What is language and how is it learnt?

This chapter describes the nature of human language and introduces theories of language acquisition.

Teaching English as an additional language in senior high school : critical discourses in critical times

This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of four policy documents currently offering ‘sets of possibilities’ for the teaching of English as an additional or second language (hereafter EAL/ESL) in senior classrooms in Queensland, Australia. The aim is to identify the ways in which each document re-presents the notion of critical literacy. Leximancer software, and Fairclough’s textually-oriented discourse analysis method (2001, 2003) are used to interrogate the relevant sections of the documents for the ways in which they re-present (sic) and construct the discourses around critical language study. This paper presents the description, interpretation and explanation of the discourses in these documents which constitute part of a larger project in which teacher interviews and classroom teaching are also investigated for the ways in which ‘the critical’ is constructed and contested in knowledge and practice.

Improved functional ability and independence in activities of daily living for older adults at high risk of hospital readmission : a randomised controlled trial

Objective: During hospitalisation older people often experience functional decline which impacts on their future independence. The objective of this study was to evaluate a multifaceted transitional care intervention including home-based exercise strategies for at-risk older people on functional status, independence in activities of daily living, and walking ability. Methods: A randomised controlled trial was undertaken in a metropolitan hospital in Australia with 128 patients (64 intervention, 64 control) aged over 65 years with an acute medical admission and at least one risk factor for hospital readmission. The intervention group received an individually tailored program for exercise and follow-up care which was commenced in hospital and included regular visits in hospital by a physiotherapist and a Registered Nurse, a home visit following discharge, and regular telephone follow-up for 24 weeks following discharge. The program was designed to improve health promoting behaviours, strength, stability, endurance and mobility. Data were collected at baseline, then 4, 12 and 24 weeks following discharge using the Index of Activities of Daily Living (ADL), Instrumental Index of Activities of Daily Living (IADL), and the Walking Impairment Questionnaire (Modified). Results: Significant improvements were found in the intervention group in IADL scores (p<.001), ADL scores (p<.001), and WIQ scale scores (p<.001) in comparison to the control group. The greatest improvements were found in the first four weeks following discharge. Conclusions: Early introduction of a transitional model of care incorporating a tailored exercise program and regular telephone follow-up for hospitalised at-risk older adults can improve independence and functional ability.

The effects of L1 orthography on processing an artificial logographic script

To date, studies have focused on the acquisition of alphabetic second languages (L2s) in alphabetic first language (L1) users, demonstrating significant transfer effects. The present study examined the process from a reverse perspective, comparing logographic (Mandarin-Chinese) and alphabetic (English) L1 users in the acquisition of an artificial logographic script, in order to determine whether similar language-specific advantageous transfer effects occurred. English monolinguals, English-French bilinguals and Chinese-English bilinguals learned a small set of symbols in an artificial logographic script and were subsequently tested on their ability to process this script in regard to three main perspectives: L2 reading, L2 working memory (WM), and inner processing strategies. In terms of L2 reading, a lexical decision task on the artificial symbols revealed markedly faster response times in the Chinese-English bilinguals, indicating a logographic transfer effect suggestive of a visual processing advantage. A syntactic decision task evaluated the degree to which the new language was mastered beyond the single word level. No L1-specific transfer effects were found for artificial language strings. In order to investigate visual processing of the artificial logographs further, a series of WM experiments were conducted. Artificial logographs were recalled under concurrent auditory and visuo-spatial suppression conditions to disrupt phonological and visual processing, respectively. No L1-specific transfer effects were found, indicating no visual processing advantage of the Chinese-English bilinguals. However, a bilingual processing advantage was found indicative of a superior ability to control executive functions. In terms of L1 WM, the Chinese-English bilinguals outperformed the alphabetic L1 users when processing L1 words, indicating a language experience-specific advantage. Questionnaire data on the cognitive strategies that were deployed during the acquisition and processing of the artificial logographic script revealed that the Chinese-English bilinguals rated their inner speech as lower than the alphabetic L1 users, suggesting that they were transferring their phonological processing skill set to the acquisition and use of an artificial script. Overall, evidence was found to indicate that language learners transfer specific L1 orthographic processing skills to L2 logographic processing. Additionally, evidence was also found indicating that a bilingual history enhances cognitive performance in L2.

Learning power and language expressiveness

The topic of the present work is to study the relationship between the power of the learning algorithms on the one hand, and the expressive power of the logical language which is used to represent the problems to be learned on the other hand. The central question is whether enriching the language results in more learning power. In order to make the question relevant and nontrivial, it is required that both texts (sequences of data) and hypotheses (guesses) be translatable from the “rich” language into the “poor” one. The issue is considered for several logical languages suitable to describe structures whose domain is the set of natural numbers. It is shown that enriching the language does not give any advantage for those languages which define a monadic second-order language being decidable in the following sense: there is a fixed interpretation in the structure of natural numbers such that the set of sentences of this extended language true in that structure is decidable. But enriching the original language even by only one constant gives an advantage if this language contains a binary function symbol (which will be interpreted as addition). Furthermore, it is shown that behaviourally correct learning has exactly the same power as learning in the limit for those languages which define a monadic second-order language with the property given above, but has more power in case of languages containing a binary function symbol. Adding the natural requirement that the set of all structures to be learned is recursively enumerable, it is shown that it pays o6 to enrich the language of arithmetics for both finite learning and learning in the limit, but it does not pay off to enrich the language for behaviourally correct learning.

Automatic spoken language identification utilizing acoustic and phonetic speech information

Automatic spoken Language Identi¯cation (LID) is the process of identifying the language spoken within an utterance. The challenge that this task presents is that no prior information is available indicating the content of the utterance or the identity of the speaker. The trend of globalization and the pervasive popularity of the Internet will amplify the need for the capabilities spoken language identi¯ca- tion systems provide. A prominent application arises in call centers dealing with speakers speaking di®erent languages. Another important application is to index or search huge speech data archives and corpora that contain multiple languages. The aim of this research is to develop techniques targeted at producing a fast and more accurate automatic spoken LID system compared to the previous National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Language Recognition Evaluation. Acoustic and phonetic speech information are targeted as the most suitable fea- tures for representing the characteristics of a language. To model the acoustic speech features a Gaussian Mixture Model based approach is employed. Pho- netic speech information is extracted using existing speech recognition technol- ogy. Various techniques to improve LID accuracy are also studied. One approach examined is the employment of Vocal Tract Length Normalization to reduce the speech variation caused by di®erent speakers. A linear data fusion technique is adopted to combine the various aspects of information extracted from speech. As a result of this research, a LID system was implemented and presented for evaluation in the 2003 Language Recognition Evaluation conducted by the NIST.