Spoken Narrative Assessment: A Supplementary Measure of Children's Creativity

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Wong, Miranda Kit-Yi; So, Wing Chee

2016-01-01

This study developed a spoken narrative (i.e., storytelling) assessment as a supplementary measure of children's creativity. Both spoken and gestural contents of children's spoken narratives were coded to assess their verbal and nonverbal creativity. The psychometric properties of the coding system for the spoken narrative assessment were…

Effects of Auditory and Visual Priming on the Identification of Spoken Words.

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Shigeno, Sumi

2017-04-01

This study examined the effects of preceding contextual stimuli, either auditory or visual, on the identification of spoken target words. Fifty-one participants (29% males, 71% females; mean age = 24.5 years, SD = 8.5) were divided into three groups: no context, auditory context, and visual context. All target stimuli were spoken words masked with white noise. The relationships between the context and target stimuli were as follows: identical word, similar word, and unrelated word. Participants presented with context experienced a sequence of six context stimuli in the form of either spoken words or photographs. Auditory and visual context conditions produced similar results, but the auditory context aided word identification more than the visual context in the similar word relationship. We discuss these results in the light of top-down processing, motor theory, and the phonological system of language.

The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and written language.

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Moats, L C

1994-01-01

Reading research supports the necessity for directly teaching concepts about linguistic structure to beginning readers and to students with reading and spelling difficulties. In this study, experienced teachers of reading, language arts, and special education were tested to determine if they have the requisite awareness of language elements (e.g., phonemes, morphemes) and of how these elements are represented in writing (e.g., knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences). The results were surprisingly poor, indicating that even motivated and experienced teachers typically understand too little about spoken and written language structure to be able to provide sufficient instruction in these areas. The utility of language structure knowledge for instructional planning, for assessment of student progress, and for remediation of literacy problems is discussed.The teachers participating in the study subsequently took a course focusing on phonemic awareness training, spoken-written language relationships, and careful analysis of spelling and reading behavior in children. At the end of the course, the teachers judged this information to be essential for teaching and advised that it become a prerequisite for certification. Recommendations for requirements and content of teacher education programs are presented.

A Descriptive Study of Registers Found in Spoken and Written Communication (A Semantic Analysis

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Nurul Hidayah

2016-07-01

Full Text Available This research is descriptive study of registers found in spoken and written communication. The type of this research is Descriptive Qualitative Research. In this research, the data of the study is register in spoken and written communication that are found in a book entitled "Communicating! Theory and Practice" and from internet. The data can be in the forms of words, phrases and abbreviation. In relation with method of collection data, the writer uses the library method as her instrument. The writer relates it to the study of register in spoken and written communication. The technique of analyzing the data using descriptive method. The types of register in this term will be separated into formal register and informal register, and identify the meaning of register.

Making a Difference: Language Teaching for Intercultural and International Dialogue

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Byram, Michael; Wagner, Manuela

2018-01-01

Language teaching has long been associated with teaching in a country or countries where a target language is spoken, but this approach is inadequate. In the contemporary world, language teaching has a responsibility to prepare learners for interaction with people of other cultural backgrounds, teaching them skills and attitudes as well as…

Towards Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems

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Schmitt, Alexander

2013-01-01

In Monitoring Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems, authors Alexander Schmitt and Wolfgang Minker investigate statistical approaches that allow for recognition of negative dialog patterns in Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS). The presented stochastic methods allow a flexible, portable and  accurate use.  Beginning with the foundations of machine learning and pattern recognition, this monograph examines how frequently users show negative emotions in spoken dialog systems and develop novel approaches to speech-based emotion recognition using hybrid approach to model emotions. The authors make use of statistical methods based on acoustic, linguistic and contextual features to examine the relationship between the interaction flow and the occurrence of emotions using non-acted  recordings several thousand real users from commercial and non-commercial SDS. Additionally, the authors present novel statistical methods that spot problems within a dialog based on interaction patterns. The approaches enable future SDS to offer m...

Pedagogy for Liberation: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Schools

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Fiore, Mia

2015-01-01

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, hip hop of the 1980s and early 1990s, and spoken word poetry have each attempted to initiate the dialogical process outlined by Paulo Freire as necessary in overturning oppression. Each art form has done this by critically engaging with the world and questioning dominant systems of power. However,…

A Randomized Comparison of the Effect of Two Prelinguistic Communication Interventions on the Acquisition of Spoken Communication in Preschoolers with ASD

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Yoder, Paul; Stone, Wendy L.

2006-01-01

Purpose: This randomized group experiment compared the efficacy of 2 communication interventions (Responsive Education and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching [RPMT] and the Picture Exchange Communication System [PECS]) on spoken communication in 36 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method: Each treatment was delivered to children for a…

Business Spoken English Learning Strategies for Chinese Enterprise Staff

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

Han Li

2013-01-01

This study addresses the issue of promoting effective Business Spoken English of Enterprise Staff in China.It aims to assess the assessment of spoken English learning methods and identify the difficulties of learning English oral expression concerned business area.It also provides strategies for enhancing Enterprise Staff’s level of Business Spoken English.

Pictures with narration versus pictures with on-screen text during teaching Mathematics

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Panagiotis Ioannou

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of two different teaching methods on students’ comprehension in Mathematics: pictures with concurrent narration versus pictures with on-screen text, during teaching triangles, a lesson in Mathematics. Forty primary school children (boys and girls selected to participate in this study. Students splitted into two experimental groups with the technique of simple random sampling. The first group consisted of students who viewed and listened (pictures with narration group, while the second group consisted of students who viewed (pictures with on-screen text a presentation of triangles. A recall test was used to evaluate students’ comprehension. The results showed that students’ comprehension was better when triangles' presentation (pictures was accompanied with spoken words, than with printed words. The pictures with narration group performed better than the pictures with on-screen text group, in recall test (M = 4.97, SD = 1.32 p<0.01. Results are consistent with the modality principle in which learners are more likely to build connections between corresponding words and pictures when words are presented in a spoken form (narration simultaneously with pictures.

TRAINING COURSE AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL FORM OF STUDENTS’ TEACHING INTERNSHIP

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T. A. Isaeva

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The research objective is to analyze the introduction of interactive educational technologies and methods during the teaching internship. The authors consider that a pedagogical concept «teaching internship» as an interactive form of the educational organization for students can be a useful possibility. This form is aimed at the development of students’ personal qualities for their future professional and pedagogical activities. The paper presents the types of internship training focused on the development of students’ personal qualities and willingness for future vocation and teaching, such as professional teaching, research, educational–rojecting and integrated types. The methods. The teaching professional training methodology involves SWOT-analysis to help students to gain the experience in the analysis of real pedagogical situations which are relevant for a particular educational organization and for education in general. On the basis of the group expert assessment method and the pedagogical aims arrangement by B. Bloom, the authors have worked out their own specific taxonomic model for reasoned training course tasks’ development; and the readiness level diagnostics of students involved in teaching internship. The results. The authors reveal new approaches to teaching internship organization for incoming vocational education teachers. It is specially noted that the training organization on the stages of teaching practice of bachelors provides not only constant feedback with the teaching internship head or tutor allowing to correct a practical activity but significantly increases students’ willingness to complete it in various educational institutions as well. Scientific novelty. The authors not only introduce the concept of «pedagogical training» but also supplement it, defining its aims and objectives. It is proved that SWOT-analysis usage as the strategic planning method during teaching course provides internal and

Evaluating the spoken English proficiency of graduates of foreign medical schools.

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Boulet, J R; van Zanten, M; McKinley, D W; Gary, N E

2001-08-01

The purpose of this study was to gather additional evidence for the validity and reliability of spoken English proficiency ratings provided by trained standardized patients (SPs) in high-stakes clinical skills examination. Over 2500 candidates who took the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates' (ECFMG) Clinical Skills Assessment (CSA) were studied. The CSA consists of 10 or 11 timed clinical encounters. Standardized patients evaluate spoken English proficiency and interpersonal skills in every encounter. Generalizability theory was used to estimate the consistency of spoken English ratings. Validity coefficients were calculated by correlating summary English ratings with CSA scores and other external criterion measures. Mean spoken English ratings were also compared by various candidate background variables. The reliability of the spoken English ratings, based on 10 independent evaluations, was high. The magnitudes of the associated variance components indicated that the evaluation of a candidate's spoken English proficiency is unlikely to be affected by the choice of cases or SPs used in a given assessment. Proficiency in spoken English was related to native language (English versus other) and scores from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The pattern of the relationships, both within assessment components and with external criterion measures, suggests that valid measures of spoken English proficiency are obtained. This result, combined with the high reproducibility of the ratings over encounters and SPs, supports the use of trained SPs to measure spoken English skills in a simulated medical environment.

Assessing spoken word recognition in children who are deaf or hard of hearing: a translational approach.

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Kirk, Karen Iler; Prusick, Lindsay; French, Brian; Gotch, Chad; Eisenberg, Laurie S; Young, Nancy

2012-06-01

Under natural conditions, listeners use both auditory and visual speech cues to extract meaning from speech signals containing many sources of variability. However, traditional clinical tests of spoken word recognition routinely employ isolated words or sentences produced by a single talker in an auditory-only presentation format. The more central cognitive processes used during multimodal integration, perceptual normalization, and lexical discrimination that may contribute to individual variation in spoken word recognition performance are not assessed in conventional tests of this kind. In this article, we review our past and current research activities aimed at developing a series of new assessment tools designed to evaluate spoken word recognition in children who are deaf or hard of hearing. These measures are theoretically motivated by a current model of spoken word recognition and also incorporate "real-world" stimulus variability in the form of multiple talkers and presentation formats. The goal of this research is to enhance our ability to estimate real-world listening skills and to predict benefit from sensory aid use in children with varying degrees of hearing loss. American Academy of Audiology.

Taxonomy of Teaching Methods and Teaching Forms for Youth in Non-Formal Education in the National Youth Council of Slovenia

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Miloševic Zupancic, Vesna

2018-01-01

Research from the field of non-formal education (NFE) in youth work emphasises the central role of experiential learning and learning in groups. The present paper aims to research teaching methods and teaching forms in NFE in youth work. The research sought to answer the following research questions: 'What teaching forms can be found in NFE for…

Instructional Benefits of Spoken Words: A Review of Cognitive Load Factors

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Kalyuga, Slava

2012-01-01

Spoken words have always been an important component of traditional instruction. With the development of modern educational technology tools, spoken text more often replaces or supplements written or on-screen textual representations. However, there could be a cognitive load cost involved in this trend, as spoken words can have both benefits and…

Primary phonological planning units in spoken word production are language-specific: Evidence from an ERP study.

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Wang, Jie; Wong, Andus Wing-Kuen; Wang, Suiping; Chen, Hsuan-Chih

2017-07-19

It is widely acknowledged in Germanic languages that segments are the primary planning units at the phonological encoding stage of spoken word production. Mixed results, however, have been found in Chinese, and it is still unclear what roles syllables and segments play in planning Chinese spoken word production. In the current study, participants were asked to first prepare and later produce disyllabic Mandarin words upon picture prompts and a response cue while electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded. Each two consecutive pictures implicitly formed a pair of prime and target, whose names shared the same word-initial atonal syllable or the same word-initial segments, or were unrelated in the control conditions. Only syllable repetition induced significant effects on event-related brain potentials (ERPs) after target onset: a widely distributed positivity in the 200- to 400-ms interval and an anterior positivity in the 400- to 600-ms interval. We interpret these to reflect syllable-size representations at the phonological encoding and phonetic encoding stages. Our results provide the first electrophysiological evidence for the distinct role of syllables in producing Mandarin spoken words, supporting a language specificity hypothesis about the primary phonological units in spoken word production.

Attention to spoken word planning: Chronometric and neuroimaging evidence

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2008-01-01

This article reviews chronometric and neuroimaging evidence on attention to spoken word planning, using the WEAVER++ model as theoretical framework. First, chronometric studies on the time to initiate vocal responding and gaze shifting suggest that spoken word planning may require some attention,

Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese.

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Qu, Qingqing; Damian, Markus F

2017-06-01

Extensive evidence from alphabetic languages demonstrates a role of orthography in the processing of spoken words. Because alphabetic systems explicitly code speech sounds, such effects are perhaps not surprising. However, it is less clear whether orthographic codes are involuntarily accessed from spoken words in languages with non-alphabetic systems, in which the sound-spelling correspondence is largely arbitrary. We investigated the role of orthography via a semantic relatedness judgment task: native Mandarin speakers judged whether or not spoken word pairs were related in meaning. Word pairs were either semantically related, orthographically related, or unrelated. Results showed that relatedness judgments were made faster for word pairs that were semantically related than for unrelated word pairs. Critically, orthographic overlap on semantically unrelated word pairs induced a significant increase in response latencies. These findings indicate that orthographic information is involuntarily accessed in spoken-word recognition, even in a non-alphabetic language such as Chinese.

CROATIAN ADULT SPOKEN LANGUAGE CORPUS (HrAL

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Jelena Kuvač Kraljević

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Interest in spoken-language corpora has increased over the past two decades leading to the development of new corpora and the discovery of new facets of spoken language. These types of corpora represent the most comprehensive data source about the language of ordinary speakers. Such corpora are based on spontaneous, unscripted speech defined by a variety of styles, registers and dialects. The aim of this paper is to present the Croatian Adult Spoken Language Corpus (HrAL, its structure and its possible applications in different linguistic subfields. HrAL was built by sampling spontaneous conversations among 617 speakers from all Croatian counties, and it comprises more than 250,000 tokens and more than 100,000 types. Data were collected during three time slots: from 2010 to 2012, from 2014 to 2015 and during 2016. HrAL is today available within TalkBank, a large database of spoken-language corpora covering different languages (https://talkbank.org, in the Conversational Analyses corpora within the subsection titled Conversational Banks. Data were transcribed, coded and segmented using the transcription format Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT and the Computerised Language Analysis (CLAN suite of programmes within the TalkBank toolkit. Speech streams were segmented into communication units (C-units based on syntactic criteria. Most transcripts were linked to their source audios. The TalkBank is public free, i.e. all data stored in it can be shared by the wider community in accordance with the basic rules of the TalkBank. HrAL provides information about spoken grammar and lexicon, discourse skills, error production and productivity in general. It may be useful for sociolinguistic research and studies of synchronic language changes in Croatian.

Development, evaluation, and utility of a peer evaluation form for online teaching.

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Gaskamp, Carol D; Kintner, Eileen

2014-01-01

Formative assessment of teaching by peers is an important component of quality improvement for educators. Teaching portfolios submitted for promotion and tenure are expected to include peer evaluations. Faculty resources designed for peer evaluation of classroom teaching are often inadequate for evaluating online teaching. The authors describe development, evaluation, and utility of a new peer evaluation form for formative assessment of online teaching deemed relevant, sound, feasible, and beneficial.

Prosodic Parallelism – comparing spoken and written language

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Richard Wiese

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The Prosodic Parallelism hypothesis claims adjacent prosodic categories to prefer identical branching of internal adjacent constituents. According to Wiese and Speyer (2015, this preference implies feet contained in the same phonological phrase to display either binary or unary branching, but not different types of branching. The seemingly free schwa-zero alternations at the end of some words in German make it possible to test this hypothesis. The hypothesis was successfully tested by conducting a corpus study which used large-scale bodies of written German. As some open questions remain, and as it is unclear whether Prosodic Parallelism is valid for the spoken modality as well, the present study extends this inquiry to spoken German. As in the previous study, the results of a corpus analysis recruiting a variety of linguistic constructions are presented. The Prosodic Parallelism hypothesis can be demonstrated to be valid for spoken German as well as for written German. The paper thus contributes to the question whether prosodic preferences are similar between the spoken and written modes of a language. Some consequences of the results for the production of language are discussed.

Comparison of Word Intelligibility in Spoken and Sung Phrases

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Lauren B. Collister

2008-09-01

Full Text Available Twenty listeners were exposed to spoken and sung passages in English produced by three trained vocalists. Passages included representative words extracted from a large database of vocal lyrics, including both popular and classical repertoires. Target words were set within spoken or sung carrier phrases. Sung carrier phrases were selected from classical vocal melodies. Roughly a quarter of all words sung by an unaccompanied soloist were misheard. Sung passages showed a seven-fold decrease in intelligibility compared with their spoken counterparts. The perceptual mistakes occurring with vowels replicate previous studies showing the centralization of vowels. Significant confusions are also evident for consonants, especially voiced stops and nasals.

Semantic and phonological schema influence spoken word learning and overnight consolidation.

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Havas, Viktória; Taylor, Jsh; Vaquero, Lucía; de Diego-Balaguer, Ruth; Rodríguez-Fornells, Antoni; Davis, Matthew H

2018-06-01

We studied the initial acquisition and overnight consolidation of new spoken words that resemble words in the native language (L1) or in an unfamiliar, non-native language (L2). Spanish-speaking participants learned the spoken forms of novel words in their native language (Spanish) or in a different language (Hungarian), which were paired with pictures of familiar or unfamiliar objects, or no picture. We thereby assessed, in a factorial way, the impact of existing knowledge (schema) on word learning by manipulating both semantic (familiar vs unfamiliar objects) and phonological (L1- vs L2-like novel words) familiarity. Participants were trained and tested with a 12-hr intervening period that included overnight sleep or daytime awake. Our results showed (1) benefits of sleep to recognition memory that were greater for words with L2-like phonology and (2) that learned associations with familiar but not unfamiliar pictures enhanced recognition memory for novel words. Implications for complementary systems accounts of word learning are discussed.

Novel Spoken Word Learning in Adults with Developmental Dyslexia

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Conner, Peggy S.

2013-01-01

A high percentage of individuals with dyslexia struggle to learn unfamiliar spoken words, creating a significant obstacle to foreign language learning after early childhood. The origin of spoken-word learning difficulties in this population, generally thought to be related to the underlying literacy deficit, is not well defined (e.g., Di Betta…

Relationship Domain of Form Six Teachers Thinking in Teaching with External Factors of Form Six Teachers

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bin Pet, Mokhtar; Sihes, Ahmad Johari Hj

2015-01-01

This study aims to examine the external factors of form six teachers who can influence thinking domain form six teachers in their teaching. This study was conducted using a quantitative approach using questionnaires. A total of 300 form six teacher schools in Johor were chosen as respondents. The findings were obtained as student background…

Code-switched English pronunciation modeling for Swahili spoken term detection

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Kleynhans, N

2016-05-01

Full Text Available Computer Science 81 ( 2016 ) 128 – 135 5th Workshop on Spoken Language Technology for Under-resourced Languages, SLTU 2016, 9-12 May 2016, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Code-switched English Pronunciation Modeling for Swahili Spoken Term Detection Neil...

Discourse context and the recognition of reduced and canonical spoken words

OpenAIRE

Brouwer, S.; Mitterer, H.; Huettig, F.

2013-01-01

In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., 'puter') more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., 'computer'). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words. Target word recognition was assessed by measuring eye fixation proportions to four printed words on a visual display: the target, a "reduced form" ...

Spoken word recognition without a TRACE

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Hannagan, Thomas; Magnuson, James S.; Grainger, Jonathan

2013-01-01

How do we map the rapid input of spoken language onto phonological and lexical representations over time? Attempts at psychologically-tractable computational models of spoken word recognition tend either to ignore time or to transform the temporal input into a spatial representation. TRACE, a connectionist model with broad and deep coverage of speech perception and spoken word recognition phenomena, takes the latter approach, using exclusively time-specific units at every level of representation. TRACE reduplicates featural, phonemic, and lexical inputs at every time step in a large memory trace, with rich interconnections (excitatory forward and backward connections between levels and inhibitory links within levels). As the length of the memory trace is increased, or as the phoneme and lexical inventory of the model is increased to a realistic size, this reduplication of time- (temporal position) specific units leads to a dramatic proliferation of units and connections, begging the question of whether a more efficient approach is possible. Our starting point is the observation that models of visual object recognition—including visual word recognition—have grappled with the problem of spatial invariance, and arrived at solutions other than a fully-reduplicative strategy like that of TRACE. This inspires a new model of spoken word recognition that combines time-specific phoneme representations similar to those in TRACE with higher-level representations based on string kernels: temporally independent (time invariant) diphone and lexical units. This reduces the number of necessary units and connections by several orders of magnitude relative to TRACE. Critically, we compare the new model to TRACE on a set of key phenomena, demonstrating that the new model inherits much of the behavior of TRACE and that the drastic computational savings do not come at the cost of explanatory power. PMID:24058349

Function and Form of Action-Based Teaching in Higher Education

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Keiding, Tina Bering

The aim of the research is to subject progressive, critical and entrepreneurial pedagogy to a didactic inquiry based on the specific application of action-based teaching in order to answer two fundamental didactic questions: What educational purpose does the use of action-based teaching serve? How...... does the educational purpose affect the specific form of the constituting elements of the method?...

Attentional Capture of Objects Referred to by Spoken Language

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Salverda, Anne Pier; Altmann, Gerry T. M.

2011-01-01

Participants saw a small number of objects in a visual display and performed a visual detection or visual-discrimination task in the context of task-irrelevant spoken distractors. In each experiment, a visual cue was presented 400 ms after the onset of a spoken word. In experiments 1 and 2, the cue was an isoluminant color change and participants…

The Beneficial Role of L1 Spoken Language Skills on Initial L2 Sign Language Learning: Cognitive and Linguistic Predictors of M2L2 Acquisition

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Williams, Joshua T.; Darcy, Isabelle; Newman, Sharlene D.

2017-01-01

Understanding how language modality (i.e., signed vs. spoken) affects second language outcomes in hearing adults is important both theoretically and pedagogically, as it can determine the specificity of second language (L2) theory and inform how best to teach a language that uses a new modality. The present study investigated which…

Orthographic Facilitation in Chinese Spoken Word Recognition: An ERP Study

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Zou, Lijuan; Desroches, Amy S.; Liu, Youyi; Xia, Zhichao; Shu, Hua

2012-01-01

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition have been previously examined in alphabetic languages. However, it is unknown whether orthographic information affects spoken word recognition in Chinese, which has a clean dissociation between orthography (O) and phonology (P). The present study investigated orthographic effects using event…

"Now We Have Spoken."

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Zimmer, Patricia Moore

2001-01-01

Describes the author's experiences directing a play translated and acted in Korean. Notes that she had to get familiar with the sound of the language spoken fluently, to see how an actor's thought is discerned when the verbal language is not understood. Concludes that so much of understanding and communication unfolds in ways other than with…

Focus on Form in task-based language teaching

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van de Guchte, M.

2015-01-01

This dissertation presents research on the way in which learners focus on grammar in task-based language teaching (TBLT). Such a focus on grammar during meaningful task performance is called a Focus on Form (FonF). For this PhD research project we conducted three experimental studies which

Time course of Chinese monosyllabic spoken word recognition: evidence from ERP analyses.

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Zhao, Jingjing; Guo, Jingjing; Zhou, Fengying; Shu, Hua

2011-06-01

Evidence from event-related potential (ERP) analyses of English spoken words suggests that the time course of English word recognition in monosyllables is cumulative. Different types of phonological competitors (i.e., rhymes and cohorts) modulate the temporal grain of ERP components differentially (Desroches, Newman, & Joanisse, 2009). The time course of Chinese monosyllabic spoken word recognition could be different from that of English due to the differences in syllable structure between the two languages (e.g., lexical tones). The present study investigated the time course of Chinese monosyllabic spoken word recognition using ERPs to record brain responses online while subjects listened to spoken words. During the experiment, participants were asked to compare a target picture with a subsequent picture by judging whether or not these two pictures belonged to the same semantic category. The spoken word was presented between the two pictures, and participants were not required to respond during its presentation. We manipulated phonological competition by presenting spoken words that either matched or mismatched the target picture in one of the following four ways: onset mismatch, rime mismatch, tone mismatch, or syllable mismatch. In contrast to the English findings, our findings showed that the three partial mismatches (onset, rime, and tone mismatches) equally modulated the amplitudes and time courses of the N400 (a negative component that peaks about 400ms after the spoken word), whereas, the syllable mismatched words elicited an earlier and stronger N400 than the three partial mismatched words. The results shed light on the important role of syllable-level awareness in Chinese spoken word recognition and also imply that the recognition of Chinese monosyllabic words might rely more on global similarity of the whole syllable structure or syllable-based holistic processing rather than phonemic segment-based processing. We interpret the differences in spoken word

Grammatical Deviations in the Spoken and Written Language of Hebrew-Speaking Children With Hearing Impairments.

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Tur-Kaspa, Hana; Dromi, Esther

2001-04-01

The present study reports a detailed analysis of written and spoken language samples of Hebrew-speaking children aged 11-13 years who are deaf. It focuses on the description of various grammatical deviations in the two modalities. Participants were 13 students with hearing impairments (HI) attending special classrooms integrated into two elementary schools in Tel Aviv, Israel, and 9 students with normal hearing (NH) in regular classes in these same schools. Spoken and written language samples were collected from all participants using the same five preplanned elicitation probes. Students with HI were found to display significantly more grammatical deviations than their NH peers in both their spoken and written language samples. Most importantly, between-modality differences were noted. The participants with HI exhibited significantly more grammatical deviations in their written language samples than in their spoken samples. However, the distribution of grammatical deviations across categories was similar in the two modalities. The most common grammatical deviations in order of their frequency were failure to supply obligatory morphological markers, failure to mark grammatical agreement, and the omission of a major syntactic constituent in a sentence. Word order violations were rarely recorded in the Hebrew samples. Performance differences in the two modalities encourage clinicians and teachers to facilitate target linguistic forms in diverse communication contexts. Furthermore, the identification of linguistic targets for intervention must be based on the unique grammatical structure of the target language.

Spoken grammar awareness raising: Does it affect the listening ability of Iranian EFL learners?

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Mojgan Rashtchi

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Advances in spoken corpora analysis have brought about new insights into language pedagogy and have led to an awareness of the characteristics of spoken language. Current findings have shown that grammar of spoken language is different from written language. However, most listening and speaking materials are concocted based on written grammar and lack core spoken language features. The aim of the present study was to explore the question whether awareness of spoken grammar features could affect learners’ comprehension of real-life conversations. To this end, 45 university students in two intact classes participated in a listening course employing corpus-based materials. The instruction of the spoken grammar features to the experimental group was done overtly through awareness raising tasks, whereas the control group, though exposed to the same materials, was not provided with such tasks for learning the features. The results of the independent samples t tests revealed that the learners in the experimental group comprehended everyday conversations much better than those in the control group. Additionally, the highly positive views of spoken grammar held by the learners, which was elicited by means of a retrospective questionnaire, were generally comparable to those reported in the literature.

Spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia: working memory and vocabulary effects.

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Wiseheart, Rebecca; Altmann, Lori J P

2018-03-01

Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group differences can be attributable to cognitive differences between groups. Fifty-one college students with and without dyslexia were asked to produce sentences from stimuli comprising a verb and two nouns. Verb types varied in argument structure and morphological form and nouns varied in animacy. Outcome measures were precision (measured by fluency, grammaticality and completeness) and efficiency (measured by response times). Vocabulary and working memory tests were also administered and used as predictors of sentence production performance. Relative to non-dyslexic peers, students with dyslexia responded significantly slower and produced sentences that were significantly less precise in terms of fluency, grammaticality and completeness. The primary predictors of precision and efficiency were working memory, which differed between groups, and vocabulary, which did not. College students with dyslexia were significantly less facile and flexible on this spoken sentence-production task than typical readers, which is consistent with previous studies of school-age children with dyslexia. Group differences in performance were traced primarily to limited working memory, and were somewhat mitigated by strong vocabulary. © 2017 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Ragnar Rommetveit's Approach to Everyday Spoken Dialogue from Within.

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Kowal, Sabine; O'Connell, Daniel C

2016-04-01

The following article presents basic concepts and methods of Ragnar Rommetveit's (born 1924) hermeneutic-dialogical approach to everyday spoken dialogue with a focus on both shared consciousness and linguistically mediated meaning. He developed this approach originally in his engagement of mainstream linguistic and psycholinguistic research of the 1960s and 1970s. He criticized this research tradition for its individualistic orientation and its adherence to experimental methodology which did not allow the engagement of interactively established meaning and understanding in everyday spoken dialogue. As a social psychologist influenced by phenomenological philosophy, Rommetveit opted for an alternative conceptualization of such dialogue as a contextualized, partially private world, temporarily co-established by interlocutors on the basis of shared consciousness. He argued that everyday spoken dialogue should be investigated from within, i.e., from the perspectives of the interlocutors and from a psychology of the second person. Hence, he developed his approach with an emphasis on intersubjectivity, perspectivity and perspectival relativity, meaning potential of utterances, and epistemic responsibility of interlocutors. In his methods, he limited himself for the most part to casuistic analyses, i.e., logical analyses of fictitious examples to argue for the plausibility of his approach. After many years of experimental research on language, he pursued his phenomenologically oriented research on dialogue in English-language publications from the late 1980s up to 2003. During that period, he engaged psycholinguistic research on spoken dialogue carried out by Anglo-American colleagues only occasionally. Although his work remained unfinished and open to development, it provides both a challenging alternative and supplement to current Anglo-American research on spoken dialogue and some overlap therewith.

Deep bottleneck features for spoken language identification.

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Bing Jiang

Full Text Available A key problem in spoken language identification (LID is to design effective representations which are specific to language information. For example, in recent years, representations based on both phonotactic and acoustic features have proven their effectiveness for LID. Although advances in machine learning have led to significant improvements, LID performance is still lacking, especially for short duration speech utterances. With the hypothesis that language information is weak and represented only latently in speech, and is largely dependent on the statistical properties of the speech content, existing representations may be insufficient. Furthermore they may be susceptible to the variations caused by different speakers, specific content of the speech segments, and background noise. To address this, we propose using Deep Bottleneck Features (DBF for spoken LID, motivated by the success of Deep Neural Networks (DNN in speech recognition. We show that DBFs can form a low-dimensional compact representation of the original inputs with a powerful descriptive and discriminative capability. To evaluate the effectiveness of this, we design two acoustic models, termed DBF-TV and parallel DBF-TV (PDBF-TV, using a DBF based i-vector representation for each speech utterance. Results on NIST language recognition evaluation 2009 (LRE09 show significant improvements over state-of-the-art systems. By fusing the output of phonotactic and acoustic approaches, we achieve an EER of 1.08%, 1.89% and 7.01% for 30 s, 10 s and 3 s test utterances respectively. Furthermore, various DBF configurations have been extensively evaluated, and an optimal system proposed.

Basic speech recognition for spoken dialogues

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Van Heerden, C

2009-09-01

Full Text Available Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) have great potential for information access in the developing world. However, the realisation of that potential requires the solution of several challenging problems, including the development of sufficiently accurate...

Spoken language outcomes after hemispherectomy: factoring in etiology.

Science.gov (United States)

Curtiss, S; de Bode, S; Mathern, G W

2001-12-01

We analyzed postsurgery linguistic outcomes of 43 hemispherectomy patients operated on at UCLA. We rated spoken language (Spoken Language Rank, SLR) on a scale from 0 (no language) to 6 (mature grammar) and examined the effects of side of resection/damage, age at surgery/seizure onset, seizure control postsurgery, and etiology on language development. Etiology was defined as developmental (cortical dysplasia and prenatal stroke) and acquired pathology (Rasmussen's encephalitis and postnatal stroke). We found that clinical variables were predictive of language outcomes only when they were considered within distinct etiology groups. Specifically, children with developmental etiologies had lower SLRs than those with acquired pathologies (p =.0006); age factors correlated positively with higher SLRs only for children with acquired etiologies (p =.0006); right-sided resections led to higher SLRs only for the acquired group (p =.0008); and postsurgery seizure control correlated positively with SLR only for those with developmental etiologies (p =.0047). We argue that the variables considered are not independent predictors of spoken language outcome posthemispherectomy but should be viewed instead as characteristics of etiology. Copyright 2001 Elsevier Science.

Phonological Analysis of University Students’ Spoken Discourse

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Clara Herlina

2011-04-01

Full Text Available The study of discourse is the study of using language in actual use. In this article, the writer is trying to investigate the phonological features, either segmental or supra-segmental, in the spoken discourse of Indonesian university students. The data were taken from the recordings of 15 conversations by 30 students of Bina Nusantara University who are taking English Entrant subject (TOEFL –IBT. Finally, the writer is in opinion that the students are still influenced by their first language in their spoken discourse. This results in English with Indonesian accent. Even though it does not cause misunderstanding at the moment, this may become problematic if they have to communicate in the real world.  

Motivating Change from Lecture-Tutorial Modes to Less Traditional Forms of Teaching

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McLaren, Helen J.; Kenny, Paul L.

2015-01-01

Teaching academics are under pressure to move away from traditional lecture-tutorial teaching modes to less traditional forms. Such pressures are in addition to changes to funding arrangements and other developments that increasingly oblige universities to operate as businesses. The flow-on effects for teachers are increased student:staff ratios,…

Alpha and theta brain oscillations index dissociable processes in spoken word recognition.

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Strauß, Antje; Kotz, Sonja A; Scharinger, Mathias; Obleser, Jonas

2014-08-15

Slow neural oscillations (~1-15 Hz) are thought to orchestrate the neural processes of spoken language comprehension. However, functional subdivisions within this broad range of frequencies are disputed, with most studies hypothesizing only about single frequency bands. The present study utilizes an established paradigm of spoken word recognition (lexical decision) to test the hypothesis that within the slow neural oscillatory frequency range, distinct functional signatures and cortical networks can be identified at least for theta- (~3-7 Hz) and alpha-frequencies (~8-12 Hz). Listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task on a set of items that formed a word-pseudoword continuum: ranging from (1) real words over (2) ambiguous pseudowords (deviating from real words only in one vowel; comparable to natural mispronunciations in speech) to (3) pseudowords (clearly deviating from real words by randomized syllables). By means of time-frequency analysis and spatial filtering, we observed a dissociation into distinct but simultaneous patterns of alpha power suppression and theta power enhancement. Alpha exhibited a parametric suppression as items increasingly matched real words, in line with lowered functional inhibition in a left-dominant lexical processing network for more word-like input. Simultaneously, theta power in a bilateral fronto-temporal network was selectively enhanced for ambiguous pseudowords only. Thus, enhanced alpha power can neurally 'gate' lexical integration, while enhanced theta power might index functionally more specific ambiguity-resolution processes. To this end, a joint analysis of both frequency bands provides neural evidence for parallel processes in achieving spoken word recognition. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Rapid modulation of spoken word recognition by visual primes.

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Okano, Kana; Grainger, Jonathan; Holcomb, Phillip J

2016-02-01

In a masked cross-modal priming experiment with ERP recordings, spoken Japanese words were primed with words written in one of the two syllabary scripts of Japanese. An early priming effect, peaking at around 200ms after onset of the spoken word target, was seen in left lateral electrode sites for Katakana primes, and later effects were seen for both Hiragana and Katakana primes on the N400 ERP component. The early effect is thought to reflect the efficiency with which words in Katakana script make contact with sublexical phonological representations involved in spoken language comprehension, due to the particular way this script is used by Japanese readers. This demonstrates fast-acting influences of visual primes on the processing of auditory target words, and suggests that briefly presented visual primes can influence sublexical processing of auditory target words. The later N400 priming effects, on the other hand, most likely reflect cross-modal influences on activity at the level of whole-word phonology and semantics.

The Listening and Spoken Language Data Repository: Design and Project Overview

Science.gov (United States)

Bradham, Tamala S.; Fonnesbeck, Christopher; Toll, Alice; Hecht, Barbara F.

2018-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of the Listening and Spoken Language Data Repository (LSL-DR) was to address a critical need for a systemwide outcome data-monitoring program for the development of listening and spoken language skills in highly specialized educational programs for children with hearing loss highlighted in Goal 3b of the 2007 Joint Committee…

Talker and background noise specificity in spoken word recognition memory

OpenAIRE

Cooper, Angela; Bradlow, Ann R.

2017-01-01

Prior research has demonstrated that listeners are sensitive to changes in the indexical (talker-specific) characteristics of speech input, suggesting that these signal-intrinsic features are integrally encoded in memory for spoken words. Given that listeners frequently must contend with concurrent environmental noise, to what extent do they also encode signal-extrinsic details? Native English listeners’ explicit memory for spoken English monosyllabic and disyllabic words was assessed as a fu...

The determinants of spoken and written picture naming latencies.

Science.gov (United States)

Bonin, Patrick; Chalard, Marylène; Méot, Alain; Fayol, Michel

2002-02-01

The influence of nine variables on the latencies to write down or to speak aloud the names of pictures taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) was investigated in French adults. The major determinants of both written and spoken picture naming latencies were image variability, image agreement and age of acquisition. To a lesser extent, name agreement was also found to have an impact in both production modes. The implications of the findings for theoretical views of both spoken and written picture naming are discussed.

The importance of oral Spanish teaching to multilingual students: A ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This paper explores important aspects of teaching Spanish, both spoken and written, to multilingual students, with specific reference to United Sates International University (USIU), a private institution located in Nairobi, Kenya. The beginner students of Spanish at the University speak at least 3 languages, one of which is ...

The effects of sign language on spoken language acquisition in children with hearing loss: a systematic review protocol.

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Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth M; Stevens, Adrienne; Garritty, Chantelle; Moher, David

2013-12-06

Permanent childhood hearing loss affects 1 to 3 per 1000 children and frequently disrupts typical spoken language acquisition. Early identification of hearing loss through universal newborn hearing screening and the use of new hearing technologies including cochlear implants make spoken language an option for most children. However, there is no consensus on what constitutes optimal interventions for children when spoken language is the desired outcome. Intervention and educational approaches ranging from oral language only to oral language combined with various forms of sign language have evolved. Parents are therefore faced with important decisions in the first months of their child's life. This article presents the protocol for a systematic review of the effects of using sign language in combination with oral language intervention on spoken language acquisition. Studies addressing early intervention will be selected in which therapy involving oral language intervention and any form of sign language or sign support is used. Comparison groups will include children in early oral language intervention programs without sign support. The primary outcomes of interest to be examined include all measures of auditory, vocabulary, language, speech production, and speech intelligibility skills. We will include randomized controlled trials, controlled clinical trials, and other quasi-experimental designs that include comparator groups as well as prospective and retrospective cohort studies. Case-control, cross-sectional, case series, and case studies will be excluded. Several electronic databases will be searched (for example, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO) as well as grey literature and key websites. We anticipate that a narrative synthesis of the evidence will be required. We will carry out meta-analysis for outcomes if clinical similarity, quantity and quality permit quantitative pooling of data. We will conduct subgroup analyses if possible according to severity

Asian/Pacific Islander Languages Spoken by English Learners (ELs). Fast Facts

Science.gov (United States)

Office of English Language Acquisition, US Department of Education, 2015

2015-01-01

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page PDF sheets, by topic, with graphics, plus key contacts. The topics for this report on Asian/Pacific Islander languages spoken by English Learners (ELs) include: (1) Top 10 Most Common Asian/Pacific Islander Languages Spoken Among ELs:…

Processing spoken lectures in resource-scarce environments

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Van Heerden, CJ

2011-11-01

Full Text Available and then adapting or training new models using the segmented spoken lectures. The eventual systems perform quite well, aligning more than 90% of a selected set of target words successfully....

Psycholinguistic norms for action photographs in French and their relationships with spoken and written latencies.

Science.gov (United States)

Bonin, Patrick; Boyer, Bruno; Méot, Alain; Fayol, Michel; Droit, Sylvie

2004-02-01

A set of 142 photographs of actions (taken from Fiez & Tranel, 1997) was standardized in French on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, and duration of the depicted actions. Objective word frequency measures were provided for the infinitive modal forms of the verbs and for the cumulative frequency of the verbal forms associated with the photographs. Statistics on the variables collected for action items were provided and compared with the statistics on the same variables collected for object items. The relationships between these variables were analyzed, and certain comparisons between the current database and other similar published databases of pictures of actions are reported. Spoken and written naming latencies were also collected for the photographs of actions, and multiple regression analyses revealed that name agreement, image agreement, and age of acquisition are the major determinants of action naming speed. Finally, certain analyses were performed to compare object and action naming times. The norms and the spoken and written naming latencies corresponding to the pictures are available on the Internet (http://www.psy.univ-bpclermont.fr/~pbonin/pbonin-eng.html) and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of actions.

Oral genres, argumentation and teaching

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Zilda G. O. Aquino

2015-02-01

Full Text Available This paper aims at dealing with issues related to language spoken in the classroom, focusing on discursive practices that highlight argumentation. We believe that the discussions that were made around genres, especially guided by the studies of Bakhtin and Text Linguistics, have been providing a breakthrough towards the necessity for the school to promote language teaching through the discursive genre approach. That is what we expect to be happening since both writing and spoken modalities deserve space in learning. We believe that oral genres demand that teachers acquire specific knowledge of the features of spoken language interaction that arise from its use in practical situations. Because these studies are recent among our researchers (not longer than three decades, they should still be very present in our discussions. In this paper, we focus on a specific genre of oral tradition – the debate. It is ideal for knowledge building and taking a stand at issues that arise in society, all of which is particularly important to the school. Besides contributing to the development of skills required by certain sociodiscursive practices, it is proposed that the teaching of argumentation in oral genres concentrate on the observation of selected strategies in interactions. We are particularly interested in interactions that emerge when one interaction party is trying to persuade the other. The corpus consists of the transcriptions of debates which occurred both in the classroom and in other contexts, such as the media. The methodological approach is done by identifying the arguments and their strategic use in specific situations. The theoretical discussion rests on the works of Orecchioni (2010, Marcuschi (2004, Dolz and Schneuwly (2004, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1996 [1958], among others.

Mapping Students' Spoken Conceptions of Equality

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Anakin, Megan

2013-01-01

This study expands contemporary theorising about students' conceptions of equality. A nationally representative sample of New Zealand students' were asked to provide a spoken numerical response and an explanation as they solved an arithmetic additive missing number problem. Students' responses were conceptualised as acts of communication and…

In a Manner of Speaking: Assessing Frequent Spoken Figurative Idioms to Assist ESL/EFL Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Grant, Lynn E.

2007-01-01

This article outlines criteria to define a figurative idiom, and then compares the frequent figurative idioms identified in two sources of spoken American English (academic and contemporary) to their frequency in spoken British English. This is done by searching the spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC), to see whether they are frequent…

Word frequencies in written and spoken English based on the British National Corpus

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Leech, Geoffrey; Wilson, Andrew (All Of Lancaster University)

2014-01-01

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English is a landmark volume in the development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have in general given frequency information about the written language only, this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the differences between spoken and written English, and between different spoken and written varieties of the language. The frequencies are derived from a wide ranging and up-to-date corpus of English: the British Na

Czech spoken in Bohemia and Moravia

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Šimáčková, Š.; Podlipský, V.J.; Chládková, K.

2012-01-01

As a western Slavic language of the Indo-European family, Czech is closest to Slovak and Polish. It is spoken as a native language by nearly 10 million people in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office n.d.). About two million people living abroad, mostly in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany,

Linking the Organizational Forms Teachers and Teaching Methods in a Class Instructional Methodology

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Graciela Nápoles-Quiñones

2016-05-01

Full Text Available A descriptive study was conducted to show the link between the organizational forms teachers and teaching methods, to expose the pedagogical theory, to deepen the teaching-learning process through methodological class. The main content of the work of teachers is the preparation and level rise; which requires the selection and use of working methods, ways and procedures in accordance with the real and objective conditions of staff who have received the action and conducive to teaching work. Teachers should be aware that you need to master the content they teach, be aware of the level of development of its students, the specific characteristics of the group and of each student, and competent to reciprocate the content they teach with reality.

SPOKEN CUZCO QUECHUA, UNITS 7-12.

Science.gov (United States)

SOLA, DONALD F.; AND OTHERS

THIS SECOND VOLUME OF AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE IN SPOKEN CUZCO QUECHUA ALSO COMPRISES ENOUGH MATERIAL FOR ONE INTENSIVE SUMMER SESSION COURSE OR ONE SEMESTER OF SEMI-INTENSIVE INSTRUCTION (120 CLASS HOURS). THE METHOD OF PRESENTATION IS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME AS IN THE FIRST VOLUME WITH FURTHER CONTRASTIVE, LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH-QUECHUA…

SPOKEN COCHABAMBA QUECHUA, UNITS 13-24.

Science.gov (United States)

LASTRA, YOLANDA; SOLA, DONALD F.

