Search results for "Spoken language"

Lexical and sublexical units in speech perception.

2009

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word-segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vint…

2019

The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children's production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of a…

The Neural Basis of Idea Density During Natural Spoken Language

2019

Idea density (ID) evolved as a quantification of propositional base structure. Besides its function as a measure of linguistic complexity, ID has also been used as an index of general linguistic ability. In order to find the neural basis for the processing of high or low ID during spontaneous speech, a sample of healthy adults was assessed using the functional resonance imaging (fMRI) technique; participants described pictures presented to them while in the scanner. Differential patterns of activation were observed for the low- and high-ID conditions, providing new insights into the processing correlates of ID.

Discourse Markers in Speech: Distinctive Features and Corpus Annotation

2017

It is generally acknowledged that discourse markers are used differently in speech and writing, yet many general descriptions and most annotation frameworks are written-based, thus partially unfit to be applied in spoken corpora. This paper identifies the major distinctive features of discourse markers in spoken language, which can be associated with problems related to their scope and structure, their meaning and their tendency to co-occur. The description is based on authentic examples and is followed by methodological recommendations on how to deal with these phenomena in more exhaustive, speech-friendly annotation models.

Du verbe instrumental dans la musique subsaharienne

2021

Sub-Saharan music results from the spoken language/instrumental language relation, directed by an oral culture. In this culture, these languages transmit ? beyond their singularities ? messages thanks to either a coded signal known by the linguistic community or previously defined among a group of individuals, or is used as a true meta-language copied on the articulated and usual language used every day. Here, an instrumental musical speech can then imitate and reproduce the tonal inflexions of the language to make its matter understandable. This fact is the natural result of a strong interaction and interrelation between the spoken language and the music as well as the conception that the …

Entre la sintaxis y el discurso: el caso de 'a lo mejor' y 'al menos' en la conversación coloquial

2018

This paper studies the Spanish forms a lo mejor (maybe) and al menos (at least) from a modular perspective, revisiting the categorization of a lo major and al menos according to the involved linguistic level and analyzing the relations between the adverbial uses of these forms and the discursive ones. Such relations show that the forms a lo mejor and al menos can be considered bicategorial lexical items, what is implemented by a corpus study based on data from spoken language.

Reshaping Curriculum to Enhance the Relevance of Literary Competence in Children's Education

2015

Twenty-first century learners face a multi-literacy landscape as they strive to acquire the cognitive skills needed for independent learning, apply linguistic skills to other knowledge base, and become computer literate. This article envisions a combination of skill sets and knowledge bases as the foundation of a literary competence-based curriculum. Such a curriculum would have the goal of enhancing young learners' critical thinking abilities; this would also help them take charge of the cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural dimensions of written and spoken language in order to make learning transferable and applicable to the real world.

Digital game-based training of early reading skills : overview of the GraphoGame method in a highly transparent orthography / Entrenamiento de habili…

2014

Learning to read in a language with a transparent orthography is generally quick and easy. To be able to read any words, learners need to know how to connect the smallest spoken language units, phonemes, into the written counterparts, graphemes. However, even learning the basic alphabetic principle has proven difficult for some learners. Here we focus on children who struggle to learn to read in Finnish that has a highly transparent orthography. In an attempt to provide efficient early preventative support for such learners, a technologyenhanced learning environment, GraphoGame, was developed. The GraphoGame method focuses on the specific problematic areas of each individual learner using a…

Audiovisual processing of Chinese characters elicits suppression and congruency effects in MEG

2019

Learning to associate written letters/characters with speech sounds is crucial for reading acquisition. Most previous studies have focused on audiovisual integration in alphabetic languages. Less is known about logographic languages such as Chinese characters, which map onto mostly syllable-based morphemes in the spoken language. Here we investigated how long-term exposure to native language affects the underlying neural mechanisms of audiovisual integration in a logographic language using magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG sensor and source data from 12 adult native Chinese speakers and a control group of 13 adult Finnish speakers were analyzed for audiovisual suppression (bimodal responses…

Reading comprehension in French 1st and 2nd grade children: Contribution of decoding and language comprehension

2006

This paper reports a study conducted with French first-grade and second-grade children (mean age: 6;8 and 7;8 respectively). The first aim was to re-examine the Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) Simple View in assessing the specific contribution of decoding ability and language comprehension to reading comprehension. The second one was to analyse the difficulties of children in reading comprehension. Reading and listening comprehension were assessed using both visual and auditory version of the same test. Decoding ability was assessed by means of a nonword reading test. On the basis of reading comprehension scores, skilled and less skilled comprehenders were contrasted, and then two groups of less …