Search results for "Orthography"
showing 10 items of 90 documents
Robust Neural Machine Translation: Modeling Orthographic and Interpunctual Variation
2020
Neural machine translation systems typically are trained on curated corpora and break when faced with non-standard orthography or punctuation. Resilience to spelling mistakes and typos, however, is crucial as machine translation systems are used to translate texts of informal origins, such as chat conversations, social media posts and web pages. We propose a simple generative noise model to generate adversarial examples of ten different types. We use these to augment machine translation systems’ training data and show that, when tested on noisy data, systems trained using adversarial examples perform almost as well as when translating clean data, while baseline systems’ performance drops by…
Reading development in agglutinative languages: Evidence from beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers
2010
Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n =3 2 each, average age = 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively) needed to read correctly versus incorrectly inflected words embedded in sentences. Half of the targets contained high-frequency stems, and the other half contained low-frequency stems. To each stem, four inflections of different lengths were attached (-a ,- ari ,- aren, and -arentzat, i.e., inflectional sequences). To tes…
Double-Deficit Hypothesis in a Clinical Sample : Extension Beyond Reading
2016
This study explored the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH) in a transparent orthography (Finnish) and extended the view from reading disabilities to comorbidity of learning-related problems in math and attention. Children referred for evaluation of learning disabilities in second through sixth grade ( N = 205) were divided into four groups based on rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness (PA) according to the DDH: the double-deficit group, the naming speed deficit–only group, the phonological deficit–only group, and the no-deficit group. The results supported the DDH in that the prevalence and severity of reading disability were greatest in the double-deficit group. Despite …
The effects of spelling consistency on phonological awareness: a comparison of English and German.
2005
Within alphabetic languages, spelling-to-sound consistency can differ dramatically. For example, English and German are very similar in their phonological and orthographic structure but not in their consistency. In English the letter a is pronounced differently in the words bank, ball, and park, whereas in German the letter a always has the same pronunciation (e.g., Ball, Park, Bank). It is often argued that reading acquisition has a reciprocal effect on phonological awareness. As reading is acquired, therefore, spoken language representation may be affected differently for English and German children. Prior to literacy acquisition, however, phonological representation in English and German…
Children with dyslexia lack multiple specializations along the visual word-form (VWF) system.
2009
Developmental dyslexia has been associated with a dysfunction of a brain region in the left inferior occipitotemporal cortex, called the "visual word-form area" (VWFA). In adult normal readers, the VWFA is specialized for print processing and sensitive to the orthographic familiarity of letter strings. However, it is still unclear whether these two levels of occipitotemporal specialization are affected in developmental dyslexia. Specifically, we investigated whether (a) these two levels of specialization are impaired in dyslexic children with only a few years of reading experience and (b) whether this impairment is confined to the left inferior occipitotemporal VWFA, or extends to adjacent …
Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies
2003
Several previous studies have suggested that basic decoding skills may develop less effectively in English than in some other European orthographies. The origins of this effect in the early (foundation) phase of reading acquisition are investigated through assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple nonword reading in English and 12 other orthographies. The results confirm that children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English. The effects appear not to be attributable to difference…
Costs and Benefits of Orthographic Inconsistency in Reading: Evidence from a Cross-Linguistic Comparison.
2016
We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, …
Valoda: nozīme un forma, 6: Valodas sistēma un lietojums
2015
Rakstu krājums „Valoda: nozīme un forma. 6. Valodas sistēma un lietojums” ir Latvijas Universitātes Humanitāro zinātņu fakultātes Latviešu un vispārīgās valodniecības katedras (sadarbībā ar Baltu valodniecības katedru) 2014. gada 20. un 21. martā rīkotās 50. profesora Artura Ozola dienas starptautiskās zinātniskās konferences „Vispārīgā valodniecība: valodas sistēma un lietojums” referātu apkopojums.
The effect of neighborhood frequency in reading: Evidence with transposed-letter neighbors
2007
Transposed-letter effects (e.g., jugde activates judge) pose serious models for models of visual-word recognition that use position-specific coding schemes. However, even though the evidence of transposed-letter effects with nonword stimuli is strong, the evidence for word stimuli is scarce and inconclusive. The present experiment examined the effect of neighborhood frequency during normal silent reading using transposed-letter neighbors (e.g., silver, sliver). Two sets of low-frequency words were created (equated in the number of substitution neighbors, word frequency, and number of letters), which were embedded in sentences. In one set, the target word had a higher frequency transposed-le…
Predictors of developmental dyslexia in European orthographies with varying complexity
2012
Background: The relationship between phoneme awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), verbal short-term/working memory (ST/WM) and diagnostic category is investigated in control and dyslexic children, and the extent to which this depends on orthographic complexity. Methods: General cognitive, phonological and literacy skills were tested in 1,138 control and 1,114 dyslexic children speaking six different languages spanning a large range of orthographic complexity (Finnish, Hungarian, German, Dutch, French, English). Results: Phoneme deletion and RAN were strong concurrent predictors of developmental dyslexia, while verbal ST/WM and general verbal abilities played a comparatively minor role…