UNITS 13-24 OF THE SPOKEN COCHABAMBA QUECHUA COURSE FOLLOW THE GENERAL FORMAT OF THE FIRST VOLUME (UNITS 1-12). THIS SECOND VOLUME IS INTENDED FOR USE IN AN INTERMEDIATE OR ADVANCED COURSE AND INCLUDES MORE COMPLEX DIALOGS, CONVERSATIONS, "LISTENING-INS," AND DICTATIONS, AS WELL AS GRAMMAR AND EXERCISE SECTIONS COVERING ADDITIONAL…

Allophones, not phonemes in spoken-word recognition

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mitterer, H.A.; Reinisch, E.; McQueen, J.M.

2018-01-01

What are the phonological representations that listeners use to map information about the segmental content of speech onto the mental lexicon during spoken-word recognition? Recent evidence from perceptual-learning paradigms seems to support (context-dependent) allophones as the basic

Teaching English Speaking Skills to the Arab Students in the Saudi School in Kuala Lumpur: Problems and Solutions

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Al-Sobhi, Bandar Mohammad Saeed; Preece, Abdul Shakour

2018-01-01

Of the four English language skills, speaking enjoys a superior status. Accordingly, it should be given high priority while teaching. In spite of its importance, teaching English speaking skill to Arab EFL learners has always been an exacting task for Arab teachers of English because it is considered a foreign language, i.e. not widely spoken or…

Picture This Character: Using Imagery To Teach a Japanese Syllabary.

Science.gov (United States)

Thompson, Joyce D.; Wakefield, John F.

This study examined the effectiveness of imagery to teach native English speakers to associate hiragana characters (a Japanese script) with the spoken Japanese syllables that the characters represent. Twenty-one adults in a psychology of learning class for teachers were taught to picture a hiragana character in such a way as to establish an…

"Poetry Does Really Educate": An Interview with Spoken Word Poet Luka Lesson

Science.gov (United States)

Xerri, Daniel

2016-01-01

Spoken word poetry is a means of engaging young people with a genre that has often been much maligned in classrooms all over the world. This interview with the Australian spoken word poet Luka Lesson explores issues that are of pressing concern to poetry education. These include the idea that engagement with poetry in schools can be enhanced by…

Biomechanically Preferred Consonant-Vowel Combinations Fail to Appear in Adult Spoken Corpora

Science.gov (United States)

Whalen, D. H.; Giulivi, Sara; Nam, Hosung; Levitt, Andrea G.; Hallé, Pierre; Goldstein, Louis M.

2012-01-01

Certain consonant/vowel (CV) combinations are more frequent than would be expected from the individual C and V frequencies alone, both in babbling and, to a lesser extent, in adult language, based on dictionary counts: Labial consonants co-occur with central vowels more often than chance would dictate; coronals co-occur with front vowels, and velars with back vowels (Davis & MacNeilage, 1994). Plausible biomechanical explanations have been proposed, but it is also possible that infants are mirroring the frequency of the CVs that they hear. As noted, previous assessments of adult language were based on dictionaries; these “type” counts are incommensurate with the babbling measures, which are necessarily “token” counts. We analyzed the tokens in two spoken corpora for English, two for French and one for Mandarin. We found that the adult spoken CV preferences correlated with the type counts for Mandarin and French, not for English. Correlations between the adult spoken corpora and the babbling results had all three possible outcomes: significantly positive (French), uncorrelated (Mandarin), and significantly negative (English). There were no correlations of the dictionary data with the babbling results when we consider all nine combinations of consonants and vowels. The results indicate that spoken frequencies of CV combinations can differ from dictionary (type) counts and that the CV preferences apparent in babbling are biomechanically driven and can ignore the frequencies of CVs in the ambient spoken language. PMID:23420980

SPOKEN AYACUCHO QUECHUA, UNITS 11-20.

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PARKER, GARY J.; SOLA, DONALD F.

THE ESSENTIALS OF AYACUCHO GRAMMAR WERE PRESENTED IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF THIS SERIES, SPOKEN AYACUCHO QUECHUA, UNITS 1-10. THE 10 UNITS IN THIS VOLUME (11-20) ARE INTENDED FOR USE IN AN INTERMEDIATE OR ADVANCED COURSE, AND PRESENT THE STUDENT WITH LENGTHIER AND MORE COMPLEX DIALOGS, CONVERSATIONS, "LISTENING-INS," AND DICTATIONS AS WELL…

Spoken Sentence Production in College Students with Dyslexia: Working Memory and Vocabulary Effects

Science.gov (United States)

Wiseheart, Rebecca; Altmann, Lori J. P.

2018-01-01

Background: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group…

The influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation in spoken word production.

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Li, Chuchu; Wang, Min

2017-08-01

Three sets of experiments using the picture naming tasks with the form preparation paradigm investigated the influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Participants included kindergarten children who have not received formal literacy instruction, Grade 1 children who are comparatively more exposed to the alphabetic pinyin system and have very limited Chinese character knowledge, Grades 2 and 4 children who have better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and skilled adult readers who have the most advanced character knowledge and most exposure to characters. Only Grade 1 children showed the form preparation effect in the same initial consonant condition (i.e., when a list of target words shared the initial consonant). Both Grade 4 children and adults showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable (but not tone) among target words was shared. Kindergartners and Grade 2 children only showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable including tonal information was shared. These developmental changes in phonological preparation could be interpreted as a joint function of the modification of phonological representation and attentional shift. Extensive pinyin experience encourages speakers to attend to and select onset phoneme in phonological preparation, whereas extensive character experience encourages speakers to prepare spoken words in syllables.

Means to form key competencies by teaching „Chemistry and environmental protection” in grade 8

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Manev, Stefan; Dimitrova, Velichka; Gushterova, Pavlina

2011-01-01

Abstract: A comparison was made of expected results set in grade 8 „Chemistry and environment preservation” curriculum and requirements to form one of eight key competencies „Mathematical literacy and basic knowledge in science and technologies”. The results obtained allow to make some recommendations towards improvement of teaching through a more effective use of science content to form key competencies. Keywords: teaching, science, chemistry, key competencies, curriculum

ELSIE: The Quick Reaction Spoken Language Translation (QRSLT)

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Montgomery, Christine

2000-01-01

The objective of this effort was to develop a prototype, hand-held or body-mounted spoken language translator to assist military and law enforcement personnel in interacting with non-English-speaking people...

Using Spoken Language to Facilitate Military Transportation Planning

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Bates, Madeleine; Ellard, Dan; Peterson, Pat; Shaked, Varda

1991-01-01

.... In an effort to demonstrate the relevance of SIS technology to real-world military applications, BBN has undertaken the task of providing a spoken language interface to DART, a system for military...

College Oral English teaching from the perspective of input and output theory

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiangxiang Yuan

2017-11-01

Full Text Available With the development of society and the deepening of economic globalization, the communicative competence of spoken English has become an important indicator of the talent. Therefore, how to improve college students’ oral English proficiency has become the focus of college English teaching. The phenomenon of “heavy input and light output” in college English teaching in China for a long period of time has led to the emergence of “dumb English, low efficiency”. Aiming at these problems, this paper discusses the functions of input and output and their relationship, and puts forward some views on oral English teaching.

A Grammar of Spoken Brazilian Portuguese.

Science.gov (United States)

Thomas, Earl W.

This is a first-year text of Portuguese grammar based on the Portuguese of moderately educated Brazilians from the area around Rio de Janeiro. Spoken idiomatic usage is emphasized. An important innovation is found in the presentation of verb tenses; they are presented in the order in which the native speaker learns them. The text is intended to…

Cognitive Predictors of Spoken Word Recognition in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

Evans, Julia L; Gillam, Ronald B; Montgomery, James W

2018-05-10

This study examined the influence of cognitive factors on spoken word recognition in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) children. Participants included 234 children (aged 7;0-11;11 years;months), 117 with DLD and 117 TD children, propensity matched for age, gender, socioeconomic status, and maternal education. Children completed a series of standardized assessment measures, a forward gating task, a rapid automatic naming task, and a series of tasks designed to examine cognitive factors hypothesized to influence spoken word recognition including phonological working memory, updating, attention shifting, and interference inhibition. Spoken word recognition for both initial and final accept gate points did not differ for children with DLD and TD controls after controlling target word knowledge in both groups. The 2 groups also did not differ on measures of updating, attention switching, and interference inhibition. Despite the lack of difference on these measures, for children with DLD, attention shifting and interference inhibition were significant predictors of spoken word recognition, whereas updating and receptive vocabulary were significant predictors of speed of spoken word recognition for the children in the TD group. Contrary to expectations, after controlling for target word knowledge, spoken word recognition did not differ for children with DLD and TD controls; however, the cognitive processing factors that influenced children's ability to recognize the target word in a stream of speech differed qualitatively for children with and without DLDs.

Word reading skill predicts anticipation of upcoming spoken language input: a study of children developing proficiency in reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Mani, Nivedita; Huettig, Falk

2014-10-01

Despite the efficiency with which language users typically process spoken language, a growing body of research finds substantial individual differences in both the speed and accuracy of spoken language processing potentially attributable to participants' literacy skills. Against this background, the current study took a look at the role of word reading skill in listeners' anticipation of upcoming spoken language input in children at the cusp of learning to read; if reading skills affect predictive language processing, then children at this stage of literacy acquisition should be most susceptible to the effects of reading skills on spoken language processing. We tested 8-year-olds on their prediction of upcoming spoken language input in an eye-tracking task. Although children, like in previous studies to date, were successfully able to anticipate upcoming spoken language input, there was a strong positive correlation between children's word reading skills (but not their pseudo-word reading and meta-phonological awareness or their spoken word recognition skills) and their prediction skills. We suggest that these findings are most compatible with the notion that the process of learning orthographic representations during reading acquisition sharpens pre-existing lexical representations, which in turn also supports anticipation of upcoming spoken words. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The socially-weighted encoding of spoken words: A dual-route approach to speech perception

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Meghan eSumner

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic patterns are mapped simultaneously to linguistic representations and to social representations. In doing so, we illuminate a paradox that results in the literature from, we argue, the focus on representations and the peripheral treatment of word-level phonetic variation. We consider phonetic variation more fully and highlight a growing body of work that is problematic for current theory: Words with different pronunciation variants are recognized equally well in immediate processing tasks, while an atypical, infrequent, but socially-idealized form is remembered better in the long-term. We suggest that the perception of spoken words is socially-weighted, resulting in sparse, but high-resolution clusters of socially-idealized episodes that are robust in immediate processing and are more strongly encoded, predicting memory inequality. Our proposal includes a dual-route approach to speech perception in which listeners map acoustic patterns in speech to linguistic and social representations in tandem. This approach makes novel predictions about the extraction of information from the speech signal, and provides a framework with which we can ask new questions. We propose that language comprehension, broadly, results from the integration of both linguistic and social information.

The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Sumner, Meghan; Kim, Seung Kyung; King, Ed; McGowan, Kevin B

2013-01-01

Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic patterns are mapped simultaneously to linguistic representations and to social representations. In doing so, we illuminate a paradox that results in the literature from, we argue, the focus on representations and the peripheral treatment of word-level phonetic variation. We consider phonetic variation more fully and highlight a growing body of work that is problematic for current theory: words with different pronunciation variants are recognized equally well in immediate processing tasks, while an atypical, infrequent, but socially idealized form is remembered better in the long-term. We suggest that the perception of spoken words is socially weighted, resulting in sparse, but high-resolution clusters of socially idealized episodes that are robust in immediate processing and are more strongly encoded, predicting memory inequality. Our proposal includes a dual-route approach to speech perception in which listeners map acoustic patterns in speech to linguistic and social representations in tandem. This approach makes novel predictions about the extraction of information from the speech signal, and provides a framework with which we can ask new questions. We propose that language comprehension, broadly, results from the integration of both linguistic and social information.

Validity, Reliability, and Potential Bias of Short Forms of Students' Evaluation of Teaching: The Case of UAE University

Science.gov (United States)

Dodeen, Hamzeh

2013-01-01

Students' opinions continue to be a significant factor in the evaluation of teaching in higher education institutions. The purpose of this study was to psychometrically assess short students evaluation of teaching (SET) forms using the UAE University form as a model. The study evaluated the form validity, reliability, the overall question, and…

Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ordelman, Roeland J.F.; Heeren, W.F.L.; Huijbregts, M.A.H.; Hiemstra, Djoerd; de Jong, Franciska M.G.; Larson, M; Fernie, K; Oomen, J; Cigarran, J.

2008-01-01

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken word archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, the least we want to be

Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Heritage Archives

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Larson, M; Ordelman, Roeland J.F.; Heeren, W.F.L.; Fernie, K; de Jong, Franciska M.G.; Huijbregts, M.A.H.; Oomen, J; Hiemstra, Djoerd

2009-01-01

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken heritage archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, we at least want to

Autosegmental Representation of Epenthesis in the Spoken French ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Nneka Umera-Okeke

... spoken French of IUFLs. Key words: IUFLs, Epenthensis, Ijebu dialect, Autosegmental phonology .... Ambiguities may result: salmi "strait" vs. salami. (An exception is that in .... tiers of segments. In the picture given us by classical generative.

Improving Spoken Language Outcomes for Children With Hearing Loss: Data-driven Instruction.

Science.gov (United States)

Douglas, Michael

2016-02-01

To assess the effects of data-driven instruction (DDI) on spoken language outcomes of children with cochlear implants and hearing aids. Retrospective, matched-pairs comparison of post-treatment speech/language data of children who did and did not receive DDI. Private, spoken-language preschool for children with hearing loss. Eleven matched pairs of children with cochlear implants who attended the same spoken language preschool. Groups were matched for age of hearing device fitting, time in the program, degree of predevice fitting hearing loss, sex, and age at testing. Daily informal language samples were collected and analyzed over a 2-year period, per preschool protocol. Annual informal and formal spoken language assessments in articulation, vocabulary, and omnibus language were administered at the end of three time intervals: baseline, end of year one, and end of year two. The primary outcome measures were total raw score performance of spontaneous utterance sentence types and syntax element use as measured by the Teacher Assessment of Spoken Language (TASL). In addition, standardized assessments (the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals--Preschool Version 2 (CELF-P2), the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT), the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT), and the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation 2 (GFTA2)) were also administered and compared with the control group. The DDI group demonstrated significantly higher raw scores on the TASL each year of the study. The DDI group also achieved statistically significant higher scores for total language on the CELF-P and expressive vocabulary on the EOWPVT, but not for articulation nor receptive vocabulary. Post-hoc assessment revealed that 78% of the students in the DDI group achieved scores in the average range compared with 59% in the control group. The preliminary results of this study support further investigation regarding DDI to investigate whether this method can consistently

A step beyond local observations with a dialog aware bidirectional GRU network for Spoken Language Understanding

OpenAIRE

Vukotic , Vedran; Raymond , Christian; Gravier , Guillaume

2016-01-01

International audience; Architectures of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) recently become a very popular choice for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) problems; however, they represent a big family of different architectures that can furthermore be combined to form more complex neural networks. In this work, we compare different recurrent networks, such as simple Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, Gated Memory Units (GRU) and their bidirectional versions,...

Auditory and verbal memory predictors of spoken language skills in children with cochlear implants

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hoog, B.E. de; Langereis, M.C.; Weerdenburg, M. van; Keuning, J.; Knoors, H.; Verhoeven, L.

2016-01-01

BACKGROUND: Large variability in individual spoken language outcomes remains a persistent finding in the group of children with cochlear implants (CIs), particularly in their grammatical development. AIMS: In the present study, we examined the extent of delay in lexical and morphosyntactic spoken

Auditory and verbal memory predictors of spoken language skills in children with cochlear implants

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hoog, B.E. de; Langereis, M.C.; Weerdenburg, M.W.C. van; Keuning, J.; Knoors, H.E.T.; Verhoeven, L.T.W.

2016-01-01

Background: Large variability in individual spoken language outcomes remains a persistent finding in the group of children with cochlear implants (CIs), particularly in their grammatical development. Aims: In the present study, we examined the extent of delay in lexical and morphosyntactic spoken

SPOKEN AYACUCHO QUECHUA. UNITS 1-10.

Science.gov (United States)

PARKER, GARY J.; SOLA, DONALD F.

THIS BEGINNING COURSE IN AYACUCHO QUECHUA, SPOKEN BY ABOUT A MILLION PEOPLE IN SOUTH-CENTRAL PERU, WAS PREPARED TO INTRODUCE THE PHONOLOGY AND GRAMMAR OF THIS DIALECT TO SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH. THE FIRST OF TWO VOLUMES, IT SERVES AS A TEXT FOR A 6-WEEK INTENSIVE COURSE OF 20 CLASS HOURS A WEEK. THE AUTHORS COMPARE AND CONTRAST SIGNIFICANT FEATURES OF…

English Listeners Use Suprasegmental Cues to Lexical Stress Early during Spoken-Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Jesse, Alexandra; Poellmann, Katja; Kong, Ying-Yee

2017-01-01

Purpose: We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English. Method: In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g.,…

What does že jo (and že ne) mean in spoken dialogue

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Komrsková, Zuzana

2017-01-01

Roč. 68, č. 2 (2017), s. 229-237 ISSN 0021-5597 R&D Projects: GA ČR GA15-01116S Institutional support: RVO:68378092 Keywords : spoken languge * spoken corpus * tag question * responze word Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Linguistics http://www.juls.savba.sk/ediela/jc/2017/2/jc17-02.pdf

What Comes First, What Comes Next: Information Packaging in Written and Spoken Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vladislav Smolka

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The paper explores similarities and differences in the strategies of structuring information at sentence level in spoken and written language, respectively. In particular, it is concerned with the position of the rheme in the sentence in the two different modalities of language, and with the application and correlation of the end-focus and the end-weight principles. The assumption is that while there is a general tendency in both written and spoken language to place the focus in or close to the final position, owing to the limitations imposed by short-term memory capacity (and possibly by other factors, for the sake of easy processibility, it may occasionally be more felicitous in spoken language to place the rhematic element in the initial position or at least close to the beginning of the sentence. The paper aims to identify differences in the function of selected grammatical structures in written and spoken language, respectively, and to point out circumstances under which initial focus is a convenient alternative to the usual end-focus principle.

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words

NARCIS (Netherlands)

McQueen, J.M.; Hüttig, F.

2014-01-01

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase

Mobile Information Access with Spoken Query Answering

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Brøndsted, Tom; Larsen, Henrik Legind; Larsen, Lars Bo

2006-01-01

window focused over the part which most likely contains an answer to the query. The two systems are integrated into a full spoken query answering system. The prototype can answer queries and questions within the chosen football (soccer) test domain, but the system has the flexibility for being ported...

Error detection in spoken human-machine interaction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Krahmer, E.J.; Swerts, M.G.J.; Theune, M.; Weegels, M.F.

2001-01-01

Given the state of the art of current language and speech technology, errors are unavoidable in present-day spoken dialogue systems. Therefore, one of the main concerns in dialogue design is how to decide whether or not the system has understood the user correctly. In human-human communication,

Error detection in spoken human-machine interaction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Krahmer, E.; Swerts, M.; Theune, Mariet; Weegels, M.

Given the state of the art of current language and speech technology, errors are unavoidable in present-day spoken dialogue systems. Therefore, one of the main concerns in dialogue design is how to decide whether or not the system has understood the user correctly. In human-human communication,

The Effect of Lexical Frequency on Spoken Word Recognition in Young and Older Listeners

Science.gov (United States)

Revill, Kathleen Pirog; Spieler, Daniel H.

2011-01-01

When identifying spoken words, older listeners may have difficulty resolving lexical competition or may place a greater weight on factors like lexical frequency. To obtain information about age differences in the time course of spoken word recognition, young and older adults’ eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instructions to click on objects displayed on a computer screen. Older listeners were more likely than younger listeners to fixate high-frequency displayed phonological competitors. However, degradation of auditory quality in younger listeners does not reproduce this result. These data are most consistent with an increased role for lexical frequency with age. PMID:21707175

Spoken sentence comprehension in aphasia: Event-related potential evidence for a lexical integration deficit

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Swaab, T.Y.; Brown, C.; Hagoort, P.

1997-01-01

In this study the N400 component of the event-related potential was used to investigate spoken sentence understanding in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. The aim of the study was to determine whether spoken sentence comprehension problems in these patients might result from a deficit in the on-line

Phonotactics, Neighborhood Activation, and Lexical Access for Spoken Words

Science.gov (United States)

Vitevitch, Michael S.; Luce, Paul A.; Pisoni, David B.; Auer, Edward T.

2012-01-01

Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the relative frequencies of segments and sequences of segments in spoken words. Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Despite a positive correlation between phonotactic probability and neighborhood density, nonsense words with high probability segments and sequences are responded to more quickly than nonsense words with low probability segments and sequences, whereas real words occurring in dense similarity neighborhoods are responded to more slowly than real words occurring in sparse similarity neighborhoods. This contradiction may be resolved by hypothesizing that effects of probabilistic phonotactics have a sublexical focus and that effects of similarity neighborhood density have a lexical focus. The implications of this hypothesis for models of spoken word recognition are discussed. PMID:10433774

Working Memory Load Affects Processing Time in Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Movements

Science.gov (United States)

Hadar, Britt; Skrzypek, Joshua E.; Wingfield, Arthur; Ben-David, Boaz M.

2016-01-01

In daily life, speech perception is usually accompanied by other tasks that tap into working memory capacity. However, the role of working memory on speech processing is not clear. The goal of this study was to examine how working memory load affects the timeline for spoken word recognition in ideal listening conditions. We used the “visual world” eye-tracking paradigm. The task consisted of spoken instructions referring to one of four objects depicted on a computer monitor (e.g., “point at the candle”). Half of the trials presented a phonological competitor to the target word that either overlapped in the initial syllable (onset) or at the last syllable (offset). Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun from its depicted phonological competitor (e.g., candy or sandal). We manipulated working memory load by using a digit pre-load task, where participants had to retain either one (low-load) or four (high-load) spoken digits for the duration of a spoken word recognition trial. The data show that the high-load condition delayed real-time target discrimination. Specifically, a four-digit load was sufficient to delay the point of discrimination between the spoken target word and its phonological competitor. Our results emphasize the important role working memory plays in speech perception, even when performed by young adults in ideal listening conditions. PMID:27242424

The Effect of Teaching Structural Discourse Markers in an EFL Classroom Setting

Science.gov (United States)

Alraddadi, Budoor Muslim

2016-01-01

This study aimed to explore the effects of explicit teaching on the acquisition of spoken discourse markers (DMs) on EFL learners' presentation production. It also aimed to measure the impact of two different treatments on the acquisition of a set of DMs. This study is an experimental study and focuses on the overall production of spoken…

A Mother Tongue Spoken Mainly by Fathers.

Science.gov (United States)

Corsetti, Renato

1996-01-01

Reviews what is known about Esperanto as a home language and first language. Recorded cases of Esperanto-speaking families are known since 1919, and in nearly all of the approximately 350 families documented, the language is spoken to the children by the father. The data suggests that this "artificial bilingualism" can be as successful…

Neural organization of linguistic short-term memory is sensory modality-dependent: evidence from signed and spoken language.

Science.gov (United States)

Pa, Judy; Wilson, Stephen M; Pickell, Herbert; Bellugi, Ursula; Hickok, Gregory

2008-12-01

Despite decades of research, there is still disagreement regarding the nature of the information that is maintained in linguistic short-term memory (STM). Some authors argue for abstract phonological codes, whereas others argue for more general sensory traces. We assess these possibilities by investigating linguistic STM in two distinct sensory-motor modalities, spoken and signed language. Hearing bilingual participants (native in English and American Sign Language) performed equivalent STM tasks in both languages during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Distinct, sensory-specific activations were seen during the maintenance phase of the task for spoken versus signed language. These regions have been previously shown to respond to nonlinguistic sensory stimulation, suggesting that linguistic STM tasks recruit sensory-specific networks. However, maintenance-phase activations common to the two languages were also observed, implying some form of common process. We conclude that linguistic STM involves sensory-dependent neural networks, but suggest that sensory-independent neural networks may also exist.

Extrinsic Cognitive Load Impairs Spoken Word Recognition in High- and Low-Predictability Sentences.

Science.gov (United States)

Hunter, Cynthia R; Pisoni, David B

Listening effort (LE) induced by speech degradation reduces performance on concurrent cognitive tasks. However, a converse effect of extrinsic cognitive load on recognition of spoken words in sentences has not been shown. The aims of the present study were to (a) examine the impact of extrinsic cognitive load on spoken word recognition in a sentence recognition task and (b) determine whether cognitive load and/or LE needed to understand spectrally degraded speech would differentially affect word recognition in high- and low-predictability sentences. Downstream effects of speech degradation and sentence predictability on the cognitive load task were also examined. One hundred twenty young adults identified sentence-final spoken words in high- and low-predictability Speech Perception in Noise sentences. Cognitive load consisted of a preload of short (low-load) or long (high-load) sequences of digits, presented visually before each spoken sentence and reported either before or after identification of the sentence-final word. LE was varied by spectrally degrading sentences with four-, six-, or eight-channel noise vocoding. Level of spectral degradation and order of report (digits first or words first) were between-participants variables. Effects of cognitive load, sentence predictability, and speech degradation on accuracy of sentence-final word identification as well as recall of preload digit sequences were examined. In addition to anticipated main effects of sentence predictability and spectral degradation on word recognition, we found an effect of cognitive load, such that words were identified more accurately under low load than high load. However, load differentially affected word identification in high- and low-predictability sentences depending on the level of sentence degradation. Under severe spectral degradation (four-channel vocoding), the effect of cognitive load on word identification was present for high-predictability sentences but not for low

Spectrotemporal processing drives fast access to memory traces for spoken words.

Science.gov (United States)

Tavano, A; Grimm, S; Costa-Faidella, J; Slabu, L; Schröger, E; Escera, C

2012-05-01

The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potentials is generated when a detectable spectrotemporal feature of the incoming sound does not match the sensory model set up by preceding repeated stimuli. MMN is enhanced at frontocentral scalp sites for deviant words when compared to acoustically similar deviant pseudowords, suggesting that automatic access to long-term memory traces for spoken words contributes to MMN generation. Does spectrotemporal feature matching also drive automatic lexical access? To test this, we recorded human auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to disyllabic spoken words and pseudowords within a passive oddball paradigm. We first aimed at replicating the word-related MMN enhancement effect for Spanish, thereby adding to the available cross-linguistic evidence (e.g., Finnish, English). We then probed its resilience to spectrotemporal perturbation by inserting short (20 ms) and long (120 ms) silent gaps between first and second syllables of deviant and standard stimuli. A significantly enhanced, frontocentrally distributed MMN to deviant words was found for stimuli with no gap. The long gap yielded no deviant word MMN, showing that prior expectations of word form limits in a given language influence deviance detection processes. Crucially, the insertion of a short gap suppressed deviant word MMN enhancement at frontocentral sites. We propose that spectrotemporal point-wise matching constitutes a core mechanism for fast serial computations in audition and language, bridging sensory and long-term memory systems. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Voice as Form of Life and Life Form

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sandra Laugier

2015-10-01

Full Text Available This paper studies the concept of form of life as central to ordinary language philosophy (as understood in Wittgenstein’s, Austin’s and Stanley Cavell’s work: philosophy of our language as spoken; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. Such an approach to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shifts the question of the common use of language – central to Wittgenstein’s Investigations – to the definition of the subject as voice, and to the reinvention of subjectivity in language. The voice is both a subjective and common expression: it is what makes it possible for my individual voice, or claim, to become shared and for our forms of life to be intertwined with a lifeform.

The role of pedagogical historiography in forming pedagogical knowledge

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vujisić-Živković Nataša

2008-01-01

Full Text Available This paper discuses the role of pedagogical historiography in forming pedagogical knowledge, both from the aspect of history and from the aspect of the present status of this discipline. Our aim is to observe the problems of pedagogical historiography, as a scientific and teaching discipline, in the context of forming of pedagogical knowledge. The process of transformation of heuristic function of the history of pedagogy is analyzed - from the traditional approach which emphasizes its role in forming pedagogical culture to the orientation of historical research and education in pedagogy towards theoretical and professional knowledge. The development of history of pedagogy as a scientific discipline is mostly observed through three phases: the first, focused on research of the development of pedagogical ideas and/or school system, lasted until the 1960s, when it was replaced by social history of education, while today it is mostly spoken about the 'cultural history of education'. The evolution of pedagogical historiography is also followed by the changes in its relation towards theory and practice of education, which is especially dealt with in this paper. In the conditions of radical changes in epistemology of social sciences and university reform, pedagogical historiography faces the question of its own relevance.

Producing complex spoken numerals for time and space

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Meeuwissen, M.H.W.

2004-01-01

This thesis addressed the spoken production of complex numerals for time and space. The production of complex numerical expressions like those involved in telling time (e.g., 'quarter to four') or producing house numbers (e.g., 'two hundred forty-five') has been almost completely ignored. Yet, adult

Talker and background noise specificity in spoken word recognition memory

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Angela Cooper

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Prior research has demonstrated that listeners are sensitive to changes in the indexical (talker-specific characteristics of speech input, suggesting that these signal-intrinsic features are integrally encoded in memory for spoken words. Given that listeners frequently must contend with concurrent environmental noise, to what extent do they also encode signal-extrinsic details? Native English listeners’ explicit memory for spoken English monosyllabic and disyllabic words was assessed as a function of consistency versus variation in the talker’s voice (talker condition and background noise (noise condition using a delayed recognition memory paradigm. The speech and noise signals were spectrally-separated, such that changes in a simultaneously presented non-speech signal (background noise from exposure to test would not be accompanied by concomitant changes in the target speech signal. The results revealed that listeners can encode both signal-intrinsic talker and signal-extrinsic noise information into integrated cognitive representations, critically even when the two auditory streams are spectrally non-overlapping. However, the extent to which extra-linguistic episodic information is encoded alongside linguistic information appears to be modulated by syllabic characteristics, with specificity effects found only for monosyllabic items. These findings suggest that encoding and retrieval of episodic information during spoken word processing may be modulated by lexical characteristics.

Delayed Anticipatory Spoken Language Processing in Adults with Dyslexia—Evidence from Eye-tracking.

Science.gov (United States)

Huettig, Falk; Brouwer, Susanne

2015-05-01

It is now well established that anticipation of upcoming input is a key characteristic of spoken language comprehension. It has also frequently been observed that literacy influences spoken language processing. Here, we investigated whether anticipatory spoken language processing is related to individuals' word reading abilities. Dutch adults with dyslexia and a control group participated in two eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 was conducted to assess whether adults with dyslexia show the typical language-mediated eye gaze patterns. Eye movements of both adults with and without dyslexia closely replicated earlier research: spoken language is used to direct attention to relevant objects in the environment in a closely time-locked manner. In Experiment 2, participants received instructions (e.g., 'Kijk naar de(COM) afgebeelde piano(COM)', look at the displayed piano) while viewing four objects. Articles (Dutch 'het' or 'de') were gender marked such that the article agreed in gender only with the target, and thus, participants could use gender information from the article to predict the target object. The adults with dyslexia anticipated the target objects but much later than the controls. Moreover, participants' word reading scores correlated positively with their anticipatory eye movements. We conclude by discussing the mechanisms by which reading abilities may influence predictive language processing. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Iconicity as a general property of language: evidence from spoken and signed languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pamela Perniss

2010-12-01

Full Text Available Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to hook up to motor and perceptual experience.

A memory-based shallow parser for spoken Dutch

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Canisius, S.V.M.; van den Bosch, A.; Decadt, B.; Hoste, V.; De Pauw, G.

2004-01-01

We describe the development of a Dutch memory-based shallow parser. The availability of large treebanks for Dutch, such as the one provided by the Spoken Dutch Corpus, allows memory-based learners to be trained on examples of shallow parsing taken from the treebank, and act as a shallow parser after

Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems

CERN Document Server

Rosset, Sophie; Garnier-Rizet, Martine; Devillers, Laurence; Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones : Putting Spoken Dialog Systems into Practice

2014-01-01

These proceedings presents the state-of-the-art in spoken dialog systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. It addresses specifically: 1. Dialog for interacting with smartphones; 2. Dialog for Open Domain knowledge access; 3. Dialog for robot interaction; 4. Mediated dialog (including crosslingual dialog involving Speech Translation); and, 5. Dialog quality evaluation. These articles were presented at the IWSDS 2012 workshop.

Foreign Language Tutoring in Oral Conversations Using Spoken Dialog Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Sungjin; Noh, Hyungjong; Lee, Jonghoon; Lee, Kyusong; Lee, Gary Geunbae

Although there have been enormous investments into English education all around the world, not many differences have been made to change the English instruction style. Considering the shortcomings for the current teaching-learning methodology, we have been investigating advanced computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. This paper aims at summarizing a set of POSTECH approaches including theories, technologies, systems, and field studies and providing relevant pointers. On top of the state-of-the-art technologies of spoken dialog system, a variety of adaptations have been applied to overcome some problems caused by numerous errors and variations naturally produced by non-native speakers. Furthermore, a number of methods have been developed for generating educational feedback that help learners develop to be proficient. Integrating these efforts resulted in intelligent educational robots — Mero and Engkey — and virtual 3D language learning games, Pomy. To verify the effects of our approaches on students' communicative abilities, we have conducted a field study at an elementary school in Korea. The results showed that our CALL approaches can be enjoyable and fruitful activities for students. Although the results of this study bring us a step closer to understanding computer-based education, more studies are needed to consolidate the findings.

The time course of morphological processing during spoken word recognition in Chinese.

Science.gov (United States)

Shen, Wei; Qu, Qingqing; Ni, Aiping; Zhou, Junyi; Li, Xingshan

2017-12-01

We investigated the time course of morphological processing during spoken word recognition using the printed-word paradigm. Chinese participants were asked to listen to a spoken disyllabic compound word while simultaneously viewing a printed-word display. Each visual display consisted of three printed words: a semantic associate of the first constituent of the compound word (morphemic competitor), a semantic associate of the whole compound word (whole-word competitor), and an unrelated word (distractor). Participants were directed to detect whether the spoken target word was on the visual display. Results indicated that both the morphemic and whole-word competitors attracted more fixations than the distractor. More importantly, the morphemic competitor began to diverge from the distractor immediately at the acoustic offset of the first constituent, which was earlier than the whole-word competitor. These results suggest that lexical access to the auditory word is incremental and morphological processing (i.e., semantic access to the first constituent) that occurs at an early processing stage before access to the representation of the whole word in Chinese.

Language and Didactic potential of Ukrainian for Specific Purposes Teaching forms in Developing Future Navigators' Text Formation Competency

OpenAIRE

Tetiana Gulchuk

2018-01-01

The article is devoted to determining the peculiarities of the organization of future navigators ’text formation competence development during various forms of training on the basis of the analysis of scientific literature on language teaching methods. On the basis of analysis, generalization and systematization of scientific sources, we elucidated the forms of organization of language teaching (lectures, practical classes, seminars), which enable to improve the future navigators’ ability to ...

IMPROVING SPOKEN COMPETENCE BY MEANS OF MULTIMODAL ENVIRONMENTS IN A DISTANCE CONTEXT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

María Jordano de la Torre

2011-10-01

Full Text Available The outline below describes the implementation of a task-based project based on the collaborative work of students and teachers in four different countries with others studying tourism in an international distance university. By means of a mainly qualitative study, we will attempt to show if occasional written and spoken encounters with people with different L1 (either English or any other and different culture can help learners to improve different aspects of their spoken competence, such as fluency, pronunciation accuracy and cultural awareness, in the context of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE.

Intervention Effects on Spoken-Language Outcomes for Children with Autism: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Hampton, L. H.; Kaiser, A. P.

2016-01-01

Background: Although spoken-language deficits are not core to an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis, many children with ASD do present with delays in this area. Previous meta-analyses have assessed the effects of intervention on reducing autism symptomatology, but have not determined if intervention improves spoken language. This analysis…

The employment of a spoken language computer applied to an air traffic control task.

Science.gov (United States)

Laveson, J. I.; Silver, C. A.

1972-01-01

Assessment of the merits of a limited spoken language (56 words) computer in a simulated air traffic control (ATC) task. An airport zone approximately 60 miles in diameter with a traffic flow simulation ranging from single-engine to commercial jet aircraft provided the workload for the controllers. This research determined that, under the circumstances of the experiments carried out, the use of a spoken-language computer would not improve the controller performance.

Bilinguals Show Weaker Lexical Access during Spoken Sentence Comprehension

Science.gov (United States)

Shook, Anthony; Goldrick, Matthew; Engstler, Caroline; Marian, Viorica

2015-01-01

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German…

The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Morales, Luis; Paolieri, Daniela; Dussias, Paola E.; Valdés kroff, Jorge R.; Gerfen, Chip; Bajo, María Teresa

2016-01-01

We investigate the ‘gender-congruency’ effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian–Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / ‘find the scarf’) and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects’ name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed. PMID:28018132

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words

OpenAIRE

McQueen, J.; Huettig, F.

2014-01-01

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of pre-exposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures’ printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onsetrelated (e.g...

Speech-Language Pathologists: Vital Listening and Spoken Language Professionals

Science.gov (United States)

Houston, K. Todd; Perigoe, Christina B.

2010-01-01

Determining the most effective methods and techniques to facilitate the spoken language development of individuals with hearing loss has been a focus of practitioners for centuries. Due to modern advances in hearing technology, earlier identification of hearing loss, and immediate enrollment in early intervention, children with hearing loss are…

Spoken Indian language identification: a review of features and ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

BAKSHI AARTI

2018-04-12

Apr 12, 2018 ... languages and can be used for the purposes of spoken language identification. Keywords. SLID .... branch of linguistics to study the sound structure of human language. ... countries, work in the area of Indian language identification has not ...... English and speech database has been collected over tele-.

The Relationship between Intrinsic Couplings of the Visual Word Form Area with Spoken Language Network and Reading Ability in Children and Adults

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yu Li

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Reading plays a key role in education and communication in modern society. Learning to read establishes the connections between the visual word form area (VWFA and language areas responsible for speech processing. Using resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC and Granger Causality Analysis (GCA methods, the current developmental study aimed to identify the difference in the relationship between the connections of VWFA-language areas and reading performance in both adults and children. The results showed that: (1 the spontaneous connectivity between VWFA and the spoken language areas, i.e., the left inferior frontal gyrus/supramarginal gyrus (LIFG/LSMG, was stronger in adults compared with children; (2 the spontaneous functional patterns of connectivity between VWFA and language network were negatively correlated with reading ability in adults but not in children; (3 the causal influence from LIFG to VWFA was negatively correlated with reading ability only in adults but not in children; (4 the RSFCs between left posterior middle frontal gyrus (LpMFG and VWFA/LIFG were positively correlated with reading ability in both adults and children; and (5 the causal influence from LIFG to LSMG was positively correlated with reading ability in both groups. These findings provide insights into the relationship between VWFA and the language network for reading, and the role of the unique features of Chinese in the neural circuits of reading.

Sizing up the competition: quantifying the influence of the mental lexicon on auditory and visual spoken word recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Strand, Julia F; Sommers, Mitchell S

2011-09-01

Much research has explored how spoken word recognition is influenced by the architecture and dynamics of the mental lexicon (e.g., Luce and Pisoni, 1998; McClelland and Elman, 1986). A more recent question is whether the processes underlying word recognition are unique to the auditory domain, or whether visually perceived (lipread) speech may also be sensitive to the structure of the mental lexicon (Auer, 2002; Mattys, Bernstein, and Auer, 2002). The current research was designed to test the hypothesis that both aurally and visually perceived spoken words are isolated in the mental lexicon as a function of their modality-specific perceptual similarity to other words. Lexical competition (the extent to which perceptually similar words influence recognition of a stimulus word) was quantified using metrics that are well-established in the literature, as well as a statistical method for calculating perceptual confusability based on the phi-square statistic. Both auditory and visual spoken word recognition were influenced by modality-specific lexical competition as well as stimulus word frequency. These findings extend the scope of activation-competition models of spoken word recognition and reinforce the hypothesis (Auer, 2002; Mattys et al., 2002) that perceptual and cognitive properties underlying spoken word recognition are not specific to the auditory domain. In addition, the results support the use of the phi-square statistic as a better predictor of lexical competition than metrics currently used in models of spoken word recognition. © 2011 Acoustical Society of America

Auditory and verbal memory predictors of spoken language skills in children with cochlear implants.

Science.gov (United States)

de Hoog, Brigitte E; Langereis, Margreet C; van Weerdenburg, Marjolijn; Keuning, Jos; Knoors, Harry; Verhoeven, Ludo

2016-10-01

Large variability in individual spoken language outcomes remains a persistent finding in the group of children with cochlear implants (CIs), particularly in their grammatical development. In the present study, we examined the extent of delay in lexical and morphosyntactic spoken language levels of children with CIs as compared to those of a normative sample of age-matched children with normal hearing. Furthermore, the predictive value of auditory and verbal memory factors in the spoken language performance of implanted children was analyzed. Thirty-nine profoundly deaf children with CIs were assessed using a test battery including measures of lexical, grammatical, auditory and verbal memory tests. Furthermore, child-related demographic characteristics were taken into account. The majority of the children with CIs did not reach age-equivalent lexical and morphosyntactic language skills. Multiple linear regression analyses revealed that lexical spoken language performance in children with CIs was best predicted by age at testing, phoneme perception, and auditory word closure. The morphosyntactic language outcomes of the CI group were best predicted by lexicon, auditory word closure, and auditory memory for words. Qualitatively good speech perception skills appear to be crucial for lexical and grammatical development in children with CIs. Furthermore, strongly developed vocabulary skills and verbal memory abilities predict morphosyntactic language skills. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Oral and Literate Strategies in Spoken and Written Narratives.

Science.gov (United States)

Tannen, Deborah

1982-01-01

Discusses comparative analysis of spoken and written versions of a narrative to demonstrate that features which have been identified as characterizing oral discourse are also found in written discourse and that the written short story combines syntactic complexity expected in writing with features which create involvement expected in speaking.…

Recognition Memory for Braille or Spoken Words: An fMRI study in Early Blind

OpenAIRE

Burton, Harold; Sinclair, Robert J.; Agato, Alvin

2011-01-01

We examined cortical activity in early blind during word recognition memory. Nine participants were blind at birth and one by 1.5 yrs. In an event-related design, we studied blood oxygen level-dependent responses to studied (“old”) compared to novel (“new”) words. Presentation mode was in Braille or spoken. Responses were larger for identified “new” words read with Braille in bilateral lower and higher tier visual areas and primary somatosensory cortex. Responses to spoken “new” words were la...

Neural dynamics of morphological processing in spoken word comprehension: Laterality and automaticity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caroline M. Whiting

2013-11-01

Full Text Available Rapid and automatic processing of grammatical complexity is argued to take place during speech comprehension, engaging a left-lateralised fronto-temporal language network. Here we address how neural activity in these regions is modulated by the grammatical properties of spoken words. We used combined magneto- and electroencephalography (MEG, EEG to delineate the spatiotemporal patterns of activity that support the recognition of morphologically complex words in English with inflectional (-s and derivational (-er affixes (e.g. bakes, baker. The mismatch negativity (MMN, an index of linguistic memory traces elicited in a passive listening paradigm, was used to examine the neural dynamics elicited by morphologically complex words. Results revealed an initial peak 130-180 ms after the deviation point with a major source in left superior temporal cortex. The localisation of this early activation showed a sensitivity to two grammatical properties of the stimuli: 1 the presence of morphological complexity, with affixed words showing increased left-laterality compared to non-affixed words; and 2 the grammatical category, with affixed verbs showing greater left-lateralisation in inferior frontal gyrus compared to affixed nouns (bakes vs. beaks. This automatic brain response was additionally sensitive to semantic coherence (the meaning of the stem vs. the meaning of the whole form in fronto-temporal regions. These results demonstrate that the spatiotemporal pattern of neural activity in spoken word processing is modulated by the presence of morphological structure, predominantly engaging the left-hemisphere’s fronto-temporal language network, and does not require focused attention on the linguistic input.

Use of critical incidents to develop a rating form for resident evaluation of faculty teaching.

