling-to-sound consistency in a language, has been hypothesized to affect the ease with which children learn to read words. However, the relationship between orthographic depth and reading comprehension is less well understood. In this study, focusing on countries in which two international assessments (PISA and PIRLS) were given in two or more languages, we examine data from elementary and high-school readers of Finnish, Swedish, Italian, German, Dutch, French and English). Findings suggest that that there may be some trade-offs between shallow and deep orthographies in terms of the specific ways that they map onto the phonological and deep meaning representations required for cognitive processing during an activity such as comprehension. These trade-offs serve to differentially support or inhibit readers depending on where they are situated on the achievement continuum.

<p><em>Previous research has demonstrated that L1 orthographic features and literacy experiences may influence some lower-level processing skills in L2 literacy development. The goal of this study is to expand understanding of this influence on the development of ESL word reading and spelling skills among a group of 49 intermediate-level Arabic learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) and a corresponding comparison group of 50 Japanese ESL learners. Data were collected on a spelling test, a reading comprehension test, and a series of word reading tasks which include reading words with a missing vowel, reading words with a missing consonant, reading a regular wordlist, and reading pseudo-words. The results indicated that at the same level of reading comprehension, the Japanese ESL group performed significantly better than the Arabic group on spelling and all the word reading measures except the accuracy and speed in reading words with a missing vowel. The study also found that the Arabic ESL learners were more adversely affected in both accuracy and speed of reading words with a missing consonant compared with reading words with a missing vowel. Furthermore, accuracy in reading words with a missing consonant was found to be the best predictor of reading comprehension for the Arabic group but for the Japanese group, spelling and accuracy in reading words with a missing consonant were both significant predictors of ESL reading comprehension. The findings were discussed in relation to previous research. Pedagogical implications were also addressed.</em></p>

The concurrent development of reading and spelling in English and Persian were examined in a sample of bilingual children. The objective was to compare how phonological and orthographic processing skills contribute to reading and spelling for two alphabetic languages that differ drastically. English orthography is characterised by both polyphony (i.e., a grapheme representing more than one phoneme) and polygraphy (i.e., a phoneme represented by more than one grapheme) which results in a complex script to read and write. In contrast, vowelised-Persian orthography is characterised by polygraphy only, which results in a simple script to read but more complex to write. Fifty-five Iranian children in grades 2 and 3, who had lived in English-speaking Canada for an average of 4 years, were tested on word reading and spelling in English and Persian. We found that the predictors of reading performance were similar across languages: Phonological and orthographic processing skills each predicted unique variance in word reading in English and in Persian once we had controlled for grade level, vocabulary, and reading experience. As expected, the predictors of spelling performance differed across language: Spelling in English was predicted similarly by phonological and orthographic processing skills, whereas spelling in Persian was predicted by orthographic processing skills only. It is possible that the nature of the Persian orthography encourages children to adopt different strategies when reading and spelling words. Spelling Persian words might be particularly conducive to using an analytic strategy which, in turn, promotes the development of and reliance on orthographic skills.

<em>Cross-linguistic studies on second language (L2) reading reveal that component skills of reading such as word recognition, phonemic decoding, spelling, and oral text reading are prone to the influence of first language (L1) orthography but few empirical studies have examined the possible influence of L1 orthography on these skills. This study investigates how adult ESL learners of two different L1 backgrounds (Spanish and Chinese) compare in their performances on word recognition efficiency, phonemic decoding efficiency, spelling, and oral text reading fluency and how these skills are related to their overall ability in reading comprehension. The differences in the learners’ performances on the component skills and the variations in the role of these skills in ESL reading comprehension indicated possible influence of the orthographic features of learners’ first language.</em>

Purpose Morphological interventions promote gains in morphological knowledge and in other oral and written language skills (e.g., phonological awareness, vocabulary, reading, and spelling), yet we have a limited understanding of critical intervention features. In this clinical focus article, we describe a relatively novel approach to teaching morphology that considers its role as the key organizing principle of English orthography. We also present a clinical example of such an intervention delivered during a summer camp at a university speech and hearing clinic. Method Graduate speech-language pathology students provided a 6-week morphology-focused orthographic intervention to children in first through fourth grade ( n = 10) who demonstrated word-level reading and spelling difficulties. The intervention focused children's attention on morphological families, teaching how morphology is interrelated with phonology and etymology in English orthography. Results Comparing pre- and posttest scores, children demonstrated improvement in reading and/or spelling abilities, with the largest gains observed in spelling affixes within polymorphemic words. Children and their caregivers reacted positively to the intervention. Therefore, data from the camp offer preliminary support for teaching morphology within the context of written words, and the intervention appears to be a feasible approach for simultaneously increasing morphological knowledge, reading, and spelling. Conclusion Children with word-level reading and spelling difficulties may benefit from a morphology-focused orthographic intervention, such as the one described here. Research on the approach is warranted, and clinicians are encouraged to explore its possible effectiveness in their practice. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12290687

The phenomenon of phonological error as the common sense in pronouncing the words not only happens among beginners but also among the advanced English learners. The English learners are also active speakers who use English as their second language used such as in a formal situation. They tend to pronounce the same for words that have same spelling as other words in most parts of the words or even thewhole words but of different parts of speech. The present writers’ study tries to answer the question on how the English learners’ pronunciation is influenced by words with the same spelling. The participants of the study were Indonesian college students who learned English at the advanced level. In order to get the data, they were given word lists that contained a number of words and then asked to pronounce them. These words were suspected as common mistakes pronounced by the advanced learners. For example the word ‘determine’ is pronounced the same as the word ‘mine’, the word ‘preface’ is pronounced as ‘face’. In this study, the result reveals that the English learners tend to pronounce the words that refer to other words that contain the same orthography. Orthographically, the words and part of the words have the same spelling but they do not share the same pronunciation. Therefore, this error is commonly found among English learners even among those of the advanced level.

