Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence

[EN] One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typologically different languages and on populations of different ages. Here we report a corpus study and an artificial grammar learning experiment testing the anchoring hypothesis in Basque, Japanese, French, and Italian adults. We show that adults are sensitive to the distribution of functors in their native language and use them when learning new linguistic material. However, compared to infants’ performance on a similar task, adults exhibit a slightly different behavior, matching the frequency distributions of their native language more closely than infants do. This finding bears on the issue of the continuity of language learning mechanism.

New method of learning to read write and speak the spanish language; with an appendix : y M. Velazquez and T. Simonne

UANL

The American : a practical book for self-instruction to speak, read and write the English language ; each English word is translated in Hebrew

by B. Goldgar and I. Mirovitch

Guide to spoken-word recordings : foreign-language instruction and literature.

Includes indexes.

Guide to spoken-word recordings : foreign language literature and instruction.

Mode of access: Internet.

A new and improved Spanish grammar, designed for every class of learners, but especially for such as are their own instructors. In two parts: Part I. An easy introduction to the elements of the Spanish language. Part II. The rules of etymology and syntax fully exemplified, with occasional notes and observations.

Mode of access: Internet.

Terry's short cut to Spanish; a new, easy, and quick method for learning the Spanish language as spoken in Spanish-America and in Spain, combined with a pronouncing phrase book for travelers in Spanish-speaking countries,

Includes bibliographies and index.

Ollendorff's new method of learning to read, write, and speak : the Spanish language : with an appendix ... /

Mode of access: Internet.

Vingut's Ollendorff's new method of learning to read, write, and speak the Spanish language ... /

Mode of access: Internet.

A first book in Spanish; or, A practical introduction to the study of the Spanish language:

Mode of access: Internet.

Synonyms of the Spanish language explained, and eludicated by copious extracts from the most approved Spanish poets : intended as an appendix to English-Spanish dictionaries /

List of errata on verso of t.p.

Limits to tDCS effects in language:failures to modulate word production in healthy participants with frontal or temporal tDCS

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a method of non-invasive brain stimulation widely used to modulate cognitive functions. Recent studies, however, suggests that effects are unreliable, small and often non-significant at least when stimulation is applied in a single session to healthy individuals. We examined the effects of frontal and temporal lobe anodal tDCS on naming and reading tasks and considered possible interactions with linguistic activation and selection mechanisms as well possible interactions with item difficulty and participant individual variability. Across four separate experiments (N, Exp 1A = 18; 1B = 20; 1C = 18; 2 = 17), we failed to find any difference between real and sham stimulation. Moreover, we found no evidence of significant effects limited to particular conditions (i.e., those requiring suppression of semantic interference), to a subset of participants or to longer RTs. Our findings sound a cautionary note on using tDCS as a means to modulate cognitive performance. Consistent effects of tDCS may be difficult to demonstrate in healthy participants in reading and naming tasks, and be limited to cases of pathological neurophysiology and/or to the use of learning paradigms.

Modelling word meaning using efficient tensor representations

Models of word meaning, built from a corpus of text, have demonstrated success in emulating human performance on a number of cognitive tasks. Many of these models use geometric representations of words to store semantic associations between words. Often word order information is not captured in these models. The lack of structural information used by these models has been raised as a weakness when performing cognitive tasks. This paper presents an efficient tensor based approach to modelling word meaning that builds on recent attempts to encode word order information, while providing flexible methods for extracting task specific semantic information.

Discriminative spoken language understanding using word confusion networks

Current commercial dialogue systems typically use hand-crafted grammars for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) operating on the top one or two hypotheses output by the speech recogniser. These systems are expensive to develop and they suffer from significant degradation in performance when faced with recognition errors. This paper presents a robust method for SLU based on features extracted from the full posterior distribution of recognition hypotheses encoded in the form of word confusion networks. Following [1], the system uses SVM classifiers operating on n-gram features, trained on unaligned input/output pairs. Performance is evaluated on both an off-line corpus and on-line in a live user trial. It is shown that a statistical discriminative approach to SLU operating on the full posterior ASR output distribution can substantially improve performance both in terms of accuracy and overall dialogue reward. Furthermore, additional gains can be obtained by incorporating features from the previous system output. © 2012 IEEE.