Science.gov (United States)

Silber, Cynthia; Novielli, Karen; Paskin, David; Brigham, Timothy; Kairys, John; Kane, Gregory; Veloski, Jon

2006-12-01

Monitoring the teaching effectiveness of attending physicians is important to enhancing the quality of graduate medical education. We used a critical incident technique with 35 residents representing a cross-section of programmes in a teaching hospital to develop a 23-item rating form. We obtained ratings of 11 attending physicians in internal medicine and general surgery from 54 residents. We performed linear and logistic regression analysis to relate the items on the form to the residents' overall ratings of the attending physicians and the programme directors' ratings of the attending physicians. The residents rated the attending physicians highly in most areas, but lower in provision of feedback, clarity of written communication and cost-effectiveness in making clinical decisions. When we used the residents' overall ratings as the criterion, the most important aspects of attending physicians' teaching were clarity of written communication, cost-effectiveness, commitment of time and energy and whether the resident would refer a family member or friend to the physician. When we used the programme directors' ratings as the criterion, the additional important aspects of performance were concern for the residents' professional well-being, knowledge of the literature and the delivery of clear verbal and written communication. The critical incident technique can be used to develop an instrument that demonstrates content and construct validity. We found that residents consider commitment of time to teaching and clinical effectiveness to be the most important dimensions of faculty teaching. Other important dimensions include written and verbal communication, cost-effectiveness and concern for residents' professional development.

Spoken Word Recognition of Chinese Words in Continuous Speech

Science.gov (United States)

Yip, Michael C. W.

2015-01-01

The present study examined the role of positional probability of syllables played in recognition of spoken word in continuous Cantonese speech. Because some sounds occur more frequently at the beginning position or ending position of Cantonese syllables than the others, so these kinds of probabilistic information of syllables may cue the locations…

Orthographic consistency affects spoken word recognition at different grain-sizes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dich, Nadya

2014-01-01

A number of previous studies found that the consistency of sound-to-spelling mappings (feedback consistency) affects spoken word recognition. In auditory lexical decision experiments, words that can only be spelled one way are recognized faster than words with multiple potential spellings. Previo...

The Use of New Technologies for the Teaching of the Igbo Language in Schools: Challenges and Prospects

Science.gov (United States)

Iloene, Modesta I.; Iloene, George O.; Mbah, Evelyn E.; Mbah, Boniface M.

2013-01-01

This paper examines the experience of teachers in the use of new technologies to teach the Igbo language spoken in South East Nigeria. The study investigates the extent to which new technologies are available and accessible to Igbo teachers, the competence of the Igbo language teachers in the new technologies and the challenges they face that…

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EXISTING INTENSIVE METHODS OF TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

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Maria Mytnyk

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the study and analysis of comparable existing intensive methods of teaching foreign languages. This work is carried out to identify the positive and negative aspects of intensive methods of teaching foreign languages. The author traces the idea of rational organization and intensification of teaching foreign languages from their inception to the moment of their preparation in an integrated system. advantages and disadvantages of the most popular methods of intensive training also analyzed the characteristic of different historical periods, namely cugestopedichny method G. Lozanov method activation of reserve possibilities of students G. Kitaygorodskoy, emotional-semantic method I. Schechter, an intensive course of learning a foreign language L. Gegechkori , sugestokibernetichny integral method of accelerated learning a foreign language B. Petrusinskogo, a crash course in the study of spoken language by immersion A. Plesnevich. Analyzed the principles of learning and the role of each method in the development of methods of intensive foreign language training. The author identified a number of advantages and disadvantages of intensive methods of teaching foreign languages: 1 the assimilation of a large number of linguistic, lexical and grammatical units; 2 active use of acquired knowledge, skills and abilities in the practice of oral speech communication in a foreign language; 3 the ability to use language material resulting not only in his speech, but also in understanding the interlocutor; 4 overcoming psychological barriers, including fear of the possibility of making a mistake; 5 high efficiency and fast learning; 6 too much new language material that is presented; 7 training of oral forms of communication; 8 decline of grammatical units and models.

Lexicon Optimization for Dutch Speech Recognition in Spoken Document Retrieval

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ordelman, Roeland J.F.; van Hessen, Adrianus J.; de Jong, Franciska M.G.

In this paper, ongoing work concerning the language modelling and lexicon optimization of a Dutch speech recognition system for Spoken Document Retrieval is described: the collection and normalization of a training data set and the optimization of our recognition lexicon. Effects on lexical coverage

Lexicon optimization for Dutch speech recognition in spoken document retrieval

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ordelman, Roeland J.F.; van Hessen, Adrianus J.; de Jong, Franciska M.G.; Dalsgaard, P.; Lindberg, B.; Benner, H.

2001-01-01

In this paper, ongoing work concerning the language modelling and lexicon optimization of a Dutch speech recognition system for Spoken Document Retrieval is described: the collection and normalization of a training data set and the optimization of our recognition lexicon. Effects on lexical coverage

Using the Corpus of Spoken Afrikaans to generate an Afrikaans ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This paper presents two chatbot systems, ALICE and. Elizabeth, illustrating the dialogue knowledge representation and pattern matching techniques of each. We discuss the problems which arise when using the. Corpus of Spoken Afrikaans (Korpus Gesproke Afrikaans) to retrain the ALICE chatbot system with human ...

Automated Metadata Extraction for Semantic Access to Spoken Word Archives

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Jong, Franciska M.G.; Heeren, W.F.L.; van Hessen, Adrianus J.; Ordelman, Roeland J.F.; Nijholt, Antinus; Ruiz Miyares, L.; Alvarez Silva, M.R.

2011-01-01

Archival practice is shifting from the analogue to the digital world. A specific subset of heritage collections that impose interesting challenges for the field of language and speech technology are spoken word archives. Given the enormous backlog at audiovisual archives of unannotated materials and

Recording voiceover the spoken word in media

CERN Document Server

Blakemore, Tom

2015-01-01

The only book on the market to specifically address its audience, Recording Voiceover is the comprehensive guide for engineers looking to understand the aspects of capturing the spoken word.Discussing all phases of the recording session, Recording Voiceover addresses everything from microphone recommendations for voice recording to pre-production considerations, including setting up the studio, working with and directing the voice talent, and strategies for reducing or eliminating distracting noise elements found in human speech.Recording Voiceover features in-depth, specific recommendations f

Working memory affects older adults' use of context in spoken-word recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Janse, Esther; Jesse, Alexandra

2014-01-01

Many older listeners report difficulties in understanding speech in noisy situations. Working memory and other cognitive skills may modulate older listeners' ability to use context information to alleviate the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition. In the present study, we investigated whether verbal working memory predicts older adults' ability to immediately use context information in the recognition of words embedded in sentences, presented in different listening conditions. In a phoneme-monitoring task, older adults were asked to detect as fast and as accurately as possible target phonemes in sentences spoken by a target speaker. Target speech was presented without noise, with fluctuating speech-shaped noise, or with competing speech from a single distractor speaker. The gradient measure of contextual probability (derived from a separate offline rating study) affected the speed of recognition. Contextual facilitation was modulated by older listeners' verbal working memory (measured with a backward digit span task) and age across listening conditions. Working memory and age, as well as hearing loss, were also the most consistent predictors of overall listening performance. Older listeners' immediate benefit from context in spoken-word recognition thus relates to their ability to keep and update a semantic representation of the sentence content in working memory.

Use of spoken and written Japanese did not protect Japanese-American men from cognitive decline in late life.

Science.gov (United States)

Crane, Paul K; Gruhl, Jonathan C; Erosheva, Elena A; Gibbons, Laura E; McCurry, Susan M; Rhoads, Kristoffer; Nguyen, Viet; Arani, Keerthi; Masaki, Kamal; White, Lon

2010-11-01

Spoken bilingualism may be associated with cognitive reserve. Mastering a complicated written language may be associated with additional reserve. We sought to determine if midlife use of spoken and written Japanese was associated with lower rates of late life cognitive decline. Participants were second-generation Japanese-American men from the Hawaiian island of Oahu, born 1900-1919, free of dementia in 1991, and categorized based on midlife self-reported use of spoken and written Japanese (total n included in primary analysis = 2,520). Cognitive functioning was measured with the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument scored using item response theory. We used mixed effects models, controlling for age, income, education, smoking status, apolipoprotein E e4 alleles, and number of study visits. Rates of cognitive decline were not related to use of spoken or written Japanese. This finding was consistent across numerous sensitivity analyses. We did not find evidence to support the hypothesis that multilingualism is associated with cognitive reserve.

Use of Spoken and Written Japanese Did Not Protect Japanese-American Men From Cognitive Decline in Late Life

Science.gov (United States)

Gruhl, Jonathan C.; Erosheva, Elena A.; Gibbons, Laura E.; McCurry, Susan M.; Rhoads, Kristoffer; Nguyen, Viet; Arani, Keerthi; Masaki, Kamal; White, Lon

2010-01-01

Objectives. Spoken bilingualism may be associated with cognitive reserve. Mastering a complicated written language may be associated with additional reserve. We sought to determine if midlife use of spoken and written Japanese was associated with lower rates of late life cognitive decline. Methods. Participants were second-generation Japanese-American men from the Hawaiian island of Oahu, born 1900–1919, free of dementia in 1991, and categorized based on midlife self-reported use of spoken and written Japanese (total n included in primary analysis = 2,520). Cognitive functioning was measured with the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument scored using item response theory. We used mixed effects models, controlling for age, income, education, smoking status, apolipoprotein E e4 alleles, and number of study visits. Results. Rates of cognitive decline were not related to use of spoken or written Japanese. This finding was consistent across numerous sensitivity analyses. Discussion. We did not find evidence to support the hypothesis that multilingualism is associated with cognitive reserve. PMID:20639282

Prospective Freshman English Teachers’ Knowledge of the English Sound System

OpenAIRE

TEZEL, Kadir Vefa

2016-01-01

Foreign language teachers use the spoken form of the target language when they teach. One of their professional responsibilities while teaching is to form a good model of pronunciation for their students. In Turkey, English is the primary foreign language taught in all educational institutions. Prospective English teachers in the English Teacher Education departments in Faculties of Education are the products of that system, and they come to their universities having been taught English for y...

A Comparison between Written and Spoken Narratives in Aphasia

Science.gov (United States)

Behrns, Ingrid; Wengelin, Asa; Broberg, Malin; Hartelius, Lena

2009-01-01

The aim of the present study was to explore how a personal narrative told by a group of eight persons with aphasia differed between written and spoken language, and to compare this with findings from 10 participants in a reference group. The stories were analysed through holistic assessments made by 60 participants without experience of aphasia…

Syllable frequency and word frequency effects in spoken and written word production in a non-alphabetic script

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Qingfang eZhang

2014-02-01

Full Text Available The effects of word frequency and syllable frequency are well-established phenomena in domain such as spoken production in alphabetic languages. Chinese, as a non-alphabetic language, presents unique lexical and phonological properties in speech production. For example, the proximate unit of phonological encoding is syllable in Chinese but segments in Dutch, French or English. The present study investigated the effects of word frequency and syllable frequency, and their interaction in Chinese written and spoken production. Significant facilitatory word frequency and syllable frequency effects were observed in spoken as well as in written production. The syllable frequency effect in writing indicated that phonological properties (i.e., syllabic frequency constrain orthographic output via a lexical route, at least, in Chinese written production. However, the syllable frequency effect over repetitions was divergent in both modalities: it was significant in the former two repetitions in spoken whereas it was significant in the second repetition only in written. Due to the fragility of the syllable frequency effect in writing, we suggest that the phonological influence in handwritten production is not mandatory and universal, and it is modulated by experimental manipulations. This provides evidence for the orthographic autonomy hypothesis, rather than the phonological mediation hypothesis. The absence of an interaction between word frequency and syllable frequency showed that the syllable frequency effect is independent of the word frequency effect in spoken and written output modalities. The implications of these results on written production models are discussed.

Phonologic-graphemic transcodifier for Portuguese Language spoken in Brazil (PLB)

Science.gov (United States)

Fragadasilva, Francisco Jose; Saotome, Osamu; Deoliveira, Carlos Alberto

An automatic speech-to-text transformer system, suited to unlimited vocabulary, is presented. The basic acoustic unit considered are the allophones of the phonemes corresponding to the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil (PLB). The input to the system is a phonetic sequence, from a former step of isolated word recognition of slowly spoken speech. In a first stage, the system eliminates phonetic elements that don't belong to PLB. Using knowledge sources such as phonetics, phonology, orthography, and PLB specific lexicon, the output is a sequence of written words, ordered by probabilistic criterion that constitutes the set of graphemic possibilities to that input sequence. Pronunciation differences of some regions of Brazil are considered, but only those that cause differences in phonological transcription, because those of phonetic level are absorbed, during the transformation to phonological level. In the final stage, all possible written words are analyzed for orthography and grammar point of view, to eliminate the incorrect ones.

Retinoic acid signaling: a new piece in the spoken language puzzle

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Jon-Ruben eVan Rhijn

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Speech requires precise motor control and rapid sequencing of highly complex vocal musculature. Despite its complexity, most people produce spoken language effortlessly. This is due to activity in distributed neuronal circuitry including cortico-striato-thalamic loops that control speech-motor output. Understanding the neuro-genetic mechanisms that encode these pathways will shed light on how humans can effortlessly and innately use spoken language and could elucidate what goes wrong in speech-language disorders.FOXP2 was the first single gene identified to cause speech and language disorder. Individuals with FOXP2 mutations display a severe speech deficit that also includes receptive and expressive language impairments. The underlying neuro-molecular mechanisms controlled by FOXP2, which will give insight into our capacity for speech-motor control, are only beginning to be unraveled. Recently FOXP2 was found to regulate genes involved in retinoic acid signaling and to modify the cellular response to retinoic acid, a key regulator of brain development. Herein we explore the evidence that FOXP2 and retinoic acid signaling function in the same pathways. We present evidence at molecular, cellular and behavioral levels that suggest an interplay between FOXP2 and retinoic acid that may be important for fine motor control and speech-motor output. We propose that retinoic acid signaling is an exciting new angle from which to investigate how neurogenetic mechanisms can contribute to the (spoken language ready brain.

Factors Influencing Verbal Intelligence and Spoken Language in Children with Phenylketonuria.

Science.gov (United States)

Soleymani, Zahra; Keramati, Nasrin; Rohani, Farzaneh; Jalaei, Shohre

2015-05-01

To determine verbal intelligence and spoken language of children with phenylketonuria and to study the effect of age at diagnosis and phenylalanine plasma level on these abilities. Cross-sectional. Children with phenylketonuria were recruited from pediatric hospitals in 2012. Normal control subjects were recruited from kindergartens in Tehran. 30 phenylketonuria and 42 control subjects aged 4-6.5 years. Skills were compared between 3 phenylketonuria groups categorized by age at diagnosis/treatment, and between the phenylketonuria and control groups. Scores on Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence for verbal and total intelligence, and Test of Language Development-Primary, third edition for spoken language, listening, speaking, semantics, syntax, and organization. The performance of control subjects was significantly better than that of early-treated subjects for all composite quotients from Test of Language Development and verbal intelligence (Pphenylketonuria subjects.

The time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese: a unimodal ERP study.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Xianjun; Yang, Jin-Chen; Zhang, Qin; Guo, Chunyan

2014-10-01

In the present study, two experiments were carried out to investigate the time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese using both event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures. To address the hypothesis that there is an early phonological processing stage independent of semantics during spoken word recognition, a unimodal word-matching paradigm was employed, in which both prime and target words were presented auditorily. Experiment 1 manipulated the phonological relations between disyllabic primes and targets, and found an enhanced P2 (200-270 ms post-target onset) as well as a smaller early N400 to word-initial phonological mismatches over fronto-central scalp sites. Experiment 2 manipulated both phonological and semantic relations between monosyllabic primes and targets, and replicated the phonological mismatch-associated P2, which was not modulated by semantic relations. Overall, these results suggest that P2 is a sensitive electrophysiological index of early phonological processing independent of semantics in Mandarin Chinese spoken word recognition. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words.

Science.gov (United States)

McQueen, James M; Huettig, Falk

2014-01-01

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes, which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures' printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onset related (e.g., pijl-pijn, arrow-pain), were from the same semantic category (e.g., pijl-zwaard, arrow-sword), or were unrelated on both dimensions. Phonological interference and semantic facilitation were observed in all experiments. Priming magnitude was similar for pictures and printed words and did not vary with picture viewing time or number of pictures in the display (either one or four). These effects arose even though participants were not explicitly instructed to name the pictures and where strategic naming would interfere with lexical decision making. This suggests that, by default, processing of related pictures and printed words influences how quickly we recognize spoken words.

Individual Differences in Online Spoken Word Recognition: Implications for SLI

Science.gov (United States)

McMurray, Bob; Samelson, Vicki M.; Lee, Sung Hee; Tomblin, J. Bruce

2010-01-01

Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have…

Orthographic Consistency Affects Spoken Word Recognition at Different Grain-Sizes

Science.gov (United States)

Dich, Nadya

2014-01-01

A number of previous studies found that the consistency of sound-to-spelling mappings (feedback consistency) affects spoken word recognition. In auditory lexical decision experiments, words that can only be spelled one way are recognized faster than words with multiple potential spellings. Previous studies demonstrated this by manipulating…

Student Evaluation of Teaching: A Study Exploring Student Rating Instrument Free-Form Text Comments

Science.gov (United States)

Stupans, Ieva; McGuren, Therese; Babey, Anna Marie

2016-01-01

Student rating instruments are recognised to be valid indicators of effective instruction, providing a valuable tool to improve teaching. However, free-form text comments obtained from the open-ended question component of such surveys are only infrequently analysed comprehensively. We employed an innovative, systematic approach to the analysis of…

Feature Statistics Modulate the Activation of Meaning during Spoken Word Processing

Science.gov (United States)

Devereux, Barry J.; Taylor, Kirsten I.; Randall, Billi; Geertzen, Jeroen; Tyler, Lorraine K.

2016-01-01

Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature-based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts' features--the number of concepts they occur in ("distinctiveness/sharedness") and likelihood of co-occurrence ("correlational…

Children show right-lateralized effects of spoken word-form learning.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anni Nora

Full Text Available It is commonly thought that phonological learning is different in young children compared to adults, possibly due to the speech processing system not yet having reached full native-language specialization. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms of phonological learning in children are poorly understood. We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG to track cortical correlates of incidental learning of meaningless word forms over two days as 6-8-year-olds overtly repeated them. Native (Finnish pseudowords were compared with words of foreign sound structure (Korean to investigate whether the cortical learning effects would be more dependent on previous proficiency in the language rather than maturational factors. Half of the items were encountered four times on the first day and once more on the following day. Incidental learning of these recurring word forms manifested as improved repetition accuracy and a correlated reduction of activation in the right superior temporal cortex, similarly for both languages and on both experimental days, and in contrast to a salient left-hemisphere emphasis previously reported in adults. We propose that children, when learning new word forms in either native or foreign language, are not yet constrained by left-hemispheric segmental processing and established sublexical native-language representations. Instead, they may rely more on supra-segmental contours and prosody.

Activating teaching methods in french language teaching

OpenAIRE

Kulhánková, Anna

2009-01-01

The subject of this diploma thesis is activating teaching methods in french language teaching. This thesis outlines the issues acitvating teaching methods in the concept of other teaching methods. There is a definition of teaching method, classification of teaching methods and characteristics of each activating method. In the practical part of this work are given concrete forms of activating teaching methods appropriate for teaching of french language.

User-Centred Design for Chinese-Oriented Spoken English Learning System

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Ping; Pan, Yingxin; Li, Chen; Zhang, Zengxiu; Shi, Qin; Chu, Wenpei; Liu, Mingzhuo; Zhu, Zhiting

2016-01-01

Oral production is an important part in English learning. Lack of a language environment with efficient instruction and feedback is a big issue for non-native speakers' English spoken skill improvement. A computer-assisted language learning system can provide many potential benefits to language learners. It allows adequate instructions and instant…

The relation of the number of languages spoken to performance in different cognitive abilities in old age.

Science.gov (United States)

Ihle, Andreas; Oris, Michel; Fagot, Delphine; Kliegel, Matthias

2016-12-01

Findings on the association of speaking different languages with cognitive functioning in old age are inconsistent and inconclusive so far. Therefore, the present study set out to investigate the relation of the number of languages spoken to cognitive performance and its interplay with several other markers of cognitive reserve in a large sample of older adults. Two thousand eight hundred and twelve older adults served as sample for the present study. Psychometric tests on verbal abilities, basic processing speed, and cognitive flexibility were administered. In addition, individuals were interviewed on their different languages spoken on a regular basis, educational attainment, occupation, and engaging in different activities throughout adulthood. Higher number of languages regularly spoken was significantly associated with better performance in verbal abilities and processing speed, but unrelated to cognitive flexibility. Regression analyses showed that the number of languages spoken predicted cognitive performance over and above leisure activities/physical demand of job/gainful activity as respective additional predictor, but not over and above educational attainment/cognitive level of job as respective additional predictor. There was no significant moderation of the association of the number of languages spoken with cognitive performance in any model. Present data suggest that speaking different languages on a regular basis may additionally contribute to the build-up of cognitive reserve in old age. Yet, this may not be universal, but linked to verbal abilities and basic cognitive processing speed. Moreover, it may be dependent on other types of cognitive stimulation that individuals also engaged in during their life course.

The Impact of Orthographic Consistency on German Spoken Word Identification

Science.gov (United States)

Beyermann, Sandra; Penke, Martina

2014-01-01

An auditory lexical decision experiment was conducted to find out whether sound-to-spelling consistency has an impact on German spoken word processing, and whether such an impact is different at different stages of reading development. Four groups of readers (school children in the second, third and fifth grades, and university students)…

On-Line Syntax: Thoughts on the Temporality of Spoken Language

Science.gov (United States)

Auer, Peter

2009-01-01

One fundamental difference between spoken and written language has to do with the "linearity" of speaking in time, in that the temporal structure of speaking is inherently the outcome of an interactive process between speaker and listener. But despite the status of "linearity" as one of Saussure's fundamental principles, in practice little more…

Interaction in Spoken Word Recognition Models: Feedback Helps

Science.gov (United States)

Magnuson, James S.; Mirman, Daniel; Luthra, Sahil; Strauss, Ted; Harris, Harlan D.

2018-01-01

Human perception, cognition, and action requires fast integration of bottom-up signals with top-down knowledge and context. A key theoretical perspective in cognitive science is the interactive activation hypothesis: forward and backward flow in bidirectionally connected neural networks allows humans and other biological systems to approximate optimal integration of bottom-up and top-down information under real-world constraints. An alternative view is that online feedback is neither necessary nor helpful; purely feed forward alternatives can be constructed for any feedback system, and online feedback could not improve processing and would preclude veridical perception. In the domain of spoken word recognition, the latter view was apparently supported by simulations using the interactive activation model, TRACE, with and without feedback: as many words were recognized more quickly without feedback as were recognized faster with feedback, However, these simulations used only a small set of words and did not address a primary motivation for interaction: making a model robust in noise. We conducted simulations using hundreds of words, and found that the majority were recognized more quickly with feedback than without. More importantly, as we added noise to inputs, accuracy and recognition times were better with feedback than without. We follow these simulations with a critical review of recent arguments that online feedback in interactive activation models like TRACE is distinct from other potentially helpful forms of feedback. We conclude that in addition to providing the benefits demonstrated in our simulations, online feedback provides a plausible means of implementing putatively distinct forms of feedback, supporting the interactive activation hypothesis. PMID:29666593

Interaction in Spoken Word Recognition Models: Feedback Helps.

Science.gov (United States)

Magnuson, James S; Mirman, Daniel; Luthra, Sahil; Strauss, Ted; Harris, Harlan D

2018-01-01

Human perception, cognition, and action requires fast integration of bottom-up signals with top-down knowledge and context. A key theoretical perspective in cognitive science is the interactive activation hypothesis: forward and backward flow in bidirectionally connected neural networks allows humans and other biological systems to approximate optimal integration of bottom-up and top-down information under real-world constraints. An alternative view is that online feedback is neither necessary nor helpful; purely feed forward alternatives can be constructed for any feedback system, and online feedback could not improve processing and would preclude veridical perception. In the domain of spoken word recognition, the latter view was apparently supported by simulations using the interactive activation model, TRACE, with and without feedback: as many words were recognized more quickly without feedback as were recognized faster with feedback, However, these simulations used only a small set of words and did not address a primary motivation for interaction: making a model robust in noise. We conducted simulations using hundreds of words, and found that the majority were recognized more quickly with feedback than without. More importantly, as we added noise to inputs, accuracy and recognition times were better with feedback than without. We follow these simulations with a critical review of recent arguments that online feedback in interactive activation models like TRACE is distinct from other potentially helpful forms of feedback. We conclude that in addition to providing the benefits demonstrated in our simulations, online feedback provides a plausible means of implementing putatively distinct forms of feedback, supporting the interactive activation hypothesis.

Interaction in Spoken Word Recognition Models: Feedback Helps

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James S. Magnuson

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Human perception, cognition, and action requires fast integration of bottom-up signals with top-down knowledge and context. A key theoretical perspective in cognitive science is the interactive activation hypothesis: forward and backward flow in bidirectionally connected neural networks allows humans and other biological systems to approximate optimal integration of bottom-up and top-down information under real-world constraints. An alternative view is that online feedback is neither necessary nor helpful; purely feed forward alternatives can be constructed for any feedback system, and online feedback could not improve processing and would preclude veridical perception. In the domain of spoken word recognition, the latter view was apparently supported by simulations using the interactive activation model, TRACE, with and without feedback: as many words were recognized more quickly without feedback as were recognized faster with feedback, However, these simulations used only a small set of words and did not address a primary motivation for interaction: making a model robust in noise. We conducted simulations using hundreds of words, and found that the majority were recognized more quickly with feedback than without. More importantly, as we added noise to inputs, accuracy and recognition times were better with feedback than without. We follow these simulations with a critical review of recent arguments that online feedback in interactive activation models like TRACE is distinct from other potentially helpful forms of feedback. We conclude that in addition to providing the benefits demonstrated in our simulations, online feedback provides a plausible means of implementing putatively distinct forms of feedback, supporting the interactive activation hypothesis.

Inferring Speaker Affect in Spoken Natural Language Communication

OpenAIRE

Pon-Barry, Heather Roberta

2012-01-01

The field of spoken language processing is concerned with creating computer programs that can understand human speech and produce human-like speech. Regarding the problem of understanding human speech, there is currently growing interest in moving beyond speech recognition (the task of transcribing the words in an audio stream) and towards machine listening—interpreting the full spectrum of information in an audio stream. One part of machine listening, the problem that this thesis focuses on, ...

Socio-Pragmatic Problems in Foreign Language Teaching

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İsmail ÇAKIR

2006-10-01

Full Text Available It is a fact that language is a means of communication for human beings. People who needto have social interaction should share the same language, beliefs, values etc., in a given society.It can be stated that when learning a foreign language, mastering only linguistic features of FLprobably does not ensure true spoken and written communication. This study aims to deal withsocio-pragmatic problems which the learners may be confront with while learning and using theforeign language. Particularly cultural and cultural values of the target language such as idioms,proverbs and metaphors and their role in foreign language teaching have been focused on.

Automated Scoring of L2 Spoken English with Random Forests

Science.gov (United States)

Kobayashi, Yuichiro; Abe, Mariko

2016-01-01

The purpose of the present study is to assess second language (L2) spoken English using automated scoring techniques. Automated scoring aims to classify a large set of learners' oral performance data into a small number of discrete oral proficiency levels. In automated scoring, objectively measurable features such as the frequencies of lexical and…

Development of Mandarin spoken language after pediatric cochlear implantation.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Bei; Soli, Sigfrid D; Zheng, Yun; Li, Gang; Meng, Zhaoli

2014-07-01

The purpose of this study was to evaluate early spoken language development in young Mandarin-speaking children during the first 24 months after cochlear implantation, as measured by receptive and expressive vocabulary growth rates. Growth rates were compared with those of normally hearing children and with growth rates for English-speaking children with cochlear implants. Receptive and expressive vocabularies were measured with the simplified short form (SSF) version of the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) in a sample of 112 pediatric implant recipients at baseline, 3, 6, 12, and 24 months after implantation. Implant ages ranged from 1 to 5 years. Scores were expressed in terms of normal equivalent ages, allowing normalized vocabulary growth rates to be determined. Scores for English-speaking children were re-expressed in these terms, allowing direct comparisons of Mandarin and English early spoken language development. Vocabulary growth rates during the first 12 months after implantation were similar to those for normally hearing children less than 16 months of age. Comparisons with growth rates for normally hearing children 16-30 months of age showed that the youngest implant age group (1-2 years) had an average growth rate of 0.68 that of normally hearing children; while the middle implant age group (2-3 years) had an average growth rate of 0.65; and the oldest implant age group (>3 years) had an average growth rate of 0.56, significantly less than the other two rates. Growth rates for English-speaking children with cochlear implants were 0.68 in the youngest group, 0.54 in the middle group, and 0.57 in the oldest group. Growth rates in the middle implant age groups for the two languages differed significantly. The SSF version of the MCDI is suitable for assessment of Mandarin language development during the first 24 months after cochlear implantation. Effects of implant age and duration of implantation can be compared directly across

SPOKEN BAHASA INDONESIA BY GERMAN STUDENTS

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I Nengah Sudipa

2014-11-01

Full Text Available This article investigates the spoken ability for German students using Bahasa Indonesia (BI. They have studied it for six weeks in IBSN Program at Udayana University, Bali-Indonesia. The data was collected at the time the students sat for the mid-term oral test and was further analyzed with reference to the standard usage of BI. The result suggests that most students managed to express several concepts related to (1 LOCATION; (2 TIME; (3 TRANSPORT; (4 PURPOSE; (5 TRANSACTION; (6 IMPRESSION; (7 REASON; (8 FOOD AND BEVERAGE, and (9 NUMBER AND PERSON. The only problem few students might encounter is due to the influence from their own language system called interference, especially in word order.

Pronoun forms and courtesy in spoken language in Tunja, Colombia

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Gloria Avendaño de Barón

2014-05-01

Full Text Available This article presents the results of a research project whose aims were the following: to determine the frequency of the use of pronoun forms in polite treatment sumercé, usted and tú, according to differences in gender, age and level of education, among speakers in Tunja; to describe the sociodiscursive variations and to explain the relationship between usage and courtesy. The methodology of the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish in Spain and in Latin America (PRESEEA was used, and a sample of 54 speakers was taken. The results indicate that the most frequently used pronoun in Tunja to express friendliness and affection is sumercé, followed by usted and tú; women and men of different generations and levels of education alternate the use of these three forms in the context of narrative, descriptive, argumentative and explanatory speech.

Toddlers' sensitivity to within-word coarticulation during spoken word recognition: Developmental differences in lexical competition.

Science.gov (United States)

Zamuner, Tania S; Moore, Charlotte; Desmeules-Trudel, Félix

2016-12-01

To understand speech, listeners need to be able to decode the speech stream into meaningful units. However, coarticulation causes phonemes to differ based on their context. Because coarticulation is an ever-present component of the speech stream, it follows that listeners may exploit this source of information for cues to the identity of the words being spoken. This research investigates the development of listeners' sensitivity to coarticulation cues below the level of the phoneme in spoken word recognition. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, adults and 2- and 3-year-old children were tested on coarticulation cues that either matched or mismatched the target. Both adults and children predicted upcoming phonemes based on anticipatory coarticulation to make decisions about word identity. The overall results demonstrate that coarticulation cues are a fundamental component of children's spoken word recognition system. However, children did not show the same resolution as adults of the mismatching coarticulation cues and competitor inhibition, indicating that children's processing systems are still developing. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Early use of orthographic information in spoken word recognition: Event-related potential evidence from the Korean language.

Science.gov (United States)

Kwon, Youan; Choi, Sungmook; Lee, Yoonhyoung

2016-04-01

This study examines whether orthographic information is used during prelexical processes in spoken word recognition by investigating ERPs during spoken word processing for Korean words. Differential effects due to orthographic syllable neighborhood size and sound-to-spelling consistency on P200 and N320 were evaluated by recording ERPs from 42 participants during a lexical decision task. The results indicate that P200 was smaller for words whose orthographic syllable neighbors are large in number rather than those that are small. In addition, a word with a large orthographic syllable neighborhood elicited a smaller N320 effect than a word with a small orthographic syllable neighborhood only when the word had inconsistent sound-to-spelling mapping. The results provide support for the assumption that orthographic information is used early during the prelexical spoken word recognition process. © 2015 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

"Context and Spoken Word Recognition in a Novel Lexicon": Correction

Science.gov (United States)

Revill, Kathleen Pirog; Tanenhaus, Michael K.; Aslin, Richard N.

2009-01-01

Reports an error in "Context and spoken word recognition in a novel lexicon" by Kathleen Pirog Revill, Michael K. Tanenhaus and Richard N. Aslin ("Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 2008[Sep], Vol 34[5], 1207-1223). Figure 9 was inadvertently duplicated as Figure 10. Figure 9 in the original article was correct.…

Applicability of the Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy Patients with Diabetes in Brazilian elderly.

Science.gov (United States)

Souza, Jonas Gordilho; Apolinario, Daniel; Farfel, José Marcelo; Jaluul, Omar; Magaldi, Regina Miksian; Busse, Alexandre Leopold; Campora, Flávia; Jacob-Filho, Wilson

2016-01-01

To translate, adapt and evaluate the properties of a Brazilian Portuguese version of the Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy Patients with Diabetes, which is a questionnaire that evaluate diabetes knowledge. A cross-sectional study with type 2 diabetes patients aged ≥60 years, seen at a public healthcare organization in the city of Sao Paulo (SP). After the development of the Portuguese version, we evaluated the psychometrics properties and the association with sociodemographic and clinical variables. The regression models were adjusted for sociodemographic data, functional health literacy, duration of disease, use of insulin, and glycemic control. We evaluated 129 type 2 diabetic patients, with mean age of 75.9 (±6.2) years, mean scholling of 5.2 (±4.4) years, mean glycosylated hemoglobin of 7.2% (±1.4), and mean score on Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy Patients with Diabetes of 42.1% (±25.8). In the regression model, the variables independently associated to Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy Patients with Diabetes were schooling (B=0.193; p=0.003), use of insulin (B=1.326; p=0.004), duration of diabetes (B=0.053; p=0.022) and health literacy (B=0.108; p=0.021). The determination coefficient was 0.273. The Cronbach a was 0.75, demonstrating appropriate internal consistency. This translated version of the Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy Patients with Diabetes showed to be adequate to evaluate diabetes knowledge in elderly patients with low schooling levels. It presented normal distribution, adequate internal consistency, with no ceiling or floor effect. The tool is easy to be used, can be quickly applied and does not depend on reading skills. Traduzir, adaptar e avaliar as propriedades de uma versão, em português do Brasil, do Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy Patients with Diabetes, um questionário que avalia conhecimento em diabetes. Estudo transversal, em diabéticos tipo 2, com idade ≥60 anos de uma instituição pública de saúde, em São Paulo (SP

The time course of lexical competition during spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese: an event-related potential study.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Xianjun; Yang, Jin-Chen

2016-01-20

The present study investigated the effect of lexical competition on the time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese using a unimodal auditory priming paradigm. Two kinds of competitive environments were designed. In one session (session 1), only the unrelated and the identical primes were presented before the target words. In the other session (session 2), besides the two conditions in session 1, the target words were also preceded by the cohort primes that have the same initial syllables as the targets. Behavioral results showed an inhibitory effect of the cohort competitors (primes) on target word recognition. The event-related potential results showed that the spoken word recognition processing in the middle and late latency windows is modulated by whether the phonologically related competitors are presented or not. Specifically, preceding activation of the competitors can induce direct competitions between multiple candidate words and lead to increased processing difficulties, primarily at the word disambiguation and selection stage during Mandarin Chinese spoken word recognition. The current study provided both behavioral and electrophysiological evidences for the lexical competition effect among the candidate words during spoken word recognition.

On the Usability of Spoken Dialogue Systems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Larsen, Lars Bo

 This work is centred on the methods and problems associated with defining and measuring the usability of Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). The starting point is the fact that speech based interfaces has several times during the last 20 years fallen short of the high expectations and predictions held...... by industry, researchers and analysts. Several studies in the literature of SDS indicate that this can be ascribed to a lack of attention from the speech technology community towards the usability of such systems. The experimental results presented in this work are based on a field trial with the OVID home...

Authentic ESL Spoken Materials: Soap Opera and Sitcom versus Natural Conversation

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Surmi, Mansoor Ali

2012-01-01

TV shows, especially soap operas and sitcoms, are usually considered by ESL practitioners as a source of authentic spoken conversational materials presumably because they reflect the linguistic features of natural conversation. However, practitioners might be faced with the dilemma of how to evaluate whether such conversational materials reflect…

Learning and Consolidation of New Spoken Words in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Science.gov (United States)

Henderson, Lisa; Powell, Anna; Gaskell, M. Gareth; Norbury, Courtenay

2014-01-01

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by rich heterogeneity in vocabulary knowledge and word knowledge that is not well accounted for by current cognitive theories. This study examines whether individual differences in vocabulary knowledge in ASD might be partly explained by a difficulty with consolidating newly learned spoken words…

Syllable Frequency and Spoken Word Recognition: An Inhibitory Effect.

Science.gov (United States)

González-Alvarez, Julio; Palomar-García, María-Angeles

2016-08-01

Research has shown that syllables play a relevant role in lexical access in Spanish, a shallow language with a transparent syllabic structure. Syllable frequency has been shown to have an inhibitory effect on visual word recognition in Spanish. However, no study has examined the syllable frequency effect on spoken word recognition. The present study tested the effect of the frequency of the first syllable on recognition of spoken Spanish words. A sample of 45 young adults (33 women, 12 men; M = 20.4, SD = 2.8; college students) performed an auditory lexical decision on 128 Spanish disyllabic words and 128 disyllabic nonwords. Words were selected so that lexical and first syllable frequency were manipulated in a within-subject 2 × 2 design, and six additional independent variables were controlled: token positional frequency of the second syllable, number of phonemes, position of lexical stress, number of phonological neighbors, number of phonological neighbors that have higher frequencies than the word, and acoustical durations measured in milliseconds. Decision latencies and error rates were submitted to linear mixed models analysis. Results showed a typical facilitatory effect of the lexical frequency and, importantly, an inhibitory effect of the first syllable frequency on reaction times and error rates. © The Author(s) 2016.

A Model of Communicative Teaching and Learning of English Vocabulary Through Interactive Actin vities

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Sahraini Sahraini

2015-02-01

Full Text Available Teaching English vocabulary is very important, and it is more than just presenting and introducing new vocabulary to the students. Knowing words is not only memorizing them, but the students need to understand the meaning of the word in context and how the words are used. This can be achieved through correct vocabulary instruction which should involve vocabulary selection, word knowledge, and techniques. The needs of prospective teachers in mastering English both spoken and written, and the ability to teach using English as the language of instruction in the teaching and learning process in the classroom is very important. They also need the skills to teach English effectively and enjoyable to make the students have confident to use English communicatively. Deciding an interesting method for students is also an English teachers’ job to do. In this paper the writer tries to design a model of teaching and learning of English vocabulary through interactive activities. By using a lot of interactive activities, hopefully the students are able to practice to communicate by using English in oral and written.

Development and Relationships Between Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Word Reading in Spoken and Standard Arabic

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Rachel Schiff

2018-04-01

Full Text Available This study addressed the development of and the relationship between foundational metalinguistic skills and word reading skills in Arabic. It compared Arabic-speaking children’s phonological awareness (PA, morphological awareness, and voweled and unvoweled word reading skills in spoken and standard language varieties separately in children across five grade levels from childhood to adolescence. Second, it investigated whether skills developed in the spoken variety of Arabic predict reading in the standard variety. Results indicate that although individual differences between students in PA are eliminated toward the end of elementary school in both spoken and standard language varieties, gaps in morphological awareness and in reading skills persisted through junior and high school years. The results also show that the gap in reading accuracy and fluency between Spoken Arabic (SpA and Standard Arabic (StA was evident in both voweled and unvoweled words. Finally, regression analyses showed that morphological awareness in SpA contributed to reading fluency in StA, i.e., children’s early morphological awareness in SpA explained variance in children’s gains in reading fluency in StA. These findings have important theoretical and practical contributions for Arabic reading theory in general and they extend the previous work regarding the cross-linguistic relevance of foundational metalinguistic skills in the first acquired language to reading in a second language, as in societal bilingualism contexts, or a second language variety, as in diglossic contexts.

Development and Relationships Between Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Word Reading in Spoken and Standard Arabic

Science.gov (United States)

Schiff, Rachel; Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor

2018-01-01

This study addressed the development of and the relationship between foundational metalinguistic skills and word reading skills in Arabic. It compared Arabic-speaking children’s phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness, and voweled and unvoweled word reading skills in spoken and standard language varieties separately in children across five grade levels from childhood to adolescence. Second, it investigated whether skills developed in the spoken variety of Arabic predict reading in the standard variety. Results indicate that although individual differences between students in PA are eliminated toward the end of elementary school in both spoken and standard language varieties, gaps in morphological awareness and in reading skills persisted through junior and high school years. The results also show that the gap in reading accuracy and fluency between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA) was evident in both voweled and unvoweled words. Finally, regression analyses showed that morphological awareness in SpA contributed to reading fluency in StA, i.e., children’s early morphological awareness in SpA explained variance in children’s gains in reading fluency in StA. These findings have important theoretical and practical contributions for Arabic reading theory in general and they extend the previous work regarding the cross-linguistic relevance of foundational metalinguistic skills in the first acquired language to reading in a second language, as in societal bilingualism contexts, or a second language variety, as in diglossic contexts. PMID:29686633

The Temporal Dynamics of Spoken Word Recognition in Adverse Listening Conditions

Science.gov (United States)

Brouwer, Susanne; Bradlow, Ann R.

2016-01-01

This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. "candle"), an onset competitor (e.g. "candy"), a rhyme competitor (e.g.…

Corrective Feedback, Spoken Accuracy and Fluency, and the Trade-Off Hypothesis

Science.gov (United States)

Chehr Azad, Mohammad Hassan; Farrokhi, Farahman; Zohrabi, Mohammad

2018-01-01

The current study was an attempt to investigate the effects of different corrective feedback (CF) conditions on Iranian EFL learners' spoken accuracy and fluency (AF) and the trade-off between them. Consequently, four pre-intermediate intact classes were randomly selected as the control, delayed explicit metalinguistic CF, extensive recast, and…

Monitoring the Performance of Human and Automated Scores for Spoken Responses

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Zhen; Zechner, Klaus; Sun, Yu

2018-01-01

As automated scoring systems for spoken responses are increasingly used in language assessments, testing organizations need to analyze their performance, as compared to human raters, across several dimensions, for example, on individual items or based on subgroups of test takers. In addition, there is a need in testing organizations to establish…

Textual, Genre and Social Features of Spoken Grammar: A Corpus-Based Approach

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Carmen Pérez-Llantada

2009-02-01

Full Text Available This paper describes a corpus-based approach to teaching and learning spoken grammar for English for Academic Purposes with reference to Bhatia’s (2002 multi-perspective model for discourse analysis: a textual perspective, a genre perspective and a social perspective. From a textual perspective, corpus-informed instruction helps students identify grammar items through statistical frequencies, collocational patterns, context-sensitive meanings and discoursal uses of words. From a genre perspective, corpus observation provides students with exposure to recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns across different academic text types (genres. From a social perspective, corpus models can be used to raise learners’ awareness of how speakers’ different discourse roles, discourse privileges and power statuses are enacted in their grammar choices. The paper describes corpus-based instructional procedures, gives samples of learners’ linguistic output, and provides comments on the students’ response to this method of instruction. Data resulting from the assessment process and student production suggest that corpus-informed instruction grounded in Bhatia’s multi-perspective model can constitute a pedagogical approach in order to i obtain positive student responses from input and authentic samples of grammar use, ii help students identify and understand the textual, genre and social aspects of grammar in real contexts of use, and therefore iii help develop students’ ability to use grammar accurately and appropriately.

Using the TED Talks to Evaluate Spoken Post-editing of Machine Translation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Liyanapathirana, Jeevanthi; Popescu-Belis, Andrei

2016-01-01

This paper presents a solution to evaluate spoken post-editing of imperfect machine translation output by a human translator. We compare two approaches to the combination of machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR): a heuristic algorithm and a machine learning method...

