Search results for: political speech

Authors: Nurzarimah Jamil, Mohd Nazaruddin Jamil

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This paper is a preliminary study about The Importance of Political Advice in Islam: Ḥadīth Thematical Study by showing the concept and proper ways to advice to politician based on hadith Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The unique of political advice in Islam that Muslim already have the strong and fulfil example that can be apply in nowadays governance that is the way of political and leadership Prophet Muhammad show in his time. As a political leader, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) established a great state whose capital was Madinah. However, his real political leadership was in the realm of morality and spirituality in which he conducted himself perfectly in situations of weakness as well as strength. His way of dealing in Makkah and Madinah indicates his great political leadership. Based on fact nowadays some of the country not practicing the proper way to advice to rulers or governance that make a lot of madness around them. This paper also aims the concept and the proper way that can be following to all Muslim to advising by the politeness, justice and kindness.

Keywords: Hadith, leadership, political advice, Prophet Muhammad

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Authors: Govind Ji Pandey

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The divergent opinions in the society are important for its development but with reasonable restrictions. The world recently witnessed one of the most violent protests by a group against the editor and publisher of the magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ for publishing cartoon of their religious leader. The supporter of freedom of speech and expression around the world were in shock and termed it the strongest attack against the free speech. People all around the world condemned the killing of the journalists but many soft voices from several corners were also coming for reasonable restrictions on the freedom of speech and expression. Of late, Indian society has witnessed many protests and supports of films with controversial content. It is the beauty of the Indian democracy which gives an opportunity to all for discussion and debate on any issue that challenges established social norms. However, many organizations as well as individuals misuse it for their personal benefits. There have been many film directors who faced protest from several quarters for their controversial themes. This research aims at analyzing the controversial contents published in print media and shown in films. To understand the nature and frequency of such media reports, content analysis technique is used. The research also highlights the perception of the public regarding the controversies. For getting the popular opinion on the coverage of controversial content in cinema and print media, five hundred people from Lucknow, UP, India were randomly selected. The findings of this research are important to understand the response of media and society towards the controversial content presented in cinema and print media. The research highlights that how a handful of people curb free speech in a democratic country like India.

Keywords: cinema, censor board, free speech, liberty, social-religious beliefs

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Authors: Farzane Yusef Ghanbari

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A sociological analysis on the ancient poetry of Vis and Ramin reveals important points about the political, cultural, and social conditions of the Iranian ancient history. The reciprocal relationship between the effect and structure of society helps the understanding and interpretation of the work. Therefore, informed by the Goldman genetic structuralism and through a glance at social epistemology, this study attempts to explain the role of spell in shaping the social knowledge of ancient people. The results suggest that due to the lack of a central government, and secularism in politics and freedom of speech and opinion, such romantic stories as Vis and Ramin, with a focal female character, has emerged.

Keywords: persian literature, Vis and Ramin, sociology, developmental structuralism

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Authors: Azza Habibullah

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The principal objective of this paper is to show the use of participatory culture in the parliamentarian campaign. The use of this method has always been non-popular amongst the parliamentarian candidates due to the amount of times and energy that they need to spent with the constituents. However, due to many parliamentarian corruption cases in the last five years period, some political party have been losing peoples trust. That political party trust lost had also affecting the parliamentarian candidates electability, so they invent some creative campaign method that involving their constituent with more intimates and friendly environment. In this paper, an observation is done to a parliamentarian candidate from Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party) in Bandung and Cimahi City area, West Java. This Parliamentraian candidate is known for her personal-approach campaign method such as a puppet show, hanging out with group of ex-bike gang leaders, and going fishing with the constituent. This paper will compare her method with other parliamentarian candidates from the same party as her that mostly use mainstream campaign method such as open speech, print media, an other one way campaign method. While the other parliamentarian candidates failed to reach the parliamentarian threshold, the participatory method had proven as an effective method.

Keywords: participatory culture, Indonesian parliamentary election, Prosperous Justice Party, electability

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Authors: Najmuddin Rasul

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The purpose of this study is to determine whether media usage and change of citizenship norms influence trends of change of political participation of young voters in Indonesia. The focus of this study is to examine citizenship norms in the context of the development of information and communication technology influence political participation in the context of Indonesia's transition to democracy. The main theoretical framework is media and political participation. For data gathering, 384 young voters between the ages of 17 to 40 years were interviewed in Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The results of this study reveal that gender, age and educational background of respondents did not influence significantly media usage and citizenship norms. The results also show that educational background is not a factor that distinguishes media usage but it becomes differentiating factor in citizenship norms. The results further show that media usage has a significant correlation with citizenship norms and citizenship norms has a significant relationship with political participation. In addition, media usage and citizenship norm significantly influence political participation. The sub-dimensions the citizenship norms (compliance, duty, and engaged citizenship) provides a significant contribution to the sub-dimensions of political participation (traditional political participation, modern political participation, civic political participation). Based on the findings it can be concluded that the political euphoria in the era of transition to democracy has changed pattern of media usage and citizenship norms among the young generation in Indonesia.

