Exploring cognition processes in second language acquisition: the case of cognates and false-friends in EST

This article explores one aspect of the processing perspective in L2 learning in an EST context: the processing of new content words, in English, of the type ‘cognates’ and ‘false friends’, by Spanish speaking engineering students. The paper does not try to offer a comprehensive overview of language acquisition mechanisms, but rather it is intended to review more narrowly how our conceptual systems, governed by intricately linked networks of neural connections in the brain, make language development possible, creating, at the same time, some L2 processing problems. The case of ‘cognates and false friends’ in specialised contexts is brought here to illustrate some of the processing problems that the L2 learner has to confront, and how mappings in the visual, phonological and semantic (conceptual) brain structures function in second language processing of new vocabulary. Resumen Este artículo pretende reflexionar sobre un aspecto de la perspectiva del procesamiento de segundas lenguas (L2) en el contexto del ICT: el procesamiento de palabras nuevas, en inglés, conocidas como “cognados” y “falsos amigos”, por parte de estudiantes de ingeniería españoles. No se pretende ofrecer una visión completa de los mecanismos de adquisición del lenguaje, más bien se intenta mostrar cómo nuestro sistema conceptual, gobernado por una complicada red de conexiones neuronales en el cerebro, hace posible el desarrollo del lenguaje, aunque ello conlleve ciertas dificultades en el procesamiento de segundas lenguas. El caso de los “cognados” y los “falsos amigos”, en los lenguajes de especialidad, se trae para ilustrar algunos de los problemas de procesamiento que el estudiante de una lengua extranjera tiene que afrontar y el funcionamiento de las correspondencias entre las estructuras visuales, fonológicas y semánticas (conceptuales) del cerebro en el procesamiento de nuevo vocabulario.

Translating bus information into sign language for deaf people

This paper describes the application of language translation technologies for generating bus information in Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española). In this work, two main systems have been developed: the first for translating text messages from information panels and the second for translating spoken Spanish into natural conversations at the information point of the bus company. Both systems are made up of a natural language translator (for converting a word sentence into a sequence of LSE signs), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). For the natural language translator, two technological approaches have been analyzed and integrated: an example-based strategy and a statistical translator. When translating spoken utterances, it is also necessary to incorporate a speech recognizer for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence, prior to the language translation module. This paper includes a detailed description of the field evaluation carried out in this domain. This evaluation has been carried out at the customer information office in Madrid involving both real bus company employees and deaf people. The evaluation includes objective measurements from the system and information from questionnaires. In the field evaluation, the whole translation presents an SER (Sign Error Rate) of less than 10% and a BLEU greater than 90%.

Assessment for English language education on the programs at the Agricultural Engineering School of Madrid

The convergence process among European academic degrees pursues the exchange of graduate students and the adaptation of university programs to social demand. Within the framework of the European Higher Education, European universities will need to be more competitive not only by increasing or maintaining the student enrolment, but also in their academic performance. Thus, the reinforcing of English language education within the University Programs might play an important role to reach these objectives. In this sense, a complete survey was accomplished at the Agricultural Egineering School of Madrid (ETSIA ) addressing issues such as: identification the needs for bilingual instruction at ETSIA, identification resources needed and interest and background in English language of students and professors (San José et al., 2013). The conclusions and recommendations to promote the bilingual instruction in the ETSIA, taking into account the approaches followed by other Spanish universities, are presented in this work.

Dynamic topic-based adaptation of language models: a comparison between different approaches

This paper presents a dynamic LM adaptation based on the topic that has been identified on a speech segment. We use LSA and the given topic labels in the training dataset to obtain and use the topic models. We propose a dynamic language model adaptation to improve the recognition performance in "a two stages" AST system. The final stage makes use of the topic identification with two variants: the first on uses just the most probable topic and the other one depends on the relative distances of the topics that have been identified. We perform the adaptation of the LM as a linear interpolation between a background model and topic-based LM. The interpolation weight id dynamically adapted according to different parameters. The proposed method is evaluated on the Spanish partition of the EPPS speech database. We achieved a relative reduction in WER of 11.13% over the baseline system which uses a single blackground LM.

Fostering English-taught higher education programs in a Spanish university: the "TechEnglish" innovative project

In recent years, coinciding with adjustments to the Bologna process, many European universities have attempted to improve their international profile by increasing course offerings in English. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), Spain has notably increased its English-taught higher education programs, ranking fifth in the list of European countries by number of English-taught Master's programs in 2013. This article presents the goals and preliminary results of an on-going innovative education project (TechEnglish) that aims to promote course offerings in English at the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, UPM). The UPM is the oldest and largest of all Technical Universities in Spain. It offers graduate and postgraduate programs that cover all the engineering disciplines as well as architecture. Currently, the UPM has no specific bilingual/multilingual program to promote teaching in English, although there is an Educational Model Whitepaper (with a focus on undergraduate degrees) that promotes the development of activities like an International Semester or a unique shared curriculum. The TechEnglish project is an attempt to foster courses taught in English at 7 UPM Technical Schools, including students and 80 faculty members. Four tasks were identified: (1) to design a university wide framework to increase course offerings, (2) to identify administrative difficulties, (3) to increase visibility of courses offered, and (4) to disseminate the results of the project. First, to design a program we analyzed existing programs at other Spanish universities, and other projects and efforts already under way at the UPM. A total of 13 plans were analyzed and classified according to their relation with students (learning), professors (teaching), administration, course offerings, other actors/institutions within the university (e.g., language departments), funds and projects, dissemination activities, mobility plans and quality control. Second, to begin to identify administrative and organizational difficulties in the implementation of teaching in English, we first estimated the current and potential course offerings at the undergraduate level at the UPM using a survey (student, teacher and administrative demand, level of English and willingness to work in English). Third, to make the course offerings more attractive for both Spanish and international students we examined the way the most prestigious universities in Spain and in Europe try to improve the visibility of their academic offerings in English. Finally, to disseminate the results of the project we created a web page and a workspace on the Moodle education platform and prepared conferences and workshops within the UPM. Preliminary results show that increasing course offerings in English is an important step to promote the internationalization of the University. The main difficulties identified at the UPM were related to how to acknowledge/certify the departments, teachers or students involved in English courses, how students should register for the courses, how departments should split and schedule the courses (Spanish and English), and the lack of qualified personnel. A concerted effort could be made to increase the visibility of English-taught programs offered on-line.