Completing the Task Procedure or Focusing on Form: Contextualizing Grammar Instruction via Task-Based Teaching

Science.gov (United States)

Saraç, Hatice Sezgi

2018-01-01

In this study, it was aimed to compare two distinct methodologies of grammar instruction: task-based and form-focused teaching. Within the application procedure, which lasted for one academic term, two groups of tertiary level learners (N = 53) were exposed to the same sequence of target structures, extensive writing activities and evaluation…

The Slow Developmental Time Course of Real-Time Spoken Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Rigler, Hannah; Farris-Trimble, Ashley; Greiner, Lea; Walker, Jessica; Tomblin, J. Bruce; McMurray, Bob

2015-01-01

This study investigated the developmental time course of spoken word recognition in older children using eye tracking to assess how the real-time processing dynamics of word recognition change over development. We found that 9-year-olds were slower to activate the target words and showed more early competition from competitor words than…

Modality differences between written and spoken story retelling in healthy older adults

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Jessica Ann Obermeyer

2015-04-01

Methods: Ten native English speaking healthy elderly participants between the ages of 50 and 80 were recruited. Exclusionary criteria included neurological disease/injury, history of learning disability, uncorrected hearing or vision impairment, history of drug/alcohol abuse and presence of cognitive decline (based on Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test. Spoken and written discourse was analyzed for micro linguistic measures including total words, percent correct information units (CIUs; Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993 and percent complete utterances (CUs; Edmonds, et al. 2009. CIUs measure relevant and informative words while CUs focus at the sentence level and measure whether a relevant subject and verb and object (if appropriate are present. Results: Analysis was completed using Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test due to small sample size. Preliminary results revealed that healthy elderly people produced significantly more words in spoken retellings than written retellings (p=.000; however, this measure contrasted with %CIUs and %CUs with participants producing significantly higher %CIUs (p=.000 and %CUs (p=.000 in written story retellings than in spoken story retellings. Conclusion: These findings indicate that written retellings, while shorter, contained higher accuracy at both a word (CIU and sentence (CU level. This observation could be related to the ability to revise written text and therefore make it more concise, whereas the nature of speech results in more embellishment and “thinking out loud,” such as comments about the task, associated observations about the story, etc. We plan to run more participants and conduct a main concepts analysis (before conference time to gain more insight into modality differences and implications.

I Feel You: The Design and Evaluation of a Domotic Affect-Sensitive Spoken Conversational Agent

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Juan Manuel Montero

2013-08-01

Full Text Available We describe the work on infusion of emotion into a limited-task autonomous spoken conversational agent situated in the domestic environment, using a need-inspired task-independent emotion model (NEMO. In order to demonstrate the generation of affect through the use of the model, we describe the work of integrating it with a natural-language mixed-initiative HiFi-control spoken conversational agent (SCA. NEMO and the host system communicate externally, removing the need for the Dialog Manager to be modified, as is done in most existing dialog systems, in order to be adaptive. The first part of the paper concerns the integration between NEMO and the host agent. The second part summarizes the work on automatic affect prediction, namely, frustration and contentment, from dialog features, a non-conventional source, in the attempt of moving towards a more user-centric approach. The final part reports the evaluation results obtained from a user study, in which both versions of the agent (non-adaptive and emotionally-adaptive were compared. The results provide substantial evidences with respect to the benefits of adding emotion in a spoken conversational agent, especially in mitigating users’ frustrations and, ultimately, improving their satisfaction.

Evaluating spoken dialogue systems according to de-facto standards: A case study

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Möller, S.; Smeele, P.; Boland, H.; Krebber, J.

2007-01-01

In the present paper, we investigate the validity and reliability of de-facto evaluation standards, defined for measuring or predicting the quality of the interaction with spoken dialogue systems. Two experiments have been carried out with a dialogue system for controlling domestic devices. During

The emergence and development of a spoken standard in England (1400-1926)

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Hans Frede

2017-01-01

The beginnings of a spoken standard in England go back to late Middle English and early Modern English times, where southern speech and especially the idiom of the Court, London and the Home Counties acquired prestige beyond that of other regional dialects. With the increasing stabilization...

Role of Working Memory in Children's Understanding Spoken Narrative: A Preliminary Investigation

Science.gov (United States)

Montgomery, James W.; Polunenko, Anzhela; Marinellie, Sally A.

2009-01-01

The role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM), attentional resource capacity/allocation, and processing speed on children's spoken narrative comprehension was investigated. Sixty-seven children (6-11 years) completed a digit span task (PSTM), concurrent verbal processing and storage (CPS) task (resource capacity/allocation), auditory-visual…

Webster's word power better English grammar improve your written and spoken English

CERN Document Server

Kirkpatrick, Betty

2014-01-01

With questions and answer sections throughout, this book helps you to improve your written and spoken English through understanding the structure of the English language. This is a thorough and useful book with all parts of speech and grammar explained. Used by ELT self-study students.

On Spoken English Phoneme Evaluation Method Based on Sphinx-4 Computer System

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Li Qin

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In oral English learning, HDPs (phonemes that are hard to be distinguished are areas where Chinese students frequently make mistakes in pronunciation. This paper studies a speech phoneme evaluation method for HDPs, hoping to improve the ability of individualized evaluation on HDPs and help provide a personalized learning platform for English learners. First of all, this paper briefly introduces relevant phonetic recognition technologies and pronunciation evaluation algorithms and also describes the phonetic retrieving, phonetic decoding and phonetic knowledge base in the Sphinx-4 computer system, which constitute the technological foundation for phoneme evaluation. Then it proposes an HDP evaluation model, which integrates the reliability of the speech processing system and the individualization of spoken English learners into the evaluation system. After collecting HDPs of spoken English learners and sorting them into different sets, it uses the evaluation system to recognize these HDP sets and at last analyzes the experimental results of HDP evaluation, which proves the effectiveness of the HDP evaluation model.

A dual contribution to the involuntary semantic processing of unexpected spoken words.

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Parmentier, Fabrice B R; Turner, Jacqueline; Perez, Laura

2014-02-01

Sounds are a major cause of distraction. Unexpected to-be-ignored auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repetitive acoustic background ineluctably break through selective attention and distract people from an unrelated visual task (deviance distraction). This involuntary capture of attention by deviant sounds has been hypothesized to trigger their semantic appraisal and, in some circumstances, interfere with ongoing performance, but it remains unclear how such processing compares with the automatic processing of distractors in classic interference tasks (e.g., Stroop, flanker, Simon tasks). Using a cross-modal oddball task, we assessed the involuntary semantic processing of deviant sounds in the presence and absence of deviance distraction. The results revealed that some involuntary semantic analysis of spoken distractors occurs in the absence of deviance distraction but that this processing is significantly greater in its presence. We conclude that the automatic processing of spoken distractors reflects 2 contributions, one that is contingent upon deviance distraction and one that is independent from it.

The role of planum temporale in processing accent variation in spoken language comprehension.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Adank, P.M.; Noordzij, M.L.; Hagoort, P.

2012-01-01

A repetitionsuppression functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm was used to explore the neuroanatomical substrates of processing two types of acoustic variationspeaker and accentduring spoken sentence comprehension. Recordings were made for two speakers and two accents: Standard Dutch and a

Symbolic Communication Forms in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Braddock, Barbara A.; Armbrecht, Eric S.

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to examine how early symbolic forms (and their associated communicative functions) are related to change in communication among a sample of 12 young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who produced two or fewer spoken words ("M" age = 28.75 months; 11 male, 1 female). Parents reported on children's…

Phonotactics Constraints and the Spoken Word Recognition of Chinese Words in Speech

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Yip, Michael C.

2016-01-01

Two word-spotting experiments were conducted to examine the question of whether native Cantonese listeners are constrained by phonotactics information in spoken word recognition of Chinese words in speech. Because no legal consonant clusters occurred within an individual Chinese word, this kind of categorical phonotactics information of Chinese…

The role of planum temporale in processing accent variation in spoken language comprehension

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Adank, P.M.; Noordzij, M.L.; Hagoort, P.

2012-01-01

A repetition–suppression functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm was used to explore the neuroanatomical substrates of processing two types of acoustic variation—speaker and accent—during spoken sentence comprehension. Recordings were made for two speakers and two accents: Standard Dutch and

Conducting spoken word recognition research online: Validation and a new timing method.

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Slote, Joseph; Strand, Julia F

2016-06-01

Models of spoken word recognition typically make predictions that are then tested in the laboratory against the word recognition scores of human subjects (e.g., Luce & Pisoni Ear and Hearing, 19, 1-36, 1998). Unfortunately, laboratory collection of large sets of word recognition data can be costly and time-consuming. Due to the numerous advantages of online research in speed, cost, and participant diversity, some labs have begun to explore the use of online platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) to source participation and collect data (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 3-5, 2011). Many classic findings in cognitive psychology have been successfully replicated online, including the Stroop effect, task-switching costs, and Simon and flanker interference (Crump, McDonnell, & Gureckis PLoS ONE, 8, e57410, 2013). However, tasks requiring auditory stimulus delivery have not typically made use of AMT. In the present study, we evaluated the use of AMT for collecting spoken word identification and auditory lexical decision data. Although online users were faster and less accurate than participants in the lab, the results revealed strong correlations between the online and laboratory measures for both word identification accuracy and lexical decision speed. In addition, the scores obtained in the lab and online were equivalently correlated with factors that have been well established to predict word recognition, including word frequency and phonological neighborhood density. We also present and analyze a method for precise auditory reaction timing that is novel to behavioral research. Taken together, these findings suggest that AMT can be a viable alternative to the traditional laboratory setting as a source of participation for some spoken word recognition research.

Narrative skills in deaf children who use spoken English: Dissociations between macro and microstructural devices.

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Jones, -A C; Toscano, E; Botting, N; Marshall, C-R; Atkinson, J R; Denmark, T; Herman, -R; Morgan, G

2016-12-01

Previous research has highlighted that deaf children acquiring spoken English have difficulties in narrative development relative to their hearing peers both in terms of macro-structure and with micro-structural devices. The majority of previous research focused on narrative tasks designed for hearing children that depend on good receptive language skills. The current study compared narratives of 6 to 11-year-old deaf children who use spoken English (N=59) with matched for age and non-verbal intelligence hearing peers. To examine the role of general language abilities, single word vocabulary was also assessed. Narratives were elicited by the retelling of a story presented non-verbally in video format. Results showed that deaf and hearing children had equivalent macro-structure skills, but the deaf group showed poorer performance on micro-structural components. Furthermore, the deaf group gave less detailed responses to inferencing probe questions indicating poorer understanding of the story's underlying message. For deaf children, micro-level devices most strongly correlated with the vocabulary measure. These findings suggest that deaf children, despite spoken language delays, are able to convey the main elements of content and structure in narrative but have greater difficulty in using grammatical devices more dependent on finer linguistic and pragmatic skills. Crown Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Does Discourse Congruence Influence Spoken Language Comprehension before Lexical Association? Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

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Boudewyn, Megan A.; Gordon, Peter C.; Long, Debra; Polse, Lara; Swaab, Tamara Y.

2011-01-01

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an ERP norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a typical N400 effect when participants heard critical associated and unassociated target words in word pairs. In a subsequent experiment, we presented the same word pairs in spoken discourse contexts. Target words were always consistent with the local sentence context, but were congruent or not with the global discourse (e.g., “Luckily Ben had picked up some salt and pepper/basil”, preceded by a context in which Ben was preparing marinara sauce (congruent) or dealing with an icy walkway (incongruent). ERP effects of global discourse congruence preceded those of local lexical association, suggesting an early influence of the global discourse representation on lexical processing, even in locally congruent contexts. Furthermore, effects of lexical association occurred earlier in the congruent than incongruent condition. These results differ from those that have been obtained in studies of reading, suggesting that the effects may be unique to spoken word recognition. PMID:23002319

The application of network teaching in applied optics teaching

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Zhao, Huifu; Piao, Mingxu; Li, Lin; Liu, Dongmei

2017-08-01

Network technology has become a creative tool of changing human productivity, the rapid development of it has brought profound changes to our learning, working and life. Network technology has many advantages such as rich contents, various forms, convenient retrieval, timely communication and efficient combination of resources. Network information resources have become the new education resources, get more and more application in the education, has now become the teaching and learning tools. Network teaching enriches the teaching contents, changes teaching process from the traditional knowledge explanation into the new teaching process by establishing situation, independence and cooperation in the network technology platform. The teacher's role has shifted from teaching in classroom to how to guide students to learn better. Network environment only provides a good platform for the teaching, we can get a better teaching effect only by constantly improve the teaching content. Changchun university of science and technology introduced a BB teaching platform, on the platform, the whole optical classroom teaching and the classroom teaching can be improved. Teachers make assignments online, students learn independently offline or the group learned cooperatively, this expands the time and space of teaching. Teachers use hypertext form related knowledge of applied optics, rich cases and learning resources, set up the network interactive platform, homework submission system, message board, etc. The teaching platform simulated the learning interest of students and strengthens the interaction in the teaching.

From spoken narratives to domain knowledge: mining linguistic data for medical image understanding.

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Guo, Xuan; Yu, Qi; Alm, Cecilia Ovesdotter; Calvelli, Cara; Pelz, Jeff B; Shi, Pengcheng; Haake, Anne R

2014-10-01

Extracting useful visual clues from medical images allowing accurate diagnoses requires physicians' domain knowledge acquired through years of systematic study and clinical training. This is especially true in the dermatology domain, a medical specialty that requires physicians to have image inspection experience. Automating or at least aiding such efforts requires understanding physicians' reasoning processes and their use of domain knowledge. Mining physicians' references to medical concepts in narratives during image-based diagnosis of a disease is an interesting research topic that can help reveal experts' reasoning processes. It can also be a useful resource to assist with design of information technologies for image use and for image case-based medical education systems. We collected data for analyzing physicians' diagnostic reasoning processes by conducting an experiment that recorded their spoken descriptions during inspection of dermatology images. In this paper we focus on the benefit of physicians' spoken descriptions and provide a general workflow for mining medical domain knowledge based on linguistic data from these narratives. The challenge of a medical image case can influence the accuracy of the diagnosis as well as how physicians pursue the diagnostic process. Accordingly, we define two lexical metrics for physicians' narratives--lexical consensus score and top N relatedness score--and evaluate their usefulness by assessing the diagnostic challenge levels of corresponding medical images. We also report on clustering medical images based on anchor concepts obtained from physicians' medical term usage. These analyses are based on physicians' spoken narratives that have been preprocessed by incorporating the Unified Medical Language System for detecting medical concepts. The image rankings based on lexical consensus score and on top 1 relatedness score are well correlated with those based on challenge levels (Spearman correlation>0.5 and Kendall

Tonal Language Background and Detecting Pitch Contour in Spoken and Musical Items

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Stevens, Catherine J.; Keller, Peter E.; Tyler, Michael D.

2013-01-01

An experiment investigated the effect of tonal language background on discrimination of pitch contour in short spoken and musical items. It was hypothesized that extensive exposure to a tonal language attunes perception of pitch contour. Accuracy and reaction times of adult participants from tonal (Thai) and non-tonal (Australian English) language…

A Spoken-Language Intervention for School-Aged Boys with Fragile X Syndrome

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McDuffie, Andrea; Machalicek, Wendy; Bullard, Lauren; Nelson, Sarah; Mello, Melissa; Tempero-Feigles, Robyn; Castignetti, Nancy; Abbeduto, Leonard

2016-01-01

Using a single case design, a parent-mediated spoken-language intervention was delivered to three mothers and their school-aged sons with fragile X syndrome, the leading inherited cause of intellectual disability. The intervention was embedded in the context of shared storytelling using wordless picture books and targeted three empirically derived…

Generalization of opinions for forms and methods of teaching used od lower stages of universities

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Rudolf Šrámek

2005-01-01

Full Text Available Competent persons show, that more than 90% of teachers of Czech elementary schools and secondary schools until and since of 90-s of last century used and still use stereotype forms and methods of teaching; these procedures, which are little autonomic, formative and social. Procedures of sharing know- ledge to students and underestimating of deducing of knowledge with students.

The Effects of Listener's Familiarity about a Talker on the Free Recall Task of Spoken Words

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Chikako Oda

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Several recent studies have examined an interaction between talker's acoustic characteristics and spoken word recognition in speech perception and have shown that listener's familiarity about a talker influences an easiness of spoken word processing. The present study examined the effect of listener's familiarity about talkers on the free recall task of words spoken by two talkers. Subjects participated in three conditions of the task: the listener has (1 explicit knowledge, (2 implicit knowledge, and (3 no knowledge of the talker. In condition (1, subjects were familiar with talker's voices and were initially informed whose voices they would hear. In condition (2, subjects were familiar with talkers' voices but were not informed whose voices they would hear. In condition (3, subjects were entirely unfamiliar with talker's voices and were not informed whose voices they would hear. We analyzed the percentage of correct answers and compared these results across three conditions. We will discuss the possibility of whether a listener's knowledge about the individual talker's acoustic characteristics stored in long term memory could reduce the quantity of the cognitive resources required in the verbal information processing.

An fMRI study of concreteness effects during spoken word recognition in aging. Preservation or attenuation?

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Tracy eRoxbury

2016-01-01

Full Text Available It is unclear whether healthy aging influences concreteness effects (ie. the processing advantage seen for concrete over abstract words and its associated neural mechanisms. We conducted an fMRI study on young and older healthy adults performing auditory lexical decisions on concrete versus abstract words. We found that spoken comprehension of concrete and abstract words appears relatively preserved for healthy older individuals, including the concreteness effect. This preserved performance was supported by altered activity in left hemisphere regions including the inferior and middle frontal gyri, angular gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. This pattern is consistent with age-related compensatory mechanisms supporting spoken word processing.

A real-time spoken-language system for interactive problem-solving, combining linguistic and statistical technology for improved spoken language understanding

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Moore, Robert C.; Cohen, Michael H.

1993-09-01

Under this effort, SRI has developed spoken-language technology for interactive problem solving, featuring real-time performance for up to several thousand word vocabularies, high semantic accuracy, habitability within the domain, and robustness to many sources of variability. Although the technology is suitable for many applications, efforts to date have focused on developing an Air Travel Information System (ATIS) prototype application. SRI's ATIS system has been evaluated in four ARPA benchmark evaluations, and has consistently been at or near the top in performance. These achievements are the result of SRI's technical progress in speech recognition, natural-language processing, and speech and natural-language integration.

Guide to Spoken-Word Recordings: Popular Literature. Reference Circular No. 95-01.

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Library of Congress, Washington, DC. National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.

This reference circular contains selected sources for the purchase, rental, or loan of fiction and nonfiction spoken-word recordings. The sources in sections 1, 2, and 3 are commercial and, unless otherwise noted, offer abridged and unabridged titles on audio cassette. Sources in section 1 make available popular fiction; classics; poetry; drama;…

Pointing and Reference in Sign Language and Spoken Language: Anchoring vs. Identifying

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Barberà, Gemma; Zwets, Martine

2013-01-01

In both signed and spoken languages, pointing serves to direct an addressee's attention to a particular entity. This entity may be either present or absent in the physical context of the conversation. In this article we focus on pointing directed to nonspeaker/nonaddressee referents in Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal,…

Interference Effects on the Recall of Pictures, Printed Words, and Spoken Words.

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Burton, John K.; Bruning, Roger H.

1982-01-01

Nouns were presented in triads as pictures, printed words, or spoken words and followed by various types of interference. Measures of short- and long-term memory were obtained. In short-term memory, pictorial superiority occurred with acoustic, and visual and acoustic, but not visual interference. Long-term memory showed superior recall for…

INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN COOPERATIVE LEARNING: MORE OPPORTUNITIES TO PRODUCE SPOKEN ENGLISH

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Puji Astuti

2017-05-01

Full Text Available The contribution of cooperative learning (CL in promoting second and foreign language learning has been widely acknowledged. Little scholarly attention, however, has been given to revealing how this teaching method works and promotes learners’ improved communicative competence. This qualitative case study explores the important role that individual accountability in CL plays in giving English as a Foreign Language (EFL learners in Indonesia the opportunity to use the target language of English. While individual accountability is a principle of and one of the activities in CL, it is currently under studied, thus little is known about how it enhances EFL learning. This study aims to address this gap by conducting a constructivist grounded theory analysis on participant observation, in-depth interview, and document analysis data drawn from two secondary school EFL teachers, 77 students in the observed classrooms, and four focal students. The analysis shows that through individual accountability in CL, the EFL learners had opportunities to use the target language, which may have contributed to the attainment of communicative competence—the goal of the EFL instruction. More specifically, compared to the use of conventional group work in the observed classrooms, through the activities of individual accountability in CL, i.e., performances and peer interaction, the EFL learners had more opportunities to use spoken English. The present study recommends that teachers, especially those new to CL, follow the preset procedure of selected CL instructional strategies or structures in order to recognize the activities within individual accountability in CL and understand how these activities benefit students.

Analysis of deposit of physiological and psychological theories of forming motive skills on development of theory of teaching to the physical drills

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Khudolii O.N.

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Influence of different theories is certain on the construction of process of teaching motive actions of young gymnasts. The results of complete factor experiment are presented. They allowed to formulate principle settings to the construction of process of teaching the physical drills of young gymnasts at the age 7-13 years old. On the construction of teaching process influences more in all: theory of functional systems (43%, р<0,001, theory of construction of motions (41%,р<0,001, theory of management mastering of knowledge, forming actions and concepts (2,6%, р<0,05. The positive effect of teaching depends on the successive decision of tasks of teaching and rational application of methods.

Initial fieldwork for LWAZI: a telephone-based spoken dialog system for rural South Africa

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Gumede, T

2009-03-01

Full Text Available government information and services. Our interviews, focus group discussions and surveys revealed that Lwazi, a telephone-based spoken dialog system, could greatly support current South African government efforts to effectively connect citizens to available...

THE RECOGNITION OF SPOKEN MONO-MORPHEMIC COMPOUNDS IN CHINESE

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Yu-da Lai

2012-12-01

Full Text Available This paper explores the auditory lexical access of mono-morphemic compounds in Chinese as a way of understanding the role of orthography in the recognition of spoken words. In traditional Chinese linguistics, a compound is a word written with two or more characters whether or not they are morphemic. A monomorphemic compound may either be a binding word, written with characters that only appear in this one word, or a non-binding word, written with characters that are chosen for their pronunciation but that also appear in other words. Our goal was to determine if this purely orthographic difference affects auditory lexical access by conducting a series of four experiments with materials matched by whole-word frequency, syllable frequency, cross-syllable predictability, cohort size, and acoustic duration, but differing in binding. An auditory lexical decision task (LDT found an orthographic effect: binding words were recognized more quickly than non-binding words. However, this effect disappeared in an auditory repetition and in a visual LDT with the same materials, implying that the orthographic effect during auditory lexical access was localized to the decision component and involved the influence of cross-character predictability without the activation of orthographic representations. This claim was further confirmed by overall faster recognition of spoken binding words in a cross-modal LDT with different types of visual interference. The theoretical and practical consequences of these findings are discussed.

The importance of causal connections in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse.

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Cevasco, Jazmin; van den Broek, Paul

2008-11-01

In this study, we investigated the psychological processes in spontaneous discourse comprehension through a network theory of discourse representation. Existing models of narrative comprehension describe the importance of causality processing for forming a representation of a text, but usually in the context of deliberately composed texts rather than in spontaneous, unplanned discourse. Our aim was to determine whether spontaneous discourse components with many causal connections are represented more strongly than components with few connections--similar to the findings in text comprehension literature--and whether any such effects depend on the medium in which the spontaneous discourse is presented (oral vs. written). Participants either listened to or read a transcription of a section of a radio transmission. They then recalled the spontaneous discourse material and answered comprehension questions. Results indicate that the processing of causal connections plays an important role in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse, and do not indicate that their effects on recall are weaker in the comprehension of oral discourse than in the comprehension of written discourse.

Interface for Barge-in Free Spoken Dialogue System Based on Sound Field Reproduction and Microphone Array

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Hinamoto Yoichi

2007-01-01

Full Text Available A barge-in free spoken dialogue interface using sound field control and microphone array is proposed. In the conventional spoken dialogue system using an acoustic echo canceller, it is indispensable to estimate a room transfer function, especially when the transfer function is changed by various interferences. However, the estimation is difficult when the user and the system speak simultaneously. To resolve the problem, we propose a sound field control technique to prevent the response sound from being observed. Combined with a microphone array, the proposed method can achieve high elimination performance with no adaptive process. The efficacy of the proposed interface is ascertained in the experiments on the basis of sound elimination and speech recognition.

Spoken Word Recognition in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Specific Language Impairment

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Loucas, Tom; Riches, Nick; Baird, Gillian; Pickles, Andrew; Simonoff, Emily; Chandler, Susie; Charman, Tony

2013-01-01

Spoken word recognition, during gating, appears intact in specific language impairment (SLI). This study used gating to investigate the process in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders plus language impairment (ALI). Adolescents with ALI, SLI, and typical language development (TLD), matched on nonverbal IQ listened to gated words that varied…

Children's Verbal Working Memory: Role of Processing Complexity in Predicting Spoken Sentence Comprehension

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Magimairaj, Beula M.; Montgomery, James W.

2012-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated the role of processing complexity of verbal working memory tasks in predicting spoken sentence comprehension in typically developing children. Of interest was whether simple and more complex working memory tasks have similar or different power in predicting sentence comprehension. Method: Sixty-five children (6- to…

The role of metalinguistic function in the construction of physical knowledge: Α theatre semiotics approach for preschool education

OpenAIRE

PANAGIOTIS PANTIDOS

2008-01-01

The rendering of physical knowledge in typical or non typical forms of teaching, is a process in which the spoken word and the language in general that is used centre on the (pre-) scientific code. In the case of science teaching, the special pedagogic framework places the discussion on concepts – regardless of school grade – at a metalinguistic level of elaboration. At this level, the extent of learning, internalisation and use of the special code is intensely brought out through the utteran...

Criteria for the segmentation of spoken input into individual utterances

OpenAIRE

Mast, Marion; Maier, Elisabeth; Schmitz, Birte

1995-01-01

This report describes how spoken language turns are segmented into utterances in the framework of the verbmobil project. The problem of segmenting turns is directly related to the task of annotating a discourse with dialogue act information: an utterance can be characterized as a stretch of dialogue that is attributed one dialogue act. Unfortunately, this rule in many cases is insufficient and many doubtful cases remain. We tried to at least reduce the number of unclear cases by providing a n...

Spoken Language Understanding Systems for Extracting Semantic Information from Speech

CERN Document Server

Tur, Gokhan

2011-01-01

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an emerging field in between speech and language processing, investigating human/ machine and human/ human communication by leveraging technologies from signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence. SLU systems are designed to extract the meaning from speech utterances and its applications are vast, from voice search in mobile devices to meeting summarization, attracting interest from both commercial and academic sectors. Both human/machine and human/human communications can benefit from the application of SLU, usin

THE USE OF UNTRADITIONAL FORMS OF TEACHING DURING CONDUCTING OF STUDIES OF THE SUBJECT “FUNDAMENTALS OF THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”.

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T. L. Arkhipova

2009-06-01

Full Text Available The use of untraditional forms of conducting the studies is favourable for the personal interest in the study of subject, develops creative independence of students, trains to work with the different sourcesof knowledge. Such forms of conducting the studies diversify traditional teaching character, are instrumental in the revival of . We can see such forms as debates, cross-words, scientific essay, , business games in the article.

Development of lexical-semantic language system: N400 priming effect for spoken words in 18- and 24-month old children.

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Rämä, Pia; Sirri, Louah; Serres, Josette

2013-04-01

Our aim was to investigate whether developing language system, as measured by a priming task for spoken words, is organized by semantic categories. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a priming task for spoken words in 18- and 24-month-old monolingual French learning children. Spoken word pairs were either semantically related (e.g., train-bike) or unrelated (e.g., chicken-bike). The results showed that the N400-like priming effect occurred in 24-month-olds over the right parietal-occipital recording sites. In 18-month-olds the effect was observed similarly to 24-month-olds only in those children with higher word production ability. The results suggest that words are categorically organized in the mental lexicon of children at the age of 2 years and even earlier in children with a high vocabulary. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Link between Form and Meaning in American Sign Language: Lexical Processing Effects

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Thompson, Robin L.; Vinson, David P.; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2009-01-01

Signed languages exploit iconicity (the transparent relationship between meaning and form) to a greater extent than spoken languages. where it is largely limited to onomatopoeia. In a picture-sign matching experiment measuring reaction times, the authors examined the potential advantage of iconicity both for 1st- and 2nd-language learners of…

Teaching Reading and Writing in Mother Tongue for Children with Visual Impairments

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Panagiotis GIOTIS

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Language plays an important role in the lives of human beings by means of communicating, expressing\tthoughts\tand\tdescribing\texperiences. Language\tpedagogy\tis\tthe\tscience\tthat\taims\tat education, teaching\tand implementation of the spoken\tand\twritten speech. If\twe\tare dealing with children who have special educational needs, e.g. visually impaired then the teaching is called special education. The loss of vision significantly affects people in various activities. Finding alternative\tmethods of communication is important. The\tmethod braille based touch allows to visually impaired people to write and read. The key element of writing is the exastigmo (six dots. The braille method is linguistically a faithful reproduction of written language. The\treading\tis\tbased on\tthe\tsame\tsounds,\tthe\tmeanings\tof\tthe\twords,\tthe\tgrammar and\tthe\tsemantics\twhich\tare\tnecessary\tfor\tthe\tunderstanding\tof\twritten\ttexts\tin\tany\tlanguage.

Recognition memory for Braille or spoken words: an fMRI study in early blind.

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Burton, Harold; Sinclair, Robert J; Agato, Alvin

2012-02-15

We examined cortical activity in early blind during word recognition memory. Nine participants were blind at birth and one by 1.5years. In an event-related design, we studied blood oxygen level-dependent responses to studied ("old") compared to novel ("new") words. Presentation mode was in Braille or spoken. Responses were larger for identified "new" words read with Braille in bilateral lower and higher tier visual areas and primary somatosensory cortex. Responses to spoken "new" words were larger in bilateral primary and accessory auditory cortex. Auditory cortex was unresponsive to Braille words and occipital cortex responded to spoken words but not differentially with "old"/"new" recognition. Left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex had larger responses to "old" words only with Braille. Larger occipital cortex responses to "new" Braille words suggested verbal memory based on the mechanism of recollection. A previous report in sighted noted larger responses for "new" words studied in association with pictures that created a distinctiveness heuristic source factor which enhanced recollection during remembering. Prior behavioral studies in early blind noted an exceptional ability to recall words. Utilization of this skill by participants in the current study possibly engendered recollection that augmented remembering "old" words. A larger response when identifying "new" words possibly resulted from exhaustive recollecting the sensory properties of "old" words in modality appropriate sensory cortices. The uniqueness of a memory role for occipital cortex is in its cross-modal responses to coding tactile properties of Braille. The latter possibly reflects a "sensory echo" that aids recollection. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

BLENDED LEARNING AS AN INNOVATIVE FORM OF TEACHING AND LEARNING AT SCHOOL

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Olga Kuzmenko

2017-09-01

Full Text Available In the paper the theoretical background of blended learning is examined, traditional brick-and-mortar and blended learning are compared, the advantages of blended learning are outlined and it effectiveness in foreign language teaching is proven. The topicality of this research is determined by the prospect of implementing the blended learning models to achieve the goals set by the National Strategy for the Development of Education in Ukraine for 2012-2021, namely: improving the quality of education on an innovative basis, creating and providing opportunities for implementing various learning models, forms and means of getting education. In this context, a modern educational institution is required to set up a combination of traditional and innovative forms of learning, and constantly update its information and communication resources, which cause the need to introduce the blended learning approach. Blended learning is a relatively new approach in the field of education in Ukraine. The great prospect of blended learning consists in its potential to combine the best of traditional and online practices. This is a formal education program in which pupils learn partially through online learning with some element of self-control over time, place and pace; and partially in a traditional classroom setting. It provides more efficiency and flexibility in comparison with traditional learning as well as online or distance learning. Moreover, blended learning implies a mastery-based approach ensuring that pupils achieve the required level of mastery at the end of the course. It also prepares learners to collaborate in an online environment and meet the demands of the modern labour market. This is particularly important for schools, because modern pupils are tech-savvy and their motivation is determined by the need for autonomy, personalization, communicatively-oriented and mastery-based learning. For the teaching staff, blended learning can improve teaching

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE IN SPOKEN AND SIGNED STORIES TOLD BY A DEAF CHILD WITH A COCHLEAR IMPLANT: WORDS, SIGNS OR PARALINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS?

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Ritva Takkinen

2011-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper the use and quality of the evaluative language produced by a bilingual child in a story-telling situation is analysed. The subject, an 11-year-old Finnish boy, Jimmy, is bilingual in Finnish sign language (FinSL and spoken Finnish.He was born deaf but got a cochlear implant at the age of five.The data consist of a spoken and a signed version of “The Frog Story”. The analysis shows that evaluative devices and expressions differ in the spoken and signed stories told by the child. In his Finnish story he uses mostly lexical devices – comments on a character and the character’s actions as well as quoted speech occasionally combined with prosodic features. In his FinSL story he uses both lexical and paralinguistic devices in a balanced way.

Grammar Teaching in Chinese Tertiary Education

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

LAN Hui-hui

2016-01-01

Grammar teaching, as one essential aspect of English language teaching (ELT), has been and continues to be an area of some controversy and debates, which entails the emergency of diverse classroom practices for language teachers:Focus on Form or Focus on FormS. Connected with the specific context of grammar teaching in Chinese higher education, this paper tends to re-consider the place of grammar teaching in the classroom, and come up with some feasible approaches to instructing grammar so as to make appropriate connections between grammatical forms and the meanings.

How sensory-motor systems impact the neural organization for language: direct contrasts between spoken and signed language

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Emmorey, Karen; McCullough, Stephen; Mehta, Sonya; Grabowski, Thomas J.

2014-01-01

To investigate the impact of sensory-motor systems on the neural organization for language, we conducted an H215O-PET study of sign and spoken word production (picture-naming) and an fMRI study of sign and audio-visual spoken language comprehension (detection of a semantically anomalous sentence) with hearing bilinguals who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Directly contrasting speech and sign production revealed greater activation in bilateral parietal cortex for signing, while speaking resulted in greater activation in bilateral superior temporal cortex (STC) and right frontal cortex, likely reflecting auditory feedback control. Surprisingly, the language production contrast revealed a relative increase in activation in bilateral occipital cortex for speaking. We speculate that greater activation in visual cortex for speaking may actually reflect cortical attenuation when signing, which functions to distinguish self-produced from externally generated visual input. Directly contrasting speech and sign comprehension revealed greater activation in bilateral STC for speech and greater activation in bilateral occipital-temporal cortex for sign. Sign comprehension, like sign production, engaged bilateral parietal cortex to a greater extent than spoken language. We hypothesize that posterior parietal activation in part reflects processing related to spatial classifier constructions in ASL and that anterior parietal activation may reflect covert imitation that functions as a predictive model during sign comprehension. The conjunction analysis for comprehension revealed that both speech and sign bilaterally engaged the inferior frontal gyrus (with more extensive activation on the left) and the superior temporal sulcus, suggesting an invariant bilateral perisylvian language system. We conclude that surface level differences between sign and spoken languages should not be dismissed and are critical for understanding the neurobiology of language

The influence of talker and foreign-accent variability on spoken word identification.

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Bent, Tessa; Holt, Rachael Frush

2013-03-01

In spoken word identification and memory tasks, stimulus variability from numerous sources impairs performance. In the current study, the influence of foreign-accent variability on spoken word identification was evaluated in two experiments. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design to test word identification in noise in single-talker and two multiple-talker conditions: multiple talkers with the same accent and multiple talkers with different accents. Identification performance was highest in the single-talker condition, but there was no difference between the single-accent and multiple-accent conditions. Experiment 2 further explored word recognition for multiple talkers in single-accent versus multiple-accent conditions using a mixed design. A detriment to word recognition was observed in the multiple-accent condition compared to the single-accent condition, but the effect differed across the language backgrounds tested. These results demonstrate that the processing of foreign-accent variation may influence word recognition in ways similar to other sources of variability (e.g., speaking rate or style) in that the inclusion of multiple foreign accents can result in a small but significant performance decrement beyond the multiple-talker effect.

Expected Test Scores for Preschoolers with a Cochlear Implant Who Use Spoken Language

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Nicholas, Johanna G.; Geers, Ann E.

2008-01-01

Purpose: The major purpose of this study was to provide information about expected spoken language skills of preschool-age children who are deaf and who use a cochlear implant. A goal was to provide "benchmarks" against which those skills could be compared, for a given age at implantation. We also examined whether parent-completed…

Contextualizing Teacher Autonomy in Time and Space: A Model for Comparing Various Forms of Governing the Teaching Profession

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Wermke, Wieland; Höstfält, Gabriella

2014-01-01

This study aims to develop a model for comparing different forms of teacher autonomy in various national contexts and at different times. Understanding and explaining local differences and global similarities in the teaching profession in a globalized world require conceptions that contribute to further theorization of comparative and…

Difference between Written and Spoken Czech: The Case of Verbal Nouns Denoting an Action

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Kolářová, V.; Kolář, Jan; Mikulová, M.

2017-01-01

Roč. 107, č. 1 (2017), s. 19-38 ISSN 0032-6585 Institutional support: RVO:67985840 Keywords : written Czech * spoken Czech * verbal nouns Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Pure mathematics https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pralin.2017.107.issue-1/pralin-2017-0002/pralin-2017-0002.xml

Intentional and Reactive Inhibition during Spoken-Word Stroop Task Performance in People with Aphasia

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Pompon, Rebecca Hunting; McNeil, Malcolm R.; Spencer, Kristie A.; Kendall, Diane L.

2015-01-01

Purpose: The integrity of selective attention in people with aphasia (PWA) is currently unknown. Selective attention is essential for everyday communication, and inhibition is an important part of selective attention. This study explored components of inhibition--both intentional and reactive inhibition--during spoken-word production in PWA and in…

Difference between Written and Spoken Czech: The Case of Verbal Nouns Denoting an Action

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Kolářová, V.; Kolář, Jan; Mikulová, M.

2017-01-01

Roč. 107, č. 1 (2017), s. 19-38 ISSN 0032-6585 Institutional support: RVO:67985840 Keywords : written Czech * spoken Czech * verbal nouns Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Pure mathematics https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pralin.2017.107.issue-1/pralin-2017-0002/pralin-2017-0002. xml

Recognition Memory for Braille or Spoken Words: An fMRI study in Early Blind

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Burton, Harold; Sinclair, Robert J.; Agato, Alvin

2012-01-01

We examined cortical activity in early blind during word recognition memory. Nine participants were blind at birth and one by 1.5 yrs. In an event-related design, we studied blood oxygen level-dependent responses to studied (“old”) compared to novel (“new”) words. Presentation mode was in Braille or spoken. Responses were larger for identified “new” words read with Braille in bilateral lower and higher tier visual areas and primary somatosensory cortex. Responses to spoken “new” words were larger in bilateral primary and accessory auditory cortex. Auditory cortex was unresponsive to Braille words and occipital cortex responded to spoken words but not differentially with “old”/“new” recognition. Left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex had larger responses to “old” words only with Braille. Larger occipital cortex responses to “new” Braille words suggested verbal memory based on the mechanism of recollection. A previous report in sighted noted larger responses for “new” words studied in association with pictures that created a distinctiveness heuristic source factor which enhanced recollection during remembering. Prior behavioral studies in early blind noted an exceptional ability to recall words. Utilization of this skill by participants in the current study possibly engendered recollection that augmented remembering “old” words. A larger response when identifying “new” words possibly resulted from exhaustive recollecting the sensory properties of “old” words in modality appropriate sensory cortices. The uniqueness of a memory role for occipital cortex is in its cross-modal responses to coding tactile properties of Braille. The latter possibly reflects a “sensory echo” that aids recollection. PMID:22251836

LOGICAL-ORIENTED TASKS AS A FORM OF ORGANIZATION OF THE EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL CONTENT IN TEACHING MATHEMATICS TO STUDENTS

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Oksana Smirnova

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The article substantiates the need to improve the logical preparation of students. The authors regard the logical-oriented tasks as a form of organization of the content of educational material in teaching Mathematics and discriminate the types of tasks aimed at the formation of logical methods and operations.

A word by any other intonation: fMRI evidence for implicit memory traces for pitch contours of spoken words in adult brains.

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Michael Inspector

Full Text Available OBJECTIVES: Intonation may serve as a cue for facilitated recognition and processing of spoken words and it has been suggested that the pitch contour of spoken words is implicitly remembered. Thus, using the repetition suppression (RS effect of BOLD-fMRI signals, we tested whether the same spoken words are differentially processed in language and auditory brain areas depending on whether or not they retain an arbitrary intonation pattern. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: Words were presented repeatedly in three blocks for passive and active listening tasks. There were three prosodic conditions in each of which a different set of words was used and specific task-irrelevant intonation changes were applied: (i All words presented in a set flat monotonous pitch contour (ii Each word had an arbitrary pitch contour that was set throughout the three repetitions. (iii Each word had a different arbitrary pitch contour in each of its repetition. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The repeated presentations of words with a set pitch contour, resulted in robust behavioral priming effects as well as in significant RS of the BOLD signals in primary auditory cortex (BA 41, temporal areas (BA 21 22 bilaterally and in Broca's area. However, changing the intonation of the same words on each successive repetition resulted in reduced behavioral priming and the abolition of RS effects. CONCLUSIONS: Intonation patterns are retained in memory even when the intonation is task-irrelevant. Implicit memory traces for the pitch contour of spoken words were reflected in facilitated neuronal processing in auditory and language associated areas. Thus, the results lend support for the notion that prosody and specifically pitch contour is strongly associated with the memory representation of spoken words.

Stimulus variability and the phonetic relevance hypothesis: effects of variability in speaking style, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate on spoken word identification.

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Sommers, Mitchell S; Barcroft, Joe

2006-04-01

Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of trial-to-trial variations in speaking style, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate on identification of spoken words. In addition, the experiments investigated whether any effects of stimulus variability would be modulated by phonetic confusability (i.e., lexical difficulty). In Experiment 1, trial-to-trial variations in speaking style reduced the overall identification performance compared with conditions containing no speaking-style variability. In addition, the effects of variability were greater for phonetically confusable words than for phonetically distinct words. In Experiment 2, variations in fundamental frequency were found to have no significant effects on spoken word identification and did not interact with lexical difficulty. In Experiment 3, two different methods for varying speaking rate were found to have equivalent negative effects on spoken word recognition and similar interactions with lexical difficulty. Overall, the findings are consistent with a phonetic-relevance hypothesis, in which accommodating sources of acoustic-phonetic variability that affect phonetically relevant properties of speech signals can impair spoken word identification. In contrast, variability in parameters of the speech signal that do not affect phonetically relevant properties are not expected to affect overall identification performance. Implications of these findings for the nature and development of lexical representations are discussed.

Personality Structure in the Trait Lexicon of Hindi, a Major Language Spoken in India

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Singh, Jitendra K.; Misra, Girishwar; De Raad, Boele

2013-01-01

The psycho-lexical approach is extended to Hindi, a major language spoken in India. From both the dictionary and from Hindi novels, a huge set of personality descriptors was put together, ultimately reduced to a manageable set of 295 trait terms. Both self and peer ratings were collected on those

Spoken commands control robot that handles radioactive materials

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Phelan, P.F.; Keddy, C.; Beugelsdojk, T.J.

1989-01-01

Several robotic systems have been developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory to handle radioactive material. Because of safety considerations, the robotic system must be under direct human supervision and interactive control continuously. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a voice-recognition system that permits this control, yet allows the robot to perform complex preprogrammed manipulations without the operator's intervention. To provide better interactive control, we connected to the robot's control computer, a speech synthesis unit, which provides audible feedback to the operator. Thus upon completion of a task or if an emergency arises, an appropriate spoken message can be reported by the control computer. The training programming and operation of this commercially available system are discussed, as are the practical problems encountered during operations

An fMRI study of concreteness effects in spoken word recognition.

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Roxbury, Tracy; McMahon, Katie; Copland, David A

2014-09-30

Evidence for the brain mechanisms recruited when processing concrete versus abstract concepts has been largely derived from studies employing visual stimuli. The tasks and baseline contrasts used have also involved varying degrees of lexical processing. This study investigated the neural basis of the concreteness effect during spoken word recognition and employed a lexical decision task with a novel pseudoword condition. The participants were seventeen healthy young adults (9 females). The stimuli consisted of (a) concrete, high imageability nouns, (b) abstract, low imageability nouns and (c) opaque legal pseudowords presented in a pseudorandomised, event-related design. Activation for the concrete, abstract and pseudoword conditions was analysed using anatomical regions of interest derived from previous findings of concrete and abstract word processing. Behaviourally, lexical decision reaction times for the concrete condition were significantly faster than both abstract and pseudoword conditions and the abstract condition was significantly faster than the pseudoword condition (p word recognition. Significant activity was also elicited by concrete words relative to pseudowords in the left fusiform and left anterior middle temporal gyrus. These findings confirm the involvement of a widely distributed network of brain regions that are activated in response to the spoken recognition of concrete but not abstract words. Our findings are consistent with the proposal that distinct brain regions are engaged as convergence zones and enable the binding of supramodal input.