The present study investigates some factors affecting the acquisition of second language (L2) phonology by learners with considerable exposure to the target language in an L2 context. More specifically, the purpose of the study is two-fold: (a) to investigate the extent to which participants resort to phonological processes resulting from the transfer of L1 sound-spelling correspondence into the L2 when pronouncing English word-final consonants; and (b) to examine the relationship between rate of transfer and learner profile factors, namely proficiency level, length of residence in the L2 country, age of arrival in the L2 country, education, chronological age, use of English with native speakers, attendance in EFL courses, and formal education. The investigation involved 31 Brazilian speakers living in the United States with diverse profiles. Data were collected using a questionnaire to elicit the participants' profiles, a sentence-reading test (pronunciation measure), and an oral picture-description test (L2 proficiency measure). The results indicate that even in an L2 context, the transfer of L1 sound-spelling correspondence to the production of L2 word-final consonants is frequent. The findings also reveal that extensive exposure to rich L2 input leads to the development of proficiency and improves production of L2 word-final consonants.

Orthographic consistency was rarely maintained in most Old English varieties, because the language system was relatively new and spelling norms took time to develop.While full standardisation is never expected in Old English, the understanding of factors underlying patterns of regularity and irregularity are paramount for a full grasp of issues pertaining to authorship, textuality and other linguistic and non-linguistic levels of analysis. These notes explore spelling irregularity in material from West Saxon dialects, bringing comparative examples of variation in spelling between early West Saxon (eWS) <ie> and late West Saxon (lWS) <y>. West Saxon generally stands up for its emphasis on some degree of orthographic standardisation and yet appears to display interesting patterns of variation. The focus of my notes will be on particular instances of spelling inconsistencies, with special attention to a specific category of words where <ie> appears to vary more frequently, namely third-person pronouns. For my exploratory analysis, various witnesses of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (i.e. examples of eWS and lWS texts) were compared. The data was collected from different sections of an orthography-friendly edition of four different manuscripts, MSA (Bately 1986), MSB (Taylor 1983), MSC (O’Brien O’Keefe 2001) and MSD (Cubbin 1996), and compared with digital copies of the original manuscripts. The latter part of these notes points to some of the factors which could explain the features detected, with an exhortation for future researchers to build on some of the ideas proposed and explore new territory.Keywords: Old English; spelling; pronouns; variation; early West Saxon; late West Saxon

AbstractAutomatic pronunciation of unknown words (i.e., those not in the system dictionary) is a difficult problem in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Currently, many data-driven approaches have been applied to the problem, as a backup strategy for those cases where dictionary matching fails. The difficulty of the problem depends on the complexity of spelling-to-sound mappings according to the particular writing system of the language. Hence, the degree of success achieved varies widely across languages but also across dictionaries, even for the same language with the same method. Further, the sizes of the training and test sets are an important consideration in data-driven approaches. In this paper, we study the variation of letter-to-phoneme transcription accuracy across seven European languages with twelve different lexicons. We also study the relationship between the size of dictionary and the accuracy obtained. The largest dictionaries of each language have been partitioned into ten approximately equal-sized subsets and combined to give ten different-sized test sets. In view of its superior performance in previous work, the transcription method used is pronunciation by analogy (PbA). Best results are obtained for Spanish, generally believed to have a very regular (‘shallow’) orthography, and poorest results for English, a language whose irregular spelling system is legendary. For those languages for which multiple dictionaries were available (i.e., French and English), results were found to vary across dictionaries. For the relationship between dictionary size and transcription accuracy, we find that as dictionary size grows, so performance grows monotonically. However, the performance gain decelerates (tends to saturate) as the dictionary increases in size; the relation can simply be described by a logarithmic regression, one parameter of which (α) can be taken as quantifying the depth of orthography of a language. We find that α for a language is significantly correlated with transcription performance on a small dictionary (approximately 10,000 words) for that language, but less so for asymptotic performance. This may be because our measure of asymptotic performance is unreliable, being extrapolated from the fitted logarithmic regression.

Bilingual children are required to successfully develop phonological skills in two languages, yet little is known about the neural correlates associated with them. We obtained structural imaging data from 30 Hindi–English children aged between 8 and 10 years and used voxel based morphometry to explore neuroanatomical correlates of behavioural measures of phonological awareness. Our results showed that phonological skills in English are predicted by grey matter volume of bilateral putamen, but solely by right putamen in Hindi. Post-hoc analysis revealed that English nonword reading correlates with grey matter volume in bilateral putamen while in Hindi nonword reading it correlates only with right putamen. These differences in putamen-based mechanisms indicate that syllable level awareness sufficiently supports early literacy in the transparent, alphasyllabic Hindi orthography whereas that in English requires both phonemic and syllabic level awareness. Our findings point towards a key role for putamen in mediating phonological and reading skills in children.

AbstractNon-standard orthography on social media provides a useful supplementary data source for sociophonetic research. Regarding an ongoing chain shift in Northern Metropolitan French nasal vowels, spellings reflecting shifted vowel targets are observed on Twitter. These non-standard spellings, e.g. avont [avɔ̃] for avant /avɑ̃/ ‘before’, provide insight into speakers’ awareness of this change and its lexical distribution. Tweets with shifted and standard spellings of 306 word forms containing the phonemes /ɛ̃/, /œ̃/, /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ were collected from an 870-million word Internet Archive corpus of French tweets from 2011–2017. Shifted spellings were found for all four vowels and 168 words. The shifted spelling rate is lower than that of comparable variables in English and is not conditioned by stress, grammatical category, frequency, or phonological context, which affect the distribution of shifted nasal vowels in speech. However, frequent words show more indications of intentional misspelling, such as repetition and capitalization of the target vowel, suggesting that some speakers are conscious of the variation and comment on it using salient words. The results also contribute to an ongoing debate about a possible merger between /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/, supporting the hypothesis of an incomplete merger where /ɛ̃/ shifts towards [ɑ̃] but /œ̃/ does not.

