Development of a Neurology Word List: A Corpus-based Study
-
Authors:
Mingxian Li² Yujun Lee¹ and Dilin Liu³ / Language and Cognitive Science / 2021,6(1): 44−59 / 2022-04-21
- Keywords: academic English; English for specific purposes; subdiscipline word list; vocabulary learning
- Abstract: The research finding that vocabulary use is often discipline-bound (Hyland and Tse 2007) has demonstrated the need for discipline-specific word lists. Driven by this need, this study aims to explore the viability and validity of developing a subdiscipline word list – a vocabulary list in neurology, a subdiscipline of medicine. A neurology corpus (NeuroC) of 6,180,718 words was compiled drawing from 970 neurological research articles systematically chosen from 10 journals. Using AntConc and AntWordProfiler as corpus tools and applying rigorous frequency and range criteria, the study selects a total of 717 words as our Neurology Word List (NeuroWL). To test the validity of the NeuroWL, the coverages of the NeuroC by the NeuroWL and by Coxhead’s AWL are calculated and compared. The results reveal that the coverage by the NeuroWL (12.99%) almost doubles that by Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) (6.06%). Additional analyses indicate that the NeuroWL shows an overlap of only 32.4% with the AWL, 53.6% with Wang et al.’s (2008) Medical Academic Word List (MAWL), and 43.9% with Yang’s (2015) Nursing Academic Word List (NAWL). These findings testify to the validity of the NeuroWL and its pedagogical significance to ESP/EFL teachers/learners in neurology and the need for developing subdiscipline word lists.
-
Verb-Object Movement Processing in CSL
- Authors:
- Keywords: gender difference; processing; V-O movement
- Abstract: The study of gender difference is an important sub-branch of linguistic research, especially for language acquisition, such as vocabulary acquisition, grammar acquisition, and syntactic acquisition. In the teaching of Chinese as a second language, some studies found that students from the Uygur areas had difficulty in learning sentences containing component movement, and gender differences also exist to make this mechanism more intricate. In this paper, we use the self-paced reading experiment to investigate both the ability of Uygur students to process Chinese V-O movement structures and gender differences in real-time processing. We found: Females process “Yijing” V-O movement structure better than males, and while males do better in simple movement sentences, females performed faster in most phases of processing. Interaction effects of gender and movement type, and of sentence type and movement type, as long as main effects of gender, sentence type, and movement type contribute to these differences in accuracy and response time of components in Chinese V-O movement structure. This study will benefit the theoretical study of Chinese V-O movement structure and its acquisition, and the study of acquisition of gender differences by non-native Chinese speakers.
-
Neural Correlates of Chinese and Japanese Semantic Processing
-
Authors:
Hengshuang Liu and S. H. Annabel Chen / Language and Cognitive Science / 2015,1(1): 77−107 / 2015-08-26
- Keywords: meta-analysis; neuroimaging; orthography; phonology; semantics
- Abstract: Semantic processing is the ultimate goal of language communication. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji both contain semantic clues in their semantic radicals, However, as Japanese is learned phonologically instead of morphologically nowadays, these clues may be more conducive to Chinese comprehension. It is therefore plausible that these inherent language differences could contribute to differential neural substrates but this has not been directly examined. To address this research gap, the current meta-analysis conducted direct contrasts between foci reported in published Chinese and Japanese fMRI studies to seek convergent activation across studies. It was found that Chinese evoked increased right hemispheric activation than Japanese, suggesting that semantic radicals might be more beneficial to Chinese than Japanese comprehension. The involvement of left supramarginal gyrus in spoken Japanese but not in spoken Chinese suggested that Japanese was processed more like alphabetic languages even though it is visually represented by characters. It might be further inferred that orthographic processing was essential for Chinese comprehension whereas phonological processing was more relevant for Japanese. The findings deepen our understanding of how linguistic characteristics shape our brains in processing semantics.
-