Forms of encoded pragmatic meaning: semantic prosody. A lexicographic perspective.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mojca Šorli

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Abstract – The present paper focuses on ways in which the pragmatic (functional meaning that arises from various contextual features, known in corpus linguistics as semantic prosody (Sinclair 1996, 2004; Louw 1993, etc. can become an integral part of lexicographic descriptions. This is especially important for the treatment of phraseology and idiomatics. The workings of semantic prosody are a good example of the ways pragmatic meaning exploits linguistic means to be codified in the text. We thus investigate the meaning that can only be studied in context, as it is completely dependent on collocation, i.e., syntagmatic relations, and therefore cannot be attributed solely to a concrete word form. Corpus analysis has yielded significant results in areas such as the lexicographic treatment of semantic prosody. We believe that in order to improve teaching pragmatics in all its complexity, it is necessary to recognise and assess various aspects of pragmatic meaning both in written and spoken language. Second/foreign language teaching/learning in particular has been strongly dependent on the inclusion of relevant information in dictionaries, in which, traditionally, pragmatic aspects of meaning have been largely neglected. Language technologies have enabled us both to study the subtleties of pragmatic meaning and to design accurate and more user-friendly (pedagogical dictionaries. We will attempt to demonstrate the value of explicit description of functional pragmatic meaning, i.e. semantic prosody, as implemented in the Slovene Lexical Database (2008-2012. A brief overview of the theoretical background is first provided, after which we describe the definition strategies employed to include pragmatics, as well as presenting a case study and arguing that explicating semantic prosody is crucial in developing pragmatic competence in (young/foreign language learners. Keywords: semantic prosody; pragmatics; lexicographic description; dictionary; lexical

A Prerequisite to L1 Homophone Effects in L2 Spoken-Word Recognition

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Nakai, Satsuki; Lindsay, Shane; Ota, Mitsuhiko

2015-01-01

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

Tag Questions across Irish English and British English: A Corpus Analysis of Form and Function

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Barron, Anne; Pandarova, Irina; Muderack, Karoline

2015-01-01

The present study, situated in the area of variational pragmatics, contrasts tag question (TQ) use in Ireland and Great Britain using spoken data from the Irish and British components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Analysis is on the formal and functional level and also investigates form-functional relationships. Findings reveal…

A framework for teaching educators to teach innovation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rump, Camilla Østerberg; Nielsen, Jan Alexis; Andersson, Pernille Hammar

in the form of a possible conceptual basis for teachers of I&E, that will enable them to interpret the meaning of I&E in their own discipline, and design teaching and learning activities that will support student development of I&E capabilities. In the paper, we present a framework for the course in the form...... to these challenges, three Danish universities in the Copenhagen area have taken the initiative to develop a course for educators at the three institutions that will provide the necessary skills to teach innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) to their students. In this paper, we present a framework for the course...... and non-intended use of the innovation. • Teaching for innovation with the intension for students to develop innovative skills or teaching through innovation with the intention for students to learn the disciplinary knowledge through innovative processes. • How does I&E relate to the disciplinary...

Suprasegmental lexical stress cues in visual speech can guide spoken-word recognition.

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Jesse, Alexandra; McQueen, James M

2014-01-01

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also use visual suprasegmental cues. In two categorization experiments, Dutch participants saw a speaker say fragments of word pairs that were segmentally identical but differed in their stress realization (e.g., 'ca-vi from cavia "guinea pig" vs. 'ka-vi from kaviaar "caviar"). Participants were able to distinguish between these pairs from seeing a speaker alone. Only the presence of primary stress in the fragment, not its absence, was informative. Participants were able to distinguish visually primary from secondary stress on first syllables, but only when the fragment-bearing target word carried phrase-level emphasis. Furthermore, participants distinguished fragments with primary stress on their second syllable from those with secondary stress on their first syllable (e.g., pro-'jec from projector "projector" vs. 'pro-jec from projectiel "projectile"), independently of phrase-level emphasis. Seeing a speaker thus contributes to spoken-word recognition by providing suprasegmental information about the presence of primary lexical stress.

Brain-to-text: Decoding spoken phrases from phone representations in the brain

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Christian eHerff

2015-06-01

Full Text Available It has long been speculated whether communication between humans and machines based on natural speech related cortical activity is possible. Over the past decade, studies have suggested that it is feasible to recognize isolated aspects of speech from neural signals, such as auditory features, phones or one of a few isolated words. However, until now it remained an unsolved challenge to decode continuously spoken speech from the neural substrate associated with speech and language processing. Here, we show for the first time that continuously spoken speech can be decoded into the expressed words from intracranial electrocorticographic (ECoG recordings. Specifically, we implemented a system, which we call Brain-To-Text that models single phones, employs techniques from automatic speech recognition (ASR, and thereby transforms brain activity while speaking into the corresponding textual representation. Our results demonstrate that our system achieved word error rates as low as 25% and phone error rates below 50%. Additionally, our approach contributes to the current understanding of the neural basis of continuous speech production by identifying those cortical regions that hold substantial information about individual phones. In conclusion, the Brain-To-Text system described in this paper represents an important step towards human-machine communication based on imagined speech.

Frequency of Applying Different Teaching Strategies and Social Teaching Methods in Primary Schools

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Ivic, Sonja

2016-01-01

The question that every modern teacher raises in their daily work is the reflection on selecting teaching strategies and social forms of teaching. Unlike traditional teaching strategies in which knowledge transfer is mainly done by the teacher while the students are passive listeners and recipients of such knowledge, modern teaching strategies…

METONYMY BASED ON CULTURAL BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE AND PRAGMATIC INFERENCING: EVIDENCE FROM SPOKEN DISCOURSE

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Arijana Krišković

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Th e characterization of metonymy as a conceptual tool for guiding inferencing in language has opened a new fi eld of study in cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. To appreciate the value of metonymy for pragmatic inferencing, metonymy should not be viewed as performing only its prototypical referential function. Metonymic mappings are operative in speech acts at the level of reference, predication, proposition and illocution. Th e aim of this paper is to study the role of metonymy in pragmatic inferencing in spoken discourse in televison interviews. Case analyses of authentic utterances classifi ed as illocutionary metonymies following the pragmatic typology of metonymic functions are presented. Th e inferencing processes are facilitated by metonymic connections existing between domains or subdomains in the same functional domain. It has been widely accepted by cognitive linguists that universal human knowledge and embodiment are essential for the interpretation of metonymy. Th is analysis points to the role of cultural background knowledge in understanding target meanings. All these aspects of metonymic connections are exploited in complex inferential processes in spoken discourse. In most cases, metaphoric mappings are also a part of utterance interpretation.

L1 and L2 Spoken Word Processing: Evidence from Divided Attention Paradigm.

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Shafiee Nahrkhalaji, Saeedeh; Lotfi, Ahmad Reza; Koosha, Mansour

2016-10-01

The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L 1 ) and second language (L 2 ) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of these bilinguals. The other goal is to explore the effects of attention manipulation on implicit retrieval of perceptual and conceptual properties of spoken L 1 and L 2 words. In so doing, the participants performed auditory word priming and semantic priming as memory tests in their L 1 and L 2 . In a half of the trials of each experiment, they carried out the memory test while simultaneously performing a secondary task in visual modality. The results revealed that effects of auditory word priming and semantic priming were present when participants processed L 1 and L 2 words in full attention condition. Attention manipulation could reduce priming magnitude in both experiments in L 2 . Moreover, L 2 word retrieval increases the reaction times and reduces accuracy on the simultaneous secondary task to protect its own accuracy and speed.

Suprasegmental lexical stress cues in visual speech can guide spoken-word recognition

OpenAIRE

Jesse, A.; McQueen, J.

2014-01-01

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also use visual suprasegmental cues. In two categorization experiments, Dutch participants saw a speaker...

Brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children and its disruption in dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Kovelman, Ioulia; Norton, Elizabeth S; Christodoulou, Joanna A; Gaab, Nadine; Lieberman, Daniel A; Triantafyllou, Christina; Wolf, Maryanne; Whitfield-Gabrieli, Susan; Gabrieli, John D E

2012-04-01

Phonological awareness, knowledge that speech is composed of syllables and phonemes, is critical for learning to read. Phonological awareness precedes and predicts successful transition from language to literacy, and weakness in phonological awareness is a leading cause of dyslexia, but the brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children is unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of phonological awareness using an auditory word-rhyming task in children who were typical readers or who had dyslexia (ages 7-13) and a younger group of kindergarteners (ages 5-6). Typically developing children, but not children with dyslexia, recruited left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when making explicit phonological judgments. Kindergarteners, who were matched to the older children with dyslexia on standardized tests of phonological awareness, also recruited left DLPFC. Left DLPFC may play a critical role in the development of phonological awareness for spoken language critical for reading and in the etiology of dyslexia.

AFRREV IJAH, Vol.2 (4) September, 2013

African Journals Online (AJOL)

First Lady

2013-09-08

Sep 8, 2013 ... the teaching and learning of spoken English in selected private/public secondary schools in South ... benefit with ease from variety of data. Similarly, Esimaje, & ... Akindele: Availability & Utilization of ICT for Spoken English.

Teaching Moments: Opening the Pipeline to Teaching Innovations

Science.gov (United States)

Tanner, John F.; Whalen, D. Joel

2013-01-01

This paper demonstrates a strategy to speed teaching innovation transfer between marketing educators. Nine teaching innovations presented at the Society for Marketing Advances 2012 Annual Conference are offered in a brief catalog form. The reader can also download support materials at www.salesleadershipcenter.com/research.html#mer-tm13/.…

Effects of early auditory experience on the spoken language of deaf children at 3 years of age.

Science.gov (United States)

Nicholas, Johanna Grant; Geers, Ann E

2006-06-01

By age 3, typically developing children have achieved extensive vocabulary and syntax skills that facilitate both cognitive and social development. Substantial delays in spoken language acquisition have been documented for children with severe to profound deafness, even those with auditory oral training and early hearing aid use. This study documents the spoken language skills achieved by orally educated 3-yr-olds whose profound hearing loss was identified and hearing aids fitted between 1 and 30 mo of age and who received a cochlear implant between 12 and 38 mo of age. The purpose of the analysis was to examine the effects of age, duration, and type of early auditory experience on spoken language competence at age 3.5 yr. The spoken language skills of 76 children who had used a cochlear implant for at least 7 mo were evaluated via standardized 30-minute language sample analysis, a parent-completed vocabulary checklist, and a teacher language-rating scale. The children were recruited from and enrolled in oral education programs or therapy practices across the United States. Inclusion criteria included presumed deaf since birth, English the primary language of the home, no other known conditions that interfere with speech/language development, enrolled in programs using oral education methods, and no known problems with the cochlear implant lasting more than 30 days. Strong correlations were obtained among all language measures. Therefore, principal components analysis was used to derive a single Language Factor score for each child. A number of possible predictors of language outcome were examined, including age at identification and intervention with a hearing aid, duration of use of a hearing aid, pre-implant pure-tone average (PTA) threshold with a hearing aid, PTA threshold with a cochlear implant, and duration of use of a cochlear implant/age at implantation (the last two variables were practically identical because all children were tested between 40 and 44

Using Key Part-of-Speech Analysis to Examine Spoken Discourse by Taiwanese EFL Learners

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Lin, Yen-Liang

2015-01-01

This study reports on a corpus analysis of samples of spoken discourse between a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, with the aim of exploring the statistically significant differences in the use of grammatical categories between the two groups of participants. The key word method extended to a part-of-speech level using the web-based…

The Effectiveness of the Brain Based Teaching Approach in Enhancing Scientific Understanding of Newtonian Physics among Form Four Students

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Saleh, Salmiza

2012-01-01

The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of Brain Based Teaching Approach in enhancing students' scientific understanding of Newtonian Physics in the context of Form Four Physics instruction. The technique was implemented based on the Brain Based Learning Principles developed by Caine & Caine (1991, 2003). This brain compatible…

"Poetry Is Not a Special Club": How Has an Introduction to the Secondary Discourse of Spoken Word Made Poetry a Memorable Learning Experience for Young People?

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Dymoke, Sue

2017-01-01

This paper explores the impact of a Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP hereafter) on young people's engagement with poetry in a group of schools in London, UK. It does so with reference to the secondary Discourses of school-based learning and the Spoken Word community, an artistic "community of practice" into which they were being…

Students who are deaf and hard of hearing and use sign language: considerations and strategies for developing spoken language and literacy skills.

Science.gov (United States)

Nussbaum, Debra; Waddy-Smith, Bettie; Doyle, Jane

2012-11-01

There is a core body of knowledge, experience, and skills integral to facilitating auditory, speech, and spoken language development when working with the general population of students who are deaf and hard of hearing. There are additional issues, strategies, and challenges inherent in speech habilitation/rehabilitation practices essential to the population of deaf and hard of hearing students who also use sign language. This article will highlight philosophical and practical considerations related to practices used to facilitate spoken language development and associated literacy skills for children and adolescents who sign. It will discuss considerations for planning and implementing practices that acknowledge and utilize a student's abilities in sign language, and address how to link these skills to developing and using spoken language. Included will be considerations for children from early childhood through high school with a broad range of auditory access, language, and communication characteristics. Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.

Positive Emotional Language in the Final Words Spoken Directly Before Execution.

Science.gov (United States)

Hirschmüller, Sarah; Egloff, Boris

2015-01-01

How do individuals emotionally cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality? DeWall and Baumeister as well as Kashdan and colleagues previously provided support that an increased use of positive emotion words serves as a way to protect and defend against mortality salience of one's own contemplated death. Although these studies provide important insights into the psychological dynamics of mortality salience, it remains an open question how individuals cope with the immense threat of mortality prior to their imminent actual death. In the present research, we therefore analyzed positivity in the final words spoken immediately before execution by 407 death row inmates in Texas. By using computerized quantitative text analysis as an objective measure of emotional language use, our results showed that the final words contained a significantly higher proportion of positive than negative emotion words. This emotional positivity was significantly higher than (a) positive emotion word usage base rates in spoken and written materials and (b) positive emotional language use with regard to contemplated death and attempted or actual suicide. Additional analyses showed that emotional positivity in final statements was associated with a greater frequency of language use that was indicative of self-references, social orientation, and present-oriented time focus as well as with fewer instances of cognitive-processing, past-oriented, and death-related word use. Taken together, our findings offer new insights into how individuals cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality.

Cohesion as interaction in ELF spoken discourse

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T. Christiansen

2013-10-01

Full Text Available Hitherto, most research into cohesion has concentrated on texts (usually written only in standard Native Speaker English – e.g. Halliday and Hasan (1976. By contrast, following on the work in anaphora of such scholars as Reinhart (1983 and Cornish (1999, Christiansen (2011 describes cohesion as an interac­tive process focusing on the link between text cohesion and discourse coherence. Such a consideration of cohesion from the perspective of discourse (i.e. the process of which text is the product -- Widdowson 1984, p. 100 is especially relevant within a lingua franca context as the issue of different variations of ELF and inter-cultural concerns (Guido 2008 add extra dimensions to the complex multi-code interaction. In this case study, six extracts of transcripts (approximately 1000 words each, taken from the VOICE corpus (2011 of conference question and answer sessions (spoken interaction set in multicultural university con­texts are analysed in depth by means of a qualitative method.

Effective teaching strategies in Australian multicultural classroom

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

高芳卉

2011-01-01

@@ 1 Introduction@@ Australia's population is increasingly culturally diverse.The diverse composition of the Australian population is reflected in the ACT.The 1991 census showed 65,739 people counted in the ACT were bern overseas,representing 23.5％ of the population.Almost 10％ of the respondents to the census came from non-English - speaking countries.(1) The results from the 2001 census showed that of the 4,645,000 people in Victoria,almost one quarter (23.4％) were born overseas,represented 208 countries and spoke 151 languages.English was spoken at home by 75.3％ of Victorians.(2) These numbers are reflected in our schools because students come from many cultural,educational and language backgrounds.The increasingly muhieultural populations in our schools present many challenges for schools and teachers,with regards to inclusive teaching strategies,language differences,muhieuhural curricular practices,racism issues and numerous other factors.

L[subscript 1] and L[subscript 2] Spoken Word Processing: Evidence from Divided Attention Paradigm

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Shafiee Nahrkhalaji, Saeedeh; Lotfi, Ahmad Reza; Koosha, Mansour

2016-01-01

The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L[subscript 1]) and second language (L[subscript 2]) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of…

Between Syntax and Pragmatics: The Causal Conjunction Protože in Spoken and Written Czech

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Čermáková, Anna; Komrsková, Zuzana; Kopřivová, Marie; Poukarová, Petra

-, 25.04.2017 (2017), s. 393-414 ISSN 2509-9507 R&D Projects: GA ČR GA15-01116S Institutional support: RVO:68378092 Keywords : Causality * Discourse marker * Spoken language * Czech Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics OBOR OECD: Linguistics https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs41701-017-0014-y.pdf

Mental Imagery as Revealed by Eye Movements and Spoken Predicates: A Test of Neurolinguistic Programming.

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Elich, Matthew; And Others

1985-01-01

Tested Bandler and Grinder's proposal that eye movement direction and spoken predicates are indicative of sensory modality of imagery. Subjects reported images in the three modes, but no relation between imagery and eye movements or predicates was found. Visual images were most vivid and often reported. Most subjects rated themselves as visual,…

The Bakayat SpokenText Tradition The Articulation of Religious Value and Social Discourse of Sasak Community in Lombok

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I Made Suyasa

2017-01-01

Full Text Available This study explored the bakayat spoken-text tradition of the Sasak people in Lombok. The tradition was used as media for preaching on Islamic day, customs and ceremonies, as well as appreciating the folk literature. Malay literary texts that contained religious values were articulated continuously in various social discourses by the community that owned this tradition. The impact of the globalization and the inclusion of various Islamic doctrines in Lombok have threatened the existence of the bakayat tradition and now most Sasak people especially the younger ones are not interested in this tradition. The background explained above has become the main reason why this study was conducted. Moreover, there were still a few studies which had investigated the bakayat tradition in-depth. This present study was focused on the history, structure, function, meaning, and articulation of the religious values and social discourse of the bakayat tradition bySasak people. This research used the descriptive analytical method. The data were analyzed using the interpretive qualitative method. The theories used in this study were the theory narratology proposed by Gerard Genette (1986, the theory of articulation proposed by Stuart Hall (1986, the theory of functions, and the theory of semiotics. The results of this study showed that the historical development ofthe Sasakbakayat tradition was characterized by the emergence of Islam in Lombok. It significantly contributed to the existence of bakayat. It was followed by the Islamic Malay literature which was used as the reading material in the bakayat tradition and the media for learning Islam. The historical development of the bakayat Sasak was explained in various aspects such as religious, cultural, political, and social aspects. The structure of the bakayat text was a form of the articulation in spoken style which involved the characteristics of the

Cochlear implants and spoken language processing abilities: Review and assessment of the literature

OpenAIRE

Peterson, Nathaniel R.; Pisoni, David B.; Miyamoto, Richard T.

2010-01-01

Cochlear implants (CIs) process sounds electronically and then transmit electric stimulation to the cochlea of individuals with sensorineural deafness, restoring some sensation of auditory perception. Many congenitally deaf CI recipients achieve a high degree of accuracy in speech perception and develop near-normal language skills. Post-lingually deafened implant recipients often regain the ability to understand and use spoken language with or without the aid of visual input (i.e. lip reading...

Effects of lexical competition on immediate memory span for spoken words.

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Goh, Winston D; Pisoni, David B

2003-08-01

Current theories and models of the structural organization of verbal short-term memory are primarily based on evidence obtained from manipulations of features inherent in the short-term traces of the presented stimuli, such as phonological similarity. In the present study, we investigated whether properties of the stimuli that are not inherent in the short-term traces of spoken words would affect performance in an immediate memory span task. We studied the lexical neighbourhood properties of the stimulus items, which are based on the structure and organization of words in the mental lexicon. The experiments manipulated lexical competition by varying the phonological neighbourhood structure (i.e., neighbourhood density and neighbourhood frequency) of the words on a test list while controlling for word frequency and intra-set phonological similarity (family size). Immediate memory span for spoken words was measured under repeated and nonrepeated sampling procedures. The results demonstrated that lexical competition only emerged when a nonrepeated sampling procedure was used and the participants had to access new words from their lexicons. These findings were not dependent on individual differences in short-term memory capacity. Additional results showed that the lexical competition effects did not interact with proactive interference. Analyses of error patterns indicated that item-type errors, but not positional errors, were influenced by the lexical attributes of the stimulus items. These results complement and extend previous findings that have argued for separate contributions of long-term knowledge and short-term memory rehearsal processes in immediate verbal serial recall tasks.

RAPPORT-BUILDING THROUGH CALL IN TEACHING CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

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Wenying Jiang

2005-05-01

Full Text Available Technological advances have brought about the ever-increasing utilisation of computer-assisted language learning (CALL media in the learning of a second language (L2. Computer-mediated communication, for example, provides a practical means for extending the learning of spoken language, a challenging process in tonal languages such as Chinese, beyond the realms of the classroom. In order to effectively improve spoken language competency, however, CALL applications must also reproduce the social interaction that lies at the heart of language learning and language use. This study draws on data obtained from the utilisation of CALL in the learning of L2 Chinese to explore whether this medium can be used to extend opportunities for rapport-building in language teaching beyond the face-to-face interaction of the classroom. Rapport's importance lies in its potential to enhance learning, motivate learners, and reduce learner anxiety. To date, CALL's potential in relation to this facet of social interaction remains a neglected area of research. The results of this exploratory study suggest that CALL may help foster learner-teacher rapport and that scaffolding, such as strategically composing rapport-fostering questions in sound-files, is conducive to this outcome. The study provides an instruction model for this application of CALL.

Mathematics Teaching as Praxis

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Grootenboer, Peter; Edwards-Groves, Christine

2014-01-01

In this paper we argue that mathematics teaching can be conceptualised as a form of praxis. Viewing mathematics teaching as praxis foregrounds the moral nature of teaching and the educational practices that are developed in response to the educational needs in particular sites. The case for praxis in mathematics education is then made by drawing…

Does it really matter whether students' contributions are spoken versus typed in an intelligent tutoring system with natural language?

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D'Mello, Sidney K; Dowell, Nia; Graesser, Arthur

2011-03-01

There is the question of whether learning differs when students speak versus type their responses when interacting with intelligent tutoring systems with natural language dialogues. Theoretical bases exist for three contrasting hypotheses. The speech facilitation hypothesis predicts that spoken input will increase learning, whereas the text facilitation hypothesis predicts typed input will be superior. The modality equivalence hypothesis claims that learning gains will be equivalent. Previous experiments that tested these hypotheses were confounded by automated speech recognition systems with substantial error rates that were detected by learners. We addressed this concern in two experiments via a Wizard of Oz procedure, where a human intercepted the learner's speech and transcribed the utterances before submitting them to the tutor. The overall pattern of the results supported the following conclusions: (1) learning gains associated with spoken and typed input were on par and quantitatively higher than a no-intervention control, (2) participants' evaluations of the session were not influenced by modality, and (3) there were no modality effects associated with differences in prior knowledge and typing proficiency. Although the results generally support the modality equivalence hypothesis, highly motivated learners reported lower cognitive load and demonstrated increased learning when typing compared with speaking. We discuss the implications of our findings for intelligent tutoring systems that can support typed and spoken input.

Three-dimensional grammar in the brain: Dissociating the neural correlates of natural sign language and manually coded spoken language.

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Jednoróg, Katarzyna; Bola, Łukasz; Mostowski, Piotr; Szwed, Marcin; Boguszewski, Paweł M; Marchewka, Artur; Rutkowski, Paweł

2015-05-01

In several countries natural sign languages were considered inadequate for education. Instead, new sign-supported systems were created, based on the belief that spoken/written language is grammatically superior. One such system called SJM (system językowo-migowy) preserves the grammatical and lexical structure of spoken Polish and since 1960s has been extensively employed in schools and on TV. Nevertheless, the Deaf community avoids using SJM for everyday communication, its preferred language being PJM (polski język migowy), a natural sign language, structurally and grammatically independent of spoken Polish and featuring classifier constructions (CCs). Here, for the first time, we compare, with fMRI method, the neural bases of natural vs. devised communication systems. Deaf signers were presented with three types of signed sentences (SJM and PJM with/without CCs). Consistent with previous findings, PJM with CCs compared to either SJM or PJM without CCs recruited the parietal lobes. The reverse comparison revealed activation in the anterior temporal lobes, suggesting increased semantic combinatory processes in lexical sign comprehension. Finally, PJM compared with SJM engaged left posterior superior temporal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe, areas crucial for sentence-level speech comprehension. We suggest that activity in these two areas reflects greater processing efficiency for naturally evolved sign language. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Effect of Auditory and Visual Motion Picture Descriptive Modalities in Teaching Perceptual-Motor Skills Used in the Grading of Cereal Grains.

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Hannemann, James William

This study was designed to discover whether a student learns to imitate the skills demonstrated in a motion picture more accurately when the supportive descriptive terminology is presented in an auditory (spoken) form or in a visual (captions) form. A six-minute color 16mm film was produced--"Determining the Test Weight per Bushel of Yellow Corn".…

Oscillatory Brain Responses Reflect Anticipation during Comprehension of Speech Acts in Spoken Dialog

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Rosa S. Gisladottir

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Everyday conversation requires listeners to quickly recognize verbal actions, so-called speech acts, from the underspecified linguistic code and prepare a relevant response within the tight time constraints of turn-taking. The goal of this study was to determine the time-course of speech act recognition by investigating oscillatory EEG activity during comprehension of spoken dialog. Participants listened to short, spoken dialogs with target utterances that delivered three distinct speech acts (Answers, Declinations, Pre-offers. The targets were identical across conditions at lexico-syntactic and phonetic/prosodic levels but differed in the pragmatic interpretation of the speech act performed. Speech act comprehension was associated with reduced power in the alpha/beta bands just prior to Declination speech acts, relative to Answers and Pre-offers. In addition, we observed reduced power in the theta band during the beginning of Declinations, relative to Answers. Based on the role of alpha and beta desynchronization in anticipatory processes, the results are taken to indicate that anticipation plays a role in speech act recognition. Anticipation of speech acts could be critical for efficient turn-taking, allowing interactants to quickly recognize speech acts and respond within the tight time frame characteristic of conversation. The results show that anticipatory processes can be triggered by the characteristics of the interaction, including the speech act type.

The interaction of lexical semantics and cohort competition in spoken word recognition: an fMRI study.

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Zhuang, Jie; Randall, Billi; Stamatakis, Emmanuel A; Marslen-Wilson, William D; Tyler, Lorraine K

2011-12-01

Spoken word recognition involves the activation of multiple word candidates on the basis of the initial speech input--the "cohort"--and selection among these competitors. Selection may be driven primarily by bottom-up acoustic-phonetic inputs or it may be modulated by other aspects of lexical representation, such as a word's meaning [Marslen-Wilson, W. D. Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition. Cognition, 25, 71-102, 1987]. We examined these potential interactions in an fMRI study by presenting participants with words and pseudowords for lexical decision. In a factorial design, we manipulated (a) cohort competition (high/low competitive cohorts which vary the number of competing word candidates) and (b) the word's semantic properties (high/low imageability). A previous behavioral study [Tyler, L. K., Voice, J. K., & Moss, H. E. The interaction of meaning and sound in spoken word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 320-326, 2000] showed that imageability facilitated word recognition but only for words in high competition cohorts. Here we found greater activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45, 47) and the right inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47) with increased cohort competition, an imageability effect in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus/angular gyrus (BA 39), and a significant interaction between imageability and cohort competition in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus/middle temporal gyrus (BA 21, 22). In words with high competition cohorts, high imageability words generated stronger activity than low imageability words, indicating a facilitatory role of imageability in a highly competitive cohort context. For words in low competition cohorts, there was no effect of imageability. These results support the behavioral data in showing that selection processes do not rely solely on bottom-up acoustic-phonetic cues but rather that the semantic properties of candidate words facilitate discrimination between competitors.

Engaging Minority Youth in Diabetes Prevention Efforts Through a Participatory, Spoken-Word Social Marketing Campaign.

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Rogers, Elizabeth A; Fine, Sarah C; Handley, Margaret A; Davis, Hodari B; Kass, James; Schillinger, Dean

2017-07-01

To examine the reach, efficacy, and adoption of The Bigger Picture, a type 2 diabetes (T2DM) social marketing campaign that uses spoken-word public service announcements (PSAs) to teach youth about socioenvironmental conditions influencing T2DM risk. A nonexperimental pilot dissemination evaluation through high school assemblies and a Web-based platform were used. The study took place in San Francisco Bay Area high schools during 2013. In the study, 885 students were sampled from 13 high schools. A 1-hour assembly provided data, poet performances, video PSAs, and Web-based platform information. A Web-based platform featured the campaign Web site and social media. Student surveys preassembly and postassembly (knowledge, attitudes), assembly observations, school demographics, counts of Web-based utilization, and adoption were measured. Descriptive statistics, McNemar's χ 2 test, and mixed modeling accounting for clustering were used to analyze data. The campaign included 23 youth poet-created PSAs. It reached >2400 students (93% self-identified non-white) through school assemblies and has garnered >1,000,000 views of Web-based video PSAs. School participants demonstrated increased short-term knowledge of T2DM as preventable, with risk driven by socioenvironmental factors (34% preassembly identified environmental causes as influencing T2DM risk compared to 83% postassembly), and perceived greater personal salience of T2DM risk reduction (p < .001 for all). The campaign has been adopted by regional public health departments. The Bigger Picture campaign showed its potential for reaching and engaging diverse youth. Campaign messaging is being adopted by stakeholders.

Task modulation of disyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese: a unimodal ERP study.

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Huang, Xianjun; Yang, Jin-Chen; Chang, Ruohan; Guo, Chunyan

2016-05-16

Using unimodal auditory tasks of word-matching and meaning-matching, this study investigated how the phonological and semantic processes in Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition are modulated by top-down mechanism induced by experimental tasks. Both semantic similarity and word-initial phonological similarity between the primes and targets were manipulated. Results showed that at early stage of recognition (~150-250 ms), an enhanced P2 was elicited by the word-initial phonological mismatch in both tasks. In ~300-500 ms, a fronto-central negative component was elicited by word-initial phonological similarities in the word-matching task, while a parietal negativity was elicited by semantically unrelated primes in the meaning-matching task, indicating that both the semantic and phonological processes can be involved in this time window, depending on the task requirements. In the late stage (~500-700 ms), a centro-parietal Late N400 was elicited in both tasks, but with a larger effect in the meaning-matching task than in the word-matching task. This finding suggests that the semantic representation of the spoken words can be activated automatically in the late stage of recognition, even when semantic processing is not required. However, the magnitude of the semantic activation is modulated by task requirements.

Estimating Spoken Dialog System Quality with User Models

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Engelbrecht, Klaus-Peter

2013-01-01

Spoken dialog systems have the potential to offer highly intuitive user interfaces, as they allow systems to be controlled using natural language. However, the complexity inherent in natural language dialogs means that careful testing of the system must be carried out from the very beginning of the design process.   This book examines how user models can be used to support such early evaluations in two ways:  by running simulations of dialogs, and by estimating the quality judgments of users. First, a design environment supporting the creation of dialog flows, the simulation of dialogs, and the analysis of the simulated data is proposed.  How the quality of user simulations may be quantified with respect to their suitability for both formative and summative evaluation is then discussed. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the problem of predicting quality judgments of users based on interaction data. New modeling approaches are presented, which process the dialogs as sequences, and which allow knowl...

Teaching English to Young Learners Through Songs

OpenAIRE

Yuliana, Yuliana

2003-01-01

Teaching English to Young Learners has become a trend nowadays. In every school, English is taught as one of the main subjects. In teaching young learners is not like teaching adults, children have their own way of learning. Since children like to play and have fun, the learning and teaching process should be suited with the nature of the children themselves. One of the forms of fun activities for children is through music, and songs are the common form of music that children know. Through th...

The Impact of Age, Background Noise, Semantic Ambiguity, and Hearing Loss on Recognition Memory for Spoken Sentences

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Koeritzer, Margaret A.; Rogers, Chad S.; Van Engen, Kristin J.; Peelle, Jonathan E.

2018-01-01

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine how background noise, linguistic properties of spoken sentences, and listener abilities (hearing sensitivity and verbal working memory) affect cognitive demand during auditory sentence comprehension. Method: We tested 30 young adults and 30 older adults. Participants heard lists of sentences in…

Semantic Fluency in Deaf Children Who Use Spoken and Signed Language in Comparison with Hearing Peers

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Marshall, C. R.; Jones, A.; Fastelli, A.; Atkinson, J.; Botting, N.; Morgan, G.

2018-01-01

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

Practice of implementation of innovative means of teaching in forming of preventive thinking in students of higher medical educational establisments

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Biletska E.M.

2017-05-01

Full Text Available The problem of construction of a holistic methodological system of training future doctors considered in the article, is impossible outside the context of integration processes taking place in modern education and needs a careful study of international experience. The research aim is to develop a system of innovative means of education for the formation of preventive thinking in students of higher medical educational establishment, concerning professionally oriented undergraduate preparation of doctors. Analysis of the results allowed to determine the characteristic features of innovative means, forms and teaching methods, specificity of their use in interactive educational environment, this against the background of meticulous work of the teaching staff of the department of general hygiene of Dnepropetrovsk Medical Academy provides the efficiency of educational process which integrates personal, creative, social and educational purposes. The suggested innovative methods are involved in the general system of modern education in higher school being effectively used for providing a high level of professional training in teaching of academic subject area "Hygiene and Ecology".

Elments constintute teachers’ teaching skills

OpenAIRE

Hoa, H.; Lам, P.

2014-01-01

Teachers’ pedagogical activities are constituted by many skills such as teaching skills, education skills, and skills of performing varied pedagogical ac- tivities. Each skill is formed from a variety of specifi c skills. Approaching teachers’ teaching skills based on pedagogical operation base can help us establish methods and develop skills for teachers. By doing so, we can assist teachers to enhance their teaching competence contributing to teaching quality improvement in schools

Morphosyntactic constructs in the development of spoken and written Hebrew text production.

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Ravid, Dorit; Zilberbuch, Shoshana

2003-05-01

This study examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures-N-N compounds and denominal adjectives-in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants in three age groups: eleven/twelve-year-olds (6th graders), sixteen/seventeen-year-olds (11th graders), and adults. The two constructions are later linguistic acquisitions, part of the profound lexical and syntactic changes that occur in language development during the school years. They are investigated in the context of learning how modality (speech vs. writing) and genre (biographical vs. expository texts) affect the production of continuous discourse. Participants were asked to speak and write about two topics, one biographical, describing the life of a public figure or of a friend; and another, expository, discussing one of ten topics such as the cinema, cats, or higher academic studies. N-N compounding was found to be the main device of complex subcategorization in Hebrew discourse, unrelated to genre. Denominal adjectives are a secondary subcategorizing device emerging only during the late teen years, a linguistic resource untapped until very late, more restricted to specific text types than N-N compounding, and characteristic of expository writing. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by number of novel N-N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause, and in older age groups this difference was found to be more pronounced. The paper contributes to our understanding of how the syntax/lexicon interface changes with age, modality and genre in the context of later language acquisition.

Narrative Reflection in the Philosophy of Teaching: Genealogies and Portraits

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McEwan, Hunter

2011-01-01

How has philosophical reflection contributed to the ways that we think about teaching? In this paper I explore two forms of narrative reflection on teaching--genealogies and portraits. Genealogies tell a story about the origins of teaching; portraits find expression in myths and other narrative forms. I explore two genealogies of teaching--one…

Combined effects of form- and meaning-based predictability on perceived clarity of speech.

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Signoret, Carine; Johnsrude, Ingrid; Classon, Elisabet; Rudner, Mary

2018-02-01

The perceptual clarity of speech is influenced by more than just the acoustic quality of the sound; it also depends on contextual support. For example, a degraded sentence is perceived to be clearer when the content of the speech signal is provided with matching text (i.e., form-based predictability) before hearing the degraded sentence. Here, we investigate whether sentence-level semantic coherence (i.e., meaning-based predictability), enhances perceptual clarity of degraded sentences, and if so, whether the mechanism is the same as that underlying enhancement by matching text. We also ask whether form- and meaning-based predictability are related to individual differences in cognitive abilities. Twenty participants listened to spoken sentences that were either clear or degraded by noise vocoding and rated the clarity of each item. The sentences had either high or low semantic coherence. Each spoken word was preceded by the homologous printed word (matching text), or by a meaningless letter string (nonmatching text). Cognitive abilities were measured with a working memory test. Results showed that perceptual clarity was significantly enhanced both by matching text and by semantic coherence. Importantly, high coherence enhanced the perceptual clarity of the degraded sentences even when they were preceded by matching text, suggesting that the effects of form- and meaning-based predictions on perceptual clarity are independent and additive. However, when working memory capacity indexed by the Size-Comparison Span Test was controlled for, only form-based predictions enhanced perceptual clarity, and then only at some sound quality levels, suggesting that prediction effects are to a certain extent dependent on cognitive abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

UNDERSTANDING TENOR IN SPOKEN TEXTS IN YEAR XII ENGLISH TEXTBOOK TO IMPROVE THE APPROPRIACY OF THE TEXTS

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Noeris Meristiani

2011-07-01

Full Text Available ABSTRACT: The goal of English Language Teaching is communicative competence. To reach this goal students should be supplied with good model texts. These texts should consider the appropriacy of language use. By analyzing the context of situation which is focused on tenor the meanings constructed to build the relationships among the interactants in spoken texts can be unfolded. This study aims at investigating the interpersonal relations (tenor of the interactants in the conversation texts as well as the appropriacy of their realization in the given contexts. The study was conducted under discourse analysis by applying a descriptive qualitative method. There were eight conversation texts which function as examples in five chapters of a textbook. The data were analyzed by using lexicogrammatical analysis, described, and interpreted contextually. Then, the realization of the tenor of the texts was further analyzed in terms of appropriacy to suggest improvement. The results of the study show that the tenor indicates relationships between friend-friend, student-student, questioners-respondents, mother-son, and teacher-student; the power is equal and unequal; the social distances show frequent contact, relatively frequent contact, relatively low contact, high and low affective involvement, using informal, relatively informal, relatively formal, and formal language. There are also some indications of inappropriacy of tenor realization in all texts. It should be improved in the use of degree of formality, the realization of societal roles, status, and affective involvement. Keywords: context of situation, tenor, appropriacy.

Teaching Participatory Design

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kensing, Finn; Bødker, Keld; Simonsen, Jesper

2004-01-01

This full-day invitational pre-conference workshop is devoted to sharing experiences from teaching PD methods, approaches, issues and concerns to students and practitioners. Our experiences stem from teaching and coaching IT practitioners as well as students studying computer science or IT. However......, people with experiences gained from working with other professions are also welcome. Short presentations from each of the participants form the starting point of the discussion to which most of the time will be devoted. The intend is not to suggest the way of teaching PD, rather we hope that each...... participant will receive valuable inspiration to help improve his or her own teaching....

Modern Educational Technologies in Teaching Senior Secondary Pupils' Communication in the Form of a Monologue and in Generating Their Cognitive Interest

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Galimova, Elvira G.; Shvetsova, Marina G.

2016-01-01

The need to address the above problem arises from the fact that school foreign language education tradition has not developed any theory based and experimentally confirmed algorithm aimed at teaching communication in the form of a monologue, although the standards of the pupils' level of proficiency in oral and written communication in a foreign…

Children's Spoken Word Recognition and Contributions to Phonological Awareness and Nonword Repetition: A 1-Year Follow-Up

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Metsala, Jamie L.; Stavrinos, Despina; Walley, Amanda C.

2009-01-01

This study examined effects of lexical factors on children's spoken word recognition across a 1-year time span, and contributions to phonological awareness and nonword repetition. Across the year, children identified words based on less input on a speech-gating task. For word repetition, older children improved for the most familiar words. There…

Event-related potentials reflecting the frequency of unattended spoken words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Shtyrov, Yury; Kimppa, Lilli; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2011-01-01

, in passive non-attend conditions, with acoustically matched high- and low-frequency words along with pseudo-words. Using factorial and correlation analyses, we found that already at ~120 ms after the spoken stimulus information was available, amplitude of brain responses was modulated by the words' lexical...... for the most frequent word stimuli, later-on (~270 ms), a more global lexicality effect with bilateral perisylvian sources was found for all stimuli, suggesting faster access to more frequent lexical entries. Our results support the account of word memory traces as interconnected neuronal circuits, and suggest......How are words represented in the human brain and can these representations be qualitatively assessed with respect to their structure and properties? Recent research demonstrates that neurophysiological signatures of individual words can be measured when subjects do not focus their attention...

RECEPTION OF SPOKEN ENGLISH. MISHEARINGS IN THE LANGUAGE OF BUSINESS AND LAW

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HOREA Ioana-Claudia

2013-07-01

Full Text Available Spoken English may sometimes cause us to face a peculiar problem in respect of the reception and the decoding of auditive signals, which might lead to mishearings. Risen from erroneous perception, from a lack in understanding the communication and an involuntary mental replacement of a certain element or structure by a more familiar one, these mistakes are most frequently encountered in the case of listening to songs, where the melodic line can facilitate the development of confusion by its somewhat altered intonation, which produces the so called mondegreens. Still, instances can be met in all domains of verbal communication, as proven in several examples noticed during classes of English as a foreign language (EFL taught to non-philological subjects. Production and perceptions of language depend on a series of elements that influence the encoding and the decoding of the message. These filters belong to both psychological and semantic categories which can either interfere with the accuracy of emission and reception. Poor understanding of a notion or concept combined with a more familiar relation with a similarly sounding one will result in unconsciously picking the structure which is better known. This means ‘hearing’ something else than it had been said, something closer to the receiver’s preoccupations and baggage of knowledge than the original structure or word. Some mishearings become particularly relevant as they concern teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP. Such are those encountered during classes of Business English or in English for Law. Though not very likely to occur too often, given an intuitively felt inaccuracy - as the terms are known by the users to need to be more specialised -, such examples are still not ignorable. Thus, we consider they deserve a higher degree of attention, as they might become quite relevant in the global context of an increasing work force migration and a spread of multinational companies.

Prediction of Audience Response from Spoken Sequences, Speech Pauses and Co-speech Gestures in Humorous Discourse by Barack Obama

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Navarretta, Costanza

2017-01-01

president mocks himself, his collaborators, political adversary and the press corps making the audience react with cheers, laughter and/or applause. The results of the prediction experiment demonstrate that information about spoken sequences, pauses and co-speech gestures by Obama can be used to predict...

Assessing spoken word recognition in children who are deaf or hard of hearing: A translational approach

OpenAIRE

Kirk, Karen Iler; Prusick, Lindsay; French, Brian; Gotch, Chad; Eisenberg, Laurie S.; Young, Nancy

2012-01-01

Under natural conditions, listeners use both auditory and visual speech cues to extract meaning from speech signals containing many sources of variability. However, traditional clinical tests of spoken word recognition routinely employ isolated words or sentences produced by a single talker in an auditory-only presentation format. The more central cognitive processes used during multimodal integration, perceptual normalization and lexical discrimination that may contribute to individual varia...