The Igbo people are at the verge of losing their language, culture and identity to the English Language [Azuonye 2002, Asonye 2013, Emeka-Nwobia 2020]. This work aims at investigating into the Anglicization of written Igbo personal and place names with a view to highlighting the extent of spellings and pronunciation inconsistencies, discover what impact it has on the learning and development of the language, and discover ways the attitude of the people can be changed towards the language to forestall its death. It argues that the spelling inconsistencies it introduced to the language is a source of challenge to learners, the majority of whom already have negative attitude towards the language. Ogbalu [1974], Oruchalu [1979] and Okodo [2008] made lists of anglicized names with their correct Igbo spellings, and decried the practice. The data for this research were collected from personal experiences, class lists, radio and television programmes, the internet, social and print media, and interviews. It concludes that a change in the attitude of the people towards their language, culture and identity as well as total implementation of the Onwu Orthography with regards to the spelling of personal and place names will complement the efforts being made to sustain the language.

<p><em>As a result of colonization of the British, the English used in many African countries and for that matter Ghana, is the British standard variety. However, the English used in Ghana, appears to have been invaded by the American English. This poses a problem as both teachers and students especially at the senior high school level confuse themselves about which word or spelling is right and vice versa. This study thus seeks to investigate students’ awareness of this invasion, the extent of the invasion and also to ascertain which of the aspects of the language has been much influenced by the American variety. The underpinning framework for this study is Kachru’s (1985) concentric model to situate the type of English used in Ghana. A sample size of 100 Students of English Education Department of University of Education, Winneba was selected for the study. The data was a secondary one: a random collection of vocabulary. Test, interview and questionnaire were also employed to gather other related data for the study. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to analyse the data with precedence on qualitative analysis and the findings were thematically presented. The results indicate that although students use both American and British English together, they have little knowledge about the differences between them, especially, with the vocabulary aspect. Students have fair knowledge about the differences between the two varieties as regards the orthography aspect. These findings have implications on the teaching of English language and on examination issues in the country. It also informs writers of various educational materials about what variety to use.</em></p>

Abstract The vocabulary, spelling and writing skills of French/English bilingual students aged between 12 and 15 years were assessed, along with their verbal working memory (VWM), visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) skills. The extent to which individual differences in writing performance reflected variations in working memory skills which were specific to the memory domain and the language of testing was assessed. All three components of working memory were significantly associated across languages confirming their independence in this bilingual sample. Significant associations were also identified between vocabulary knowledge and VWM in both languages. For text composition in English, significant associations were identified between spelling and PSTM assessed in English, with medium sized, but non-significant, correlations identified with vocabulary knowledge and VWM. For text composition in French, although the associations with spelling, PSTM and VWM were of a moderate effect size, none of these associations reached significance. Comparisons across languages revealed that although writing in English was not significantly associated with either French vocabulary or spelling, writing in French was associated with both these subcomponent skills assessed in English. Visuo-spatial working memory bore little association with either spelling or writing skills either within or across languages. Broadly speaking therefore the data were consistent with an interpretation of the relationship between working memory and writing that reflects a domain-specific view of the capacity limitations in working memory which constrain writing performance, rather than limitations imposed by a domain-general attentional construct. However, it was proposed that these verbal processing effects are not language-specific.

The vocabulary, spelling and writing skills of French/English bilingual students aged between 12 and 15 years were assessed, along with their verbal working memory (VWM), visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) skills. The extent to which individual differences in writing performance reflected variations in working memory skills which were specific to the memory domain and the language of testing was assessed. All three components of working memory were significantly associated across languages confirming their independence in this bilingual sample. Significant associations were also identified between vocabulary knowledge and VWM in both languages. For text composition in English, significant associations were identified between spelling and PSTM assessed in English, with medium sized, but non-significant, correlations identified with vocabulary knowledge and VWM. For text composition in French, although the associations with spelling, PSTM and VWM were of a moderate effect size, none of these associations reached significance. Comparisons across languages revealed that although writing in English was not significantly associated with either French vocabulary or spelling, writing in French was associated with both these subcomponent skills assessed in English. Visuo-spatial working memory bore little association with either spelling or writing skills either within or across languages. Broadly speaking therefore the data were consistent with an interpretation of the relationship between working memory and writing that reflects a domain-specific view of the capacity limitations in working memory which constrain writing performance, rather than limitations imposed by a domain-general attentional construct. However, it was proposed that these verbal processing effects are not language-specific.

Abstract Research into orthography in the history of English is not a simple venture. The history of English spelling is primarily based on printed texts, which fail to capture the range of variation inherent in the language; many manuscript phenomena are simply not found in printed texts. Manuscript-based corpora would be the ideal research data, but as this is resource-intensive, linguists use editions that have been produced by non-linguists. Many editions claim to retain original spellings, but in practice text is always normalized at the graph level and possibly more so. This does not preclude using such a corpus for orthographical research, but there has been no systematic way to determine the philological reliability of an edited text. In this paper we present a typological methodology we are developing for the evaluation of orthographical quality of edition-based corpora, with the aim of making the best use of bad data in the context of editions and manuscript practices. As a case study, we apply this methodology to the Early Modern and Late Modern English sections of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence.