Keywords: political participation, media, citizenship norms, democracy, young voters, Indonesia

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Authors: Sachin, Shantanu Arya, Gunjan Mehta, Md. Shamim Ansari

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The cross-modal influence of visual information on speech perception can be illustrated by the McGurk effect which is an illusion of hearing of syllable /ta/ when a listener listens one syllable, e.g.: /pa/ while watching a synchronized video recording of syllable, /ka/. The McGurk effect is an excellent tool to investigate multisensory integration in speech perception in both normal hearing and hearing impaired populations. As the visual cue is unaffected by noise, individuals with hearing impairment rely more than normal listeners on the visual cues.However, when non congruent visual and auditory cues are processed together, audiovisual interaction seems to occur differently in normal and persons with hearing impairment. Therefore, this study aims to observe the audiovisual interaction in speech perception in Cochlear Implant users compares the same with normal hearing children. Auditory stimuli was routed through calibrated Clinical audiometer in sound field condition, and visual stimuli were presented on laptop screen placed at a distance of 1m at 0 degree azimuth. Out of 4 presentations, if 3 responses were a fusion, then McGurk effect was considered to be present. The congruent audiovisual stimuli /pa/ /pa/ and /ka/ /ka/ were perceived correctly as ‘‘pa’’ and ‘‘ka,’’ respectively by both the groups. For the non- congruent stimuli /da/ /pa/, 23 children out of 35 with normal hearing and 9 children out of 35 with cochlear implant had a fusion of sounds i.e. McGurk effect was present. For the non-congruent stimulus /pa/ /ka/, 25 children out of 35 with normal hearing and 8 children out of 35 with cochlear implant had fusion of sounds.The children who used cochlear implants for less than three years did not exhibit fusion of sound i.e. McGurk effect was absent in this group of children. To conclude, the results demonstrate that consistent fusion of visual with auditory information for speech perception is shaped by experience with bimodal spoken language during early life. When auditory experience with speech is mediated by cochlear implant, the likelihood of acquiring bimodal fusion is increased and it greatly depends on the age of implantation. All the above results strongly support the need for screening children for hearing capabilities and providing cochlear implants and aural rehabilitation as early as possible.

Keywords: cochlear implant, congruent stimuli, mcgurk effect, non-congruent stimuli

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Authors: Sanja Seljan, Ivan Dunđer

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The paper presents combined automatic speech recognition (ASR) for English and machine translation (MT) for English and Croatian in the domain of business correspondence. The first part presents results of training the ASR commercial system on two English data sets, enriched by error analysis. The second part presents results of machine translation performed by online tool Google Translate for English and Croatian and Croatian-English language pairs. Human evaluation in terms of usability is conducted and internal consistency calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient, enriched by error analysis. Automatic evaluation is performed by WER (Word Error Rate) and PER (Position-independent word Error Rate) metrics, followed by investigation of Pearson’s correlation with human evaluation.

Keywords: automatic machine translation, integrated language technologies, quality evaluation, speech recognition

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Authors: Naouel Zoghlami

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Spoken-word recognition involves the simultaneous activation of potential word candidates which compete with each other for final correct recognition. In continuous speech, the activation-competition process gets more complicated due to speech reductions existing at word boundaries. Lexical processing is more difficult in L2 than in L1 because L2 listeners often lack phonetic, lexico-semantic, syntactic, and prosodic knowledge in the target language. In this study, we investigate the on-line lexical segmentation hypotheses that French listeners of L2 English form and then revise as subsequent perceptual evidence is revealed. Our purpose is to shed further light on the processes of L2 spoken-word recognition in context and better understand L2 listening difficulties through a comparison of skilled and unskilled reactions at the point where their working hypothesis is rejected. We use a variant of the gating experiment in which subjects transcribe an English sentence presented in increments of progressively greater duration. The spoken sentence was “And this amazing athlete has just broken another world record”, chosen mainly because it included common reductions and phonetic features in English, such as elision and assimilation. Our preliminary results show that there is an important difference in the manner in which proficient and less-proficient L2 listeners handle connected speech. Less-proficient listeners delay recognition of words as they wait for lexical and syntactic evidence to appear in the gates. Further statistical results are currently being undertaken.

Keywords: gating paradigm, spoken word recognition, online lexical segmentation, L2 listening

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Authors: Arianna Vedaschi

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This paper addresses the relationship between freedom of expression, national security and radicalization. Is it still possible to talk about a balance between the first two elements? Or, due to the intrusion of the third, is it more appropriate to consider freedom of expression as “permanently disfigured” by securitarian concerns? In this study, both the legislative and the judicial level are taken into account and the comparative method is employed in order to provide the reader with a complete framework of relevant issues and a workable set of solutions. The analysis moves from the finding according to which the tension between free speech and national security has become a major issue in democratic countries, whose very essence is continuously endangered by the ever-changing and multi-faceted threat of international terrorism. In particular, a change in terrorist groups’ recruiting pattern, attracting more and more people by way of a cutting-edge communicative strategy, often employing sophisticated technology as a radicalization tool, has called on law-makers to modify their approach to dangerous speech. While traditional constitutional and criminal law used to punish speech only if it explicitly and directly incited the commission of a criminal action (“cause-effect” model), so-called glorification offences – punishing mere ideological support for terrorism, often on the web – are becoming commonplace in the comparative scenario. Although this is direct, and even somehow understandable, consequence of the impending terrorist menace, this research shows many problematic issues connected to such a preventive approach. First, from a predominantly theoretical point of view, this trend negatively impacts on the already blurred line between permissible and prohibited speech. Second, from a pragmatic point of view, such legislative tools are not always suitable to keep up with ongoing developments of both terrorist groups and their use of technology. In other words, there is a risk that such measures become outdated even before their application. Indeed, it seems hard to still talk about a proper balance: what was previously clearly perceived as a balancing of values (freedom of speech v. public security) has turned, in many cases, into a hierarchy with security at its apex. In light of these findings, this paper concludes that such a complex issue would perhaps be better dealt with through a combination of policies: not only criminalizing ‘terrorist speech,’ which should be relegated to a last resort tool, but acting at an even earlier stage, i.e., trying to prevent dangerous speech itself. This might be done by promoting social cohesion and the inclusion of minorities, so as to reduce the probability of people considering terrorist groups as a “viable option” to deal with the lack of identification within their social contexts.