TEACHING BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE FOR TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY THROUGH COLLABORATIVE WRITING APPROACH

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Budi Purnomo

2017-04-01

Full Text Available This research aims at answering problems: (1 ―How to teach business correspondence for tourism and hospitality (BCTH through collaborative writing approach (CWA?‖ (2 ―What are the advantages of teaching BCTH through CWA?‖ and (3 ―What are the disadvantages of teaching BCHT through CWA?‖ This study is a descriptive and qualitative research. It uses three techniques for collecting data: observation and field notes, questionnaire and in-depth interviewing. It was undertaken in a Business Correspondence class at Sahid Tourism Institute of Surakarta from July to December 2013. There are 28 undergraduate students of semester five and one English lecturer as research subjects. Through CWA students in pairs were given tasks to compose (1 introduction letter, (2 letter of inquiry and offer, (3 reservation letter, (4 letter of collection, (5 letter of changes and cancelation, (6 letter of complaint, (7 letter of joint venture, (8 invitation letter, (9 application letter, (10 letter of resignation, (11 letter of recommendation and (12 business report. The research findings show that procedures to teach BCTH through CWA are: teacher explains a BCTH topic and shows a model of letter; students choose their partners themselves; teacher gives a writing task to students; student A writes a letter and student B writes a reply letter; pairs exchange information during the process of writing; students submit their products of writing; teacher makes a correction for their products outside of class. The advantages of teaching BCTH through CWA are: CWA helps students work together to reach the best products of writing; CWA improves the content of writing; CWA develops grammatical and structural proficiency and CWA reduces stress and saves time. The disadvantages of teaching BCTH through CWA are: CWA affects a conflict related to personal learning style; CWA improves the use of unexpected spoken Indonesian and Javanese languages during doing the tasks and

SOME ASPECTS OF THE INTEGRATION OF CONTENT, FORMS, MEANS, METHODS OF TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGESIN THE CONDITIONS OF INFORMATIZATION OF EDUCATION

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И Ю Мишота

2016-12-01

Full Text Available In article some questions of integration of training methods to foreign languages using means of informatization of education are considered.The attention that application of information technologies in teaching foreign languages integrally supplements is focused and expands possibilities of an effective solution of didactic tasks in case of creation of modern pedagogical models and is a certain factor of integration of methods and forms of education.

TEACHING ENGLISH TO YOUNG LEARNERS THROUGH SONGS

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Yuliana Yuliana

2003-01-01

Full Text Available Teaching English to Young Learners has become a trend nowadays. In every school, English is taught as one of the main subjects. In teaching young learners is not like teaching adults, children have their own way of learning. Since children like to play and have fun, the learning and teaching process should be suited with the nature of the children themselves. One of the forms of fun activities for children is through music, and songs are the common form of music that children know. Through this paper, the writer wants to show that through songs, children could enhance their language skills, such as speaking, listening and writing.

7 CFR 3406.12 - Program application materials-teaching.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 15 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Program application materials-teaching. 3406.12... GRANTS PROGRAM Preparation of a Teaching Proposal § 3406.12 Program application materials—teaching... program, and the forms needed to prepare and submit teaching grant applications under the program. ...

VIDEO BLOGGING AS AN INNOVATIVE FORM OF THE PROJECT ACTIVITY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING TO JOURNALISM STUDENTS

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M. V. Petrova

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Introduction. The appearance of new formats and ways of presenting information inevitably affects the educational process and leads to the necessity to revise the paradigm of pedagogical attitudes and tools of the teaching activity, which in turn generates a number of methodological and didactic problems to be solved. The relevance of the research topic is caused by the current tendency of the distribution of video blogging as an information activity tool that affects the educational environment. There is a steady development of video blogging (a special kind of blog, where the emphasis is made on video information as a new channel of communication in the educational services market, and using it as a separate form of non-educational project activity within the framework of mastering one or another academic discipline. In the conditions of deficiency of classroom hours and increase in student independent work, project-based education is becoming more and more demanded type of training. Currently, interdisciplinary projects are being widely disseminated at high school; these projects are aimed at vocational guidance for a foreign language, they meet the requirements of the new communication reality and the needs of modern educational systems. The aim of the publication is to consider video blogging as an innovative form of project-oriented learning a foreign language and to characterize the features of creating and implementing media content within the framework of a foreign language training course. Methodology and research methods. In the course the research, such theoretical scientific methods as analysis, synthesis, concretization, generalization, as well as hypothetical-deductive and design methods were applied. Results and scientific novelty. For the first time the article deals with the structure of video blogging as a project work and as a form of professionally oriented foreign language teaching as well, also there are formulated basic

forming bases of health-improvement competence of students

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Muntian V.S.

2012-11-01

Full Text Available The questions of optimization of educational process are considered on the basis of forming to health-improvement competence of student young people. Basic factors, influencing on the confidence of man in the capabilities, are selected: successful experience in the past; vicariation teaching; verbal persuasion; interiorization of motivation; succession of the teaching programs. It is marked that at forming of competence it is necessary to take into account the role of motivation, degree of estimation of the capabilities and confidence in the possibilities. Forming cognitive activity, positive motivation and steady interest to employments are the basic constituents of successful development of personality. It is marked that forming of competence foresees: providing knowledge about the methods of activity; the real application of knowledge is in practical activity; interiorization of motivation and individual approach; it is providing of succession of the teaching programs.

Cultures of Teaching in Childhood: Formal Schooling and Maya Sibling Teaching at Home

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Maynard, Ashley E.

2004-01-01

Culture can be thought of a set of shared practices, beliefs, and values that are transmitted across generations through language [Bruner, J. (1990). "Acts of meaning". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. Teaching is one way that culture is transmitted, but forms of teaching vary across cultures and across activity settings within…

Computational Interpersonal Communication: Communication Studies and Spoken Dialogue Systems

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David J. Gunkel

2016-09-01

Full Text Available With the advent of spoken dialogue systems (SDS, communication can no longer be considered a human-to-human transaction. It now involves machines. These mechanisms are not just a medium through which human messages pass, but now occupy the position of the other in social interactions. But the development of robust and efficient conversational agents is not just an engineering challenge. It also depends on research in human conversational behavior. It is the thesis of this paper that communication studies is best situated to respond to this need. The paper argues: 1 that research in communication can supply the information necessary to respond to and resolve many of the open problems in SDS engineering, and 2 that the development of SDS applications can provide the discipline of communication with unique opportunities to test extant theory and verify experimental results. We call this new area of interdisciplinary collaboration “computational interpersonal communication” (CIC

Sign Language and Spoken Language for Children With Hearing Loss: A Systematic Review.

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Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth M; Hamel, Candyce; Stevens, Adrienne; Pratt, Misty; Moher, David; Doucet, Suzanne P; Neuss, Deirdre; Bernstein, Anita; Na, Eunjung

2016-01-01

Permanent hearing loss affects 1 to 3 per 1000 children and interferes with typical communication development. Early detection through newborn hearing screening and hearing technology provide most children with the option of spoken language acquisition. However, no consensus exists on optimal interventions for spoken language development. To conduct a systematic review of the effectiveness of early sign and oral language intervention compared with oral language intervention only for children with permanent hearing loss. An a priori protocol was developed. Electronic databases (eg, Medline, Embase, CINAHL) from 1995 to June 2013 and gray literature sources were searched. Studies in English and French were included. Two reviewers screened potentially relevant articles. Outcomes of interest were measures of auditory, vocabulary, language, and speech production skills. All data collection and risk of bias assessments were completed and then verified by a second person. Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) was used to judge the strength of evidence. Eleven cohort studies met inclusion criteria, of which 8 included only children with severe to profound hearing loss with cochlear implants. Language development was the most frequently reported outcome. Other reported outcomes included speech and speech perception. Several measures and metrics were reported across studies, and descriptions of interventions were sometimes unclear. Very limited, and hence insufficient, high-quality evidence exists to determine whether sign language in combination with oral language is more effective than oral language therapy alone. More research is needed to supplement the evidence base. Copyright © 2016 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

ON ORGANIZING EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY OF THE FUTURE TEACHING COACHES

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Svatyev Andrey Vyacheslavovich

2012-12-01

Full Text Available In didactics of higher education institution’s scientists reveal the forms of learning process organisation and the forms of teaching students through the ways of the interaction between the teacher and their students when solving didactic tasks. They are revealed by means of different ways of activity management, communication, interpersonal relations. The content of education, educational technologies, styles, principles, methods and teaching aids etc. are realized in them. The analysis of the Ukrainian studies and publications of the decade (A. M. Aleksyuk, Y. Y. Bolyubash, A. A. Vasilyuk, V. I. Bondar, V. A. Semichenko and others gives reasons to state that unfortunately we observe the substitution of two notions: the form of organization and the form of teaching, as well as narrowing the notion “teaching of students”.

The Role of Camp in Promoting the Participants’ Spoken English Expression

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jalaluddin Jalaluddin

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The study investigated the topics of participants’ spoken expressionin an English camp and how the topics were discussed.A case study was applied as the research design. Data were gained from focus-group interviews, observation, and questionnaire. The results showed that the participants talked about various topics, which could be categorized into two types i.e. guided topics and situational topics. Guided topics were discussed by the participants in guided conditions. On the other hand, situational topics appeared naturally with respect to the situation. The data also indicated that the activeness and confidence of the participants to talk in English gradually increasedduring the English camp. The findings suggested that English campsbeheld regularly as they can boost the participants’ English speaking skill.

The Attitudes and Motivation of Children towards Learning Rarely Spoken Foreign Languages: A Case Study from Saudi Arabia

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Al-Nofaie, Haifa

2018-01-01

This article discusses the attitudes and motivations of two Saudi children learning Japanese as a foreign language (hence JFL), a language which is rarely spoken in the country. Studies regarding children's motivation for learning foreign languages that are not widely spread in their contexts in informal settings are scarce. The aim of the study…

Adherence to a Standardized Order Form for Gastric Cancer in a Referral Chemotherapy Teaching Hospital, Mashhad, Iran

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Mitra Asgarian

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Background: Standardized forms for prescription and medication administration are one solution to reduce medication errors in the chemotherapy process. Gastric cancer is the most common cancer in Iran. In this study, we have attempted to design and validate a standard printed chemotherapy form and evaluate adherence by oncologists and nurses to this form. Methods: We performed this cross-sectional study in a Mashhad, Iran teaching hospital from August 2015 until January 2016. A clinical pharmacist designed the chemotherapy form that included various demographic and clinical parameters and approved chemotherapy regimens for gastric cancer. Clinical oncologists that worked in this center validated the form. We included all eligible patients. A pharmacy student identified adherence by the oncologists and nurses to this form and probable medication errors. Results are mean ± standard deviation or number (percentages for nominal variables. Data analysis was performed using the SPSS 16.0 statistical package. Results:We evaluated 54 patients and a total of 249 chemotherapy courses. In 146 (58.63% chemotherapy sessions, the administered regimens lacked compatibility with the standard form. Approximately 66% of recorded errors occurred in the prescription phase and the remainder during the administration phase. The most common errors included improper dose (61% and wrong infusion time (34%. We observed that 37 dose calculation errors occurred in 32 chemotherapy sessions. Conclusions: In general, adherence by oncologists and nurses with the developed form for chemotherapy treatment of gastric cancer was not acceptable. These findings indicated the necessity for a standardized order sheet to simplify the chemotherapy process for the clinicians, and reduce prescription and administration errors.

Dimensions and psychology of peer teaching in medical education.

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Ten Cate, Olle; Durning, Steven

2007-09-01

Peer teaching, an educational arrangement in which one student teaches one or more fellow students, is applied in several forms in medical education. A number of authors have linked peer teaching to theories of education and psychology. Yet no comprehensive overview of what theory can offer to understand dynamics of peer teaching has been previously provided. A framework is designed to categorize forms of peer teaching, distinguishing three dimensions: distance in stage of education, formality of the educational setting and size of the group taught. Theories are categorized in two dimensions: theories that explain benefits of peer teaching from a cognitive versus a social-psychological perspective, and theories that explain benefits for peer learners versus peer teachers. Both dimensional frameworks help to clarify why and in what conditions peer teaching may help students to learn.

Basics of teaching Latin at Humanities University

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Bragova Arina Mikhailovna

2017-04-01

Full Text Available The article reviews the goals, tasks, methods, and results of teaching Latin at Humanities University. The article points out that the basis of teaching is analytical reading with elements of discursive analysis. In Humanities University teaching is being provided through the interdisciplinary approach. The educational process includes interactive exercises, the use various forms of control, for example, lingual-didactic testing in a virtual learning environment. The results of current and final control are formed with the help of the point-rating system of assessing knowledge.

Teaching as an exaptation.

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Smaldino, Paul E; Newton, Emily K

2015-01-01

We appreciate and endorse Kline's ethological taxonomy and its application. However, the definition of teaching she presents is problematic, as it replaces mentalistic intent with intention on the part of natural selection. We discuss problems with the strict adaptationist view and suggest instead that the five forms of teaching presented in the taxonomy may constitute exaptations rather than adaptations.

Visual attention shift to printed words during spoken word recognition in Chinese: The role of phonological information.

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Shen, Wei; Qu, Qingqing; Tong, Xiuhong

2018-05-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which phonological information mediates the visual attention shift to printed Chinese words in spoken word recognition by using an eye-movement technique with a printed-word paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are visually presented with four printed words on a computer screen, which include a target word, a phonological competitor, and two distractors. Participants are then required to select the target word using a computer mouse, and the eye movements are recorded. In Experiment 1, phonological information was manipulated at the full-phonological overlap; in Experiment 2, phonological information at the partial-phonological overlap was manipulated; and in Experiment 3, the phonological competitors were manipulated to share either fulloverlap or partial-overlap with targets directly. Results of the three experiments showed that the phonological competitor effects were observed at both the full-phonological overlap and partial-phonological overlap conditions. That is, phonological competitors attracted more fixations than distractors, which suggested that phonological information mediates the visual attention shift during spoken word recognition. More importantly, we found that the mediating role of phonological information varies as a function of the phonological similarity between target words and phonological competitors.

Social inclusion for children with hearing loss in listening and spoken Language early intervention: an exploratory study.

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Constantinescu-Sharpe, Gabriella; Phillips, Rebecca L; Davis, Aleisha; Dornan, Dimity; Hogan, Anthony

2017-03-14

Social inclusion is a common focus of listening and spoken language (LSL) early intervention for children with hearing loss. This exploratory study compared the social inclusion of young children with hearing loss educated using a listening and spoken language approach with population data. A framework for understanding the scope of social inclusion is presented in the Background. This framework guided the use of a shortened, modified version of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to measure two of the five facets of social inclusion ('education' and 'interacting with society and fulfilling social goals'). The survey was completed by parents of children with hearing loss aged 4-5 years who were educated using a LSL approach (n = 78; 37% who responded). These responses were compared to those obtained for typical hearing children in the LSAC dataset (n = 3265). Analyses revealed that most children with hearing loss had comparable outcomes to those with typical hearing on the 'education' and 'interacting with society and fulfilling social roles' facets of social inclusion. These exploratory findings are positive and warrant further investigation across all five facets of the framework to identify which factors influence social inclusion.

Modeling Longitudinal Changes in Older Adults’ Memory for Spoken Discourse: Findings from the ACTIVE Cohort

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Payne, Brennan R.; Gross, Alden L.; Parisi, Jeanine M.; Sisco, Shannon M.; Stine-Morrow, Elizabeth A. L.; Marsiske, Michael; Rebok, George W.

2014-01-01

Episodic memory shows substantial declines with advancing age, but research on longitudinal trajectories of spoken discourse memory (SDM) in older adulthood is limited. Using parallel process latent growth curve models, we examined 10 years of longitudinal data from the no-contact control group (N = 698) of the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) randomized controlled trial in order to test (a) the degree to which SDM declines with advancing age, (b) predictors of these age-related declines, and (c) the within-person relationship between longitudinal changes in SDM and longitudinal changes in fluid reasoning and verbal ability over 10 years, independent of age. Individuals who were younger, White, had more years of formal education, were male, and had better global cognitive function and episodic memory performance at baseline demonstrated greater levels of SDM on average. However, only age at baseline uniquely predicted longitudinal changes in SDM, such that declines accelerated with greater age. Independent of age, within-person decline in reasoning ability over the 10-year study period was substantially correlated with decline in SDM (r = .87). An analogous association with SDM did not hold for verbal ability. The findings suggest that longitudinal declines in fluid cognition are associated with reduced spoken language comprehension. Unlike findings from memory for written prose, preserved verbal ability may not protect against developmental declines in memory for speech. PMID:24304364

Resting-state low-frequency fluctuations reflect individual differences in spoken language learning.

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Deng, Zhizhou; Chandrasekaran, Bharath; Wang, Suiping; Wong, Patrick C M

2016-03-01

A major challenge in language learning studies is to identify objective, pre-training predictors of success. Variation in the low-frequency fluctuations (LFFs) of spontaneous brain activity measured by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) has been found to reflect individual differences in cognitive measures. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the extent to which initial spontaneous brain activity is related to individual differences in spoken language learning. We acquired RS-fMRI data and subsequently trained participants on a sound-to-word learning paradigm in which they learned to use foreign pitch patterns (from Mandarin Chinese) to signal word meaning. We performed amplitude of spontaneous low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) analysis, graph theory-based analysis, and independent component analysis (ICA) to identify functional components of the LFFs in the resting-state. First, we examined the ALFF as a regional measure and showed that regional ALFFs in the left superior temporal gyrus were positively correlated with learning performance, whereas ALFFs in the default mode network (DMN) regions were negatively correlated with learning performance. Furthermore, the graph theory-based analysis indicated that the degree and local efficiency of the left superior temporal gyrus were positively correlated with learning performance. Finally, the default mode network and several task-positive resting-state networks (RSNs) were identified via the ICA. The "competition" (i.e., negative correlation) between the DMN and the dorsal attention network was negatively correlated with learning performance. Our results demonstrate that a) spontaneous brain activity can predict future language learning outcome without prior hypotheses (e.g., selection of regions of interest--ROIs) and b) both regional dynamics and network-level interactions in the resting brain can account for individual differences in future spoken language learning success

Resting-state low-frequency fluctuations reflect individual differences in spoken language learning

Science.gov (United States)

Deng, Zhizhou; Chandrasekaran, Bharath; Wang, Suiping; Wong, Patrick C.M.

2016-01-01

A major challenge in language learning studies is to identify objective, pre-training predictors of success. Variation in the low-frequency fluctuations (LFFs) of spontaneous brain activity measured by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) has been found to reflect individual differences in cognitive measures. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the extent to which initial spontaneous brain activity is related to individual differences in spoken language learning. We acquired RS-fMRI data and subsequently trained participants on a sound-to-word learning paradigm in which they learned to use foreign pitch patterns (from Mandarin Chinese) to signal word meaning. We performed amplitude of spontaneous low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) analysis, graph theory-based analysis, and independent component analysis (ICA) to identify functional components of the LFFs in the resting-state. First, we examined the ALFF as a regional measure and showed that regional ALFFs in the left superior temporal gyrus were positively correlated with learning performance, whereas ALFFs in the default mode network (DMN) regions were negatively correlated with learning performance. Furthermore, the graph theory-based analysis indicated that the degree and local efficiency of the left superior temporal gyrus were positively correlated with learning performance. Finally, the default mode network and several task-positive resting-state networks (RSNs) were identified via the ICA. The “competition” (i.e., negative correlation) between the DMN and the dorsal attention network was negatively correlated with learning performance. Our results demonstrate that a) spontaneous brain activity can predict future language learning outcome without prior hypotheses (e.g., selection of regions of interest – ROIs) and b) both regional dynamics and network-level interactions in the resting brain can account for individual differences in future spoken language learning success

Development of brain networks involved in spoken word processing of Mandarin Chinese.

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Cao, Fan; Khalid, Kainat; Lee, Rebecca; Brennan, Christine; Yang, Yanhui; Li, Kuncheng; Bolger, Donald J; Booth, James R

2011-08-01

Developmental differences in phonological and orthographic processing of Chinese spoken words were examined in 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Rhyming and spelling judgments were made to two-character words presented sequentially in the auditory modality. Developmental comparisons between adults and both groups of children combined showed that age-related changes in activation in visuo-orthographic regions depended on a task. There were developmental increases in the left inferior temporal gyrus and the right inferior occipital gyrus in the spelling task, suggesting more extensive visuo-orthographic processing in a task that required access to these representations. Conversely, there were developmental decreases in activation in the left fusiform gyrus and left middle occipital gyrus in the rhyming task, suggesting that the development of reading is marked by reduced involvement of orthography in a spoken language task that does not require access to these orthographic representations. Developmental decreases may arise from the existence of extensive homophony (auditory words that have multiple spellings) in Chinese. In addition, we found that 11-year-olds and adults showed similar activation in the left superior temporal gyrus across tasks, with both groups showing greater activation than 9-year-olds. This pattern suggests early development of perceptual representations of phonology. In contrast, 11-year-olds and 9-year-olds showed similar activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus across tasks, with both groups showing weaker activation than adults. This pattern suggests late development of controlled retrieval and selection of lexical representations. Altogether, this study suggests differential effects of character acquisition on development of components of the language network in Chinese as compared to previous reports on alphabetic languages. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Picture-book reading as an intervention to teach the use of line drawings for communication with students with severe intellectual disabilities.

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Stephenson, Jennifer

2009-01-01

Picture-book reading provides an effective intervention context for young children learning spoken language and may also be appropriate for teaching the use of augmentative and alternative communication to children with severe intellectual disabilities. This study reports on a group intervention using a semiscripted book reading routine implemented by a teacher in a classroom for students with severe intellectual disabilities. Student use of line drawings was observed over the course of the intervention. Students' abilities to match words, line drawings, book illustrations, and real objects were assessed weekly. There were differences between baseline and intervention performances for all students, and these differences were particularly noticeable for one student.

THE ESTIMATION OF THE CIRCLED FORM OF PERFORMANCE INFLUENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPEED IN THE PHYSICAL EDUCATION TEACHING

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Drago Milošević

2006-06-01

Full Text Available On the sample of 108 students from the 1st and 2nd secondary school classrooms in Kolashin, which is divided for this research into two subsamples ( 54 of the tested students make experimental and 54 tested students make control group , was applied the circled form of performance, in the basic part of the lesson for the experimental group, in order to establish the level of contribution of this type of the teaching method on the development of the speed. The control group had made by the teaching program the determined instruction of physical education. The initial and the final measurements of the tests were made. For estimation of the latent speed ability for both subsamples 6 tests were applied. The influence of the circled work method on the development of the examined mobility ability, in the experiment lasted 4 teaching months, was established by the discriminative analyses. The obtained coefficients of the discriminative analyses have shown that the tested students from the experimental group, in the statistical sense, importantly improved their speed level at the final than at the initial measurement. The experiment also showed that the obtained results on the final measurement, in the statistical sense, are much bigger within the experimental than within the control group.

Giving Shape and Form to Emotion: Using Drawings to Identify Emotions in University Teaching

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Löfström, Erika; Nevgi, Anne

2014-01-01

Academia is generally not considered a place for expressing emotions, yet emotions are inevitably present in complex activities such as teaching. We investigated whether drawings could be used as a means of gaining access to emotions in university teaching and how. The data consisted of academics' drawings of themselves as university teachers…

Early Gesture Provides a Helping Hand to Spoken Vocabulary Development for Children with Autism, Down Syndrome, and Typical Development

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Özçaliskan, Seyda; Adamson, Lauren B.; Dimitrova, Nevena; Baumann, Stephanie

2017-01-01

Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at a cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects ("cat"). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words. We asked whether gesture plays the…

The Development and Validation of the "Academic Spoken English Strategies Survey (ASESS)" for Non-Native English Speaking Graduate Students

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Schroeder, Rui M.

2016-01-01

This study reports on the three-year development and validation of a new assessment tool--the Academic Spoken English Strategies Survey (ASESS). The questionnaire is the first of its kind to assess the listening and speaking strategy use of non-native English speaking (NNES) graduate students. A combination of sources was used to develop the…

Phonological and Semantic Knowledge Are Causal Influences on Learning to Read Words in Chinese

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Zhou, Lulin; Duff, Fiona J.; Hulme, Charles

2015-01-01

We report a training study that assesses whether teaching the pronunciation and meaning of spoken words improves Chinese children's subsequent attempts to learn to read the words. Teaching the pronunciations of words helps children to learn to read those same words, and teaching the pronunciations and meanings improves learning still further.…

Modulating the Focus of Attention for Spoken Words at Encoding Affects Frontoparietal Activation for Incidental Verbal Memory

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Christensen, Thomas A.; Almryde, Kyle R.; Fidler, Lesley J.; Lockwood, Julie L.; Antonucci, Sharon M.; Plante, Elena

2012-01-01

Attention is crucial for encoding information into memory, and current dual-process models seek to explain the roles of attention in both recollection memory and incidental-perceptual memory processes. The present study combined an incidental memory paradigm with event-related functional MRI to examine the effect of attention at encoding on the subsequent neural activation associated with unintended perceptual memory for spoken words. At encoding, we systematically varied attention levels as ...

Characterization of the teaching aids in the teaching-learning process in Physical Education

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César Perazas Zamora

2017-04-01

Full Text Available The aids and resources of teaching are an important didactic component inside of the teaching learning process, they are the material support of the teaching aids, its adequate use warrant the quality of the process. With the accelerated development of the science, technique and technologies the audiovisual aids has passed to form part of the teaching learning process humanizing the teacher’s work and favouring the transmission of knowledge with a truly scientific approach. The objective of this article is standing out the main concepts, definitions and advantages of the teaching aids more used nowadays, its importance as didactic component and its adequate use in the teaching learning process linked with the objective, method and content, ensuring the lasting learning that contributes to raise the integral general culture of the students. Besides it deals with the topic of audiovisual aids as one of the components of the teaching learning process, it is offered concepts and definitions from different authors and emphasized the advantages, use and importance of its systematic and planned use.

Self-Ratings of Spoken Language Dominance: A Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and Preliminary Norms for Young and Aging Spanish-English Bilinguals

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Gollan, Tamar H.; Weissberger, Gali H.; Runnqvist, Elin; Montoya, Rosa I.; Cera, Cynthia M.

2012-01-01

This study investigated correspondence between different measures of bilingual language proficiency contrasting self-report, proficiency interview, and picture naming skills. Fifty-two young (Experiment 1) and 20 aging (Experiment 2) Spanish-English bilinguals provided self-ratings of proficiency level, were interviewed for spoken proficiency, and…

Near-peer teaching in clinical neuroanatomy.

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Hall, Samuel; Lewis, Michael; Border, Scott; Powell, Matthew

2013-08-01

Near-peer teaching involves students being taught by more senior students and draws on their similar knowledge base and shared experiences. It has been used previously for teaching gross anatomy, but has not yet been reported specifically for neuroanatomy. At the University of Southampton there is no formal neuroanatomy teaching during the clinical years, and so a near-peer teaching programme was developed to support students, learning in between attending their clinical attachments. A series of seven sessions were organised and delivered by two medical students throughout the 2010/11 academic year, and each session was evaluated by using participant feedback forms. Sixty feedback forms were returned by the students, giving an average rating for the overall quality of the sessions of 4.3 out of 5.0. There was an 18 per cent increase in the student's perceived level of knowledge (p peer teaching sessions. The most common feedback received from our students related to the availability of handouts and expressions of gratitude. The results from this teaching development support the use of near-peer teaching in neuroanatomy. In this article we provide some evidence to suggest that students feel more confident with neuroanatomy after attending these sessions, and describe some unique advantages of this teaching programme over sessions led by faculty staff. The wider benefits to both faculty staff and student teachers are also considered. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ambiguity and Inconsistencies in Mathematics Spoken in the Classroom: The Need for Teacher Training and Rules for Communication of Mathematics

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Isaacson, M.D.; Srinivasan, S.; Lloyd, L.L.

2012-01-01

Mathematics has the potential for being spoken ambiguously. This is problematic for many students, in particular those who have disabilities that inhibit processing of printed material. This paper documents the magnitude of potential ambiguity arising from textbooks and provides a measure of the degree to which potential ambiguity is actualized…

Semantic Richness and Word Learning in Children with Hearing Loss Who Are Developing Spoken Language: A Single Case Design Study

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Lund, Emily; Douglas, W. Michael; Schuele, C. Melanie

2015-01-01

Children with hearing loss who are developing spoken language tend to lag behind children with normal hearing in vocabulary knowledge. Thus, researchers must validate instructional practices that lead to improved vocabulary outcomes for children with hearing loss. The purpose of this study was to investigate how semantic richness of instruction…

Teaching Spanish Pragmatics Through Colloquial Conversations

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Albelda Marco, Marta

2017-11-01

Full Text Available This paper focuses on the advantages of teaching and learning a foreign language with and through spoken discursive corpora, and especially colloquial and conversational ones. The benefits of developing oral competence and communicative skills in language learners using colloquial conversations will be exposed and discussed. In this paper, we characterise the colloquial conversation and the features that define this register and discursive genre. Being the most natural and original way to communicate among human beings, the colloquial conversation is the most common means to communicate, and therefore, this genre should have a greater presence in foreign-language classrooms. Secondly, we expound on the advantages of teaching using colloquial conversations corpora, particularly resulting from its contextualisation (the linguistic input is learnt in its real and authentic context and from its oral and conversational features (prosodic elements and interactional mechanisms. Thirdly, the paper provides a list of corpora of colloquial conversations that are available in Spanish, focusing on Val.Es.Co. colloquial corpus (peninsular Spanish oral corpus, Briz et al., 2002; Cabedo & Pons online, www.valesco.es. Finally, a set of pragmatic applications of corpora in foreign-language classroom is offered, in particular using the Val.Es.Co. colloquial corpus: functions of discourse markers and interjections (whose meanings change depending on the context, strategies of turn-takings, ways of introducing new topic in the dialogues, mechanisms of keeping or “stealing” the turn, devices to introduce direct speech, attitudes expressed by the falling and rising intonations, hedges and intensifiers, and so on. In general, this paper pretends to offer ideas, resources and materials to make the students more competent in communication using authentic discursive oral corpora.

The Differences between Spoken and Written Grammar in English, in Comparison with Vietnamese (Las Diferencias entre la Gramática Oral y Escrita del Idioma Inglés en Comparación con el Idioma Vietnamita)

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Thanh, Nguyen Cao

2015-01-01

The fundamental point of this paper is to describe and evaluate some differences between spoken and written grammar in English, and compare some of the points with Vietnamese. This paper illustrates that spoken grammar is less rigid than written grammar. Moreover, it highlights the distinction between speaking and writing in terms of subordination…

Formulacity in ESP Teaching: A Case of Doing a Balancing Act Between Form and Meaning

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Gutowska Urszula

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Grammar teaching has never belonged to mainstream ESP teaching/ learning practices. However, this apparent lack of concern with grammar in ESP materials runs counter to both subjective and objective needs of ESP learners. The first part of the paper presents students′ views on deficiencies of coursebooks for teaching English for Medical Purposes (EMP as well as author’s reflective thinking on the needs of medical undergraduates of vocational schools in Poland. It is suggested that some of the deficiencies of the materials might be remedied and the students′ needs better taken care of if explicit teaching of formulaic language is introduced into ESP classroom environment. It is hypothesized that explicit teaching of formulaic language may stimulate grammar development in the long term and foster communicative competence of ESP learners in the short term. Therefore, the second part of the paper proposes pedagogically relavant classification of medical formulaic sequences motivated by the lexicogrammatical features of Medical English. The third part of the paper shows in what way the proposed classification of formulaic sequences might help teachers of medical English design tasks that are conducive to the development of formulaic competence of students of English for Medical Purposes.

V2 word order in subordinate clauses in spoken Danish

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jensen, Torben Juel; Christensen, Tanya Karoli

are asymmetrically distributed, we argue that the word order difference should rather be seen as a signal of (subtle) semantic differences. In main clauses, V3 is highly marked in comparison to V2, and occurs in what may be called emotives. In subordinate clauses, V2 is marked and signals what has been called...... ”assertiveness”, but is rather a question of foregrounding (cf. Simons 2007: Main Point of Utterance). The paper presents the results of a study of word order in subordinate clauses in contemporary spoken Danish and focuses on how to include the proposed semantic difference as a factor influencing the choice...... studies of two age cohorts of speakers in Copenhagen, recorded in the 1980s and again in 2005-07, and on recent recordings with two age cohorts of speakers from the western part of Jutland. This makes it possible to study variation and change with respect to word order in subordinate clauses in both real...

The Influence of Topic Status on Written and Spoken Sentence Production

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Cowles, H. Wind; Ferreira, Victor S.

2012-01-01

Four experiments investigate the influence of topic status and givenness on how speakers and writers structure sentences. The results of these experiments show that when a referent is previously given, it is more likely to be produced early in both sentences and word lists, confirming prior work showing that givenness increases the accessibility of given referents. When a referent is previously given and assigned topic status, it is even more likely to be produced early in a sentence, but not in a word list. Thus, there appears to be an early mention advantage for topics that is present in both written and spoken modalities, but is specific to sentence production. These results suggest that information-structure constructs like topic exert an influence that is not based only on increased accessibility, but also reflects mapping to syntactic structure during sentence production. PMID:22408281

How and When Accentuation Influences Temporally Selective Attention and Subsequent Semantic Processing during On-Line Spoken Language Comprehension: An ERP Study

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Li, Xiao-qing; Ren, Gui-qin

2012-01-01

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of…

Fast mapping of novel word forms traced neurophysiologically

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Yury eShtyrov

2011-11-01

Full Text Available Human capacity to quickly learn new words, critical for our ability to communicate using language, is well-known from behavioural studies and observations, but its neural underpinnings remain unclear. In this study, we have used event-related potentials to record brain activity to novel spoken word forms as they are being learnt by the human nervous system through passive auditory exposure. We found that the brain response dynamics change dramatically within the short (20 min exposure session: as the subjects become familiarised with the novel word forms, the early (~100 ms fronto-central activity they elicit increases in magnitude and becomes similar to that of known real words. At the same time, acoustically similar real words used as control stimuli show a relatively stable response throughout the recording session; these differences between the stimulus groups are confirmed using both factorial and linear regression analyses. Furthermore, acoustically matched novel non-speech stimuli do not demonstrate similar response increase, suggesting neural specificity of this rapid learning phenomenon to linguistic stimuli. Left-lateralised perisylvian cortical networks appear to be underlying such fast mapping of novel word forms unto the brain’s mental lexicon.

Use of Automated Scoring in Spoken Language Assessments for Test Takers with Speech Impairments. Research Report. ETS RR-17-42

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Loukina, Anastassia; Buzick, Heather

2017-01-01

This study is an evaluation of the performance of automated speech scoring for speakers with documented or suspected speech impairments. Given that the use of automated scoring of open-ended spoken responses is relatively nascent and there is little research to date that includes test takers with disabilities, this small exploratory study focuses…

Computer Assisted Testing of Spoken English: A Study of the SFLEP College English Oral Test System in China

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John Lowe

2009-06-01

Full Text Available This paper reports on the on-going evaluation of a computer-assisted system (CEOTS for the assessing of spoken English skills among Chinese university students. This system is being developed to deal with the negative backwash effects of the present system of assessment of speaking skills which is only available to a tiny minority. We present data from a survey of students at the developing institution (USTC, with follow-up interviews and further interviews with English language teachers, to gauge the reactions to the test and its impact on language learning. We identify the key issue as being one of validity, with a tension existing between construct and consequential validities of the existing system and of CEOTS. We argue that a computer-based system seems to offer the only solution to the negative backwash problem but the development of the technology required to meet current construct validity demands makes this a very long term prospect. We suggest that a compromise between the competing forms of validity must therefore be accepted, probably well before a computer-based system can deliver the level of interaction with the examinees that would emulate the present face-to-face mode.

Shared Teaching Culture in Different Forms: A Comparison of Expert and Novice Teachers' Practices

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Arani, Mohammad Reza Sarkar

2017-01-01

This study aims to reveal the teaching script and structure of lesson practice of two seventh-grade Japanese mathematics teachers--a "novice" and "expert"--through comparative analysis of mathematics lessons. Specifically, it aims to clarify how the teachers' views of teaching as tacit knowledge determine lesson structure and…

The Peculiarities of the Adverbs Functioning of the Dialect Spoken in the v. Shevchenkove, Kiliya district, Odessa Region

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Maryna Delyusto

2013-08-01

Full Text Available The article gives new evidence about the adverb as a part of the grammatical system of the Ukrainian steppe dialect spread in the area between the Danube and the Dniester rivers. The author proves that the grammatical system of the dialect spoken in the v. Shevchenkove, Kiliya district, Odessa region is determined by the historical development of the Ukrainian language rather than the influence of neighboring dialects.

How Does the Linguistic Distance between Spoken and Standard Language in Arabic Affect Recall and Recognition Performances during Verbal Memory Examination

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Taha, Haitham

2017-01-01

The current research examined how Arabic diglossia affects verbal learning memory. Thirty native Arab college students were tested using auditory verbal memory test that was adapted according to the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and developed in three versions: Pure spoken language version (SL), pure standard language version (SA), and…

Activating gender stereotypes during online spoken language processing: evidence from Visual World Eye Tracking.

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Pyykkönen, Pirita; Hyönä, Jukka; van Gompel, Roger P G

2010-01-01

This study used the visual world eye-tracking method to investigate activation of general world knowledge related to gender-stereotypical role names in online spoken language comprehension in Finnish. The results showed that listeners activated gender stereotypes elaboratively in story contexts where this information was not needed to build coherence. Furthermore, listeners made additional inferences based on gender stereotypes to revise an already established coherence relation. Both results are consistent with mental models theory (e.g., Garnham, 2001). They are harder to explain by the minimalist account (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992) which suggests that people limit inferences to those needed to establish coherence in discourse.

Bilingual Teaching Research and Practice of Complex Function Theory

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Ma, Lixin

2011-01-01

Mathematics bilingual teaching is assisted in Chinese with English teaching, and gradually enables students to independently use English to learn, study, reflect and exchange Mathematics. In order to better carry out mathematics teaching, department of mathematics in Dezhou University forms discussion groups and launches bilingual teaching…

Sound specificity effects in spoken word recognition: The effect of integrality between words and sounds.

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Strori, Dorina; Zaar, Johannes; Cooke, Martin; Mattys, Sven L

2018-01-01

Recent evidence has shown that nonlinguistic sounds co-occurring with spoken words may be retained in memory and affect later retrieval of the words. This sound-specificity effect shares many characteristics with the classic voice-specificity effect. In this study, we argue that the sound-specificity effect is conditional upon the context in which the word and sound coexist. Specifically, we argue that, besides co-occurrence, integrality between words and sounds is a crucial factor in the emergence of the effect. In two recognition-memory experiments, we compared the emergence of voice and sound specificity effects. In Experiment 1 , we examined two conditions where integrality is high. Namely, the classic voice-specificity effect (Exp. 1a) was compared with a condition in which the intensity envelope of a background sound was modulated along the intensity envelope of the accompanying spoken word (Exp. 1b). Results revealed a robust voice-specificity effect and, critically, a comparable sound-specificity effect: A change in the paired sound from exposure to test led to a decrease in word-recognition performance. In the second experiment, we sought to disentangle the contribution of integrality from a mere co-occurrence context effect by removing the intensity modulation. The absence of integrality led to the disappearance of the sound-specificity effect. Taken together, the results suggest that the assimilation of background sounds into memory cannot be reduced to a simple context effect. Rather, it is conditioned by the extent to which words and sounds are perceived as integral as opposed to distinct auditory objects.

Videogames, Informal Teaching, and the Rhetoric of Design

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Holmes, Jeffrey Brandon

2016-01-01

This dissertation is about videogames. It is also about teaching, and the ways videogame design represents good teaching. However, this dissertation is not about videogames alone. It makes broad claims about teaching in- and out-of-schools in the 21st Century. Over the last few decades many scholars have been impressed by the rich forms of…

Teaching English Stress: A Case Study

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Sadat-Tehrani, Nima

2017-01-01

This article addresses the issue of teaching pronunciation in English as a second language (ESL) classes by specifically looking at the impact of teaching lexical stress rules and tendencies on learners' stress placement performance. Sixteen rules in the form of interactive worksheets were taught in three ESL classes at pre-intermediate,…

A randomized trial comparison of the effects of verbal and pictorial naturalistic communication strategies on spoken language for young children with autism.

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Schreibman, Laura; Stahmer, Aubyn C

2014-05-01

Presently there is no consensus on the specific behavioral treatment of choice for targeting language in young nonverbal children with autism. This randomized clinical trial compared the effectiveness of a verbally-based intervention, Pivotal Response Training (PRT) to a pictorially-based behavioral intervention, the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) on the acquisition of spoken language by young (2-4 years), nonverbal or minimally verbal (≤9 words) children with autism. Thirty-nine children were randomly assigned to either the PRT or PECS condition. Participants received on average 247 h of intervention across 23 weeks. Dependent measures included overall communication, expressive vocabulary, pictorial communication and parent satisfaction. Children in both intervention groups demonstrated increases in spoken language skills, with no significant difference between the two conditions. Seventy-eight percent of all children exited the program with more than 10 functional words. Parents were very satisfied with both programs but indicated PECS was more difficult to implement.

Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition.

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Cai, Zhenguang G; Gilbert, Rebecca A; Davis, Matthew H; Gaskell, M Gareth; Farrar, Lauren; Adler, Sarah; Rodd, Jennifer M

2017-11-01

Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker's linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1-3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of "bonnet") in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker's dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British- and American-accented recordings, were interpreted in a similar way to accented words when embedded in a context of accented words (Experiment 2). This finding indicates that listeners do not use accent to guide meaning retrieval on a word-by-word basis; instead they use accent information to determine the dialectic identity of a speaker and then use their experience of that dialect to guide meaning access for all words spoken by that person. These results motivate a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition in which comprehenders determine key characteristics of their interlocutor and use this knowledge to guide word meaning access. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Plausibility of Tonal Evolution in the Malay Dialect Spoken in Thailand: Evidence from an Acoustic Study

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Phanintra Teeranon

2007-12-01

Full Text Available The F0 values of vowels following voiceless consonants are higher than those of vowels following voiced consonants; high vowels have a higher F0 than low vowels. It has also been found that when high vowels follow voiced consonants, the F0 values decrease. In contrast, low vowels following voiceless consonants show increasing F0 values. In other words, the voicing of initial consonants has been found to counterbalance the intrinsic F0 values of high and low vowels (House and Fairbanks 1953, Lehiste and Peterson 1961, Lehiste 1970, Laver 1994, Teeranon 2006. To test whether these three findings are applicable to a disyllabic language, the F0 values of high and low vowels following voiceless and voiced consonants were studied in a Malay dialect of the Austronesian language family spoken in Pathumthani Province, Thailand. The data was collected from three male informants, aged 30-35. The Praat program was used for acoustic analysis. The findings revealed the influence of the voicing of initial consonants on the F0 of vowels to be greater than that of the influence of vowel height. Evidence from this acoustic study shows the plausibility for the Malay dialect spoken in Pathumthani to become a tonal language by the influence of initial consonants rather by the influence of the high-low vowel dimension.

Reform of experimental teaching based on quality cultivation

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Wang, Wei; Yan, Xingwei; Liu, Wei; Yao, Tianfu; Shi, Jianhua; Lei, Bing; Hu, Haojun

2017-08-01

Experimental teaching plays an import part in quality education which devotes to cultivating students with innovative spirit, strong technological talents and practical ability. However, in the traditional experimental teaching mode, the experiments are treated as a vassal or supplementary mean of theoretical teaching, and students prefer focus on theory to practice. Therefore, the traditional experimental teaching mode is difficult to meet the requirements of quality education. To address this issue, the reform of experimental teaching is introduced in this paper taking the photoelectric detector experiment as the example. The new experimental teaching mode is designed from such aspects as experimental content, teaching method and experimental evaluation. With the purpose of cultivating students' practical ability, two different-level experimental content is designed. Not only the basic experiments used to verify the theory are set to consolidate the students' learned theoretical knowledge, but also comprehensive experiments are designed to encourage the students to apply their learned knowledge to solve practical problems. In the teaching process, heuristic teaching thought is adopt and the traditional `teacher-centered' teaching form is replaced by `student-centered' form, which aims to encourage students to design the experimental systems by their own with the teacher's guidance. In addition to depending on stimulating the students' interest of science research, experimental evaluation is necessary to urge students to complete the experiments efficiently. Multifaceted evaluation method is proposed to test the students' mastery of theoretical knowledge, practice ability, troubleshooting and problem solving skills, and innovation capability comprehensively. Practices demonstrated the satisfying effect of our experimental teaching mode.

A theoretical framework for analysing preschool teaching

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Chaiklin, Seth

2014-01-01

This article introduces a theoretical framework for analysing preschool teaching as a historically-grounded societal practice. The aim is to present a unified framework that can be used to analyse and compare both historical and contemporary examples of preschool teaching practice within and across...... national traditions. The framework has two main components, an analysis of preschool teaching as a practice, formed in relation to societal needs, and an analysis of the categorical relations which necessarily must be addressed in preschool teaching activity. The framework is introduced and illustrated...

Excellence in clinical teaching: knowledge transformation and development required.