Aims: The present study aims to examine the cross-script cognate facilitation effect that cognates have processing advantages over non-cognates and this effect is strong evidence supporting the non-selective access hypothesis for bilinguals. Methodology: By adopting a masked translation priming paradigm, Experiment 1 used 48 Chinese–English cognates (Chinese words) and 48 non-cognates (Chinese words) as primes and their English translation equivalences as targets. Chinese–English bilinguals were instructed to judge whether the target stimuli were real words or not. In Experiment 2, another group of participants took the same lexical decision task as in Experiment 1, except that English–Chinese cognates and non-cognates (English words) served as primes and their Chinese translation equivalences were targets. Data and analysis: Response latency and accuracy data were submitted to a repeated-measures analysis of variance. Findings/conclusions: Experiment 1 showed that Chinese–English cognates (Chinese words) and non-cognates (Chinese words) produced similar priming effect, while Experiment 2 revealed that English–Chinese cognates (English words) generated a significant priming effect, whereas non-cognates (English words) failed to induce any priming effect. Overall, Chinese words did not show cognate advantage, while English words produced a significant cognate facilitation effect. These results might be attributed to different mappings from orthography to phonology in English and Chinese. Opaque mapping from orthography to phonology in Chinese hindered phonological activation and reduced Chinese–English cognate phonological priming effect. However, English–Chinese cognates benefited from transparent mapping from sound to print and thus generated a significant phonological priming effect. Implications of the current findings for bilingual word recognition models were discussed. Originality: The present study is the first to investigate the cross-script cognate facilitation effect by ensuring both the heterogeneity of primes and targets (English and Chinese) and the homogeneity of primes (Chinese or English). The results indicated that the writing systems of the primes constrained the cross-script cognate priming effect.

Abstract Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves.

Cette étude se plonge dans l’interlangue d’un groupe d’apprenants nigérians de Français Langue Étrangère pour évaluer leur compétence en construction dans le domaine de l’orthographe lexicale. Cette compétence est évaluée par le biais des erreurs qui représentent des symptômes révélateurs des difficultés d’apprentissage et des points d’appui pour un enseignement meilleur. L’étude cherche dans un premier temps à expliquer les difficultés liées au processus d’apprentissage de l’orthographe lexicale et dans un deuxième temps à proférer des voies et moyens pour aider l’apprenant à mieux apprendre. Le corpus est constitué de productions écrites collectées auprès d’étudiants de première année de licence inscrits au cours de rédaction en français. Les résultats montrent que les types d’erreurs qui prédominent sont les erreurs liées aux accents, suivies des erreurs à dominante phonétique et des erreurs à dominante non-fonctionnelle. Par ailleurs, l’anglais, la langue seconde de ces apprenants, constitue la langue pourvoyeuse de la plus grande influence sur leur comportement orthographique. L’étude recommande que plus d’attention soit accordée à l’enseignement de l’orthographe lexicale dans les activités de classe de FLE au Nigéria. This study focuses on the interlanguage of a group of Nigerian learners of French as a Foreign Language in order to assess their competence level in lexical spelling. This competence in phonographic encoding is measured through errors, which can be seen as symptoms showing learning difficulties and at the same as tools through which the learning process can be improved upon. Specifically, the study investigates the difficulties associated with learning of lexical spelling and suggest ways through which the learner can learn it better. Data for the study are elicited through written productions of first-year undergraduate students enrolled in a French Composition course. Results reveal that errors of diacritic marks predominate in the written productions of these students, followed by phonetic induced spelling errors and errors related to non-functional alphabetic letters. English, the second language of these learners, is the language with the greatest influence on their spelling behaviour. The study recommends that more attention should be accorded to the teaching of lexical orthography in French Language classroom activities in Nigeria.

Abstract Corpora of Early Modern English have been collected and released for research for a number of years. With large scale digitisation activities gathering pace in the last decade, much more historical textual data is now available for research on numerous topics including historical linguistics and conceptual history. We summarise previous research which has shown that it is necessary to map historical spelling variants to modern equivalents in order to successfully apply natural language processing and corpus linguistics methods. Manual and semiautomatic methods have been devised to support this normalisation and standardisation process. We argue that it is important to develop a linguistically meaningful rationale to achieve good results from this process. In order to do so, we propose a number of guidelines for normalising corpora and show how these guidelines have been applied in the Corpus of English Dialogues.

Abstract Background Merging disparate and heterogeneous datasets from clinical routine in a standardized and semantically enriched format to enable a multiple use of data also means incorporating unstructured data such as medical free texts. Although the extraction of structured data from texts, known as natural language processing (NLP), has been researched at least for the English language extensively, it is not enough to get a structured output in any format. NLP techniques need to be used together with clinical information standards such as openEHR to be able to reuse and exchange still unstructured data sensibly. Objectives The aim of the study is to automatically extract crucial information from medical free texts and to transform this unstructured clinical data into a standardized and structured representation by designing and implementing an exemplary pipeline for the processing of pediatric medical histories. Methods We constructed a pipeline that allows reusing medical free texts such as pediatric medical histories in a structured and standardized way by (1) selecting and modeling appropriate openEHR archetypes as standard clinical information models, (2) defining a German dictionary with crucial text markers serving as expert knowledge base for a NLP pipeline, and (3) creating mapping rules between the NLP output and the archetypes. The approach was evaluated in a first pilot study by using 50 manually annotated medical histories from the pediatric intensive care unit of the Hannover Medical School. Results We successfully reused 24 existing international archetypes to represent the most crucial elements of unstructured pediatric medical histories in a standardized form. The self-developed NLP pipeline was constructed by defining 3.055 text marker entries, 132 text events, 66 regular expressions, and a text corpus consisting of 776 entries for automatic correction of spelling mistakes. A total of 123 mapping rules were implemented to transform the extracted snippets to an openEHR-based representation to be able to store them together with other structured data in an existing openEHR-based data repository. In the first evaluation, the NLP pipeline yielded 97% precision and 94% recall. Conclusion The use of NLP and openEHR archetypes was demonstrated as a viable approach for extracting and representing important information from pediatric medical histories in a structured and semantically enriched format. We designed a promising approach with potential to be generalized, and implemented a prototype that is extensible and reusable for other use cases concerning German medical free texts. In a long term, this will harness unstructured clinical data for further research purposes such as the design of clinical decision support systems. Together with structured data already integrated in openEHR-based representations, we aim at developing an interoperable openEHR-based application that is capable of automatically assessing a patient's risk status based on the patient's medical history at time of admission.

