¿Cómo se conserva una lengua de herencia? El caso del español en Montreal

Pourquoi, dans un contexte migratoire, certains enfants parlent la langue maternelle de leurs parents tandis que d’autres ne l'acquièrent jamais? Cette question nous paraît particulièrement pertinente dans le contexte multiculturel et plurilingue du Canada, plus particulièrement à Montréal, où on trouve « le plus haut pourcentage de distribution du groupe minoritaire ‘latino-américain’ de tout le pays » (Pato 2010: 1). L’objectif principal de cette recherche est d’apporter de nouvelles connaissances en lien avec la transmission et le maintien de l’espagnol comme langue d’origine à Montréal, sujet très peu exploré à ce jour. Afin de mieux comprendre les facteurs impliqués dans la transmission intergénérationnelle de la langue, nous avons étudié deux groupes, les parents et les enfants, formés de huit participants chacun. Les données recueillies à travers de questionnaires et d’entrevues sociolinguistiques apportent des réponses aux questions suivantes : (1) Quels sont les principaux facteurs impliqués dans le maintien de l’espagnol comme langue d’origine à Montréal ? (2) Quelles sont les attitudes des parents et des enfants face à la conservation et à la perte de l’espagnol ? (3) Quelles types de stratégies emploient les parents pour maintenir l’utilisation de l’espagnol à la maison ? (4) Quelle importance a le bilinguisme (français – anglais) dans le maintien et la perte de l’espagnol à Montréal ? L’analyse de nos données nous permet d’identifier que les cinq principaux facteurs impliqués dans la conservation de l’espagnol à Montréal sont : (i) l’exposition à la langue ; (ii) l’utilisation de la langue formelle ; (iii) la motivation ; (iv) le contact avec la famille ; (v) l’exposition à la culture d’origine. Notre recherche démontre que les familles étudiées ont une attitude favorable face à la conservation de leur langue, ce qui ne semble pas être déterminée par l’implémentation des « politiques linguistiques » ou stratégies explicites à la maison. Pour terminer, nos données démontrent aussi que, contrairement à notre hypothèse, le contexte bilingue particulier à Montréal ne semble pas influer de façon significative sur la conservation de l’espagnol.

Advances in scaling deep learning algorithms

Les algorithmes d'apprentissage profond forment un nouvel ensemble de méthodes puissantes pour l'apprentissage automatique. L'idée est de combiner des couches de facteurs latents en hierarchies. Cela requiert souvent un coût computationel plus elevé et augmente aussi le nombre de paramètres du modèle. Ainsi, l'utilisation de ces méthodes sur des problèmes à plus grande échelle demande de réduire leur coût et aussi d'améliorer leur régularisation et leur optimization. Cette thèse adresse cette question sur ces trois perspectives. Nous étudions tout d'abord le problème de réduire le coût de certains algorithmes profonds. Nous proposons deux méthodes pour entrainer des machines de Boltzmann restreintes et des auto-encodeurs débruitants sur des distributions sparses à haute dimension. Ceci est important pour l'application de ces algorithmes pour le traitement de langues naturelles. Ces deux méthodes (Dauphin et al., 2011; Dauphin and Bengio, 2013) utilisent l'échantillonage par importance pour échantilloner l'objectif de ces modèles. Nous observons que cela réduit significativement le temps d'entrainement. L'accéleration atteint 2 ordres de magnitude sur plusieurs bancs d'essai. Deuxièmement, nous introduisont un puissant régularisateur pour les méthodes profondes. Les résultats expérimentaux démontrent qu'un bon régularisateur est crucial pour obtenir de bonnes performances avec des gros réseaux (Hinton et al., 2012). Dans Rifai et al. (2011), nous proposons un nouveau régularisateur qui combine l'apprentissage non-supervisé et la propagation de tangente (Simard et al., 1992). Cette méthode exploite des principes géometriques et permit au moment de la publication d'atteindre des résultats à l'état de l'art. Finalement, nous considérons le problème d'optimiser des surfaces non-convexes à haute dimensionalité comme celle des réseaux de neurones. Tradionellement, l'abondance de minimum locaux était considéré comme la principale difficulté dans ces problèmes. Dans Dauphin et al. (2014a) nous argumentons à partir de résultats en statistique physique, de la théorie des matrices aléatoires, de la théorie des réseaux de neurones et à partir de résultats expérimentaux qu'une difficulté plus profonde provient de la prolifération de points-selle. Dans ce papier nous proposons aussi une nouvelle méthode pour l'optimisation non-convexe.

