scholarly journals Dominance Norms and Data for Spoken Ambiguous Words in British English

2022 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Gilbert ◽  
Jennifer M. Rodd
Keyword(s):  
British English ◽  
Ambiguous Words

scholarly journals Dominance Norms and Data for Spoken Ambiguous Words in British English

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Anne Gilbert ◽  
Jennifer M Rodd
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Relative Frequency ◽  
Additional Data ◽  
Word Association ◽  
British English ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Relative Preferences

Words with multiple meanings (e.g. bark of the tree/dog) have provided important insights into several key topics within psycholinguistics. Experiments that use ambiguous words require stimuli to be carefully controlled for the relative frequency (dominance) of their different meanings, as this property has pervasive effects on numerous tasks. Dominance scores are often calculated from word association responses: by measuring the proportion of participants who respond to the word ‘bark’ with dog-related (e.g. “woof”) or tree-related (e.g. “branch”) responses, researchers can estimate people’s relative preferences for these meanings. We collated data from a number of recent experiments and pre-tests to construct a dataset of 29,533 valid responses for 243 spoken ambiguous words from participants from the United Kingdom. We provide summary dominance data for the 182 ambiguous words that have a minimum of 100 responses, and a tool for automatically coding new word association responses based on responses in our coded set, which allows additional data to be more easily scored and added to this database. All files can be found at: https://osf.io/uy47w/.

scholarly journals Interlocutor modelling in comprehending speech from interleaved interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhenguang Garry Cai
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
American English ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
British English ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Same Gender ◽  
Meaning Interpretation

It has been shown that, in language comprehension, listeners model certain attributes of their interlocutor (e.g., dialectic background, age, gender) and interpret speech against the model; e.g., they understand cross-dialectally ambiguous words such as flat and gas for their American English (AE) meanings more often when listening to an AE interlocutor than a British English (BE) interlocutor. This study reported two experiments to further investigate whether listeners can construct concurrent interlocutor models when communicating with two interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds and, if they do, how effectively and upon what cues they choose between concurrent models for word interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed that listeners accessed more AE meanings when listening to an AE than BE interlocutor and such an accent effect that was comparable between listening to blocked interlocutors and listening to interleaved interlocutors. This finding suggests that listeners can construct concurrent interlocutor models and appropriately apply them to constrain word meaning interpretation. Experiment 2 (pre-registered) replicated the finding of concurrent interlocutor models and further showed that listeners chose between concurrent interlocutor models using accent details in a word (such that words pronounced more differently between BE and AE showed a larger accent effect) but not using voice details (such that the accent effect was comparable between listening to interlocutors of the same gender and listening to interlocutors of different genders). In all, our results show that listeners can construct concurrent interlocutor models of dialectic backgrounds and use accent details in a word to determine which model the word should be interpreted against.

Effects of Previous Trial on Processing Ambiguous Words

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Garlinghouse ◽  
F. Richard Ferraro ◽  
C. Henderson ◽  
T. Lenhardt ◽  
J. Mountain
Keyword(s):  
Previous Trial ◽  
Ambiguous Words

"ROSE" is Faster Than "rose": Proper Name Advantage Using Ambiguous Words

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remo Job ◽  
Francesca Peressotti ◽  
Roberto Cubelli ◽  
Lorella Lotto
Keyword(s):  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Proper Name

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Amplifiers in British English

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Zhonghua Xiao ◽  
Hongyin Tao
Keyword(s):  
British English

LEXICAL AMBIGUITY IN READING ANALYTICAL EXPOSITION TEXTS FOR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Putri Sembiring And Sortha Silitonga
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Lexical Ambiguity ◽  
School Students ◽  
Dominant Type ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Reading Materials ◽  
English Textbooks ◽  
Senior High School Students

The objectives of this study were to find out the types of lexical ambiguity and the most dominant type of lexical ambiguity used in analytical exposition texts in English Today 2 and Advanced Learning English 2 textbooks. This study was conducted by using descriptive qualitative method. The research was mainly focused on the four types of lexical ambiguity proposed by Saeed, such as homonymy, polysemy, synonymy and antonymy. In carrying out this study, the data were taken from analytical exposition texts in reading materials and exercise material from the two English textbooks which contained of ambiguous words. The result of the study indicated the numbers of lexical ambiguity were 46 words within homonymy (34,8%), polysemy (28,2%), synonymy (19,6%), and antonymy (17,4%).

Awareness-Raising in the TEFL Phonology Classroom

2004 ◽  
Vol 145-146 ◽  
pp. 219-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
British English ◽  
Linguistic Imperialism ◽  
Teacher Student ◽  
Suprasegmental Features ◽  
Discourse Intonation ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The Impact

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological models. The first phase is an exploration of their attitudes toward, a native-speaker variety (British English) and a nonnative (Chinese EFL-speaker) variety of English pronunciation and intonation. The second reports on a didactic intervention study of the impact of activities that engaged the students in the awareness-raising of the importance of suprasegmental features, especially discourse intonation, on self-perceptions of their efficacy and confidence in communication. The results showed a systematic pattern of participant endorsement for a native-speaker model and a clear improvement in theIr perceptions of the importance of suprasegmental features of standard English because of teacher-student co-construction of meaning through interactive awareness-raising activities. The findings are discussed with reference to the students' sociocultural and psychological needs in TEFL training, particularly with reference to recent academic discourse on the issue of “linguistic imperialism” (Canagarajah, 1999; Phillipson, 1992, 1996) and ElL in pedagogy (Jenkins, 1998, 2002) and their wider implications in typical EFL contexts.

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