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Irby, David M

2014-08-01

Clinical teachers in medicine face the daunting task of mastering the many domains of knowledge needed for practice and teaching. The breadth and complexity of this knowledge continue to increase, as does the difficulty of transforming the knowledge into concepts that are understandable to learners. Properly targeted faculty development has the potential to expedite the knowledge transformation process for clinical teachers. Based on my own research in clinical teaching and faculty development, as well as the work of others, I describe the unique forms of clinical teacher knowledge, the transformation of that knowledge for teaching purposes and implications for faculty development. The following forms of knowledge for clinical teaching in medicine need to be mastered and transformed: (i) knowledge of medicine and patients; (ii) knowledge of context; (iii) knowledge of pedagogy and learners, and (iv) knowledge integrated into teaching scripts. This knowledge is employed and conveyed through the parallel processes of clinical reasoning and clinical instructional reasoning. Faculty development can facilitate this knowledge transformation process by: (i) examining, deconstructing and practising new teaching scripts; (ii) focusing on foundational concepts; (iii) demonstrating knowledge-in-use, and (iv) creating a supportive organisational climate for clinical teaching. To become an excellent clinical teacher in medicine requires the transformation of multiple forms of knowledge for teaching purposes. These domains of knowledge allow clinical teachers to provide tailored instruction to learners at varying levels in the context of fast-paced and demanding clinical practice. Faculty development can facilitate this knowledge transformation process. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

How to teach the potassium hydroxide preparation: a disappearing clinical art form.

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Wilkison, Bart D; Sperling, Leonard C; Spillane, Anne P; Meyerle, Jon H

2015-08-01

Using potassium hydroxide (KOH) preparations in the diagnosis of superficial fungal infections is a technique that has been handed down from teacher to apprentice for more than 100 years. The technique is simple, accurate, and inexpensive; however, there is reason to believe it is falling to the wayside in favor of empiric treatment, especially in primary care settings. To continue the use of this valuable diagnostic aid, a system of teaching the KOH preparation to the next generation of physicians (ie, medical students, residents) is proposed with emphasis on facilitating the process by storing viable skin samples infected with dermatophytes for long periods of time. This technique obviates the need to find suitably infected patients before each teaching laboratory. This technique also is appropriate to refresh the skills of practicing physicians as they prepare for point-of-care testing assessments.

Model brain based learning (BBL and whole brain teaching (WBT in learning

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Baiq Sri Handayani

2017-08-01

Full Text Available The learning process is a process of change in behavior as a form of the result of learning. The learning model is a crucial component of the success of the learning process. The learning model is growing fastly, and each model has different characteristics. Teachers are required to be able to understand each model to teach the students optimally by matching the materials and the learning model. The best of the learning model is the model that based on the brain system in learning that are the model of Brain Based Learning (BBL and the model of Whole Brain Teaching (WBT. The purposes of this article are to obtain information related to (1 the brain’s natural learning system, (2 analyze the characteristics of the model BBL and WBT based on theory, brain sections that play a role associated with syntax, similarities, and differences, (3 explain the distinctive characteristics of both models in comparison to other models. The results of this study are: (1 the brain’s natural learning system are: (a the nerves in each hemisphere do not work independently, (b doing more activities can connect more brain nerves, (c the right hemisphere controls the left side motoric sensor of the body, and vice versa; (2 the characteristics of BBL and WBT are: (a BBL is based on the brain’s structure and function, while the model WBT is based on the instructional approach, neurolinguistic, and body language, (b the parts of the brain that work in BBL are: cerebellum, cerebral cortex, frontal lobe, limbic system, and prefrontal cortex; whereas the parts that work WBT are: prefrontal cortex, visual cortex, motor cortex, limbic system, and amygdala, (c the similarities between them are that they both rely on the brain’s system and they both promote gesture in learning, whereas the differences are on the view of the purposes of gestures and the learning theory that they rely on. BBL relies on cognitive theory while WBT relies on social theory; (3 the typical

Team teaching as an innovative approach in education at higher education institutions

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Karmen Knežević

2012-12-01

Full Text Available In order to achieve maximum motivation and success in teaching students in higher education, it is necessary to use different forms of teaching. The aim of this article is to define the form of team teaching and to identify the advantages and disadvantages of it. For this purpose a team teaching lecture of English and physics was held with eleven students in the fourth semester at the Department of Physics at the University of Josip Juraj Strossmayer in Osijek. During the research and preparation for this team teaching lecture a number of open questions appeared and were answered by the authors / teachers. The results of the team teaching lecture and mutual gained experience (teacher – student show that this innovative approach provides a richer educational environment both for students and for teachers, which increases the efficiency of the teaching process. This form of teaching enabled teachers and students new roles in the educational system, which is a key factor in increasing the competitiveness at colleges, universities and study programs. However, a successful implementation of team teaching requires common elements of the team members that need to be aligned with the curriculum and other participants in the educational process.

A communist teaching experiment

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Skak, Morten

teaching. A form of mutual teaching where (student)teachers have good knowledge of the students’ learning problems. The role of the (conventional) teacher: To initiate and supervise the process and act as “final” teacher when this is required. The experiment produced various problems and the students...... of teaching is an improvement? I can only show two (poor?) methods: a) asking the students and b) use their examination results.......At the beginning of the course, students were told all the examination questions for the oral examination, and that they, in groups, should produce a report with a) A pedagogical presentation of (the selected part of) the theory/syllabus b) This theory put into perspective by self...

Harnessing the Power of Informal Learning: Using WeChat, the Semi-Synchronous Group Chat, to Enhance Spoken Fluency in Chinese Learners

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Sadoux, Marion

2017-01-01

This research is an exploratory study that seeks to evaluate the potentials of the Chinese app WeChat to enhance the spoken fluency of learners of French in China, who report having limited and insufficient opportunities to practice speaking in their daily life. WeChat is an extremely popular instant messenger facilitating communication through a…

Music and movement education as a form of motivation in teaching Greek traditional dances.

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Likesas, G; Zachopoulou, E

2006-04-01

Research has shown that motivation for participating in physical education, particularly in traditional dances, has decreased dramatically. The aim of this research was to examine whether a music and movement program would increase pleasure and intrinsic motivation of students in elementary education while teaching them Greek traditional dances. 232 students were divided into two groups, a trained group of 135 participants (72 boys, 63 girls) and a control group of 97 (53 boys, 44 girls). The trained group was taught using the music and movement teaching model of traditional dances. The control group was taught using the instructional or guided teaching method of traditional Greek dances. To measure effectiveness of the two methods was accomplished by the completion of McAuley's Intrinsic Motivation Inventory. Analysis of scores showed use of music and movement education had a positive effect on intrinsic motivation for dancing and active participation of students, especially of the trained boys' group.

Language Planning for Venezuela: The Role of English.

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Kelsey, Irving; Serrano, Jose

A rationale for teaching foreign languages in Venezuelan schools is discussed. An included sociolinguistic profile of Venezuela indicates that Spanish is the sole language of internal communication needs. Other languages spoken in Venezuela serve primarily a group function among the immigrant and indigenous communities. However, the teaching of…

Socratic Method as an Approach to Teaching

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Haris Delić

2016-10-01

Full Text Available In this article we presented the theoretical view of Socrates' life and his method in teaching. After the biographical facts of Socrates and his life, we explained the method he used in teaching and the two main types of his method, Classic and Modern Socratic Method. Since the core of Socrates' approach is the dialogue as a form of teaching we explained how exactly the Socratic dialogue goes. Besides that, we presented two examples of dialogues that Socrates led, Meno and Gorgias. Socratic circle is also one of the aspects that we presented in this paper. It is the form of seminars that is crucial for group discussions of a given theme. At the end, some disadvantages of the Method are explained. With this paper, the reader can get the conception of this approach of teaching and can use Socrates as an example of how successfull teacher leads his students towards the goal.

Long-term temporal tracking of speech rate affects spoken-word recognition.

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Baese-Berk, Melissa M; Heffner, Christopher C; Dilley, Laura C; Pitt, Mark A; Morrill, Tuuli H; McAuley, J Devin

2014-08-01

Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour. © The Author(s) 2014.

Spoken language achieves robustness and evolvability by exploiting degeneracy and neutrality.

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Winter, Bodo

2014-10-01

As with biological systems, spoken languages are strikingly robust against perturbations. This paper shows that languages achieve robustness in a way that is highly similar to many biological systems. For example, speech sounds are encoded via multiple acoustically diverse, temporally distributed and functionally redundant cues, characteristics that bear similarities to what biologists call "degeneracy". Speech is furthermore adequately characterized by neutrality, with many different tongue configurations leading to similar acoustic outputs, and different acoustic variants understood as the same by recipients. This highlights the presence of a large neutral network of acoustic neighbors for every speech sound. Such neutrality ensures that a steady backdrop of variation can be maintained without impeding communication, assuring that there is "fodder" for subsequent evolution. Thus, studying linguistic robustness is not only important for understanding how linguistic systems maintain their functioning upon the background of noise, but also for understanding the preconditions for language evolution. © 2014 WILEY Periodicals, Inc.

The Effects of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Speech Perception on Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Children: Simulating Deficits in an Experimental Design

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Higgins, Meaghan C.; Penney, Sarah B.; Robertson, Erin K.

2017-01-01

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N = 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control,…

SPOKEN COCHABAMBA QUECHUA, UNITS 1-12.

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LASTRA, YOLANDA; SOLA, DONALD F.

THE FIRST OF TWO VOLUMES PREPARED FOR TEACHING THE COCHABAMBA DIALECT OF QUECHUA TO SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH, THIS DOCUMENT IS MADE UP OF 12 UNITS THAT COMPRISE A 6-WEEK INTENSIVE COURSE OF 20 CLASS HOURS A WEEK. EACH UNIT CONSISTS OF ONE OR MORE DIALOGS TO BE MEMORIZED, A DIALOG REVIEW, A SECTION ON GRAMMAR WITH ACCOMPANYING EXERCISES, CONVERSATION,…

The effect of written text on comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language.

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Diao, Yali; Chandler, Paul; Sweller, John

2007-01-01

Based on cognitive load theory, this study investigated the effect of simultaneous written presentations on comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language. Learners' language comprehension was compared while they used 3 instructional formats: listening with auditory materials only, listening with a full, written script, and listening with simultaneous subtitled text. Listening with the presence of a script and subtitles led to better understanding of the scripted and subtitled passage but poorer performance on a subsequent auditory passage than listening with the auditory materials only. These findings indicated that where the intention was learning to listen, the use of a full script or subtitles had detrimental effects on the construction and automation of listening comprehension schemas.

GLOBALIZATION AND TEACHER DEVELOPMENT FOR SPOKEN ENGLISH INSTRUCTION

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Christine C.M. Goh

2013-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract: The impact of globalization is experienced most strongly in business and commerce but also increasingly in education. As a result, some scholars have called for a re-envisioning of the role of teachers to model what it means to be a global citizen. In this paper, I acknowledge the need for ESL/EFL teachers to re-examine their identity and roles in light of these global developments. At the same time, I argue that teachers should not lose sight of the importance of honing the craft of teaching English so as to increase their professional capital to mediate the impact of globalization for their students. This article first discusses the changing roles of teachers in a globalized world and highlights the implications for English language teaching and learning.  The ideas are further related to teaching second language oracy (speaking and listening because of its centrality in developing important 21st Century skills in the globalized world. The article also offers ways in which teacher education that takes cognizance of globalization forces can develop ESL/ EFL teachers’ knowledge and beliefs to play their new roles more effectively.

An Applied Methodology for the Use of "Deutsch, Erstes Buch."

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Dimler, G. Richard

Discussion of teaching methods used with the text, "Deutsch, Erstes Buch" by Hugo Mueller, focuses on practical approaches to the problem of teaching culture through the spoken language and the use of pattern practice. While concentrating on Chapter Eight, "In der Sommerfrische," discussion is presented in subdivisions characteristic of every…

Teaching Competencies of Students Practice Teaching at Elementary Schools and Kindergartens

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Nur Fatimah

2012-08-01

Full Text Available The objective of this study is to describe the teaching competencies of English Education students practising at elementary schools and kindergartens based on the teacher supervisors’ view. The teaching competencies include the students’ competence on writing the lesson plan and their competence on practice teaching. To reach the objectives of the study, the researcher collected the data by distributing a questionnaire to the supervisors at schools. There were 41 schools consisting of TK ABA, SD Muhammadiyah, SD Negeri located in Yogyakarta (24, Sleman (1 and Bantul (16. The questionnaire used was based on the official assessment form published by Indonesian government for teacher’s certification. It contains some indicators of teaching competence, it uses Likert scales ranging from 1 to 5. The criteria are as follows: 1 = very poor, 2 = poor, 3 = rather poor, 4 = good, and 5 = excellent. The data were taken from proportionally random sampling of the supervisors. From the total number of 103 teacher supervisors, the researcher distributed 61 questionnaires. The supervisors represented the ones from different educational backgrounds. The findings show the following results. The competence of English Education students in composing the lesson plan, according to the teacher supervisors, is classified good (actual mean = 3.858, SD = 0.685, ideal mean = 3, ideal SD = 0.750. Further, their competence on practice teaching is also good (actual mean = 3.867, SD = 0.688, ideal mean = 3, ideal SD = 0.966. The two aspects of composing the lesson plan to improve are teaching material organization and the completeness of assessment instrument. The other two aspects to improve in teaching practice are contextual teaching and learning and class management.

Snowball Throwing in Teaching Grammar

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Yanuarti Apsari

2018-05-01

Full Text Available The aims of this study are to describe the implementation of snowball throwing in teaching grammar and to investigate the benefits of applying snowball throwing. The research was conducted at STKIP Siliwangi Bandung. This study applied qualitative research involving one class consisting of second semester students in English Department who were taking the subject of foundation of English Grammar. The data were obtained from classroom observation and students’ interview. The findings showed that there are seven stages in implementing snowball throwing in teaching grammar. The stages consist of preparing teaching material, forming group, re-explaining the material to the member of the group, formulating question, tossing the ball, answering questions and evaluating teaching and learning process. In addition, the findings also revealed that there are some benefits from applying snowball throwing in teaching grammar such as improving students’ comprehension in learning grammar, creating enjoyable learning atmosphere, increasing students’ vocabulary, developing students’ speaking skill, developing students’ cooperation skill and increasing students’ participation in the class.

The relationship between spoken English proficiency and participation in higher education, employment and income from two Australian censuses.

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Blake, Helen L; Mcleod, Sharynne; Verdon, Sarah; Fuller, Gail

2018-04-01

Proficiency in the language of the country of residence has implications for an individual's level of education, employability, income and social integration. This paper explores the relationship between the spoken English proficiency of residents of Australia on census day and their educational level, employment and income to provide insight into multilingual speakers' ability to participate in Australia as an English-dominant society. Data presented are derived from two Australian censuses i.e. 2006 and 2011 of over 19 million people. The proportion of Australians who reported speaking a language other than English at home was 21.5% in the 2006 census and 23.2% in the 2011 census. Multilingual speakers who also spoke English very well were more likely to have post-graduate qualifications, full-time employment and high income than monolingual English-speaking Australians. However, multilingual speakers who reported speaking English not well were much less likely to have post-graduate qualifications or full-time employment than monolingual English-speaking Australians. These findings provide insight into the socioeconomic and educational profiles of multilingual speakers, which will inform the understanding of people such as speech-language pathologists who provide them with support. The results indicate spoken English proficiency may impact participation in Australian society. These findings challenge the "monolingual mindset" by demonstrating that outcomes for multilingual speakers in education, employment and income are higher than for monolingual speakers.

Peer Assessment of Elementary Science Teaching Skills

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Kilic, Gulsen Bagci; Cakan, Mehtap

2007-01-01

In this study, peer assessment was applied in assessing elementary science teaching skills. Preservice teachers taught a science topic as a team to their peers in an elementary science methods course. The peers participating in the science lesson assessed teacher-groups' elementary science teaching skills on an assessment form provided by the…

Teaching to the Test: Coaching or Corruption

Science.gov (United States)

Bond, Lloyd

2008-01-01

Despite their current popularity, many still view coaching schools for college admissions as somehow vaguely unethical, as a form of "teaching to the test." But "coaching" as an instructional exercise only crosses some ethical line of propriety when instructors have access to and in fact teach the actual items that will appear…

Towards a Sociolinguistically Responsive Pedagogy: Teaching Second-Person Address Forms in French

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van Compernolle, Remi A.

2010-01-01

This article presents a sociolinguistically responsive model of pedagogy situated within existing sociocultural and communicative approaches to language learning and teaching. The specific focus of the discussion is on the French pronouns of address, "tu" and "vous". The article reviews previous research on second-person address in educational and…

Investigation of the Effects of Mathematical Thinking States of Form Teachers on Their Mathematics Teaching Anxieties

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Yorulmaz, Alper; Altintas, Sedat; Sidekli, Sabri

2017-01-01

The state of mathematical thinking is considered to have an effect on the formation of anxiety regarding teaching mathematics. It is hypothesized that with the formation of mathematical thinking, the anxiety in teachers regarding teaching mathematics will be reduced. Since mathematical thinking is a skill acquired starting from the early years of…

Enhancing Foreign Language Learning through Listening Strategies Delivered in L1: An Experimental Study

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Bozorgian, Hossein; Pillay, Hitendra

2013-01-01

Listening used in language teaching refers to a complex process that allows us to understand spoken language. The current study, conducted in Iran with an experimental design, investigated the effectiveness of teaching listening strategies delivered in L1 (Persian) and its effect on listening comprehension in L2. Five listening strategies:…

An Action Research Study into the Role of Student Negotiation in Enhancing Perceived Student Engagement during English Speaking Classes at University Level in Turkey

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Uztosun, Mehmet Sercan; Skinner, Nigel; Cadorath, Jill

2018-01-01

A major issue in English language teaching in Turkey and other monolingual countries is the teaching of spoken English. This article reports the initial and final stages of an action research study which used student negotiation to enhance student engagement in speaking classes. The research was conducted in the English Language Teaching…

Learning by Observing a Peer's Teaching Situation

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Hendry, Graham D.; Bell, Amani; Thomson, Kate

2014-01-01

This article reports on a study of academics who observed their colleagues' teaching at a large research-intensive university in Australia. These academics had completed peer observation as part of a foundations programme designed for those new to teaching or new to the university. Survey responses and interview transcripts form the basis of an…

A Brief Analysis of Large Classroom’s English Teaching Management Skills

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Weixuan Zhong

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Classroom is the basic place of teaching, where intertwined with a variety of teaching factors, and all these factors forms various kinds of connections. Scientific and effective class teaching management is the necessary and powerful measure of improving the teaching quality. Effective English teaching management skills are parts of the elements of successful large classroom teaching. Under the new educational situation, how to organize, regulate, manage large classrooms in order to train the students' English proficiency within certain time, which is very important to improve English classes management efficiency and teaching quality.

Insights into teaching mathematics

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Orton, Anthony

2004-01-01

Providing essential guidance and background information about teaching mathematics, this book is intended particularly for teachers who do not regard themselves as specialists in mathematics. It deals with issues of learning and teaching, including the delivery of content and the place of problems and investigations. Difficulties which pupils encounter in connection with language and symbols form important sections of the overall discussion of how to enhance learning. The curriculum is considered in brief under the headings of number, algebra, shape and space, and data handling, and special at

Language configurations of degree-related denotations in the spoken production of a group of Colombian EFL university students: A corpus-based study

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Wilder Yesid Escobar

2015-05-01

Full Text Available Recognizing that developing the competences needed to appropriately use linguistic resources according to contextual characteristics (pragmatics is as important as the cultural-imbedded linguistic knowledge itself (semantics and that both are equally essential to form competent speakers of English in foreign language contexts, we feel this research relies on corpus linguistics to analyze both the scope and the limitations of the sociolinguistic knowledge and the communicative skills of English students at the university level. To such end, a linguistic corpus was assembled, compared to an existing corpus of native speakers, and analyzed in terms of the frequency, overuse, underuse, misuse, ambiguity, success, and failure of the linguistic parameters used in speech acts. The findings herein describe the linguistic configurations employed to modify levels and degrees of descriptions (salient sematic theme exhibited in the EFL learners´ corpus appealing to the sociolinguistic principles governing meaning making and language use which are constructed under the social conditions of the environments where the language is naturally spoken for sociocultural exchange.

Impact of cognitive function and dysarthria on spoken language and perceived speech severity in multiple sclerosis

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Feenaughty, Lynda

Purpose: The current study sought to investigate the separate effects of dysarthria and cognitive status on global speech timing, speech hesitation, and linguistic complexity characteristics and how these speech behaviors impose on listener impressions for three connected speech tasks presumed to differ in cognitive-linguistic demand for four carefully defined speaker groups; 1) MS with cognitive deficits (MSCI), 2) MS with clinically diagnosed dysarthria and intact cognition (MSDYS), 3) MS without dysarthria or cognitive deficits (MS), and 4) healthy talkers (CON). The relationship between neuropsychological test scores and speech-language production and perceptual variables for speakers with cognitive deficits was also explored. Methods: 48 speakers, including 36 individuals reporting a neurological diagnosis of MS and 12 healthy talkers participated. The three MS groups and control group each contained 12 speakers (8 women and 4 men). Cognitive function was quantified using standard clinical tests of memory, information processing speed, and executive function. A standard z-score of ≤ -1.50 indicated deficits in a given cognitive domain. Three certified speech-language pathologists determined the clinical diagnosis of dysarthria for speakers with MS. Experimental speech tasks of interest included audio-recordings of an oral reading of the Grandfather passage and two spontaneous speech samples in the form of Familiar and Unfamiliar descriptive discourse. Various measures of spoken language were of interest. Suprasegmental acoustic measures included speech and articulatory rate. Linguistic speech hesitation measures included pause frequency (i.e., silent and filled pauses), mean silent pause duration, grammatical appropriateness of pauses, and interjection frequency. For the two discourse samples, three standard measures of language complexity were obtained including subordination index, inter-sentence cohesion adequacy, and lexical diversity. Ten listeners

Are Danish doctors comfortable teaching in English?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nilas, Lisbeth; Løkkegaard, Ellen Christine Leth; Laursen, Jacob Brink

2016-01-01

English skills was perceived low. Conclusion Teaching in English was rated as 30 % more difficult than in Danish, and a significant subgroup of doctors had difficulties in all forms of communication in English, resulting in challenges when introducing international students in non-native English speaking...... medical departments. Keywords International students Clinical teaching Teaching in foreign language Doctors’ English skills Self-assessment......Background From 2012–2015, the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and of Pediatrics at the University of Copenhagen conducted a project, “Internationalization at Home ”, offering clinical teaching in English. The project allowed international students to work with Danish speaking students...

Macromethod of teaching acrobatic exercises difficult on coordination

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Boloban V.N.

2010-06-01

Full Text Available The logical flow diagram of realization of macromethod of teaching acrobatic exercises is shown. The functional aggregate of long duration programs of teaching exercises of «school of motions», base level, specialization, arbitrary and final programs is presented. Directions of development of physical qualities are offered in interface with technical preparation. Technologies of forming motive presentations serve as didactic basis of the teaching programs, elementary, deep training acrobatic exercises.

Project as an education method in teaching of physics

OpenAIRE

ŽAHOUREK, Martin

2011-01-01

The diploma thesis ?Project as an educational method for teaching physics ?deals with the possibilities of using project-based method for teaching physics at primary schools. Not only does it contain the theoretical background of project-based teaching, but also deals with practical issues in the form of an implementation of a chosen project ?Physics and physical education?. The aim of said project was to evaluate the efficiency of project-based teaching as far as the knowledge of pupils and ...

Altering Practices to Include Bimodal-bilingual (ASL-Spoken English) Programming at a Small School for the Deaf in Canada.

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Priestley, Karen; Enns, Charlotte; Arbuckle, Shauna

2018-01-01

Bimodal-bilingual programs are emerging as one way to meet broader needs and provide expanded language, educational and social-emotional opportunities for students who are deaf and hard of hearing (Marschark, M., Tang, G. & Knoors, H. (Eds). (2014). Bilingualism and bilingual Deaf education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Paludneviciene & Harris, R. (2011). Impact of cochlear implants on the deaf community. In Paludneviciene, R. & Leigh, I. (Eds.), Cochlear implants evolving perspectives (pp. 3-19). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press). However, there is limited research on students' spoken language development, signed language growth, academic outcomes or the social-emotional factors associated with these programs (Marschark, M., Tang, G. & Knoors, H. (Eds). (2014). Bilingualism and bilingual Deaf education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Nussbaum, D & Scott, S. (2011). The cochlear implant education center: Perspectives on effective educational practices. In Paludneviciene, R. & Leigh, I. (Eds.) Cochlear implants evolving perspectives (pp. 175-205). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. The cochlear implant education center: Perspectives on effective educational practices. In Paludnevicience & Leigh (Eds). Cochlear implants evolving perspectives (pp. 175-205). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press; Spencer, P. & Marschark, M. (Eds.) (2010). Evidence-based practice in educating deaf and hard-of-hearing students. New York, NY: Oxford University Press). The purpose of this case study was to look at formal and informal student outcomes as well as staff and parent perceptions during the first 3 years of implementing a bimodal-bilingual (ASL and spoken English) program within an ASL milieu at a small school for the deaf. Speech and language assessment results for five students were analyzed over a 3-year period and indicated that the students made significant positive gains in all areas, although results were variable. Staff and parent

Native Language Spoken as a Risk Marker for Tooth Decay.

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Carson, J; Walker, L A; Sanders, B J; Jones, J E; Weddell, J A; Tomlin, A M

2015-01-01

The purpose of this study was to assess dmft, the number of decayed, missing (due to caries), and/ or filled primary teeth, of English-speaking and non-English speaking patients of a hospital based pediatric dental clinic under the age of 72 months to determine if native language is a risk marker for tooth decay. Records from an outpatient dental clinic which met the inclusion criteria were reviewed. Patient demographics and dmft score were recorded, and the patients were separated into three groups by the native language spoken by their parents: English, Spanish and all other languages. A total of 419 charts were assessed: 253 English-speaking, 126 Spanish-speaking, and 40 other native languages. After accounting for patient characteristics, dmft was significantly higher for the other language group than for the English-speaking (p0.05). Those patients under 72 months of age whose parents' native language is not English or Spanish, have the highest risk for increased dmft when compared to English and Spanish speaking patients. Providers should consider taking additional time to educate patients and their parents, in their native language, on the importance of routine dental care and oral hygiene.

Defining, Developing, and Measuring "Proclivities for Teaching Mathematics"

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Lewis, Jennifer M.; Fischman, Davida; Riggs, Matt

2015-01-01

This article presents a form of teacher reasoning that we call "proclivities for teaching mathematics." We define proclivities for teaching mathematics as the beliefs, knowledge, and dispositions that are actionable in the flow of instruction, and we argue that growth in this area contributes to positive change in mathematics…

Teaching grammar, structure and meaning exploring theory and practice for post-16 English language teachers

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Giovanelli, Marcello

2014-01-01

Teaching Grammar, Structure and Meaning introduces teachers to some basic ideas from the increasingly popular field of cognitive linguistics as a way of explaining and teaching key grammatical concepts. Particularly suitable for those teaching post-16 English Language, this book offers a methodology for teaching key aspects of linguistic form and an extensive set of learning activities. Written by an experienced linguist and teacher, this book contains:· an evaluation of current approaches to the teaching of grammar and linguistic form· a revised pedagogy based on principles from cognitive sci

Visual Form, Ethics, and a Typology of Purpose: Teaching Effective Information Design

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Rosenquist, Christina

2012-01-01

Stallworth Williams introduces concepts of visual rhetoric and ethics for a classroom exercise in the analysis and revision of a sales letter. This article revisits Stallworth Williams's proposed teaching strategies, suggesting that not only do students need to be instructed in elements of visual design, but they must also be taught to link those…

Речевое оформление и использование обращений в деловой коммуникации на японском языке

OpenAIRE

Свинина, Надежда

2008-01-01

The article is dedicated to study and analysis of forms of address in spoken Japanese and business conversations in Japanese language. Forms of address are analyzed on basis of real life examples. Several conclusions on using forms of address in business conversations in Japanese are made after analyzing usual forms of address of spoken Japanese language.

The role of visual representations during the lexical access of spoken words.

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Lewis, Gwyneth; Poeppel, David

2014-07-01

Do visual representations contribute to spoken word recognition? We examine, using MEG, the effects of sublexical and lexical variables at superior temporal (ST) areas and the posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) compared with that of word imageability at visual cortices. Embodied accounts predict early modulation of visual areas by imageability--concurrently with or prior to modulation of pMTG by lexical variables. Participants responded to speech stimuli varying continuously in imageability during lexical decision with simultaneous MEG recording. We employed the linguistic variables in a new type of correlational time course analysis to assess trial-by-trial activation in occipital, ST, and pMTG regions of interest (ROIs). The linguistic variables modulated the ROIs during different time windows. Critically, visual regions reflected an imageability effect prior to effects of lexicality on pMTG. This surprising effect supports a view on which sensory aspects of a lexical item are not a consequence of lexical activation. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Multilingual Approach to Analysing Standardized Test Results: Immigrant Primary School Children and the Role of Languages Spoken in a Bi-/Multilingual Community

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De Angelis, Gessica

2014-01-01

The present study adopts a multilingual approach to analysing the standardized test results of primary school immigrant children living in the bi-/multilingual context of South Tyrol, Italy. The standardized test results are from the Invalsi test administered across Italy in 2009/2010. In South Tyrol, several languages are spoken on a daily basis…

Development of the Visual Word Form Area Requires Visual Experience: Evidence from Blind Braille Readers.

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Kim, Judy S; Kanjlia, Shipra; Merabet, Lotfi B; Bedny, Marina

2017-11-22

Learning to read causes the development of a letter- and word-selective region known as the visual word form area (VWFA) within the human ventral visual object stream. Why does a reading-selective region develop at this anatomical location? According to one hypothesis, the VWFA develops at the nexus of visual inputs from retinotopic cortices and linguistic input from the frontotemporal language network because reading involves extracting linguistic information from visual symbols. Surprisingly, the anatomical location of the VWFA is also active when blind individuals read Braille by touch, suggesting that vision is not required for the development of the VWFA. In this study, we tested the alternative prediction that VWFA development is in fact influenced by visual experience. We predicted that in the absence of vision, the "VWFA" is incorporated into the frontotemporal language network and participates in high-level language processing. Congenitally blind ( n = 10, 9 female, 1 male) and sighted control ( n = 15, 9 female, 6 male), male and female participants each took part in two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments: (1) word reading (Braille for blind and print for sighted participants), and (2) listening to spoken sentences of different grammatical complexity (both groups). We find that in blind, but not sighted participants, the anatomical location of the VWFA responds both to written words and to the grammatical complexity of spoken sentences. This suggests that in blindness, this region takes on high-level linguistic functions, becoming less selective for reading. More generally, the current findings suggest that experience during development has a major effect on functional specialization in the human cortex. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region in the human cortex that becomes specialized for the recognition of written letters and words. Why does this particular brain region become specialized for reading? We

Audiovisual spoken word recognition as a clinical criterion for sensory aids efficiency in Persian-language children with hearing loss.

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Oryadi-Zanjani, Mohammad Majid; Vahab, Maryam; Bazrafkan, Mozhdeh; Haghjoo, Asghar

2015-12-01

The aim of this study was to examine the role of audiovisual speech recognition as a clinical criterion of cochlear implant or hearing aid efficiency in Persian-language children with severe-to-profound hearing loss. This research was administered as a cross-sectional study. The sample size was 60 Persian 5-7 year old children. The assessment tool was one of subtests of Persian version of the Test of Language Development-Primary 3. The study included two experiments: auditory-only and audiovisual presentation conditions. The test was a closed-set including 30 words which were orally presented by a speech-language pathologist. The scores of audiovisual word perception were significantly higher than auditory-only condition in the children with normal hearing (Paudiovisual presentation conditions (P>0.05). The audiovisual spoken word recognition can be applied as a clinical criterion to assess the children with severe to profound hearing loss in order to find whether cochlear implant or hearing aid has been efficient for them or not; i.e. if a child with hearing impairment who using CI or HA can obtain higher scores in audiovisual spoken word recognition than auditory-only condition, his/her auditory skills have appropriately developed due to effective CI or HA as one of the main factors of auditory habilitation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

English Language Teaching: Teaching of Hedges

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Charles Ko

2014-05-01

Full Text Available A hedge is a mitigating word or sound used to lessen the impact of an utterance. It can be an adjective, for example, ‘Small potato me is not as strong as you’; or an adverb: ‘I maybe can swim faster than you’, while it can also consist of clauses, that it could be regarded as a form of euphemism which should be taught as a main topic in English class of schools around the world. For instance, in Hong Kong schools, based on my observation while teaching in a number of primary and secondary English courses as a tutor, students report that their school teachers usually emphasize the teaching of all cohesive devices in terms of skills of writing while they neglect to explain the importance of the use of hedges in order to show euphemism. In this study, I would adopt Corpus Linguistics, a division of applied linguistics, as methodology to discover a great deal of hedges employed by so-called native speakers of English, for promoting the idiomatic usage of hedges in writing, nevertheless in speaking, so as to help teachers gain resources and inspiration in teaching to students the appropriate English hedges as a consequence of the author’s hard effort while revealing from the selected corpora of this paper.

Approaching multidimensional forms of knowledge through Personal Meaning Mapping in science integrating teaching outside the classroom

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hartmeyer, Rikke; Bolling, Mads; Bentsen, Peter

2017-01-01

knowledge dimensions is important, especially in science teaching outside the classroom, where “hands-on” approaches and experiments are often part of teaching and require procedural knowledge, among other things. Therefore, this study investigates PMM as a method for exploring specific knowledge dimensions......Current research points to Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) as a method useful in investigating students’ prior and current science knowledge. However, studies investigating PMM as a method for exploring specific knowledge dimensions are lacking. Ensuring that students are able to access specific...... in formal science education integrating teaching outside the classroom. We applied a case study design involving two schools and four sixth-grade classes. Data were collected from six students in each class who constructed personal meaning maps and were interviewed immediately after natural science...

Evaluation of Malaysian English Language Teaching Textbooks

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Jayakaran Mukundan

2013-07-01

Full Text Available Research in materials evaluation has been an important focus in ELT since the 1980s. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the general attributes of the textbooks and to evaluate the learning-teaching content. In this study, 944 male and female English teachers (Year 1 to Year 6 & Form 1 to Form 5 evaluated the English books using a valid and reliable checklist. In terms of general attributes and learning-teaching content of the textbooks, the results showed that Year 1 to Year 6 teachers reported that the current textbooks are ‘highly useful’ to the students, whereas Form 1 to Form 5 teachers contended that the school books are only ‘moderately useful’. The findings of this study can be useful for curricula designers and Ministry of Education as a reference for improving or modifying the textbooks.

SuperFormLab: showing SuperFormLab

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

2013-01-01

bachelor program, followed by two years of master studies. The courses are offered equally to students from other design disciplines, e.g. industrial design. Teaching is mainly in English as the program is attended by a relatively large group of non-Danish students, who seek exactly this combination......3D-printing in clay and ceramic objects shaped by your own sounds and movements! Digital form transferred via CNC-milling to ornamental ceramic wall-cladding. Brave New World… Students and their teacher at SuperFormLab, the new ceramic workshop of the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy...... of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, will be showing results of their investigations into the potential of combining digital technologies with ceramic materials. It is now possible to shape the most complex mathematical, virtual 3D objects through the use of advanced software-programs. And more than that – you can...

Developing students' teaching through peer observation and feedback.

Science.gov (United States)

Rees, Eliot L; Davies, Benjamin; Eastwood, Michael

2015-10-01

With the increasing popularity and scale of peer teaching, it is imperative to develop methods that ensure the quality of teaching provided by undergraduate students. We used an established faculty development and quality assurance process in a novel context: peer observation of teaching for undergraduate peer tutors. We have developed a form to record observations and aid the facilitation of feedback. In addition, experienced peer tutors have been trained to observe peer-taught sessions and provide tutors with verbal and written feedback. We have found peer observation of teaching to be a feasible and acceptable process for improving quality of teaching provided by undergraduate medical students. However, feedback regarding the quality of peer observer's feedback may help to develop students' abilities further.

Emergent Literacy Skills in Preschool Children with Hearing Loss Who Use Spoken Language: Initial Findings from the Early Language and Literacy Acquisition (ELLA) Study

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Werfel, Krystal L.

2017-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare change in emergent literacy skills of preschool children with and without hearing loss over a 6-month period. Method: Participants included 19 children with hearing loss and 14 children with normal hearing. Children with hearing loss used amplification and spoken language. Participants completed…

Teaching and assessing consultation skills: an evaluation of a South ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Teaching and assessing consultation skills: an evaluation of a South African workshop ... of this work is unsupervised consultations with patients suffering from new or ... Their attitudes to the LAP and the forms of teaching that its use promotes ...

Undergraduate psychiatry students' attitudes towards teaching methods at an Irish university.

Science.gov (United States)

Jabbar, F; Casey, P; Kelly, B D

2016-11-01

At University College Dublin, teaching in psychiatry includes clinical electives, lectures, small-group and problem-based teaching, consistent with international trends. To determine final-year psychiatry students' attitudes towards teaching methods. We distributed questionnaires to all final-year medical students in two classes (2008 and 2009), after final psychiatry examination (before results) and all of them participated (n = 111). Students' interest in psychiatry as a career increased during psychiatry teaching. Students rated objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) as the most useful element of teaching and examination. The most common learning style was "reflector"; the least common was "pragmatist". Two thirds believed teaching could be improved (increased patient contact) and 89 % reported that experience of psychiatry changed attitudes towards mental illness (increased understanding). Students' preference for OSCEs may reflect the closeness of OSCE as a form of learning to OSCE as a form of assessment: OSCEs both focus on specific clinical skills and help prepare for examinations. Future research could usefully examine the extent to which these findings are university-specific or instructor-dependent. Information on the consistency of various teaching, examination and modularisation methods would also be useful.

Learning to Attend to Precision: The Impact of Micro-Teaching Guided by Expert Secondary Mathematics Teachers on Pre-Service Teachers' Teaching Practice

Science.gov (United States)

Cheng, Jing

2017-01-01

Micro-teaching at universities and student teaching in secondary schools are standard forms of practice training for pre-service mathematics teachers in Chinese university teacher education programs. The former is guided by university professors, and the latter is guided by school teachers. In recent years, a special kind of micro-teaching…

New forms of nurse teacher preparation 1989-1992 : Development and evaluation.

OpenAIRE

Race, Angela J.

1995-01-01

Radical reform of the arrangements for pre-registration nurse education and the recommendation that nurse teaching become a graduate profession prompted a reappraisal of the arrangements for nurse teacher preparation. This thesis reports an evaluation of a new form of preparation for nurse teaching. The new courses were intended to combine advanced study of nursing with educational theory and practice, and led to an honours degree and a teaching qualification recordable on the professional re...

Critical Pedagogy Principles in Teaching EFL Reading

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Slamet Wahyudi Yulianto

2015-12-01

Full Text Available This study attempts to reveal how the use of critical pedagogy principles in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL reading facilitates students to think critically. Additionally, it investigates and elaborates the benefits and challenges of using critical pedagogy principles in teaching EFL reading. The three critical pedagogy principles used in this study were dialogic education, democratic classroom, and reading the world and the word. Critical thinking skills and dispositions expected to be performed by the participants were analysis and evaluation skills, open-mindedness, and making reasoned decision. This is a case study design which was conducted in the form of teaching program. The teaching program which consisted of eight meetings was given to 59 EFL sophomores in the Reading in Professional Context class at a private teacher education in Bandung. Data in the form of classroom talks and activities and students‟ responses as well as their critical thinking skills self-assessment were collected by using video recordings, observation notes, interview guideline, students‟ learning journals, and questionnaires. It is revealed that the teaching program has facilitated students to think critically by providing four categories of activity. They are (1 offering problematic topics and reading materials that are linked to the students‟ lives, (2 encouraging students to read between the lines, (3 distributing classroom power, and (4 creating space for students‟ voices to be heard. Meanwhile, there are two benefits of the teaching program, namely (1 language development and (2 new knowledge as well as experience acquisition. However, there are three major challenges in conducting the teaching program that are (1 the lack of classroom-friendly authentic controversial reading materials, (2 the passive culture, and (3 the unpredictable classroom.

Evaluating academic literacy teaching at a South African university ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Are the teaching and learning methodologies employed in these programmes consistent with current trends in the teaching of English as a second language? Are these programmes managed and structured in a way that promotes the achievement of the very purpose for which they were formed? This paper presents a case ...

Forms And Functions Relationships: Use Of Discourse Markers In ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Frederick Iraki

According to Fraser (1996) a DM is “an expression which signals the relationship of the basic ..... with the listener, the usage of DM serves as a positive politeness strategy (Cook, 1983). .... 'Alors and don in spoken French: A re analysis'.

Predoctoral Teaching of Geriatric Dentistry in U.S. Dental Schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Ettinger, Ronald L; Goettsche, Zachary S; Qian, Fang

2017-08-01

The aim of this study was to assess the current teaching of geriatric dentistry in U.S. dental schools and compare the findings to previous reports. Academic deans at all 67 U.S. dental schools were contacted in November 2015 via email, asking them to complete a questionnaire about the teaching of geriatric dentistry or gerodontology at their institution. Questionnaires were received from 56 of the 67 schools (84% response rate). The results showed that geriatric dentistry was taught in all responding schools; for 92.8% of the respondents, the instruction was compulsory. Among the responding schools, 62.5% were teaching it as an independent course, 25% as an organized series of lectures, and 8.9% as occasional lectures in parts of other courses. In addition, 57.1% had some form of compulsory clinical education in geriatric dentistry. Public schools, as opposed to private schools, were marginally associated with an increased interest in expanding geriatric dentistry teaching (p=0.078). No differences were found between any teaching variables and school location. This study found that the form of education in geriatric dentistry in U.S. dental schools differed in many ways, but the teaching of geriatric dentistry had increased among all respondents and had been increasing for over 30 years. Future research is needed to determine the impact of this teaching on services to the geriatric community.

Spoken language development in oral preschool children with permanent childhood deafness.

Science.gov (United States)

Sarant, Julia Z; Holt, Colleen M; Dowell, Richard C; Rickards, Field W; Blamey, Peter J

2009-01-01

This article documented spoken language outcomes for preschool children with hearing loss and examined the relationships between language abilities and characteristics of children such as degree of hearing loss, cognitive abilities, age at entry to early intervention, and parent involvement in children's intervention programs. Participants were evaluated using a combination of the Child Development Inventory, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Preschool Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals depending on their age at the time of assessment. Maternal education, cognitive ability, and family involvement were also measured. Over half of the children who participated in this study had poor language outcomes overall. No significant differences were found in language outcomes on any of the measures for children who were diagnosed early and those diagnosed later. Multiple regression analyses showed that family participation, degree of hearing loss, and cognitive ability significantly predicted language outcomes and together accounted for almost 60% of the variance in scores. This article highlights the importance of family participation in intervention programs to enable children to achieve optimal language outcomes. Further work may clarify the effects of early diagnosis on language outcomes for preschool children.

Teaching social skills in the language classroom | Venter | Journal ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Bullying has become a major problem in schools worldwide. It might escalate to serious forms of anti-social behaviour, therefore the teaching of social skills are important in the school as a whole. The language classroom is the ideal place to teach social and communication skills. In the whole language approach, combined ...

Teaching Medical Students Clinical Anesthesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Curry, Saundra E

2018-05-01

allowed full access to patient care, including performing history and physical examinations, participating in the insertion of IVs and airway management. Simulation-based teaching was used by 82% of programs during medical student anesthesia clerkships. Sixty-eight percent of respondents reported that they have no formal training for their anesthesiology faculty teachers, 51% stated that they do not receive nonclinical time to teach, and 38% of respondents stated that they received some form of remuneration for teaching medical students, primarily nonclinical time. This article presents a summary of these survey results, provides a historical review of previous evaluations of teaching medical students clinical anesthesia, and discusses the contributions of anesthesiologists to medical student education.

Design and Realization of Network Teaching System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ji Shan Shan

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Since 21 century, with the wide spread in family and public, network has been applied in many new fields, and the application in classes is of no exception. In traditional education, teachers give lessons to students face to face. Hence, the teaching quality depends largely on the quality and initiative of the individual teacher. However, the serious disadvantages of this mode are that teachers completely dominate the classroom and may ignore the subjective cognition role of the students, which may be bad for the growth of creativity and the innovative thinking ability. Obviously, traditional education mode cannot meet the requirements of the this new era which leads to the booming developing tendency of the network. As a new teaching measure, scientifically combining modern information technology and teaching practice, network teaching not only changes the traditional education by the means and form, but even also gives new meanings to teaching concept, process, method as well as teacher-student role and other deep levels. With the help of network teaching system, on-line classroom learning, relevant information systematization, standardization and automation, this system provides students with an efficient online learning method with high quality. This also helps to solve the disadvantages of the traditional teaching mode and promote the teaching methods to a new stage. It improves the network teaching platform, enriches the network teaching resources, and establishes a network teaching system, so as to improve information quality of teachers and students and assist in improving teaching quality of schools.