Language plurality as power struggle, or: Translating politics in Canada

For this paper, heterolingualism or language plurality will be considered as the presence in a single text or in a social environment of both French and English, Canada’s official languages. Language plurality will here be studied from an institutional viewpoint: the influence of the Canadian government on the translation of political speeches. The first part of this article will establish that political speeches are written in a bilingual environment where the two official languages are often in contact. This bilingualism, however, is often homogenised when it comes to speech delivery and publication. Therefore, the second part focuses on the speeches’ paratextual

Changing Role of Academic Libraries in the E-learning Environment: Issues and Challenges

The development of computer and network technology is changing the education scenario and transforming the teaching and learning process from the traditional physical environment to the digital environment. It is now possible to access vast amount of information online and enable one to one communication without the confines of place or time. While E-learning and teaching is unlikely to replace face-to-face training and education it is becoming an additional delivery method, providing new learning opportunities to many users. It is also causing an impact on library services as the increased use of ICT and web based learning technologies have paved the way for providing new ICT based services and resources to the users. Online learning has a crucial role in user education, information literacy programmes and in training the library professionals. It can help students become active learners, and libraries will have to play a greater role in this process of transformation. The significance of libraries within an institution has improved due to the fact that academic libraries and information services are now responsible for e-learning within their organization.

A framework for translating English text into Malayalam using statistical models

A methodology for translating text from English into the Dravidian language, Malayalam using statistical models is discussed in this paper. The translator utilizes a monolingual Malayalam corpus and a bilingual English/Malayalam corpus in the training phase and generates automatically the Malayalam translation of an unseen English sentence. Various techniques to improve the alignment model by incorporating the morphological inputs into the bilingual corpus are discussed. Removing the insignificant alignments from the sentence pairs by this approach has ensured better training results. Pre-processing techniques like suffix separation from the Malayalam corpus and stop word elimination from the bilingual corpus also proved to be effective in producing better alignments. Difficulties in translation process that arise due to the structural difference between the English Malayalam pair is resolved in the decoding phase by applying the order conversion rules. The handcrafted rules designed for the suffix separation process which can be used as a guideline in implementing suffix separation in Malayalam language are also presented in this paper. Experiments conducted on a sample corpus have generated reasonably good Malayalam translations and the results are verified with F measure, BLEU and WER evaluation metrics

Developing a Child Friendly Text-to-Speech System

This paper discusses the implementation details of a child friendly, good quality, English text-to-speech (TTS) system that is phoneme-based, concatenative, easy to set up and use with little memory. Direct waveform concatenation and linear prediction coding (LPC) are used. Most existing TTS systems are unit-selection based, which use standard speech databases available in neutral adult voices.Here reduced memory is achieved by the concatenation of phonemes and by replacing phonetic wave files with their LPC coefficients. Linguistic analysis was used to reduce the algorithmic complexity instead of signal processing techniques. Sufficient degree of customization and generalization catering to the needs of the child user had been included through the provision for vocabulary and voice selection to suit the requisites of the child. Prosody had also been incorporated. This inexpensive TTS systemwas implemented inMATLAB, with the synthesis presented by means of a graphical user interface (GUI), thus making it child friendly. This can be used not only as an interesting language learning aid for the normal child but it also serves as a speech aid to the vocally disabled child. The quality of the synthesized speech was evaluated using the mean opinion score (MOS).

Experience in introduction of English terminology in engineering lessons: methodology and evaluation

This communication explains a experience for the introduction of English terminology in a technical degree of higher education. We present the methodology and assessment procedures used to evaluate the way the students perceived the introduction of terminology in English in two different subjects from 3rd and 5th year courses of a Computer Science degree in which English was not the vehicular language. We propose a strategy based on two main pillars, namely: 1) The design of materials, explanations, and exams, paying particular attention to the way in which the specific terminology was exposed to the students, and 2) The assessment of the impact in the students by means of the analysis of the feedback trough a set of enquiries. Our experience showed that the students responded very positively to the introduction of English terminology, and presented an affirmative feedback about the impact that an improvement of their linguistic abilities would have in their future work. Further, we present statistics regarding the use of English as the vehicular language for technical reports, which is envisaged as very useful by the students. Finally, we propose a set of questions for further debate which are centered in the role that English terminology should pay in technical degrees, and about the way in which universities should deploy resources in English languages within the different Syllabus

How is the language of medicines use review leaflets symbolising the service?