During the last two decades, sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, has become one of the most explored research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining. Sentiment analysis focuses on the sentiments or opinions of consumers expressed over social media or different web sites. Due to exposure on the Internet, sentiment analysis has attracted vast numbers of researchers over the globe. A large amount of research has been conducted in English, Chinese, and other languages used worldwide. However, Roman Urdu has been neglected despite being the third most used language for communication in the world, covering millions of users around the globe. Although some techniques have been proposed for sentiment analysis in Roman Urdu, these techniques are limited to a specific domain or developed incorrectly due to the unavailability of language resources available for Roman Urdu. Therefore, in this article, we are proposing an unsupervised approach for sentiment analysis in Roman Urdu. First, the proposed model normalizes the text to overcome spelling variations of different words. After normalizing text, we have used Roman Urdu and English opinion lexicons to correctly identify users’ opinions from the text. We have also incorporated negation terms and stemming to assign polarities to each extracted opinion. Furthermore, our model assigns a score to each sentence on the basis of the polarities of extracted opinions and classifies each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral. In order to verify our approach, we have conducted experiments on two publicly available datasets for Roman Urdu and compared our approach with the existing model. Results have demonstrated that our approach outperforms existing models for sentiment analysis tasks in Roman Urdu. Furthermore, our approach does not suffer from domain dependency.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient and scalable Arabic semantic search engine based on a domain-specific ontological graph for Colleges of Applied Science, Sultanate of Oman (CASOnto). It also supports the factorial question answering and uses two types of searching: the keyword-based search and the semantics-based search in both languages Arabic and English. This engine is built on variety of technologies such as resource description framework data and ontological graph. Furthermore, two experimental results are conducted; the first is a comparison among entity-search and the classical-search in the system itself. The second compares the CASOnto with well-known semantic search engines such as Kngine, Wolfram Alpha and Google to measure their performance and efficiency. Design/methodology/approach The design and implementation of the system comprises the following phases, namely, designing inference, storing, indexing, searching, query processing and the user’s friendly interface, where it is designed based on a specific domain of the IBRI CAS (College of Applied Science) to highlight the academic and nonacademic departments. Furthermore, it is ontological inferred data stored in the tuple data base (TDB) and MySQL to handle the keyword-based search as well as entity-based search. The indexing and searching processes are built based on the Lucene for the keyword search, while TDB is used for the entity search. Query processing is a very important component in the search engines that helps to improve the user’s search results and make the system efficient and scalable. CASOnto handles the Arabic issues such as spelling correction, query completion, stop words’ removal and diacritics removal. It also supports the analysis of the factorial question answering. Findings In this paper, an efficient and scalable Arabic semantic search engine is proposed. The results show that the semantic search that built on the SPARQL is better than the classical search in both simple and complex queries. Clearly, the accuracy of semantic search equals to 100 per cent in both types of queries. On the other hand, the comparison of CASOnto with the Wolfram Alpha, Kngine and Google refers to better results by CASOnto. Consequently, it seems that our proposed engine retrieved better and efficient results than other engines. Thus, it is built according to the ontological domain-specific, highly scalable performance and handles the complex queries well by understanding the context behind the query. Research limitations/implications The proposed engine is built on a specific domain (CAS Ibri – Oman), and in the future vision, it will highlight the nonfactorial question answering and expand the domain of CASOnto to involve more integrated different domains. Originality/value The main contribution of this paper is to build an efficient and scalable Arabic semantic search engine. Because of the widespread use of search engines, a new dimension of challenge is created to keep up with the evolution of the semantic Web. Whereas, catering to the needs of users has become a matter of paramount importance in the light of artificial intelligence and technological development to access the accurate and the efficient information in less possible time. However, the research challenges still in its infancy due to lack of research engine that supports the Arabic language. It could be traced back to the complexity of the Arabic language morphological and grammar rules.

The depth of the English orthography makes reading and spelling in English a difficult task; particularly for English language learners (ELLs) whose first language (L1) has a shallow orthography. Mastering spelling in English is a critical component of increasing the English literacy of ELLs. This study investigated the English spelling of 569 Spanish-speaking ELLs in Grades 4 to 6. Participants’ writing samples were analyzed for spelling errors. Latent class analysis was utilized to discover hidden categories within the data using eight spelling error categories: (a) Vowel Omission; (b) Vowel Addition; (c) Vowel Substitution; (d) Vowel Sequence; (e) Consonant Omission; (f) Consonant Addition; (g) Consonant Substitution; (h) Consonant Sequence. Consonant- and vowel-based errors were nearly equal in each grade level. Latent class analysis resulted in a two-class model. Students in Class 1 made more types of errors than students in Class 2. As the grade level increased, the percentage of students in Class 2 increased. The results of this study show the effects of English and Spanish orthographies on the spelling of Spanish-speaking ELLs, with spelling errors occurring among both vowels and consonants. As omissions were the most prevalent errors in both classes, spelling instruction aimed at decreasing omissions should be considered for ELLs.