Keywords: radicalization, free speech, international terrorism, national security

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Authors: Pushpavathi M., Kavya V., Akshatha V.

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Introduction: Cleft lip and palate (CLP) is a congenital condition which hinders effectual communication due to associated speech and language difficulties. Expressive language delay (ELD) is a feature seen in this population which is influenced by factors such as type and severity of CLP, age at surgical and linguistic intervention and also the type and intensity of speech and language therapy (SLT). Since CLP is the most common congenital abnormality seen in Indian children, early intervention is a necessity which plays a critical role in enhancing their speech and language skills. The interaction between the timing of intervention and factors which contribute to effective intervention by caregivers is an area which needs to be explored. Objectives: The present study attempts to determine the effect of timing of intervention on the contributing maternal factors for effective linguistic intervention in toddlers with repaired CLP with respect to the awareness, home training patterns, speech and non-speech behaviors of the mothers. Participants: Thirty six toddlers in the age range of 1 to 4 years diagnosed as ELD secondary to repaired CLP, along with their mothers served as participants. Group I (Early Intervention Group, EIG) included 19 mother-child pairs who came to seek SLT soon after corrective surgery and group II (Delayed Intervention Group, DIG) included 16 mother-child pairs who received SLT after the age of 3 years. Further, the groups were divided into group A, and group B. Group ‘A’ received SLT for 60 sessions by Speech Language Pathologist (SLP), while Group B received SLT for 30 sessions by SLP and 30 sessions only by mother without supervision of SLP. Method: The mothers were enrolled for the Early Language Intervention Program and following this, their awareness about CLP was assessed through the Parental awareness questionnaire. The quality of home training was assessed through Mohite’s Inventory. Subsequently, the speech and non-speech behaviors of the mothers were assessed using a Mother’s behavioral checklist. Detailed counseling and orientation was done to the mothers, and SLT was initiated for toddlers. After 60 sessions of intensive SLT, the questionnaire and checklists were re-administered to find out the changes in scores between the pre- and posttest measurements. Results: The scores obtained under different domains in the awareness questionnaire, Mohite’s inventory and Mothers behavior checklist were tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis. Since the data did not follow normal distribution (i.e. p > 0.05), Mann-Whitney U test was conducted which revealed that there was no significant difference between groups I and II as well as groups A and B. Further, Wilcoxon Signed Rank test revealed that mothers had better awareness regarding issues related to CLP and improved home-training abilities post-orientation (p ≤ 0.05). A statistically significant difference was also noted for speech and non-speech behaviors of the mothers (p ≤ 0.05). Conclusions: Extensive orientation and counseling helped mothers of both EI and DI groups to improve their knowledge about CLP. Intensive SLT using focused stimulation and a parent-implemented approach enabled them to carry out the intervention in an effectual manner.

Keywords: awareness, cleft lip and palate, early language intervention program, home training, orientation, timing of intervention

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Authors: Swapna N., Deepthy Ann Joy

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One of the major causes of communication disorders in pediatric population is Motor speech disorders. These disorders which affect the motor aspects of speech articulators can have an adverse effect on the communication abilities of children in their developmental period. The motor aspects are dependent on the sensory abilities of children with motor speech disorders. Hence, oral sensorimotor evaluation is an important component in the assessment of children with motor speech disorders. To our knowledge, the importance of oral motor examination has been well established, yet the sensory assessment of the oral structures has received less focus. One of the most common motor speech disorders seen in children is developmental dysarthria. The present study aimed to assess the orosensory aspects in children with developmental dysarthria (CDD). The control group consisted of 240 children in the age range of four and eight years which was divided into four subgroups (4-4.11, 5-5.11, 6-6.11 and 7-7.11 years). The experimental group consisted of 15 children who were diagnosed with developmental dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy who belonged in the age range of four and eight years. The oro-sensory aspects such as response to touch, temperature, taste, texture, and orofacial sensitivity were evaluated and profiled. For this purpose, the authors used the ‘Oral Sensorimotor Evaluation Protocol- Children’ which was developed by the authors. The oro-sensory section of the protocol was administered and the clinical profile of oro-sensory abilities of typically developing children and CDD was obtained for each of the sensory abilities. The oro-sensory abilities of speech articulators such as lips, tongue, palate, jaw, and cheeks were assessed in detail and scored. The results indicated that experimental group had poorer scores on oro-sensory aspects such as light static touch, kinetic touch, deep pressure, vibration and double simultaneous touch. However, it was also found that the experimental group performed similar to control group on few aspects like temperature, taste, texture and orofacial sensitivity. Apart from the oro-motor abilities which has received utmost interest, the variation in the oro-sensory abilities of experimental and control group is highlighted and discussed in the present study. This emphasizes the need for assessing the oro-sensory abilities in children with developmental dysarthria in addition to oro-motor abilities.

