In the era of hyphenated identities, one’s identity may not be as clear as decades before; the same applies to culture and literature. Over the past years, there have been discussions about the exact definition of national literature. In Estonia there have been debates surrounding the definition of Estonian literature: is it a literature written in Estonian or is it a literature written in Esto...

An attempt of Russian universities to move forward to the leading positions in the world rankings has resulted in some initiatives to enhance their activities on the market of education services. Under these conditions, foreign language proficiency is no longer a luxury and it is becoming an important tool to implement goals of university development. In this regard, new methods and techniques ...

Social status and relationships affect language production. Consider the converse: can socio-cultural information be inferred from linguistic evidence? Specific phenomena naturally vary by language, so an intermediate variable, language use, abstracts over diverse phenomena such as formal/informal pronouns (Russian vy), indirect/direct phrasing (English), or related features (e.g. Navajo fourth...

In this paper we report the results of first experiments with HMEANT (a semiautomatic evaluation metric that assesses translation utility by matching semantic role fillers) on the Russian language. We developed a web-based annotation interface and with its help evaluated practicability of this metric in the MT research and development process. We studied reliability, language independence, labo...

Previous research shows that pausing and disfluencies are common in non-native speech. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between fluency and pausing in Russian read-aloud speech of 12 Finnish university students and examine their fluency development during a 3.5-month study-period in Russia. To assess fluency, 30 Russian teachers rated the students’ speech samples (on a ...

Mapping of written input onto orthographic representations was examined in bilingual speakers whose two languages have partially overlapping orthographies. Russian-English bilinguals and English monolinguals were tested with a modified version of the picture-word interference paradigm, adapted for use with eye-tracking. Compared to English monolinguals, Russian-English bilinguals (tested in Eng...

Two studies explored the role of native language use of an acoustic cue, vowel duration, in both native and non-native contexts in order to test the hypothesis that non-native listeners' reliance on vowel duration instead of vowel quality to distinguish the English tense/lax vowel contrast could be explained by the role of duration as a cue in native phonological contrasts. In the first experim...

Semantic relatedness of terms represents similarity of meaning by a numerical score. On the one hand, humans easily make judgements about semantic relatedness. On the other hand, this kind of information is useful in language processing systems. While semantic relatedness has been extensively studied for English using numerous language resources, such as associative norms, human judgements and ...

This work investigates first-language (L1) influence on second-language (L2) acquisition of embedded aspect, comparing participants with homogeneous L1 background (Russian) in Greece (L2 Standard Modern Greek) and Cyprus (L2 Cypriot Greek), where verb complementation takes a finite form instead of an infinitival as in Russian. The focus of the experimental study is on those embedded sentential ...

In this paper we compare the Russian National Corpus to a larger Russian web corpus composed in 2014; the assumption behind our work is that the National corpus, being limited by the texts it contains and their proportions, presents lexical contexts (and thus meanings) which are different from those found ‘in the wild’ or in a language in use. To do such a comparison, we used both corpora as tr...