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SMS language is characterized by fashion and user’s creativity but needs a transformation to proper English words or spelling to formulate natural language and text processing activities. The proposed application, Web Information Retrieval System Architecture Based on SMS (WIRSABoSMS), normalizes SMS language to retain its original syntactic structure. The concept of mobile agents in web technology was introduced as a medium to achieving Short Message Service (SMS) normalization. SMS normalization was carried out with the adoption of multi-agent technology, as agents are involved in character search, sort, and compare of the strings written in SMS form into its parental orthography. This architecture was designed based on web information retrieval system (IRS) in order to achieve SMS normalization. BLEU (bilingual evaluation understudy) was used to evaluate the quality of text. BLEU scores compare the human judgment with that of the machine translation using two set of corpora. The outcome of syntactic text message normalization recorded an average of 90% performance (for the corpus collected from researchers) when compared with the similar test conducted with human judgment using BLEU scores metric in an health-related domain.

Language performance requires support from central cognitive/linguistic abilities as well as the more peripheral sensorimotor skills to plan and implement spoken and written communication. Both output modalities are vulnerable to impairment following damage to the language-dominant hemisphere, but much of the research to date has focused exclusively on spoken language. In this study we aimed to examine an integrated model of language processing that includes the common cognitive processes that support spoken and written language, as well as modality-specific skills. To do so, we evaluated spoken and written language performance from 87 individuals with acquired language impairment resulting from damage to left perisylvian cortical regions that collectively constitute the dorsal language pathway. Comprehensive behavioral assessment served to characterize the status of central and peripheral components of language processing in relation to neurotypical controls (n = 38). Performance data entered into principal components analyses (with or without control scores) consistently yielded a strong five-factor solution. In line with a primary systems framework, three central cognitive factors emerged: semantics, phonology, and orthography that were distinguished from peripheral processes supporting speech production and allographic skill for handwriting. The central phonology construct reflected performance on phonological awareness and manipulation tasks and showed the greatest deficit of all the derived factors. Importantly, this phonological construct was orthogonal to the speech production factor that reflected repetition of words/non-words. When entered into regression analyses, semantics and phonological skill were common predictors of language performance across spoken and written modalities. The speech production factor was also a strong, distinct predictor of spoken naming and oral reading, in contrast to allographic skills which only predicted written output. As expected, visual orthographic processing contributed more to written than spoken language tasks and reading/spelling performance was strongly reliant on phonological and semantic abilities. Despite the heterogeneity of this cohort regarding aphasia type and severity, the marked impairment of phonological skill was a unifying feature. These findings prompt greater attention to clinical assessment and potential treatment of underlying phonological skill in individuals with left perisylvian damage.

IntroductionAccording to the strong version of the orthographic depth hypothesis, in languages with transparent letter-sound mappings (shallow orthographies) the reading of both familiar words and unfamiliar nonwords may be accomplished by a sublexical pathway that relies on serial grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. However, in languages such as English characterized by inconsistent letter-sound relationships (deep orthographies), word reading is mediated by a lexical-semantic pathway that relies on mappings between word-specific orthographic, semantic, and phonological representations, whereas the sublexical pathway is used primarily to read nonwords.MethodsIn this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to elucidate neural substrates of reading in Czech, a language characterized by a shallo worthography. Specifically, we contrasted patterns of brain activation and connectivity during word and nonword reading to determine whether similar or different neural mechanisms are involved. Neural correlates were measured as differences in simple whole-brain voxel-wise activation, and differences in visual word form area (VWFA) task-related connectivity were computed on the group level from data of 24 young subject. Trial-to-trial reading reaction times were used as a measure of task difficulty, and these effects were subtracted from the activation and connectivity effects in order to eliminate difference in cognitive effort which is naturally higher for nonwords and may mask the true lexicality effects.ResultsWe observed pattern of activity well described in the literature mostly derived from data of English speakers – nonword reading (as compared to word reading) activated the sublexical pathway to a greater extent whereas word reading was associated with greater activation of semantic networks. VWFA connectivity analysis also revealed stronger connectivity to a component of the sublexical pathway - left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), for nonword compared to word reading.DiscussionThese converging results suggest that the brain mechanism of skilled reading in shallow orthography languages are similar to those engaged when reading in languages with a deep orthography and are supported by a universal dual-pathway neural architecture.

Abstract Extensive evidence has demonstrated that bilinguals non-selectively activate lexicons of both languages when reading or hearing words in one language. Here, we further investigated the electrophysiological roles of cross-linguistic orthography and phonology in the processing of L2 spoken words in unbalanced Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals in a cross-modal situation. Relative to unrelated control, the recognition of auditory L2 words showed behavioral interference effects when paired with orthographic or phonological neighbors of the correct translations of L2 words. Moreover, the lexical effects were also exhibited in the electrophysiological data, as reflected by marginally less positive late positive component (500–800 ms) amplitudes in the frontal region. Importantly, the orthographic rather than phonological translation neighbor condition elicited less negative N400 (300–500 ms) amplitudes in the parietal–occipital regions, suggesting that this orthographic translation neighbor condition facilitated the co-activation of spoken L2 words. Taken together, these findings indicate that cross-linguistic orthographic and phonological activation have different temporal dynamics with both bottom-up parallel cross-linguistic activation and the top-down inhibitory control mechanism governing the two-language lexical organization in L2 spoken word recognition.

