Comprehending and producing sentences is a complex endeavor requiring the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions. We examined three issues related to the brain networks underlying sentence ...comprehension and production in healthy individuals: First, which regions are recruited for sentence comprehension and sentence production? Second, are there differences for auditory sentence comprehension vs. visual sentence comprehension? Third, which regions are specifically recruited for the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences? Results from activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analyses (from 45 studies) implicated a sentence comprehension network occupying bilateral frontal and temporal lobe regions. Regions implicated in production (from 15 studies) overlapped with the set of regions associated with sentence comprehension in the left hemisphere, but did not include inferior frontal cortex, and did not extend to the right hemisphere. Modality differences between auditory and visual sentence comprehension were found principally in the temporal lobes. Results from the analysis of complex syntax (from 37 studies) showed engagement of left inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions, as well as the right insula. The involvement of the right hemisphere in the comprehension of these structures has potentially important implications for language treatment and recovery in individuals with agrammatic aphasia following left hemisphere brain damage.
Writers usually exert many efforts in writing sentences with the proper length. Some of them stick to short sentences, which can make their writing looks choppy. Others like to write with long ...sentences, which can make the writing seems long-winded or wordy, even if it is not. In English language, the length of a sentence refers to how many words are there in that sentence. In almost all formulas, this number is used to estimate how much the sentence is difficult. Still, sometimes, a short sentence shows more difficulty to be read than a long one. Sometimes, longer sentences lead to facilitate comprehension, especially those that contain coordinate structures. This study discusses the basic grammatical notion of sentence, and its length from different points of view. Innumerable definitions of sentence exist and some of these are presented here to get a workable definition to this key term. A definition of sentence length is also presented. Different treatments of the so called sentence length are to be discussed . The various techniques , that have been devised to deal with the sentence in different types of texts as to get better writings, are accounted for in this study . These points are discussed to reach the end , i.e. the conclusion of good sentence length .
Remote sensing image captioning (RSIC), which aims at generating a well-formed sentence for a remote sensing image, has attracted more attention in recent years. The general framework for RSIC is the ...encoder-decoder architecture containing two submodels of encoder and decoder. Although the significant performance is obtained, the encoder-decoder architecture is a black-box model with a lack of explainability. To overcome this drawback, in this article, we propose a new explainable word-sentence framework for RSIC. The proposed word-sentence framework consists of two parts: word extractor and sentence generator, where the former extracts the valuable words in the given remote sensing image, while the latter organizes these words into a well-formed sentence. The proposed framework decomposes RSIC into a word classification task and a word sorting task, which is more in line with human intuitive understanding. On the basis of the word-sentence framework, some ablation experiments are conducted on the three public RSIC data sets of Sydney-captions, UCM-captions, and RSICD to explore the specific and effective network structures. In order to evaluate the proposed word-sentence framework objectively, we further conduct some comparative experiments on these three data sets and achieve comparable results in comparison with the encoder-decoder-based methods.
Image-language matching tasks have recently attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field. These tasks include image-sentence matching, i.e., given an image query, retrieving relevant ...sentences and vice versa, and region-phrase matching or visual grounding, i.e., matching a phrase to relevant regions. This paper investigates two-branch neural networks for learning the similarity between these two data modalities. We propose two network structures that produce different output representations. The first one, referred to as an embedding network , learns an explicit shared latent embedding space with a maximum-margin ranking loss and novel neighborhood constraints. Compared to standard triplet sampling, we perform improved neighborhood sampling that takes neighborhood information into consideration while constructing mini-batches. The second network structure, referred to as a similarity network , fuses the two branches via element-wise product and is trained with regression loss to directly predict a similarity score. Extensive experiments show that our networks achieve high accuracies for phrase localization on the Flickr30K Entities dataset and for bi-directional image-sentence retrieval on Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets.
A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this ...difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation‐based and memory‐based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy‐context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context—that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language‐dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.