Introduction The medicines use review (MUR), a new community pharmacy ‘service’, was launched in England and Wales to improve patients’ knowledge and use of medicines through a private, patient–pharmacist appointment. After 18 months, only 30% of pharmacies are providing MURs; at an average of 120 per annum (maximum 400 allowed).1 One reason linked to low delivery is patient recruitment.2 Our aim was to examine how the MUR is symbolised and given meaning via printed patient information, and potential implications. Method The language of 10 MUR patient leaflets, including the NHS booklet,3 and leaflets from multiples and wholesalers was evaluated by discourse analysis. Results and Discussion Before experiencing MURs, patients conceivably ‘categorise’ relationships with pharmacists based on traditional interactions.4 Yet none of the leaflets explicitly describe the MUR as ‘new’ and presuppose patients would become involved in activities outside of their pre-existing relationship with pharmacists such as appointments, self-completion of charts, and pharmacy action plans. The MUR process is described inconsistently, with interchangeable use of formal (‘review meeting‘) and informal (‘friendly’) terminology, the latter presumably to portray an intended ‘negotiation model’ of interaction.5 Assumptions exist about attitudes (‘not understanding’; ‘problems’) that might lead patients to an appointment. However, research has identified a multitude of reasons why patients choose (or not) to consult practitioners,6 and marketing of MURs should also consider other barriers. For example, it may be prudent to remove time limits to avoid implying patients might not be listened to fully, during what is for them an additional practitioner consultation.

Non-word repetition in adolescents with Specific Language Impairment and Autism plus Language Impairments: a qualitative analysis

Non-word repetition (NWR) was investigated in adolescents with typical development, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Plus language Impairment (ALI) (n = 17, 13, 16, and mean age 14;4, 15;4, 14;8 respectively). The study evaluated the hypothesis that poor NWR performance in both groups indicates an overlapping language phenotype (Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg, 2001). Performance was investigated both quantitatively, e.g. overall error rates, and qualitatively, e.g. effect of length on repetition, proportion of errors affecting phonological structure, and proportion of consonant substitutions involving manner changes. Findings were consistent with previous research (Whitehouse, Barry, & Bishop, 2008) demonstrating a greater effect of length in the SLI group than the ALI group, which may be due to greater short-term memory limitations. In addition, an automated count of phoneme errors identified poorer performance in the SLI group than the ALI group. These findings indicate differences in the language profiles of individuals with SLI and ALI, but do not rule out a partial overlap. Errors affecting phonological structure were relatively frequent, accounting for around 40% of phonemic errors, but less frequent than straight Consonant-for-Consonant or vowel-for-vowel substitutions. It is proposed that these two different types of errors may reflect separate contributory mechanisms. Around 50% of consonant substitutions in the clinical groups involved manner changes, suggesting poor auditory-perceptual encoding. From a clinical perspective algorithms which automatically count phoneme errors may enhance sensitivity of NWR as a diagnostic marker of language impairment. Learning outcomes: Readers will be able to (1) describe and evaluate the hypothesis that there is a phenotypic overlap between SLI and Autism Spectrum Disorders (2) describe differences in the NWR performance of adolescents with SLI and ALI, and discuss whether these differences support or refute the phenotypic overlap hypothesis, and (3) understand how computational algorithms such as the Levenshtein Distance may be used to analyse NWR data.

POP-11 comes of age: the advancement of an AI programming language

In 1989, the computer programming language POP-11 is 21 years old. This book looks at the reasons behind its invention, and traces its rise from an experimental language to a major AI language, playing a major part in many innovating projects. There is a chapter on the inventor of the language, Robin Popplestone, and a discussion of the applications of POP-11 in a variety of areas. The efficiency of AI programming is covered, along with a comparison between POP-11 and other programming languages. The book concludes by reviewing the standardization of POP-11 into POP91.