PurposeThe main aim of this paper is to build an approach to analyze the tourist content posted on social media. The approach incorporates information extraction, cleaning, data processing, descriptive and content analysis and can be used on different social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, etc. This work proposes an approach to social media analytics in traveler-generated content (TGC), and the authors use Twitter to apply this study and examine data about the city and the province of Granada.Design/methodology/approachIn order to identify what people are talking and posting on social media about places, events, restaurants, hotels, etc. the authors propose the following approach for data collection, cleaning and data analysis. The authors first identify the main keywords for the place of study. A descriptive analysis is subsequently performed, and this includes post metrics with geo-tagged analysis and user metrics, retweets and likes, comments, videos, photos and followers. The text is then cleaned. Finally, content analysis is conducted, and this includes word frequency calculation, sentiment and emotion detection and word clouds. Topic modeling was also performed with latent Dirichlet association (LDA).FindingsThe authors used the framework to collect 262,859 tweets about Granada. The most important hashtags are #Alhambra and #SierraNevada, and the most prolific user is @AlhambraCultura. The approach uses a seasonal context, and the posted tweets are divided into two periods (spring–summer and autumn–winter). Word frequency was calculated and again Granada, Alhambra are the most frequent words in both periods in English and Spanish. The topic models show the subjects that are mentioned in both languages, and although there are certain small differences in terms of language and season, the Alhambra, Sierra Nevada and gastronomy stand out as the most important topics.Research limitations/implicationsExtremely difficult to identify sarcasm, posts may be ambiguous, users may use both Spanish and English words in their tweets and tweets may contain spelling mistakes, colloquialisms or even abbreviations. Multilingualism represents also an important limitation since it is not clear how tweets written in different languages should be processed. The size of the data set is also an important factor since the greater the amount of data, the better the results. One of the largest limitations is the small number of geo-tagged tweets as geo-tagging would provide information about the place where the tweet was posted and opinions of it.Originality/valueThis study proposes an interesting way to analyze social media data, bridging tourism and social media literature in the data analysis context and contributes to discover patterns and features of the tourism destination through social media. The approach used provides the prospective traveler with an overview of the most popular places and the major posters for a particular tourist destination. From a business perspective, it informs managers of the most influential users, and the information obtained can be extremely useful for managing their tourism products in that region.