Keywords: cerebral palsy, developmental dysarthria, orosensory assessment, touch

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Authors: Vivian Franco

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There has been a great deal of research about vowel production of second language learners of Spanish, vowel variation across Spanish dialects, and more recently, research related to Spanish heritage speakers’ vowel production based on speech style. However, there is little investigation reported on Spanish heritage speakers’ vowel production in regard to task modality by incorporating own comparison groups of monolinguals and late bilinguals. Thus, the present study investigates the influence of speech style on Spanish heritage speakers’ vowel production by comparing Spanish-English early and late bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. The study was guided by the following research question: How do early bilinguals (heritage speakers) differ/relate to advanced L2 speakers of Spanish (late bilinguals) and Spanish monolinguals in their vowel quality (acoustic distribution) and quantity (duration) based on speech style? The participants were a total of 11 speakers of Spanish: 7 early Spanish-English bilinguals with a similar linguistic background (simultaneous bilinguals of the second generation); 2 advanced L2 speakers of Spanish; and 2 Spanish monolinguals from Mexico. The study consisted of two tasks. The first one adopted a semi-spontaneous style by a solicited narration of life experiences and a description of a favorite movie with the purpose to collect spontaneous speech. The second task was a reading activity in which the participants read two paragraphs of a Mexican literary essay 'La nuez.' This task aimed to obtain a more controlled speech style. From this study, it can be concluded that early bilinguals and monolinguals show a smaller formant vowel space overall compared to the late bilinguals in both speech styles. In terms of formant values by stress, the early bilinguals and the late bilinguals resembled in the semi-spontaneous speech style as their unstressed vowel space overlapped with that of the unstressed vowels different from the monolinguals who displayed a slightly reduced unstressed vowel space. For the controlled data, the early bilinguals were similar to the monolinguals as their stressed and unstressed vowel spaces overlapped in comparison to the late bilinguals who showed a more clear reduction of unstressed vowel space. In regard to stress, the monolinguals revealed longer vowel duration overall. However, findings of duration by stress showed that the early bilinguals and the monolinguals remained stable with shorter values of unstressed vowels in the semi-spontaneous data and longer duration in the controlled data when compared to the late bilinguals who displayed opposite results. These findings suggest an implication for Spanish heritage speakers and L2 Spanish vowels research as it has been frequently argued that Spanish bilinguals differ from the Spanish monolinguals by their vowel reduction and centralized vowel space influenced by English. However, some Spanish varieties are characterized by vowel reduction especially in certain phonetic contexts so that some vowels present more weakening than others. Consequently, it would not be conclusive to affirm an English influence on the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Keywords: Spanish-English bilinguals, Spanish monolinguals, spontaneous and controlled speech, vowel production.

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Authors: Abdulmalik Adamu

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This study is premised on the assumption that language, particularly, English plays a significant role in the acquisition of power in Nigeria. This is against the backdrop of the fact that for the first time in the political history of Nigeria, an opposition party succeeded in dethroning an incumbent President and ruling political party in an election. Therefore the main objective was to investigate the role of language, particularly English in the acquisition of political power in Nigeria. The corpus generated for this study consisted of excerpts from the media exchange between the spokespersons of the two dominant political parties at the time of the elections in 2015; Olisa Metuh of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Lai Mohammed of the All Progressive Party (APC). The excerpts were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a research tool. The findings revealed the acceptance of the first proposition that English facilitates the acquisition of political power in Nigeria and the rejection of the second proposition that English is an instrument for the exclusion of the populist from political events in Nigeria. The study, therefore, concluded that language, particularly English played a significant role in the acquisition of political power in Nigeria.

Keywords: language, power, politics, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

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Authors: Gustavo Naranjo Maroto, Dolores Fernandez Martinez

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Context has always been essential to understand any reaction from every human being, and words, whether written or spoken, are definitely a powerful representative sample of human reaction. This study starts with an accurate breakdown of the context in which the current president of the US, Mr. Donald J. Trump is conveying his discourses in order to be able to judge them from a critical discourse analysis point of view. The present world’s scenario with a pandemic disease in form of Covid-19 that is threatening the world and certainly putting at risk the so called 'Welfare State', the role of the United States as the first superpower on earth nowadays, the very peculiar profile of President Trump not only as a politician but as a persona, and the fact of being on the verge of a very controversial presidential elections are without doubt a great and undeniable opportunity for the implementation of the critical discourse analysis methodology. Hence, this research will primarily analyze in detail some of the most interesting discourses delivered by Trump in different media since the very beginning of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States of America (February, 2020), sadly very often downplayed by President Trump, until the final result of the upcoming presidential election scheduled for Tuesday, November 3, 2020, where the political discourse has been dramatically downgraded to a very dangerous state, putting in jeopardy the fundamentals of the political fair play in terms of speech. Finally, the study will hopefully conclude with the final outcome of the data analyzed, allowing to picture how significant the context can be concerning linguistics on the one hand, in terms of shaping or altering the message that the issuer thought to convey in the first place, and on the other hand, generously assessing to what extend the recipients of the message are influenced by the message in terms of receptiveness.

