The French Constitutional Council as the Rottweiler of the Republican Ideal in the Language Field: Does Jurisprudence Really Reflect Reality? EDAP 03/2012, 2012

France is known for being a champion of individual rights as well as for its overt hostility to any form of group rights. Linguistic pluralism in the public sphere is rejected for fear of babelization and Balkanization of the country. Over recent decades the Conseil Constitutionnel (CC) has, together with the Conseil d’État, remained arguably the strongest defender of this Jacobin ideal in France. In this article, I will discuss the role of France’s restrictive language policy through the prism of the CC’s jurisprudence. Overall, I will argue that the CC made reference to the (Jacobin) state-nation concept, a concept that is discussed in the first part of the paper, in order to fight the revival of regional languages in France over recent decades. The clause making French the official language in 1992 was functional to this policy. The intriguing aspect is that in France the CC managed to standardise France’s policy vis-à-vis regional and minority languages through its jurisprudence; an issue discussed in the second part of the paper. But in those regions with a stronger tradition of identity, particularly in the French overseas territories, the third part of the paper argues, normative reality has increasingly become under pressure. Therefore, a discrepancy between the ‘law in courts’ and the compliance with these decisions (‘law in action’) has been emerging over recent years. Amid some signs of opening of France to minorities, this contradiction delineates a trend that might well continue in future.

Memory-based Embodied Cognition: a computational architecture

At its most fundamental, cognition as displayed by biological agents (such as humans) may be said to consist of the manipulation and utilisation of memory. Recent discussions in the field of cognitive robotics have emphasised the role of embodiment and the necessity of a value or motivation for autonomous behaviour. This work proposes a computational architecture – the Memory-Based Cognitive (MBC) architecture – based upon these considerations for the autonomous development of control of a simple mobile robot. This novel architecture will permit the exploration of theoretical issues in cognitive robotics and animal cognition. Furthermore, the biological inspiration of the architecture is anticipated to result in a mobile robot controller which displays adaptive behaviour in unknown environments.

Architecture for Living Neuronal Network Control of a mobile robot

The intelligent controlling mechanism of a typical mobile robot is usually a computer system. Research is however now ongoing in which biological neural networks are being cultured and trained to act as the brain of an interactive real world robot – thereby either completely replacing or operating in a cooperative fashion with a computer system. Studying such neural systems can give a distinct insight into biological neural structures and therefore such research has immediate medical implications. The principal aims of the present research are to assess the computational and learning capacity of dissociated cultured neuronal networks with a view to advancing network level processing of artificial neural networks. This will be approached by the creation of an artificial hybrid system (animat) involving closed loop control of a mobile robot by a dissociated culture of rat neurons. This paper details the components of the overall animat closed loop system architecture and reports on the evaluation of the results from preliminary real-life and simulated robot experiments.

Strategy clusters and sources of knowledge in French L2 listening comprehension

This article reports on an exploratory investigation into the listening strategies of lower-intermediate learners of French as an L2, including the sources of knowledge they employed in order to comprehend spoken French. Data from 14 learners were analysed to investigate whether employment of strategies in general and sources of knowledge in particular varied according to the underlying linguistic knowledge of the student. While low linguistic knowledge learners were less likely to deploy effectively certain strategies or strategy clusters, high linguistic knowledge levels were not always associated with effective strategy use. Similarly, while there was an association between linguistic knowledge and learners’ ability to draw on more than one source of knowledge in a facilitative manner, there was also evidence that learners tended to over-rely on linguistic knowledge where other sources, such as world knowledge, would have proved facilitative. We conclude by arguing for a fresh approach to listening pedagogy and research, including strategy instruction, bottom-up skill development and a consideration of the role of linguistic knowledge in strategy use.

A management architecture for active networks

In this paper we present an architecture for network and applications management, which is based on the Active Networks paradigm and shows the advantages of network programmability. The stimulus to develop this architecture arises from an actual need to manage a cluster of active nodes, where it is often required to redeploy network assets and modify nodes connectivity. In our architecture, a remote front-end of the managing entity allows the operator to design new network topologies, to check the status of the nodes and to configure them. Moreover, the proposed framework allows to explore an active network, to monitor the active applications, to query each node and to install programmable traps. In order to take advantage of the Active Networks technology, we introduce active SNMP-like MIBs and agents, which are dynamic and programmable. The programmable management agents make tracing distributed applications a feasible task. We propose a general framework that can inter-operate with any active execution environment. In this framework, both the manager and the monitor front-ends communicate with an active node (the Active Network Access Point) through the XML language. A gateway service performs the translation of the queries from XML to an active packet language and injects the code in the network. We demonstrate the implementation of an active network gateway for PLAN (Packet Language for Active Networks) in a forty active nodes testbed. Finally, we discuss an application of the active management architecture to detect the causes of network failures by tracing network events in time.

Idiom comprehension in French-speaking children and adolescents with Williams syndrome

This study looks at idiom comprehension by French-speaking people with Williams’ syndrome (WS) and metapragmatic knowledge is examined. Idiomatic expressions are a nonliteral form of language where there is a considerable difference between what is said (literal interpretation) and what is meant (idiomatic interpretation). WS is characterized by a relatively preserved formal language, social interest and poor conversational skills. Using this framework, the present study aims to explore the comprehension of idiomatic expressions by 20 participants with WS. Participants performed a story completion task (comprehension task), and a task of metapragmatic knowledge to justify their chosen answers. WS performances were compared to typically developing children with the same verbal mental age. The main results can be summarized as follows: (1) People with WS have difficulties to understand idioms; (3) WS group seems to perform partly as typically developing children for the acquisition of metapragmatic knowledge of linguistic convention: there is a progressive increase in metapragmatic knowledge of linguistic convention as age increased. Our results indicate a delay of acquisition in idiom comprehension in Williams’ syndrome.

A double data rate (DDR) architecture for OFDM based wireless consumer devices

The creation of OFDM based Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) has allowed the development of high bit-rate wireless communication devices suitable for streaming High Definition video between consumer products, as demonstrated in Wireless-USB and Wireless-HDMI. However, these devices need high frequency clock rates, particularly for the OFDM, FFT and symbol processing sections resulting in high silicon cost and high electrical power. The high clock rates make hardware prototyping difficult and verification is therefore very important but costly. Acknowledging that electrical power in wireless consumer devices is more critical than the number of implemented logic gates, this paper presents a Double Data Rate (DDR) architecture for implementation inside a OFDM baseband codec in order to reduce the high frequency clock rates by a complete factor of 2. The presented architecture has been implemented and tested for ECMA-368 (Wireless- USB context) resulting in a maximum clock rate of 264MHz instead of the expected 528MHz clock rate existing anywhere on the baseband codec die.

A double data rate (DDR) architecture for OFDM based wireless consumer devices

The creation of OFDM based Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) has allowed high bit-rate wireless communication devices suitable for streaming High Definition video between consumer products as demonstrated in Wireless- USB. However, these devices need high clock rates, particularly for the OFDM sections resulting in high silicon cost and high electrical power. Acknowledging that electrical power in wireless consumer devices is more critical than the number of implemented logic gates, this paper presents a Double Data Rate (DDR) architecture to reduce the OFDM input and output clock rate by a factor of 2. The architecture has been implemented and tested for Wireless-USB (ECMA-368) resulting in a maximum clock of 264MHz instead of 528MHz existing anywhere on the die.