Most investigations of language use in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems colloquially known as 'chat rooms' are based on studies of chat rooms in which English is the predominant language. This study begins to redress that bias by investigating language use in a Swedish text-based chat room. Do Swedish chat participants just adopt strategies adapted to suit the needs of written online conversation, or is Swedish written language being developed in analogy with adaptations that can be observed in 'international' chat rooms? As is now well known, text-based chat rooms provide a means for people to converse in near real time with very little delay between messages. As a written form of interaction, there is no possibility of sending simultaneous non-verbal information, and while the minimal delay gives the interaction a more conversational feel, the conversants must struggle with the time pressure of combining a slow message production system with rapid transmission-reception. Several strategies have been developed in order to ease the strain of writing and to convey more information than written symbols normally allow (Werry; Witmer & Katzman; Hård af Segerstad, "Emoticons"). A number of strategies have been developed to suit the needs of CMC, some of which we recognise from traditional writing, but perhaps use more generously in the new environment. Well known and internationally recognised strategies used to compensate for the lack of non-verbal or non-vocal signals include providing analogies for vocalisations adopted in order to compensate for the effort of typing and time pressure: Smileys (or emoticons): Smileys are combinations of keyboard characters which attempt to resemble facial expressions, eg. ;) (or simple objects such as roses). These are mostly placed at the end of a sentence as an aid to interpret the emotional state of the sender; Surrounding words with *asterisks* (or a number of variants, such as underscores (_word_)). As with smileys, asterisks may be used to indicate the emotional state of the sender (eg. *smiles*, *s*), and also to convey an action (*waves*, *jumps up and down*); In some systems, different fonts and colours may be used to express emotions. Capitals, unorthodox spelling and mixing of cases in the middle of words and Extreme use of punctuation marks may all be used to convey analogies to prosodic phenomena such as intonation, tone of voice, emphasis ("you IDIOT"); Abbreviations and acronyms: some are traditional, others new to the medium; Omission of words: ellipsis, grammatical function words; and, Little correction of typographical errors -- orthography or punctuation -- and little traditional use of mixed cases (eg. capitals at the beginning of sentences), and punctuation. Method This study compares and contrasts data from a questionnaire and material from a logged chat channel. The investigation began with a questionnaire, inquiring into the habits and preferences of Swedish students communicating on the Internet. 333 students (164 females and 169 males) answered the questionnaire that was sent to five upper secondary schools (students aged 16-18), and two lower secondary schools (students aged 13-15). Subjects were asked for three kinds of information: (a) examples of the strategies mentioned above and whether they used these when chatting online, (b) which languages were used in everyday communication and in chat rooms, and (c) the names of favourite chat rooms. One of the most popular public chat rooms turned out to be one maintained by a Swedish newspaper. Permission was obtained to log material from this chat room. The room may be accessed at: <http://nychat.aftonbladet.se/webchat/oppenkanal/Entren.php>. A 'bot (from 'robot', a program that can act like a user on an IRC network) was used to log the time, sender and content of contributions in the room. In order to get a large data set and to record the spread of activity over the most part of a week, approximately 120 hours of logging occurred, six days and nights in succession. During this period 4 293 users ('unique pseudonyms'), from 278 different domains provided 47 715 contributions in total (410 355 total utterances). The logged material was analysed, using the automated search tool TRASA (developed by Leif Gronqvist -- Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden). Results The language used in the chat room was mainly Swedish. Apart from loan words (in some cases with the English spelling intact, in other cases adapted to Swedish spelling), English phrases (often idiomatic) showed up occasionally, sometimes in the middle of a Swedish sentence. Some examples of contributions are shown, extracted from their original context. (Note: Instances of Nordic letters in the examples have been transformed into the letters 'a' and 'o' respectively.) Table 1. Examples of nicknames and contributions taken from the Web chat material. 01.07.20 Darth Olsson Helloo allibadi hur e de i dag? 14:44:40 G.B Critical information check 01.11.40 Little Boy Lost fru hjarterdam...120 mil busstripp...Later hojdare om det...;) 18.10.30 PeeWee this sucks 22.17.12 Ellen (16) Whatever! 16.06.55 Blackboy Whats up The above examples demonstrate that both nicknames and contributions consist of a mix either of Swedish and English, or of pure English. In answering the questionnaire, the subjects gave many examples of the more 'traditional strategies' used in international chat channels for overcoming the limitations of writing: traditional abbreviations, the use of all uppercase, asterisk-framed words, extreme use of punctuation and the simplest smileys (Hård af Segerstad, "Emoticons", "Expressing Emoticons", "Strategies" and "Swedish Teenagers"). The questionnaire results also included examples of 'net-abbreviations' based on English words. However, while these were similar to those observed in international chat rooms, the most interesting finding was that Swedish teenagers do not just copy that behaviour from the international chat rooms that they have visited: the examples of creative and new abbreviations are made up in comparison with the innovative English net-abbreviations, but based on Swedish words. A number of different types of abbreviations emerged: Acronyms made up from the first letters in a phrase (eg. "istf", meaning "i stallet for" [trans. "instead of"]); Numbers representing the sound value of a syllable in combination with letters (eg. "3vligt" meaning "trevligt" [trans. "nice"]); and, Letters representing the sound value of a syllable in combination with other letters forming an abbreviated representation of a word (eg. "CS" meaning "(vi) ses" [trans. "see (you)"]). The logged chat material showed that all of the strategies, both Swedish and English, mentioned in the questionnaire were actually used online. The Swedish strategies mentioned in the questionnaire are illustrated in Table 2. Table 2. Examples of innovative and traditional Swedish abbreviations given in the questionnaire. Innovative Abbreviation Full phrase Translation Traditional abbreviation Full phrase Translation Asg Asgarvar Laughs hard ngn nagon someone Iofs i och for sig Strictly speaking Ngra nagra some ones iaf, if i allafall Anyway gbg Göteborg Göteborg É Ar Is sv svenska Swedish D Det It bla bland annat among other things Cs (vi) ses See you t.ex. till exempel for example Lr Eller Or ngt nagot something B.S.D.V Bara Sa Du Vet Just To Let You Know t.om till och med even P Pa On, at etc et cetera QL (ql) Kul Fun m.m med mera and more 3vligt Trevligt Nice m.a.o. med andra ord in other words Tebax Tillbaka Back mkt mycket a lot Oxa Ocksa Too ibl Ibland sometimes The table above shows examples of traditional and creative abbreviations developed to suit the limitations and advantages of written Swedish online. A comparison of the logged material with the examples given in the questionnaire shows that all innovative abbreviations exemplified were used, sometimes with slightly different orthography. Table 3. The most frequent abbreviations used in the chat material No. of occurrences Innovative Abbreviations No. of occurrences Traditional abbreviations 224 Oxa 74 GBG 101 Oki 60 gbg 62 Oki 56 ngn 47 É 43 mm 16 P 42 Gbg 10 Iofs 37 ngt 10 If 26 bla 10 D 19 tex 5 Tebax 19 Tom 5 OKI 18 etc 4 É 8 MM 4 Ql 6 Ngn 4 P 5 BLA 4 OXA 4 tom 4 D 4 NGN 3 Asg 4 Mm 3 IF 3 TEX 2 Oxa 2 TOM 1 Cs 2 Ngt 1 Tebax 1 ngra 1 QL 1 bLA 1 If 1 ASG The limited space of this article does not allow for a full analysis of the material from the chat, but in short, data from both the questionnaire and the Web chat of this study suggest that Swedish teenagers conversing in electronic chat rooms draw on their previous knowledge of strategies used in traditional written language to minimise time and effort when writing/typing (cf. Ferrara et al.). They do not just copy behaviour and strategies that they observe in international chat rooms that they have visited, but adapt these to suit the Swedish language. As well as saving time and effort typing, and apart from conveying non-verbal information, it would appear that these communication strategies are also used as a way of signalling and identifying oneself as 'cyber-regulars' -- people who know the game, so to speak. At this stage of research, beyond the use of Swedish language by Swedish nationals, there is nothing to indicate that the adaptations found are significantly different to online adaptations of English or French (cf. Werry). This result calls for further research on the specifics of Swedish adaptations. References Allwood, Jens. "An Activity Based Approach to Pragmatics." Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics 76. Dept. of Linguistics, University of Göteborg, 1995. Ferrara, K., H. Brunner, and G. Whittemore. "Interactive Written Discourse as an Emergent Register." Written Communication 8.1 (1991): 8-34. Hård af Segerstad, Ylva. "Emoticons -- A New Mode for the Written Language." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Expressing Emotions in Electronic Writing." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Strategies in Computer-Mediated Written Communication -- A Comparison between Two User Groups." Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden. Unpublished paper, 1998. ---. "Swedish Teenagers' Written Conversation in Electronic Chat Environments." WebTalk -- Writing As Conversation. Ed. Diane Penrod. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Forthcoming. Witmer, Diane, and Sandra Lee Katzman. "On-Line Smiles: Does Gender Make A Difference in the Use of Graphic Accents?" Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 19 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/witmer1.php>. Werry, Christopher, C. "Linguistic and Interactional Features of Internet Relay Chat." Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Susan Herring. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. 47-63. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad. "Swedish Chat Rooms." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php>. Chicago style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad, "Swedish Chat Rooms," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ylva Hård af Segerstad. (2000) Swedish chat rooms. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/swedish.php> ([your date of access]).