Keywords: Covid-19, critical discourse analysis, Donald J. Trump, political discourse

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Authors: Zainab Mutlaq Ibrahim, Mohamed Bader-El-Den, Mihaela Cocea

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Students' textual feedback can hold unique patterns and useful information about learning process, it can hold information about advantages and disadvantages of teaching methods, assessment components, facilities, and other aspects of teaching. The results of analysing such a feedback can form a key point for institutions’ decision makers to advance and update their systems accordingly. This paper proposes a data mining framework for analysing end of unit general textual feedback using part of speech feature (PoS) with four machine learning algorithms: support vector machines, decision tree, random forest, and naive bays. The proposed framework has two tasks: first, to use the above algorithms to build an optimal model that automatically classifies the whole data set into two subsets, one subset is tailored to assessment practices (assessment related), and the other one is the non-assessment related data. Second task to use the same algorithms to build an optimal model for whole data set, and the new data subsets to automatically detect their sentiment. The significance of this paper is to compare the performance of the above four algorithms using part of speech feature to the performance of the same algorithms using n-grams feature. The paper follows Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDDM) framework to construct the classification and sentiment analysis models, which is understanding the assessment domain, cleaning and pre-processing the data set, selecting and running the data mining algorithm, interpreting mined patterns, and consolidating the discovered knowledge. The results of this paper experiments show that both models which used both features performed very well regarding first task. But regarding the second task, models that used part of speech feature has underperformed in comparison with models that used unigrams and bigrams.

Keywords: assessment, part of speech, sentiment analysis, student feedback

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Authors: Abdullahi Mohammed Auwal

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Formation and change or decamping from one political party to another have now become a common trend in Nigeria. Many of the parties’ members who could not secure positions and or win elections in their parties or are not very much satisfied with the trends occurring in the party’s internal democratic principles and mechanisms, change their respective parties. This paper developed/presented and analyzed the used of non linear mathematical model for defections between two political parties using epidemiological approach. The whole population was assumed to be a constant and homogeneously mixed. Equilibria have been analytically obtained and their local and global stability discussed. Conditions for the co-existence of both the political parties have been determined, in the study of defections between People Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressive Congress (APC) in Nigeria using numerical simulations to support the analytical results.

Keywords: model, political parties, deffection, stability, equilibrium, epidemiology

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Authors: Zahra Fotovatnia, Jeffery A. Jones, Alexandra Gottardo

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Speech communication often occurs in environments where noise conceals part of a message. Listeners should compensate for the lack of auditory information by picking up distinct acoustic cues and using semantic and sentential context to recreate the speaker’s intended message. This situation seems to be more challenging in a nonnative than native language. On the other hand, early bilinguals are expected to show an advantage over the late bilingual and monolingual speakers of a language due to their better executive functioning components. In this study, English monolingual speakers were compared with early and late nonnative speakers of English to understand speech in noise processing (SIN) and the underlying neurobiological features of this phenomenon. Auditory mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded using a double-oddball paradigm in response to a minimal pair that differed in their middle vowel (beat/bit) at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. The results did not show any significant structural and electroneural differences across groups. However, vocabulary knowledge correlated positively with performance on tests that measured SIN processing in participants who learned English after age 6. Moreover, their performance on the test negatively correlated with the integral area amplitudes in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG). In addition, the STG was engaged before the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in noise-free and low-noise test conditions in all groups. We infer that the pre-attentive processing of words engages temporal lobes earlier than the fronto-central areas and that vocabulary knowledge helps the nonnative perception of degraded speech.

Keywords: degraded speech perception, event-related brain potentials, mismatch negativities, brain regions

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Authors: Mary Edokpa Fadal, Frances Agweda

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Considering the volatile and evolving nature of the political environment in the developing countries, it is important that the subject of effective leadership practices that focus on transformational and systematic political development and values be reviewed. If the attitude towards partisan politics and the played politics by political parties is relatively deviated from expected adherence to acceptance, safe, efficient and practical standard, the political parties will continue to struggle endlessly in an effort to maintain a system that works. The analysis is situated in the context of political parties and partisan political behavior in contemporary societies and developing nations. Recent research of empirical evidence shows that most of the political parties are more or less, not too active in playing their instrumental role in the political system, such as unifying, simplifying and stabilizing the political process. This is however traced to the problem of ethnic politics that have been dominated by tribalism. The rising clamor for political development needs re-structuring and correcting the abnormalities in the center of the polity to address the flaws in our political system. The paper argues that political parties and political actors are some of the vital instrument of attaining societal goals of democratic principles for peace and durability. Issues of ethnic and partisan politics are also discussed, as it relates to question pertaining to political ideologies. It is in the findings that this paper examines some of the issues that have been seen revolving the true practice of political parties and its activities towards the democratic trend of a society, that help to resolve questions surrounding the issues of politics and governance in developing countries. These issues are seen as an aberration that have characterized politics and political behavior especially in the aspect of transparency and fulfilling its purpose of existence. The paper argues that the transition of the developing nature of states largely depends on the political structures and party politics and the nature of constitutionalism following the democratic awakening. The paper concludes that politics and political behavior are all human factors that play a vital role in the development of contemporary societies. They drive the wheel of nations towards its goal attainment. This paper relies on documentary, primary sources of data collection and empirical analysis.