Ellipsis is a branch of syntax that study about elimination word to avoid repetition word in the sentence. This study concern to find out the types of elliptical sentence and analyze the constituent ...structure of sentence in the novel by Peter Corris in title Open File A Cliff Hardy. This study applied the theory proposed by Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) to find out the types of elliptical sentence and the theory from Brown and Miller (1991) to analyze the constituent structure of sentence. The data were collected by documentation method and analyzed descriptively by qualitative method. The finding shows that there are five types of elliptical sentence which the most dominant is ellipsis of subject (and auxiliary)
The article researches the history and sociological substantiation of ELF (English as Lingua Franca) in Azerbaijan. The author indicates the unique historical role of mercantile activities in ...extending the borders of EFL. It is also stated that the English language would be on a narrow scale long before ELF was used in Azerbaijan. The paper argues that scientific and linguistic literature supports the idea that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) served as an extension for ELF usage. At the same time, some linguists make a controversial statement that the reason English is spreading around the world at the moment is because of its utility as a lingua franca. It also analyses the distinct stages of ELF use in Azerbaijan and illustrates the historical facts necessitating the vast in-country spread and usage of ELF. Following the in-depth analyses of ELF, the paper makes some new remarks: 1) There are at least two varieties of English and simplified (we may call it mere or simple English); 2) Global English existed long before English existed; 3) Until people speak English to their kids, it is usually called ELF; 4) ELF is more extensive; 5) Simple English is more intensive by its nature, and so on. The author argues that the content and concept of ELF's usage is more significant than the concept of simple or mere English usage because the former assumes much-embracing features rather than the "simple English choice". That means, unlike English, ELF has the following specific qualities: 1) It is not spontaneous but strictly purposeful and pragmatic (but are these not for the sake of any foreign language use); 2) It emerges and develops in close connection with "communication needs"; 3) It includes further behaviour of communicators, whether to use or abandon it; 4) It has a distinct cause-and-effect chain in the socio-political and economic situation in the areas of its usage; 5) It does not come from family nurture and instructions but is taken for the needs of its urgency; 6) Side forces (external, socio-political) can strengthen its usage and extension. However, its "impetus" is always needs-based; 7) ELF is more practical rather than English instructional; 8) English is a transitory stage in its transference into ELF when it assumes a global character; 9) ELF serves as a source of enrichment of English vocabulary, at least by its international varieties, dialects, and terminological usages; 10) English and EFL are ontologically interrelated, though different in formalities and designation. Another essential feature of the article is ELF's study on the sociological level in Azerbaijan by conducting the respondents of the different musts. While analysing the experiment results, it became clear that 40 % of people aged 25-35 in Azerbaijan prefer EFL in education and science, which is less than twice for the community aged 35-45. On the contrary, 43 % of 35-45-year-old community members preferred ELF in business and management. It proves that apart from the language peculiarities, its extracurricular features also play a leading role in determining the choice of ELF. The article's findings are new to the specialities in the relevant fields.
Previous research showed that verifying a pictured object mentioned in a preceding sentence takes less time when the pictured object shape is compatible with the described object location or spatial ...position. In the current work we asked if nonvisual information is integrated into the mental model when the target object shape is implied by virtue of a description of a heavy versus light item being dropped on it. Furthermore, we asked if the canonical target object state continues to play an important role when the context requires the activation of a noncanonical representation. In seven experiments the data provide an affirmative response to both questions. Participants (N = 766) first read sentences that implied target object state-changes as a function of the impact caused by differently weighted items (e.g., "You drop a balloon/a bowling ball on a tomato") and then verified pictures of "squashable" target objects in either a canonical (e.g., intact tomato) or a noncanonical (e.g., squashed tomato) state. A reaction time (RT) advantage was consistently observed when a "noncanonical" target was preceded by a "heavy" (e.g., bowling ball) sentence than a "light" (e.g., balloon) sentence. However, no such advantage was observed when a "canonical" target was preceded by a light sentence than a heavy sentence. This pattern of results remained unchanged regardless of the items used and the verbal tense of the sentence. These data suggest that when changes of state are inferred (i.e., not driven by lexical semantics), both the initial and resultant states are equally accessible.
Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: ...processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task. The results show that even when participants are given a considerable amount of time for processing the sentence prior to verification, the polarity effect is not entirely eliminated. We suggest that this sustained effect stems from a retained negation-containing representation in working memory.
Translating ideas into acceptable sentence is an essential writing production process. Limited sentence construction skills can hinder young writers from expressing ideas as intended or creating ...sentences that are comprehensible to their audiences. This may also limit other writing production processes, as young writers must devote considerable attention to this skill until it becomes more facile. This investigation replicated an earlier sentence combining study conducted in the USA by Saddler and Graham (Journal of Educational Psychology, 97:43–54, 2005). In the current study, 88 Grade 2 to 4 Turkish students who received sentence combining instruction that included peer-assisted learning were compared to 83 students in the same grades and school who continued to receive their regular classroom writing instruction. Students receiving sentence combining instruction had statistically higher scores on measures of sentence fluency, writing quality, and length of essays than students in the business-as-usual comparison. The study provided evidence that the peer-assisted learning model of sentence combining instruction tested here and in Saddler and Graham (Journal of Educational Psychology, 97:43–54, 2005) was effective. These findings also provided support for the importance of sentence construction skills, as teaching such skills resulted in more general improvements in writing, including an improvement of overall quality of text. Implications for practice, theory, and research are discussed.