Search results for "6121 Languages"
showing 10 items of 20 documents
Digital Games as a Source of English Vocabulary for Finnish Writers
2021
The material for this paper comes from Finnish people who wrote about their experiences of the music of digital games. We collected 184 texts, all but one written in Finnish. There is relatively little code-switching into English at the clause level, but the vocabulary of the texts is influenced by English on a continuum from clearly English words such as comfy to established loanwords such as uniikki (‘unique’). We will consider how the influence of the English language used both in the games and in discussions about them characterizes the vocabulary of these texts and how the English language enables the authors to enter the game world. peerReviewed
Spatiotemporal dynamics of activation in motor and language areas suggest a compensatory role of the motor cortex in second language processing
2023
The involvement of the motor cortex in language understanding has been intensively discussed in the framework of embodied cognition. Although some studies have provided evidence for the involvement of the motor cortex in different receptive language tasks, the role that it plays in language perception and understanding is still unclear. In the present study, we explored the degree of involvement of language and motor areas in a visually presented sentence comprehension task, modulated by language proficiency (L1: native language, L2: second language) and linguistic abstractness (literal, metaphorical, and abstract). Magnetoencephalography data were recorded from 26 late Chinese learners of …
Asymmetries of Knowledge and Epistemic Change in Social Gaming Interaction
2014
While a growing number of studies investigate the role of knowledge and interactional management of knowledge asymmetries in conversation analysis, the epistemic organization of multilingual and second language interactions is still largely unexplored. This article addresses this issue by investigating how knowledge asymmetries and changing positions with regard to knowledge impact social interaction in multilingual gaming activities. Drawing on a collection of video recordings of social gaming sessions collected over a two year period and involving the same two participants, we examine how the participants orient to knowledge and deal with knowledge asymmetries while solving game-related p…
Recipient Design by Gestures : How Depictive Gestures Embody Actions in Cooking Instructions
2022
This paper investigates how depictive gestures, i.e., hand movements that depict actions, scenes or objects, are configured and used for accomplishing instructions. By drawing on video recordings of second language interactions in cooking classes for newcomers in Finland, we focus on instructions that project a certain type of complying bodily action as the relevant next action. We demonstrate that the instructions are designed to be sensitive not only to the contingencies of the material ecology of the kitchen but also to the epistemic and linguistic asymmetries between the participants. The analysis shows how depictive gestures contribute to the forward-feeding function of cooking instruc…
Neural phoneme discrimination in variable speech in newborns – associations with dyslexia risk and later language skills
2023
AbstractA crucial skill in infant language acquisition is learning of the native language phonemes. This requires the ability to group complex sounds into distinct auditory categories based on their shared features. Problems in phonetic learning have been suggested to underlie language learning difficulties in dyslexia, a developmental reading-skill deficit. We investigated auditory abilities important for language acquisition in newborns with or without a familial risk for dyslexia with electrophysiological mismatch responses (MMRs). We presented vowel changes in a sequence of acoustically varying vowels, requiring grouping of the stimuli to two phoneme categories. The vowel changes elicit…
Finnish L2 proficiency for working life : towards research-based language education and supervision practices
2021
In all Nordic countries, the L2 proficiency needed at work has become a key area in the language education provided for adult immigrants. This paper is part of a series of articles that gives an overview of language policies and research activities in the Nordic countries related to L2 in working life, together with a presentation of novel empirical analyses. Here, the focus is on the Finnish perspective. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, it provides an overall picture of the policies and research findings underlying recent tendencies in Finnish L2 language education in/for working life. After this, the article presents two case studies of clinical supervision practices in health c…
Bodily Practices in Action Formation and Ascription in Multilingual Interaction: Introduction to the Special Issue.
2022
This special issue brings together empirical studies that investigate how bodily practices feature in action formation and action ascription in multilingual interaction (Schegloff, 2007; Levinson, 2013). Grounded in video-based conversation analysis and drawing on data from diverse sociomaterial settings, the articles investigate the contingent interactional processes through which speakers from different language backgrounds accomplish actions and achieve intersubjectivity. They demonstrate how specific constellations of linguistic resources, bodily conduct, spatial configurations, and material ecology are built into accomplishment of actions at different levels of interactional organizati…
Attentional modulation of interhemispheric (a)symmetry in children with developmental language disorder
2022
Funding Information: The MEG recordings were conducted at Aalto University with the support of Grant #315553 from the Academy of Finland. This research was also supported by a personal grant to DH from the Jenni and Antti Wihuri Foundation and to RS from the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s). The nature of auditory processing problems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is still poorly understood. Much research has been devoted to determining the extent to which DLD is associated with general auditory versus language-specific dysfunction. However, less emphasis has been given to the role of different task conditions in these dysfunctio…
Differences in acoustically determined sentence stress between native and L2 speakers of Finland Swedish
2021
This study describes a pilot attempt to use acoustically determined sentence stress in distinguishing native and L2 speakers of Finland Swedish at different proficiency levels. The study is part of the DigiTala project that examines and develops automatic tools for spoken L2 assessment. Stressed syllables were detected in 235 L2 and 30 L1 speech samples using combinations of f0, intensity, and duration. Differences were found in the relative number of stressed syllables between native and L2 speakers using f0 and duration or all three features. Further research with more consistent speech data is needed to establish reliable automatic measures of sentence stress. nonPeerReviewed
Making Sense of Interactional Trouble Through Mobile-Supported Sharing Activities
2019
acceptedVersion Peer reviewed