Keywords: development, ethnicity, partisan politics, political behavior, political parties

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Authors: Yishu Gong, Liangliang Yang, Jianyu Zhang, Zhengyu Chen, Sihong He, Xusheng Zhang, Wei Zhang

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of people worldwide and is characterized by cognitive decline and behavioral changes. People living with Alzheimer’s disease often find it hard to complete routine tasks. However, there are limited objective assessments that aim to quantify the difficulty of certain tasks for AD patients compared to non-AD people. In this study, we propose to use speech emotion recognition (SER), especially the frustration level, as a potential biomarker for quantifying the difficulty patients experience when describing a picture. We build an SER model using data from the IEMOCAP dataset and apply the model to the DementiaBank data to detect the AD/non-AD group difference and perform longitudinal analysis to track the AD disease progression. Our results show that the frustration level detected from the SER model can possibly be used as a cost-effective tool for objective tracking of AD progression in addition to the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, speech emotion recognition, longitudinal biomarker, machine learning

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Authors: Joy Aworo-Okoroh

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Literary texts are mirrors of a real-life situation. Thus, authors choose the linguistic items that would best encode their intended meanings and messages. However, words mean more than they seem. The meaning of words is not static rather, it is dynamic as they constantly enter into relationships within a context. Literary texts can only be meaningful if all pragmatic cues are identified and interpreted. Drawing upon Teun Van Djik's theory of local pragmatic coherence, it is established that words enter into relations in a text and these relations account for sequential speech acts in the texts. Comprehension of the text is dependent on the interpretation of these relations.To show the relevance of pragmatic coherence in literary text analysis, ten conversations were selected in Americanah in order to give a clear idea of the pragmatic relations used. The conversations were analysed, identifying the speech act and epistemic relations inherent in them. A subtle analysis of the structure of the conversations was also carried out. It was discovered that justification is the most commonly used relation and the meaning of the text is dependent on the interpretation of these instances' pragmatic coherence. The study concludes that to effectively teach literature in English, pragmatic coherence should be incorporated as words mean more than they say.

Keywords: pragmatic coherence, epistemic coherence, speech act, Americanah

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Authors: Tiago do Carmo Nogueira, Cássio Dener Noronha Vinhal, Gélson da Cruz Júnior, Matheus Rudolfo Diedrich Ullmann

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Generating automatic image descriptions through natural language is a challenging task. Image captioning is a task that consistently describes an image by combining computer vision and natural language processing techniques. To accomplish this task, cutting-edge models use encoder-decoder structures. Thus, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are used to extract the characteristics of the images, and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) generate the descriptive sentences of the images. However, cutting-edge approaches still suffer from problems of generating incorrect captions and accumulating errors in the decoders. To solve this problem, we propose a model based on the encoder-decoder structure, introducing a module that generates the weights according to the importance of the word to form the sentence, using the part-of-speech (PoS). Thus, the results demonstrate that our model surpasses state-of-the-art models.

Keywords: gated recurrent units, caption generation, convolutional neural network, part-of-speech

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Authors: Alimohamad Asghari, Ahmad Daneshi, Mohammad Farhadi, Arash Bayat, Mohammad Ajalloueyan, Marjan Mirsalehi, Mohsen Rajati, Seyed Basir Hashemi, Nader Saki, Ali Omidvari

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Evidence suggests that Cochlear Implantation (CI) is a beneficial approach for auditory and speech skills improvement in children with severe to profound hearing loss. However, it remains controversial if implantation in children <12 months is safe and effective compared to older children. The present study aimed to determine whether children's ages affect surgical complications and auditory and speech development. The current multicenter study enrolled 86 children who underwent CI surgery at <12 months of age (group A) and 362 children who underwent implantation between 12 and 24 months of age (group B). The Categories of Auditory Performance (CAP) and Speech Intelligibility Rating (SIR) scores were determined pre-impanation, and "one-year" and "two-year" post-implantation. Four complications (overall rate: 4.65%; three minor) occurred in group A and 12 complications (overall rate: 4.41%; nine minor) occurred in group B. We found no statistically significant difference in the complication rates between the groups (p>0.05). The mean SIR and CAP scores improved over time following CI activation in both groups. However, we did not find significant differences in CAP and SIR scores between the groups across different time points. Cochlear implantation is a safe and efficient procedure in children younger than 12 months, providing substantial auditory and speech benefits comparable to children undergoing implantation at 12 to 24 months of age. Furthermore, surgical complications in younger children are similar to those of children undergoing the CI at an older age.

