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Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.
Latvia
(2019)
This chapter deals with current issues in bilingual education in the framework of language and educational policies in Latvia, and also outlines similarities or common tendencies in the two other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania. As commonly understood in the 21st century, the term ‘bilingual education’ includes ‘multilingual education, as the umbrella term to cover a wide spectrum of practice and policy’ (García, 2009: 9).
Our paper discusses family language policies among multilingual families in Latvia with Russian as home language. The presentation is based on three case studies, i.e. interviews conducted with Russophones who have chosen to send their children to Latvian-medium pre-schools and schools. The main aim is to understand practices and regards among such families “from below,” i.e. which family-internal and family-external factors influenced the choice of Latvian-medium education and what impact this choice has on linguistic practices.
The paper shows that there have been critical events which both encouraged and discouraged the choice of Latvian-medium education. The wish to integrate into mainstream society has been met by obstacles both from ethnic Russians and Latvians. Yet, the three families consider their choices to be the right ones for the future development of their children in a multiethnic Latvia in which Latvian serves as the unifying language of society.
This article describes an English Zulu learners’ dictionary that is part of a larger set of information tools, namely an online Zulu course, an e-dictionary of possessives (which was implemented earlier) accompanied by training software offering translation tasks on several levels, and an ontology of morphemic items categorizing and describing all parts of speech of Zulu. The underlying lexicographic database contains the usual type of lexicographic data, such as translation equivalents and their respective morphosyntactic data, but its entries have been extended with data related to the lessons of the online course in order to enable the learner to link both tools autonomously. The ‘outer matter’ is integrated into the website in the form of several texts on additional web pages (how-to-use, typical outputs, grammar tables, information on morphosyntactic rules, etc.). The dictionary comprises a modular system, where each module fulfils one of the necessary functions.
In the context of a Nordic Conference on Bilingualism, it can be a rewarding task to look at issues such as language planning, policy and legislation from a perspective of the southern neighbours of the Nordic world. This paper therefore intends to point attention towards a case of societal multilingualism at the periphery of the Nordic world by dealing with recent developments in language policy and legislation with regard to the North Frisian speech community in the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein. As I will show, it is striking to what degree there are considerable differences in the discourse on minority protection and language legislation between the Nordic countries and a cultural area which may arguably be considered to be part of the Nordic fringe - and which itself occasionally takes Scandinavia as a reference point, e.g. in the recent adoption of a pan-Frisian flag modelled on the Nordic cross (Falkena 2006).
The main focus of the paper will be on the Frisian Act which was passed in the Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein in late 2004. It provides a certain legal basis for some political activities with regard to Frisian, but falls short of creating a true spirit of minority language protection and/or revitalisation. In contrast to the traditions of the German and Danish minorities along the German-Danish border and to minority protection in Northern Scandinavia (in particular to Sámi language rights), the approach chosen in the Frisian Act is extremely weak and has no connotation of long-term oriented language-planning, let alone a rights-based perspective.
The paper will then look at policy developments in the time since the Act was passed, e.g. in the Schleswig-Holstein election campaign in 2005, and on latest perceptions of the Frisian language situation in the discourse on North Frisian Policy in Schleswig-Holstein majority society. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss reasons for the differences in minority language policy discourse between Germany and the Nordic countries, and try to provide an outlook on how Frisian could benefit from its geographic proximity to the Nordic world.
Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents
(2014)
Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.
This chapter will present results of a linguistic landscape (LL) project in the regional centre of Rēzekne in the region of Latgale in Eastern Latvia. Latvia was de facto a part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and this has given it a highly multilingual society. In the essentially post-colonial situation since 1991, strict language policies have been in place, which aim to reverse the language shift from Russian, the dominant language of Soviet times, back to Latvian. Thus, the main interests of the research were how the complex pattern of multilingualism in Latvia is reflected in the LL; how people relate to current language legislation; and what motivations, attitudes and emotions inform their behaviour.