Confucius, constructivism and the impact of continuing professional development on teachers of English in China

In this article we explore issues around the sustainability and appropriateness of professional development for secondary teachers of English in China offered by overseas providers from the perspective of teachers who completed courses at the University of Reading between 2003 and 2010. We start by offering an overview of English teaching in China. We then describe the collection and analysis of interviews and focus groups discussions involving former participants, their teaching colleagues and senior management, as well as classroom observation. Evidence is presented for changes in teachers’ philosophies of education directly attributable to participation in the courses; for improved teacher competencies (linguistic, cultural and pedagogical) in the classroom; and for the ways in which returnees are undertaking new roles and responsibilities which exploit their new understandings. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for both providers and sponsors of CPD for English language teachers. We conclude that the recognition of English as an essential element in the modernisation of China, together with the growing awareness of the weaknesses of traditional approaches to the teaching of the language, has opened up new spaces for dialogue concerning pedagogy and professional practice. It is clearly important, however, that new approaches to the teaching of English are presented in a way which allows teachers to decide which elements should be incorporated into their teaching and how.

Processing empty categories in a second language: When naturalistic exposure fills the (intermediate) gap

An ongoing debate on second language (L2) processing revolves around whether or not L2 learners process syntactic information similarly to monolinguals (L1), and what factors lead to a native-like processing. According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a), L2 learners’ processing does not include abstract syntactic features, such as intermediate gaps of wh-movement, but relies more on lexical/semantic information. Other researchers have suggested that naturalistic L2 exposure can lead to native-like processing (Dussias, 2003). This study investigates the effect of naturalistic exposure in processing wh-dependencies. Twenty-six advanced Greek learners of L2 English with an average nine years of naturalistic exposure, 30 with classroom exposure, and 30 native speakers of English completed a self-paced reading task with sentences involving intermediate gaps. L2 learners with naturalistic exposure showed evidence of native-like processing of the intermediate gaps, suggesting that linguistic immersion can lead to native-like abstract syntactic processing in the L2.

Latent learning in end stage renal disease (ESRD)

Cognitive functions such as attention and memory are known to be impaired in End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD), but the sites of the neural changes underlying these impairments are uncertain. Patients and controls took part in a latent learning task, which had previously shown a dissociation between patients with Parkinson’s disease and those with medial temporal damage. ESRD patients (n=24) and age and education-matched controls (n=24) were randomly assigned to either an exposed or unexposed condition. In Phase 1 of the task, participants learned that a cue (word) on the back of a schematic head predicted that the subsequently seen face would be smiling. For the exposed (but not unexposed) condition, an additional (irrelevant) colour cue was shown during presentation. In Phase 2, a different association, between colour and facial expression, was learned. Instructions were the same for each phase: participants had to predict whether the subsequently viewed face was going to be happy or sad. No difference in error rate between the groups was found in Phase 1, suggesting that patients and controls learned at a similar rate. However, in Phase 2, a significant interaction was found between group and condition, with exposed controls performing significantly worse than unexposed (therefore demonstrating learned irrelevance). In contrast, exposed patients made a similar number of errors to unexposed in Phase 2. The pattern of results in ESRD was different from that previously found in Parkinson’s disease, suggesting a different neural origin.

Morphological awareness and reading development in bilingual English-Chinese children in Singapore

Addressing two aspects of morphological awareness – derivational and compound, this study investigates the relationships between morphological awareness and vocabulary and reading comprehension in English-Chinese bilingual primary 3 children in Singapore (N = 76). Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were administered to examine the children’s morphological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The results show that morphological awareness is highly related to vocabulary and reading comprehension, with higher correlations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension than between morphological awareness and vocabulary. This indicates that morphological awareness may have direct influence on reading comprehension beyond the mediating effect of vocabulary. Furthermore, the results indicate that children displayed more compound than derivational morphological awareness for Chinese due to the dominance of compound morphology in Chinese. However the children also displayed similar levels of derivational and compound morphological awareness for English despite far more derivatives than compounds in English. The robust cross-linguistic correlations suggest that Chinese compound morphological knowledge plays a facilitating role not only in learning English compounds, but also in learning transparently derived words that do not involve phonological or orthographic shifts.