Keywords: cochlear implant, Infant, complications, outcome

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Authors: Wesam Mohamed Abdel Khalek Ibrahim

Abstract:

This paper examines the use of metaphors in Arabic political news discourse, focusing particularly on the headlines of the news articles relating to the Egyptian political situation in the period from June 2012 to October 2013. Metaphors are skilfully manipulated in the headlines to influence the public stance towards several events and entities including Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood (MB), Morsi, the June 30th uprising, Al-Sisi and the Armed Forces. The findings reveal that Arabic political news discourse shares basic features with its English counterpart, namely the use of metaphors as persuasive strategies and the presence of certain target domains. Insights gained from this study feed back into the conceptual metaphor theory by providing further evidence to the universality of metaphors.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor theory, political discourse, news discourse, Egyptian political situation

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Authors: Albatool Al Abdulwahid, Bayan Shakally, Mariam Mohamed, Wed Almokri

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence has infiltrated every part of our life and every field we can think of. With technical developments, artificial intelligence applications are becoming more prevalent. We chose ELSA speak because it is a magnificent example of Artificial intelligent applications, ELSA speak is a smartphone application that is free to download on both IOS and Android smartphones. ELSA speak utilizes artificial intelligence to help non-native English speakers pronounce words and phrases similar to a native speaker, as well as enhance their English skills. It employs speech-recognition technology that aids the application to excel the pronunciation of its users. This remarkable feature distinguishes ELSA from other voice recognition algorithms and increase the efficiency of the application. This study focused on evaluating ELSA speak application, by testing the degree of effectiveness based on survey questions. The results of the questionnaire were variable. The generality of the participants strongly agreed that ELSA has helped them enhance their pronunciation skills. However, a few participants were unconfident about the application’s ability to assist them in their learning journey.

Keywords: ELSA speak application, artificial intelligence, speech-recognition technology, language learning, english pronunciation

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Authors: Raeda F. Abualrub, Amani Abdulnabi

Abstract:

Aim: The aims of this study were to (a) examine the levels of nurses' political efficacy and involvement in health policy; and (b) explore the relationships between political efficacy, involvement in health policy, and participants’ background variables. Background: Nurses as citizens and health care providers have the right to express their opinions and beliefs in regard to issues that are concerned with the health care system or the public health domain. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional design using was utilized. A self-administered questionnaire (Political Efficacy Scale & Involvement in Health Policy Scale) was completed by a convenience sample of 302 nurses. Results: The results of this study showed low levels of involvement in health policy and political efficacy and a positive weak correlation between political efficacy and involvement in health policy. The perceived level of political efficacy was associated positively with nurses’ age and experience. Conclusions: Nurse administrators and managers may empower, support, and encourage nurses to enhance their involvement in health policy. Implications for Nursing Management: The findings have implications for nursing leaders and administrators to design appropriate strategies to enhance nurses’ involvement in health policy development.

Keywords: health policy, Jordan, nurses, political efficacy

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Authors: Soliman Rosemary

Abstract:

Despite the widespread movements towards democratization in most countries, women are still largely underrepresented at most levels of governments, especially in ministerial and other executive bodies. This paper is going to focus on the status quo of women political marginalization in Japan and the role social movements, feminist groups and campaigns play in raising the number of female politicians in administrative decision making process. The paper will raise some Japanese feminist groups such as ‘WIN WIN’ and ‘Q no Kai’ and other feminist groups as case studies. The study will help in furthering the understanding of women political empowerment in Japan and the strategies of contemporary social movements in raising the awareness of the importance of gender quota in the electoral system to be able to place new items on the political agenda that reflect and address women's gender-specific concerns, values and experiences, and providing new perspectives on mainstream political issues.

Keywords: feminist, political empowerment, quota, social movements

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Authors: T. Thein, S. Kalyar Myo

Abstract:

Human uses visual information for understanding the speech contents in noisy conditions or in situations where the audio signal is not available. The primary advantage of visual information is that it is not affected by the acoustic noise and cross talk among speakers. Using visual information from the lip movements can improve the accuracy and robustness of automatic speech recognition. However, a major challenge with most automatic lip reading system is to find a robust and efficient method for extracting the linguistically relevant speech information from a lip image sequence. This is a difficult task due to variation caused by different speakers, illumination, camera setting and the inherent low luminance and chrominance contrast between lip and non-lip region. Several researchers have been developing methods to overcome these problems; the one is lip reading. Moreover, it is well known that visual information about speech through lip reading is very useful for human speech recognition system. Lip reading is the technique of a comprehensive understanding of underlying speech by processing on the movement of lips. Therefore, lip reading system is one of the different supportive technologies for hearing impaired or elderly people, and it is an active research area. The need for lip reading system is ever increasing for every language. This research aims to develop a visual teaching method system for the hearing impaired persons in Myanmar, how to pronounce words precisely by identifying the features of lip movement. The proposed research will work a lip reading system for Myanmar Consonants, one syllable consonants (င (Nga)၊ ည (Nya)၊ မ (Ma)၊ လ (La)၊ ၀ (Wa)၊ သ (Tha)၊ ဟ (Ha)၊ အ (Ah) ) and two syllable consonants ( က(Ka Gyi)၊ ခ (Kha Gway)၊ ဂ (Ga Nge)၊ ဃ (Ga Gyi)၊ စ (Sa Lone)၊ ဆ (Sa Lain)၊ ဇ (Za Gwe) ၊ ဒ (Da Dway)၊ ဏ (Na Gyi)၊ န (Na Nge)၊ ပ (Pa Saug)၊ ဘ (Ba Gone)၊ ရ (Ya Gaug)၊ ဠ (La Gyi) ). In the proposed system, there are three subsystems, the first one is the lip localization system, which localizes the lips in the digital inputs. The next one is the feature extraction system, which extracts features of lip movement suitable for visual speech recognition. And the final one is the classification system. In the proposed research, Two Dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (2D-DCT) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) with Active Contour Model (ACM) will be used for lip movement features extraction. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used for finding class parameter and class number in training set and testing set. Then, experiments will be carried out for the recognition accuracy of Myanmar consonants using the only visual information on lip movements which are useful for visual speech of Myanmar languages. The result will show the effectiveness of the lip movement recognition for Myanmar Consonants. This system will help the hearing impaired persons to use as the language learning application. This system can also be useful for normal hearing persons in noisy environments or conditions where they can find out what was said by other people without hearing voice.

Keywords: feature extraction, lip reading, lip localization, Active Contour Model (ACM), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Two Dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (2D-DCT)

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Authors: Kuralay Kenzhekanova, Akmaral Dalelbekkyzy

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the problem of political discourse and its reflection on mass cognition. This article is dedicated to describe the myth as one of the main features of political discourse. The dominance of an expressional and emotional component in the myth is shown. Precedent phenomenon plays an important role in distinguishing the myth from the linguistic point of view. Precedent phenomena show the linguistic cognition, which is characterized by their fame and recognition. Four types of myths such as master myths, a foundation myth, sustaining myth, eschatological myths are observed. The myths about the national idea are characterized by national specificity. The main aim of the political discourse with the help of myths is to influence on the mass consciousness in order to motivate the addressee to certain actions so that the target purpose is reached owing to unity of forces.

Keywords: cognition, myth, linguistic consciousness, types of myths, political discourse, political myth, precedent phenomena

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Authors: Rasha Salameh

Abstract:

In light of the tense relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, this research paper sheds some light on Al-Arabiya’s reporting of Coronavirus in the Gulf. Particularly because most of the cases, in the beginning, were coming from Iran, some programs of this Saudi channel embraced a conspiracy theory. Hate speech has been used in talking about the topic and discussing it. The results of these discussions will be detailed in this paper in percentages with regard to the research sample, which includes five programs on Al-Arabiya channel: ‘DNA’, ‘Marraya’ (Mirrors), ‘Panorama’, ‘Tafaolcom’ (Your Interaction) and the ‘Diplomatic Street’, in the period between January 19, that is, the date of the first case in Iran, and April 10, 2020. The research shows the use of a conspiracy theory in the programs, in addition to some professional violations. The surveyed sample also shows that the matter receded due to the Arab Gulf states' preoccupation with the successively increasing cases that have appeared there since the start of the pandemic. The results indicate that hate speech was present in the sample at a rate of 98.1% and that most of the programs that dealt with the Iranian issue under the Corona pandemic on Al Arabiya used the conspiracy theory at a rate of 75.5%.

Keywords: Al-Arabiya, Iran, Corona, hate speech, conspiracy theory, politicization of the pandemic

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Authors: Shantanu Arya, Sachin Sakhuja, Gunjan Mehta, Sanjay Munjal

Abstract:

Stuttering may be defined as a speech disorder affecting the fluency domain of speech and characterized by covert features like word substitution, omittance and circumlocution and overt features like prolongation of sound, syllables and blocks etc. Many etiologies have been postulated to explain stuttering based on various experiments and research. Moreover, Breathlessness has also been reported by many individuals with stuttering for which breathing exercises are generally advised. However, no studies reporting objective evaluation of the pulmonary capacity and further objective assessment of the efficacy of breathing exercises have been conducted. Pulmonary Function Test which evaluates parameters like Forced Vital Capacity, Peak Expiratory Flow Rate, Forced expiratory flow Rate can be used to study the pulmonary behavior of individuals with stuttering. The study aimed: a) To identify speech motor & physiologic behaviours associated with stuttering by administering PFT. b) To recognize possible reasons for an association between speech motor behaviour & stuttering severity. In this regard, PFT tests were administered on individuals who reported signs and symptoms of stuttering and showed abnormal scores on Stuttering Severity Index. Parameters like Forced Vital Capacity, Forced Expiratory Volume, Peak Expiratory Flow Rate (L/min), Forced Expiratory Flow Rate (L/min) were evaluated and correlated with scores of Stuttering Severity Index. Results showed significant decrease in the parameters (lower than normal scores) in individuals with established stuttering. Strong correlation was also found between degree of stuttering and the degree of decrease in the pulmonary volumes. Thus, it is evident that fluent speech requires strong support of lung pressure and requisite volumes. Further research in demonstrating the efficacy of abdominal breathing exercises in this regard is needed.

Keywords: forced expiratory flow rate, forced expiratory volume, forced vital capacity, peak expiratory flow rate, stuttering

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