ORTHOGRAPHIC INTERFERENCE and THE TEACHING OF BRITISH PRONUNCIATION TO TURKISH LEARNERS

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Prof. Dr.Sinan Bayraktaroğlu

2008-10-01

Full Text Available This article is the report of an investigation of pronunciation difficulties of Turkish speakers/learners of English which are due to differences in the sound-letter representations in the orthographies of the two languages, namely called “ortographic interference”. These difficulties are different in nature than those arising from differences in the sound sysytems of Turkish and English.1While Turkish orthography is to a large extent phonemic, i.e. employing a one-to-one letter-sound correspondence (with few exceptions such as k - kâr- ɡ - yegane- gavur, etc., English orthography, on the other hand, represents 46 sounds of the spoken language with 102 single or group of letters in the written language.Such actual difficulties arising from the differences in the orthographic sound-letter represenatations of Turkish and English are classified, evaluated, and their sources are explained through a detailed phonetic analysis as applied to research methods of “contarstive analysis” and “error analysis”, which are effective approaches in the field of Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Learning.For different categories of difficulties, corrective exercises are recommended for the teaching and learning of English pronunciation to Turkish students.

Perspectives on learning, learning to teach and teaching elementary science

Science.gov (United States)

Avraamidou, Lucy

The framework that characterizes this work is that of elementary teachers' learning and development. Specifically, the ways in which prospective and beginning teachers' develop pedagogical content knowledge for teaching science in light of current recommendations for reform emphasizing teaching and learning science as inquiry are explored. Within this theme, the focus is on three core areas: (a) the use of technology tools (i.e., web-based portfolios) in support of learning to teach science at the elementary level; (b) beginning teachers' specialized knowledge for giving priority to evidence in science teaching; and (c) the applications of perspectives associated with elementary teachers' learning to teach science in Cyprus, where I was born and raised. The first manuscript describes a study aimed at exploring the influence of web-based portfolios and a specific task in support of learning to teach science within the context of a Professional Development School program. The task required prospective teachers to articulate their personal philosophies about teaching and learning science in the form of claims, evidence and justifications in a web-based forum. The findings of this qualitative case study revealed the participants' developing understandings about learning and teaching science, which included emphasizing a student-centered approach, connecting physical engagement of children with conceptual aspects of learning, becoming attentive to what teachers can do to support children's learning, and focusing on teaching science as inquiry. The way the task was organized and the fact that the web-based forum provided the ability to keep multiple versions of their philosophies gave prospective teachers the advantage of examining how their philosophies were changing over time, which supported a continuous engagement in metacognition, self-reflection and self-evaluation. The purpose of the study reported in the second manuscript was to examine the nature of a first

Olomouc Corpus of Spoken Czech: characterization and main features of the project

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Pořízka, Petr

2009-01-01

Full Text Available This study presents the results of the author's research project called Olomouc Corpus of Spoken Czech (OCSC. The paper is focused on the state and partial phases of constructing the corpora, its methodology and annotation. Within the OCSC we use so called dual system of transcription, which means (1 an orthographic one with the purpose of linguistic (morpho-logical analysis and tagging and (2 a phonetic version of transcript which consists of three layers of the text: first the real transcription and further various types of the metatexts as a second and third layer, including communication aspects of the texts. The criteria of selection of speakers are also listed here and the highly important statistical analysis of the sociolin-guistic categories (gender, age, type of education, types of recordings is presented as well. This analysis can serve as a base for a partial correction of possible non-balance among those sociolinguistic parameters. The annotation rules and principles are mentioned at the end of this study.

Adaptation and Assessment of a Public Speaking Rating Scale

Science.gov (United States)

Iberri-Shea, Gina

2017-01-01

Prominent spoken language assessments such as the Oral Proficiency Interview and the Test of Spoken English have been primarily concerned with speaking ability as it relates to conversation. This paper looks at an additional aspect of spoken language ability, namely public speaking. This study used an adapted form of a public speaking rating scale…

Improving of the teaching methods of chemical subjects by using of teaching tests in high educational institutions

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Gulzahira Turebekova

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Using the information technologies may cause great pedagogical effect: using of computer opens the opportunity for organization of problem teaching developing the creative thinking, forming research, practical skills of students, creation of the steady positive motivation of the students. Technical facilities of the computer technology allow solving the teaching and research tasks in the chemistry come as original catalyst of creation of different types of information technology systems and projection on their basis the novel ways and methods of their application. Use of computer technology in education helps to support necessary educational level of students and pay attention to their independent work. The article represents that the computer testing can be widely used for control of knowledge and for teaching. Teaching testing arouses interest in subject and develops ability of self-preparation and self – education, provides in-door and out- door work.

Application of blended learning in teaching statistical methods

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Barbara Dębska

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The paper presents the application of a hybrid method (blended learning - linking traditional education with on-line education to teach selected problems of mathematical statistics. This includes the teaching of the application of mathematical statistics to evaluate laboratory experimental results. An on-line statistics course was developed to form an integral part of the module ‘methods of statistical evaluation of experimental results’. The course complies with the principles outlined in the Polish National Framework of Qualifications with respect to the scope of knowledge, skills and competencies that students should have acquired at course completion. The paper presents the structure of the course and the educational content provided through multimedia lessons made accessible on the Moodle platform. Following courses which used the traditional method of teaching and courses which used the hybrid method of teaching, students test results were compared and discussed to evaluate the effectiveness of the hybrid method of teaching when compared to the effectiveness of the traditional method of teaching.

The value of near-peer teaching in the medical curriculum

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Sonagara VJ

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Vinay Jamnadas Sonagara, Swina Santhirakumaran, Harkaran Singh Kalkat Department of Undergraduate Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK According to the General Medical Council’s guide for “Good Medical Practice”, doctors are expected to partake in active mentoring roles and contribute to the education of other training doctors.1 This reflects the fact that medical education is an apprenticeship where the vertical transmission of knowledge from peers and colleagues contributes to a large proportion of the necessary clinical training. Therefore, peer teaching skills should be inculcated from an early stage. At Imperial College London, student-led societies encourage the cohort to take on mentoring and teaching roles to students in earlier years, in the form of near-peer teaching. However, this near-peer teaching largely remains a voluntary undertaking. Given the importance of these skills, there is an argument to be made that such tutoring schemes ought to form a more extensive and mandatory part of the medical syllabus.

Burnout syndrome: understanding of medical teaching professionals

OpenAIRE

Jaqueline Brito Vidal Batista; Thaíza Ferreira Costa; Jocerlânia Maria Dias de Morais; Eveline de Oliveira Barros; Patrícia Serpa de Souza Batista; Márcia Adriana Dias Meirelles Moreira; Jessyka Cibelly Minervina da Costa Silva; Débora Rodrigues Alves de Lima; Ana Hévila Marinho Bezerra; Irany Carvalho da Silva

2017-01-01

This study aimed to investigate the understanding of medical teaching professionals about Burnout Syndrome. This is a qualitative, exploratory study, consisting of ten teaching physicians, who work at the hospital of a higher education institution. The data were collected from May to June 2013, through a form with questions pertinent to the proposed research objective, after approval by the Research Ethics Committee (Protocol No. 84022), and analyzed qualitatively, through the content analysi...

Teaching business plan negotiation : fostering entrepreneurship among business and engineering students

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ulijn, J.M.; O'Duill, M.; Robertson, S.A.

2004-01-01

FROM PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS to complex business dealings, negotiations are essential forms of communication. But negotiation skills are often neglected in university courses. One reason for this neglect is the difficulty of teaching negotiations effectively. Such teaching requires both an underlying

Examining the effectiveness of experiential teaching in small and large OM modules

OpenAIRE

Piercy, N.; Brandon-Jones, A.; Brandon-Jones, E.; Campbell, C.

2012-01-01

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the preferences of students towards different teaching methods and the perceived effectiveness of experiential teaching methods in different operations management (OM) modules.Design/methodology/approach – Student perceptions of different teaching methods and various aspects of an experiential teaching method, in the form of a business simulation game, are examined using survey data from 274 respondents in four small post-experience and two large pre-exper...

COMPUTER ORIENTED FACILITIES OF TEACHING AND INFORMATIVE COMPETENCE

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Olga M. Naumenko

2010-09-01

Full Text Available In the article it is considered the history of views to the tasks of education, estimations of its effectiveness from the point of view of forming of basic vitally important competences. Opinions to the problem in different countries, international organizations, corresponding experience of the Ukrainian system of education are described. The necessity of forming of informative competence of future teacher is reasonable in the conditions of application of the computer oriented facilities of teaching at the study of naturally scientific cycle subjects in pedagogical colleges. Prognosis estimations concerning the development of methods of application of computer oriented facilities of teaching are presented.

NOTES FOR A TEACHING MODEL

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María Adriana Estrada Soza

2013-09-01

Full Text Available One of the actions that require institutions of teachers is to review the part reflective of our work teaching, being this aspect one of the elements which, in our opinion, we consider relevant in the learning process of teachers, and the same teacher trainers of teachers, by the fact that today day improve educational practices, part of this is based and hence the orientation vocational preparation. On the one hand only has prioritized him the curriculum and the instructional to promote the teaching and learning. And isn't bad, but it requires that all teachers us us to a more interactive form with our practice, primarily teaching institutions, have not only outlined in their professional academic profiles who never imagined that they would enter teaching and by the simple fact of being professional, not subjected to a formative and reflective process also of their own practicesby which much of what orients itself at future masters students, it doesn't impact beyond the classroom. This proposal somewhat idealistic, personally has given us a new perspective on where you have to w

A Theoretical Glimpse at Issues of Grammar Teaching

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

朱海涛

2012-01-01

When it comes to the description of the status of grammar in the field of second language teaching now,recent literature bears witness a good deal of discussion about a ’grammar revival’. More recently,theoretical perspectives on language teaching and learning have changed. The possibilities and feasibility of integrating form - focus instruction and meaningful communicative activities in the communicative language classroom have been explored.

Teaching Teens To Use Condoms Faithfully

Science.gov (United States)

... Stages Listen Español Text Size Email Print Share Teaching Teens To Use Condoms Faithfully Page Content Article ... this much-maligned form of contraception. Some young women, for example, say that using rubbers makes them ...

Performative Pedagogy in Teaching Anti-Racism

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Nena Močnik

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The paper deals with the issue of effective anti-racism teaching in everyday contexts, where the traditional forms of racism are replaced by more sophisticated, subtle practices of exlusion, hatred and violence. Historical connotations of terms such as racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. specifically characterize certain groups of people and somehow further deepen divisions between the hegemonic majority and the oppressed minority; therefore, several indicators of inefficience in teaching anti-racism have appeared, particularly in applying theories into practices. Teaching anti-racism is presented through new attitudes towards performative pedagogy, for a long time understood in the context of the teacher as the actor who engage his/her students as spectators through variety of acting techniques and performative practies. Along with the theoretical and applied development of the field, more and more the performative pedagogy is recognized as a critical teaching approach, based on artistic expression, improvisation, continuous dialogue, and the body as an ideologically inscribed product.

ON IF AND WHETHER COMPLEMENT CLAUSES OF SEE, WONDER, AND KNOW IN CONTEMPORARY SPOKEN ACADEMIC AMERICAN ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

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http://www.rephi.knf.vu.lt/images/24_29/2_6%20Respectus%202013%2024(29%20%20Online%20Issn%20Kazimianec.pdf

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The main goal of this article is to investigate the distribution of two apparently vying finite complementation patterns—if and whether clauses—accompanying three mental verbs (see, wonder, and know in the MICASE corpus of spoken academic American English. The default introspective theoretical assumption that the two investigated complementizers are in a free distribution was not corroborated by the empiricical inquiry. The three verbs do evince linguistic preferences regarding complementation, preferences which depend on a number of factors: the valency pattern of a given verb, co(ntext, sub-genre, and the like. Moreover, the investigation also appears to have demonstrated that, in respect to the complementation of see, wonder, and know, spoken academic English bears a greater resemblance to everyday conversation than to written academic English, thus corroborating the contention that field prevails over mode (to employ Hallidayan parlance. Furthermore, the inquiry into the semantics of the three mental verbs investigated indicates that their meanings are affected by the genre, inasmuch as the verbs investigated tend to depart from their default dictionary definitions by conveying less-prototypical meanings. This finding, in turn, provides a rationale for probing into the pragmatics and functions of the three verbs. It must be stressed that the results should not be generalised due to the relatively small corpus size, which implies that further research is indicated.

Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

2006-01-01

"Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding" is a 19-minute award-winning short-film about teaching at university and higher-level educational institutions. It is based on the "Constructive Alignment" theory developed by Prof. John Biggs. The film delivers a foundation for understanding what...

Student Evaluation of Teaching: The Use of Best-Worst Scaling

Science.gov (United States)

Huybers, Twan

2014-01-01

An important purpose of student evaluation of teaching is to inform an educator's reflection about the strengths and weaknesses of their teaching approaches. Quantitative instruments are one way of obtaining student responses. They have traditionally taken the form of surveys in which students provide their responses to various statements using…

Teaching for Creativity by Science Teachers in Grades 5-10

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Abdali, Nasser S.; Al-Balushi, Sulaiman M.

2016-01-01

This classroom observation study explored how science teachers (N = 22) teach for creativity in grades 5-10 in Oman. We designed an observation form with 4 main categories that targeted the instructional practices related to teaching for creativity: questioning strategy, teacher's responses to students' ideas, classroom activities to support…

Teaching Norwegian to Beginners: Six Principles to Guide Lesson Planning

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Anna Krulatz

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Teaching a foreign language is no simple task. There are several factors to consider, from curriculum design, to material selection and lesson implementation, to assessment. The challenge, however, is even greater, if you are teaching a less commonly taught language such as Norwegian – a language spoken by fewer than six million native speakers, used almost exclusively in one country, and with a limited number of available pedagogical materials. Under such circumstances, the task of preparing high quality communicative lessons is immense, even for an experienced language instructor. The goal of this article is to present how a successful language lesson can be developed even if one is using a textbook that does not foster communicative competence. As an example, I am using a unit from a Norwegian textbook for beginners: På vei, often used in Norwegian as a second language course for adults in Norway. The lesson focuses on routines and times of the day, and it concludes with the students comparing and contrasting their daily routines with a partner. Prior to this lesson, students have learned to provide basic information about themselves (where they come from, what languages they speak, what they do for work, expressions for greetings and goodbyes, basic verbs relating to daily activities such as ‘snakker’ (to speak, ‘kjører’ (to drive, ‘kjøpper’ (to buy, ‘jobber’ (to work, ‘leser’ (to read, ‘scriver’ (to write, ordinal numerals, meals, some food items, some basic prepositions and locations, words for family members, and subject and object pronouns for all persons. If you were to closely follow the textbook in teaching this unit, you would begin by teaching the students how to tell time, then briefly go over some verbs to express daily routines, listen to and read a text titled ‘Jeg står opp klokka seks,’ a narrative about Monica’s day (Monica is one of the characters in the book, and finally ask the students

Teaching natural language to computers

OpenAIRE

Corneli, Joseph; Corneli, Miriam

2016-01-01

"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and cultural modules. Being able to produce novel and useful behavior following repeated practice gets to the root of both artificial intelligence and human language. This paper investigates the modalities involved in language-like applications that computers -- and ...

Invention through Form and Function Analogy

Science.gov (United States)

Rule, Audrey C.

2015-01-01

"Invention through Form and Function Analogy" is an invention book for teachers and other leaders working with youth who are involving students in the invention process. The book consists of an introduction and set of nine learning cycle formatted lessons for teaching the principles of invention through the science and engineering design…

Aeronautical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering: A Learner-Centered Teaching Perspective in Higher Education

Science.gov (United States)

Gohardani, Omid; Gohardani, Amir S.; Dokter, Erin; Macario, Kyla

2014-01-01

Teaching in the 21st century requires a modern teaching practice coherent with the evolutions of the Information Age. Interestingly, teaching practices have stretched beyond an art form and into the realm of science. Following these scientific trails, one can argue that one of the greatest challenges educators currently face is to maintain student…

Teaching and learning English as a Home Language in a ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The most important difference from the standpoint of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was in the learning content selection, with the EHL settings using more literary works, and so focusing less on the direct teaching of grammatical forms. However, a disturbing pattern was the inability of the learners in both sets of ...

Do as I say! …but who says what i should say-or do? On the definition of a standard spoken command vocabulary for ICT devices and services

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Niman, B. von; Chaplin, C.; Collado-Vega, J.A.; Groh, L.; McGlashan, S.; Mellors, W.; Leeuwen, D.A. van

2002-01-01

This paper describes the development of a new ETSI Standard (ES): Generic spoken command vocabulary for ICT devices and services. It’s basic approach focuses on simplifying the learning procedure for end-users, there by allowing for reuse of basic knowledge between different terminal devices and

Teaching Business Plan Negotiation: Fostering Entrepreneurship among Business and Engineering Students

Science.gov (United States)

Ulijn, Jan M.; O'Duill, Micheal; Robertson, Stephen A.

2004-01-01

From personal relationships to complex business dealings, negotiations are essential forms of communication. But negotiation skills are often neglected in university courses. One reason for this neglect is the difficulty of teaching negotiations effectively. Such teaching requires both an underlying theoretical base and activities that provide…

English Foreign Language Learners Kinesics on Teaching Performance

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Hajjah Zulianti

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This research entitle English foreign language learners kinesics on teaching performance aims to mention and to describe the forms and the function of kinesics used by EFL learners on teaching performance, and to describe the importance of kinesics in teaching activity. This research is descriptive qualitative research. The data of the research are taken from EFL learners’ teaching performance on sixth semester at STKIP PGRI Bandar Lampung. The researcher observes the learners’ kinesics in teaching activity by using observing method and noting technique. In analyzing the data, the researcher uses description method. The result shows that there are twenty kinds of kinesics acted by the trainee, those are sitting in relaxing, arms crossed in front of the chest, standing in relaxing, walking around the class, checking the time, stroking the chin or beard, smile, happily surprised, wrinkle forehead, nodding head, shaking head, thumbs up, pointing finger, counting hand, waving hand, looking up, eye following, squinting, look in eye and breaking or making eye contact. Keywords: Kinesics, EFL Learners, Teaching Performance

Sound specificity effects in spoken word recognition: The effect of integrality between words and sounds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Strori, Dorina; Zaar, Johannes; Cooke, Martin

2017-01-01

Recent evidence has shown that nonlinguistic sounds co-occurring with spoken words may be retained in memory and affect later retrieval of the words. This sound-specificity effect shares many characteristics with the classic voice-specificity effect. In this study, we argue that the sound......-specificity effect is conditional upon the context in which the word and sound coexist. Specifically, we argue that, besides co-occurrence, integrality between words and sounds is a crucial factor in the emergence of the effect. In two recognition-memory experiments, we compared the emergence of voice and sound...... from a mere co-occurrence context effect by removing the intensity modulation. The absence of integrality led to the disappearance of the sound-specificity effect. Taken together, the results suggest that the assimilation of background sounds into memory cannot be reduced to a simple context effect...

A Positivity Bias in Written and Spoken English and Its Moderation by Personality and Gender.

Science.gov (United States)

Augustine, Adam A; Mehl, Matthias R; Larsen, Randy J

2011-09-01

The human tendency to use positive words ("adorable") more often than negative words ("dreadful") is called the linguistic positivity bias. We find evidence for this bias in two studies of word use, one based on written corpora and another based on naturalistic speech samples. In addition, we demonstrate that the positivity bias applies to nouns and verbs as well as adjectives. We also show that it is found to the same degree in written as well as spoken English. Moreover, personality traits and gender moderate the effect, such that persons high on extraversion and agreeableness and women display a larger positivity bias in naturalistic speech. Results are discussed in terms of how the linguistic positivity bias may serve as a mechanism for social facilitation. People, in general, and some people more than others, tend to talk about the brighter side of life.

Teaching Healthy Habits to Young Children: Handwashing, Toileting and Toothbrushing

Science.gov (United States)

Oshikanlu, Seyi

2006-01-01

Teaching children habits is a routine part of many early childhood program curricula, with teachers never really stopping to think about what or how teaching is affecting their students. Habits are formed with consistent practice. Habits can be taught to children easily when teachers have some creativity to the actions. In this article, the author…

TEACHING WRITING IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

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I Made Purna Wijaya

2015-11-01

Full Text Available This article aims at describing about teaching writing in English as a foreign Language. The reasons for teaching writing to students of English as a Foreign language include reinforcement, language development, learning style and the most importantly, writing as skill in its own right. Like many other aspects of English language teaching, the type of writing that students should do, will depend on their age, interest and level. These include writing post cards, letters of various kinds, filling in forms such as job applications, writing narrative compositions, report, newspaper and magazine article. The result showed that the students’ success of writing such matters absolutely depend on their motivations.

Pre-Service Teachers' Constructivist Teaching Scores Based on Their Learning Styles

Science.gov (United States)

Kablan, Zeynel; Kaya, Sibel

2014-01-01

This study examined the relationship between pre-service teachers' constructivist teaching and their learning styles based on Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory. The Learning Styles Inventory-3 was administered at the beginning of the semester to determine preferred learning style. The Constructivist Teaching Evaluation Form was filled out by…

Learning to teach effectively: Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduate teaching assistants' teaching self-efficacy

Science.gov (United States)

Dechenne, Sue Ellen

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are important in the teaching of undergraduate students (Golde & Dore, 2001). However, they are often poorly prepared for teaching (Luft, Kurdziel, Roehrig, & Turner, 2004). This dissertation addresses teaching effectiveness in three related manuscripts: (1) A position paper that summarizes the current research on and develops a model of GTA teaching effectiveness. (2) An adaptation and validation of two instruments; GTA perception of teaching training and STEM GTA teaching self-efficacy. (3) A model test of factors that predict STEM GTA teaching self-efficacy. Together these three papers address key questions in the understanding of teaching effectiveness in STEM GTAs including: (a) What is our current knowledge of factors that affect the teaching effectiveness of GTAs? (b) Given that teaching self-efficacy is strongly linked to teaching performance, how can we measure STEM GTAs teaching self-efficacy? (c) Is there a better way to measure GTA teaching training than currently exists? (d) What factors predict STEM GTA teaching self-efficacy? An original model for GTA teaching effectiveness was developed from a thorough search of the GTA teaching literature. The two instruments---perception of training and teaching self-efficacy---were tested through self-report surveys using STEM GTAs from six different universities including Oregon State University (OSU). The data was analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Using GTAs from the OSU colleges of science and engineering, the model of sources of STEM GTA teaching self-efficacy was tested by administering self-report surveys and analyzed by using OLS regression analysis. Language and cultural proficiency, departmental teaching climate, teaching self-efficacy, GTA training, and teaching experience affect GTA teaching effectiveness. GTA teaching self-efficacy is a second-order factor combined from self

Forming Information Competence of Technical Students in Context-Based Teaching

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G A Kruchinina

2011-12-01

Full Text Available The article considers the concept of information competence of technical students. The description of stages of forming structural components of information competence in context-based training is submitted. The results of the experiment on forming information competence of future metallurgists are given.

Medical students' perceptions of bedside teaching.

Science.gov (United States)

Gray, David; Cozar, Octavian; Lefroy, Janet

2017-06-01

Bedside teaching is recognised as a valuable tool in medical education by both students and faculty members. Bedside teaching is frequently delivered by consultants; however, junior doctors are increasingly engaging in this form of clinical teaching, and their value in this respect is becoming more widely recognised. The aim of this study was to supplement work completed by previous authors who have begun to explore students' satisfaction with bedside teaching, and their perceptions of the relationship with the clinical teachers. Specifically, we aimed to identify how students perceive bedside teaching delivered by junior doctors compared with consultants. We aimed to identify how students perceived bedside teaching delivered by junior doctors compared with consultants METHODS: A questionnaire was distributed to all third-year medical students at Keele University via e-mail. Responses were submitted anonymously. Forty-six students responded (37.4%), 73.3 per cent of whom said that they felt more comfortable having bedside teaching delivered by junior doctors than by consultants. Consultants were perceived as more challenging by 60 per cent of respondents. Students appeared to value feedback on their performance, trust the validity of taught information, and to value the overall educational experience equally, regardless of the clinical grade of the teacher. Student preference does not equate to the value that they place on their bedside teaching. Junior doctors are perceived as being more in touch with students and the curriculum, whereas consultants are perceived as having higher expectations and as being both stricter and more knowledgeable. The clinical teacher's approachable manner and enthusiasm for teaching are more important than clinical grade, as is the ability to deliver well-structured constructive feedback. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

SPECIFICS OF IMPLEMENTING TECHNOLOGY OF ASSOCIATIVE TEACHING ENGLISH AT PRIMARY SCHOOL

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Iryna Lobachova

2016-11-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the problem of the application of the associative teaching technology at primary school and the peculiarities of its implementation in teaching English to primary schoolchildren. It is found out that the modern primary school student should be able to think creatively, to solve given tasks, find associative links between objects, and be able to intercultural communication. So, a teacher has to master the innovative teaching technologies that optimize and intensify the educational process to forming primary schoolchildren’s abilities of this kind. It is determined that the technology of associative teaching English to primary schoolchildren is one of the most effective technologies because it meets quite new goals and tasks of teaching foreign languages at primary school, age and individual characteristics, needs, and interests of primary schoolchildren. It is shown that the associative teaching technology is based on the principle of harmony with nature and it creates conditions that are close to life situations, makes learning the foreign language accessible and relaxed. Associative teaching a foreign language and its various aspects are performed in accordance with the primary schoolchildren’s individual characteristics. The psychological mechanism is very important in the organization of associative teaching; it is taken into account in teaching children of primary school because human beings think with images and words are sound images that allow you to express what a person sees, feels, and thinks. Associative teaching combines both verbal and non-verbal means of communication. Associative teaching contributes to learning a foreign language based on the child’s real actions in the form of the active actions with items in accordance with the human linguistic programme that defines phased sequence of the language development. An effective method of teaching a foreign language is a method of Mind Mapping, which

The effect of electronic networking on preservice elementary teachers' science teaching self-efficacy and attitude towards science teaching

Science.gov (United States)

Mathew, Nishi Mary

Preservice elementary teachers' science teaching efficacy and attitude towards science teaching are important determinants of whether and how they will teach science in their classrooms. Preservice teachers' understanding of science and science teaching experiences have an impact on their beliefs about their ability to teach science. This study had a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design (N = 60). Preservice elementary teachers in this study were networked through the Internet (using e-mail, newsgroups, listserv, world wide web access and electronic mentoring) during their science methods class and student practicum. Electronic networking provides a social context in which to learn collaboratively, share and reflect upon science teaching experiences and practices, conduct tele-research effectively, and to meet the demands of student teaching through peer support. It was hoped that the activities over the electronic networks would provide them with positive and helpful science learning and teaching experiences. Self-efficacy was measured using a 23-item Likert scale instrument, the Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument, Form-B (STEBI-B). Attitude towards science teaching was measured using the Revised Science Attitude Scale (RSAS). Analysis of covariance was used to analyze the data, with pretest scores as the covariate. Findings of this study revealed that prospective elementary teachers in the electronically networked group had better science teaching efficacy and personal science teaching efficacy as compared to the non-networked group of preservice elementary teachers. The science teaching outcome expectancy of prospective elementary teachers in the networked group was not greater than that of the prospective teachers in the non-networked group (at p < 0.05). Attitude towards science teaching was not significantly affected by networking. However, this is surmised to be related to the duration of the study. Information about the

Improving the teaching of econometrics

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David F. Hendry

2016-12-01

Full Text Available We recommend a major shift in the Econometrics curriculum for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. It is essential to include a range of topics that are still rarely addressed in such teaching, but are now vital for understanding and conducting empirical macroeconomic research. We focus on a new approach to macro-econometrics teaching, since even undergraduate econometrics courses must include analytical methods for time series that exhibit both evolution from stochastic trends and abrupt changes from location shifts, and so confront the “non-stationarity revolution”. The complexity and size of the resulting equation specifications, formulated to include all theory-based variables, their lags and possibly non-linear functional forms, as well as potential breaks and rival candidate variables, places model selection for models of changing economic data at the centre of teaching. To illustrate our proposed new curriculum, we draw on a large UK macroeconomics database over 1860–2011. We discuss how we reached our present approach, and how the teaching of macro-econometrics, and econometrics in general, can be improved by nesting so-called “theory-driven” and “data-driven” approaches. In our methodology, the theory-model’s parameter estimates are unaffected by selection when the theory is complete and correct, so nothing is lost, whereas when the theory is incomplete or incorrect, improved empirical models can be discovered from the data. Recent software like Autometrics facilitates both the teaching and the implementation of econometrics, supported by simulation tools to examine operational performance, designed to be feasibly presented live in the classroom.

Neurophysiological advantages of biorelevant methodology of teaching academic disciplines

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Natalia A. Davidovskaya

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The analysis of technology of teaching a biorelevant lesson showed when using a traditional methodology of teaching (the sinistrocerebral one, there is a contradiction between social and biological aspects of the cerebrum functional system. It impels teachers to search for new methods of teaching on the basis of human reserves that have not been involved before. Personal development and education, as processes of forming higher mental functions, are considered in the article as complex forms of conscious activity, which are regulated by the corresponding aims and programs. It is shown that for comprehensive perception and fixing of the received information in memory, it is important that neural connections of cerebrum were maximally activated vertically (subcortex-cortex and horizontally (left and right brain. In this connection, a cerebrum is considered as a complex metasystem consisting of macro- and microsystems incorporated into a multilevel organization with multiple horizontal and vertical relations. In such a system, the code of perceiving, processing and maintaining information is highly sought in the conditions of research activity and corresponds to a person’s instinct of self-preservation at most.  On the principle that the sinistrocerebral methodology of teaching, dividing reason and feelings, leads to “robotization” of an individual, disconnection with long-term memory, teleologism and natural instincts are disjoined. Further use of the sinistrocerebral methodology of teaching in the conditions of computerization of society threatens with degradation of the succeeding generations. The traditional method of teaching violates the genetic sequence of perceiving information and results in the functional disconnection in the integrative brain activity, forming the “tunnel of reality”, limited by short-term memory, on the one hand, and by the blinkered vision, on the other hand, that worsens the quality of life, psychological

How can we teach EBM in clinical practice? An analysis of barriers to implementation of on-the-job EBM teaching and learning.

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Oude Rengerink, Katrien; Thangaratinam, Shakila; Barnfield, Gemma; Suter, Katja; Horvath, Andrea R; Walczak, Jacek; Wełmińska, Anna; Weinbrenner, Susanne; Meyerrose, Berit; Arvanitis, Theodoros N; Onody, Rita; Zanrei, Gianni; Kunz, Regina; Arditi, Chantal; Burnand, Bernard; Gee, Harry; Khan, Khalid S; Mol, Ben W J

2011-01-01

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) improves the quality of health care. Courses on how to teach EBM in practice are available, but knowledge does not automatically imply its application in teaching. We aimed to identify and compare barriers and facilitators for teaching EBM in clinical practice in various European countries. A questionnaire was constructed listing potential barriers and facilitators for EBM teaching in clinical practice. Answers were reported on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from not at all being a barrier to being an insurmountable barrier. The questionnaire was completed by 120 clinical EBM teachers from 11 countries. Lack of time was the strongest barrier for teaching EBM in practice (median 5). Moderate barriers were the lack of requirements for EBM skills and a pyramid hierarchy in health care management structure (median 4). In Germany, Hungary and Poland, reading and understanding articles in English was a higher barrier than in the other countries. Incorporation of teaching EBM in practice faces several barriers to implementation. Teaching EBM in clinical settings is most successful where EBM principles are culturally embedded and form part and parcel of everyday clinical decisions and medical practice.

Teaching Radiology Physics Interactively with Scientific Notebook Software.

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Richardson, Michael L; Amini, Behrang

2018-06-01

The goal of this study is to demonstrate how the teaching of radiology physics can be enhanced with the use of interactive scientific notebook software. We used the scientific notebook software known as Project Jupyter, which is free, open-source, and available for the Macintosh, Windows, and Linux operating systems. We have created a scientific notebook that demonstrates multiple interactive teaching modules we have written for our residents using the Jupyter notebook system. Scientific notebook software allows educators to create teaching modules in a form that combines text, graphics, images, data, interactive calculations, and image analysis within a single document. These notebooks can be used to build interactive teaching modules, which can help explain complex topics in imaging physics to residents. Copyright © 2018 The Association of University Radiologists. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Peculiarities of Teaching Medical Informatics and Statistics

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Sergey Glushkov

2017-05-01

Full Text Available The article reviews features of teaching Medical Informatics and Statistics. The course is referred to the disciplines of Mathematical and Natural sciences. The course is provided in all the faculties of I. M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. For students of Preventive Medicine Department the time frame allotted for studying the course is significantly larger than for similar course provided at other faculties. To improve the teaching methodology of the discipline an analysis of the curriculum has been carried out, attendance and students’ performance statistics have been summarized. As a result, the main goals and objectives have been identified. Besides, general educational functions and the contribution to the solution of problems of education, students’ upbringing and development have been revealed; two stages of teaching have been presented. Recommendations referred to the newest methodological development aimed at improving the quality of teaching the discipline are provided. The ways of improving the methods and organizational forms of education are outlined.

184 Compounding in Igala: Defining Criteria, Forms and Functions ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Ike Odimegwu

West Benue-Congo language spoken in north central Nigeria. Defining ..... argues, in Ígálà, ọ́ma 'child', for instance, can stand in for the noun phrase 'ọ́ma óko' 'Oko's .... e.g. 'in Pawnee it is mainly body part words which are incorporated' (c.f. ...

Ethics teaching on 'Beginning of Life' issues in UK medical schools.

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Oldroyd, Christopher; Fialova, Lydie

2014-12-01

Medical ethics forms an essential component of an undergraduate medical programme. In the UK the Institute of Medical Ethics has released a consensus statement detailing its recommendations for a minimum curriculum for ethics. One important issue it highlights for inclusion is 'Beginning of Life', which includes a wide range of themes. This paper presents an evaluation of the current teaching and assessment of these important issues in UK medical schools, complemented by a specific analysis of students' reaction to the teaching they received at the University of Edinburgh as part of their Obstetrics and Gynaecology rotation. Schools which responded to the survey reported a wide range of teaching and assessment methods. While there was a good overall coverage of topics, only one of them was covered by every institution and the religious/cultural elements of those topics were often neglected. The medical schools viewed better clinical integration of ethics teaching as the best route to improvement, but the students reported a desire for more ethics teaching in the form of specific tutorials, lectures or discussions. It is likely that a combination of these approaches will lead to significant improvements in the delivery of ethics teaching in this area and in others. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.

FORMING ENGLISH LISTENING COMPETENCE OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS – THE FUTURE TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

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Ірина Левчик

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Based on the analysis of psychological characteristics of first-year students (the dominance of teaching and professional activities, shift to the inner self-control and an increase in need for achievement, a high level of cognitive motivation, improvement of theoretical thinking, a tendency to individual activity, reflection, a conscious learning approach the following peculiarities of forming English learning competence of first-year students have been outlined in the article: introduction of propaedeutic stage in order to form students’ listening mechanisms and eliminate the gaps in skills; focusing on the specifics of their future professional occupation which is reflected in the themes of teaching materials and tasks to them; developing students’ autonomy by enhancing their individual activity; forming students’ listening strategies (training and communicative on two stages – learning strategies and training them in use. The criteria for selection of audio texts and video and sound recording that should be used in teaching listening to first-year students have been determined.

Leaching experiment of cement solidified waste form under unsaturated condition

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wang Zhiming; Yao Laigen; Li Shushen; Zhao Yingjie; Cai Yun; Li Dan; Han Xinsheng; An Yongfeng

2003-01-01

A device for unsaturated leaching experiments was designed and built up. 8 different sizes, ranging from 40.2 cm 3 to 16945.5 cm 3 , of solidified waste form were tested in the experiment. 5 different water contents, from 0.15 to 0.40, were used for the experiment. The results show that the cumulative leaching fraction increases with water content when the sizes of the forms are equal to and less than 4586.7 cm 3 , for example, the ratios of the cumulative leaching fractions are between 1.24-1.41 under water content of 0.35 and 0.15 on 360 day of Teaching. It can also be seen that the cumulative leaching fraction under higher water content is close to that under saturated condition. The cumulative leaching fraction decreases with size of the form. Maximum leached depth of the solidified waste forms is about 2.25 cm after one year Teaching. Moreover, it has no clear effect on cumulative leaching fraction that sampling or non-sampling during the experiment

Practice Report / Bericht aus der Praxis: Peer teaching: From method to philosophy.

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Ten Cate, Olle

2017-11-01

Peer teaching or peer-assisted learning is a popular topic in the medical education literature. While not one method of education, a categorization is possible according to (a) the developmental distance between learner and peer teacher, (b) the scale or group size of learners in peer teaching arrangements and (c) the extent of formality or structure of the arrangement. That yields many different forms of peer teaching. Viewing peer teaching as a multifaceted method shows several benefits. On a deeper level however peer teaching may be viewed as a philosophy of medical education that has historical roots but aligns well with current thinking of teaching and learning across the continuum of medical education. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier GmbH.

Teaching Chemical Engineers about Teaching

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Heath, Daniel E.; Hoy, Mary; Rathman, James F.; Rohdieck, Stephanie

2013-01-01

The Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at The Ohio State University in collaboration with the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching developed the Chemical Engineering Mentored Teaching Experience. The Mentored Teaching Experience is an elective for Ph.D. students interested in pursuing faculty careers. Participants are…

Awarding Teaching Excellence: "What Is It Supposed to Achieve?" Teacher Perceptions of Student-Led Awards

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Madriaga, Manuel; Morley, Krystle

2016-01-01

Although there is lack of agreement as to what constitutes teaching excellence, there remains a steady effort to make an intangible, ambiguous, multifaceted concept incarnate in the form of "student-led" teaching awards schemes within higher education institutions. What teaching staff say about such schemes have largely been ignored.…

Art Spoken Here: Reggio Emilia for the Big Kids

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Cutcher, Alexandra

2013-01-01

Developing one's creative potential is a basic human right, and thus the relationship between democracy and creativity is ineffable. Reggio Emilia pedagogies recognise this intrinsically; teaching through this modality embeds deep learning and an aesthetic awareness not often evident in formal schooling, despite the overwhelming evidence…

On teaching psychoanalysis.

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Ogden, Thomas H

2006-08-01

Teaching psychoanalysis is no less an art than is the practice of psychoanalysis. As is true of the analytic experience, teaching psychoanalysis involves an effort to create clearances in which fresh forms of thinking and dreaming may emerge, with regard to both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Drawing on his experience of leading two ongoing psychoanalytic seminars, each in its 25th year, the author offers observations concerning (1) teaching analytic texts by reading them aloud, line by line, in the seminar setting, with a focus on how the writer is thinking/writing and on how the reader is altered by the experience of reading; (2) treating clinical case presentations as experiences in collective dreaming in which the seminar members make use of their own waking dreaming to assist the presenter in dreaming aspects of his experience with the patient that the analytic pair has not previously been able to dream; (3) reading poetry and fiction as a way of enhancing the capacity of the seminar members to be aware of and alive to the effects created by the patient's and the analyst's use of language; and (4) learning to overcome what one thought one knew about conducting analytic work, i.e. learning to forget what one has learned.

A New Look at Teaching Music History.

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Borroff, Edith

1992-01-01

Contends that teaching music history has traditionally focused on five eras of Western music. Relates these periods to concepts of form, space, and understanding. Acknowledges that music education has been ethnocentric and recommends a more universal music education. (CFR)

A multisensory, multicognitive approach to teaching pronunciation

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Edward Y. Odisho

2007-01-01

Full Text Available The Multisensory, Multicognitive Approach (MMA introduced in this paper is premised on the belief that the seat of language is in the brain prior to its physical manifestation in the form of speech being in the mouth. Hence, in teaching pronunciation, the identity of speech as a cognitive entity prior to being a physical one should be seriously considered in relevant language learning and teaching situations – more so in L2 situations than in L1. The traditional assumption that the ideal and the exclusive sensory modality of teaching pronunciation is the auditory modality is no longer acceptable because a holistic view of speech – in production, transmission and perception – manifests itself not only via the auditory sensory modality, but also equally significantly via the visual and tactile-kinesthetic sensory modalities. It is due to this fact that MMA is described as multisensory, a fact that determines the diversified auditory, visual and tactile-kinesthetic implementational techniques needed for effective and efficient teaching of pronunciation especially to adults. Equally importantly, the multicognitive nature of MMA requires the manipulation of diversified cognitive processes in the form of thinking, associating, analyzing, synthesizing, comparing, contrasting etc… for implementation. According to MMA, the teaching of pronunciation becomes more of a multifaceted educational process than a mere repeat-after-me mechanical parroting of speech sounds. Such an approach requires more effort on the part of the instructor and learner and a stronger collaboration between them through the diversification of teaching and learning styles, respectively. Certainly, MMA requires more time to implement in classroom situations, but the time spent is worth it. MMA is no longer a single technique or drill that tackles one sound at a time; instead, it is a joint selection of cognitive and sensory techniques that are applied concurrently to

Fostering nature of science teaching in elementary pre-service teachers through developing reflection on teaching and learning

Science.gov (United States)

Pongsanon, Khemmawadee

Although teacher educators have successfully helped K-12 teachers' develop adequate views of NOS, their views have not been transferred to their students. It is evident that K-12 students' understanding of NOS still does not align with the recommendation of the reforms document, indicating that holding an adequate view of NOS is insufficient for teaching NOS effectively. Instead, to teach NOS, teachers must develop the knowledge for translating their understanding of NOS into the forms accessible to students. The current study investigated the influence of four contexts of reflective practice on prospective elementary teachers' learning of how and intention to teach NOS. The participants were 18 pre-service teachers enrolled in a science methods course that was tied to a field experience course. To understand the development of the participants' intentions, knowledge of instructional strategies, and knowledge of assessment for teaching NOS, multiple data were collected throughout the science methods course and the field experience. Data sources included different versions of participants' lesson plans, video recordings of their teaching and teaching debriefings, online weekly teaching reflections, final semester reflection and other artifacts from the methods course. Content analysis was conducted with all data. The data revealed that the participants' knowledge of how and intentions to teach NOS were developed throughout the science methods course. Toward the conclusion of the semester, the participants showed intention to include NOS in their science instruction. With regard to strategies, participants planned to apply explicit reflective NOS instruction in the context of inquiry-based activities and stories from children's literature. They also planned to use age-appropriate language to refer to the targeted NOS aspects. In terms of assessment, by the conclusion of the semester the participants tended to use more formal assessment strategies. They reported

Are Danish doctors comfortable teaching in English?

Science.gov (United States)

Nilas, L; Løkkegaard, E C; Laursen, J B; Kling, J; Cortes, D

2016-08-27

From 2012-2015, the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and of Pediatrics at the University of Copenhagen conducted a project, "Internationalization at Home ", offering clinical teaching in English. The project allowed international students to work with Danish speaking students in a clinical setting. Using semi-quantitative questionnaires to 89 clinicians about use of English and need for training, this paper considers if Danish clinical doctors are prepared to teach in English. The majority self-assessed their English proficiency between seven and eight on a 10 unit visual analogue scale, with 10 equivalent to working in Danish, while 15 % rated five or less. However, one-fourth found teaching and writing in English to be twice as difficult than in Danish, and 12 % rated all teaching tasks in English at four or less compared to Danish. The self-assessed need for additional English skills was perceived low. Teaching in English was rated as 30 % more difficult than in Danish, and a significant subgroup of doctors had difficulties in all forms of communication in English, resulting in challenges when introducing international students in non-native English speaking medical departments.

Teaching Morally and Teaching Morality

Science.gov (United States)

Fenstermacher, Gary D.; Osguthorpe, Richard D.; Sanger, Matthew N.

2009-01-01

In this article, the authors introduce what they believe is an important distinction between teaching morality and teaching morally. In P-12 schools, the moral education debate often focuses on character education programs or other moral curricula. Such programs and curricula are championed as a means of teaching morality and transmitting moral…

Language teachers and teaching global perspectives, local initiatives

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Ben Said, Selim

2013-01-01

This volume gathers contributions from a range of global experts in teacher education to address the topic of language teacher education. It shows how teacher education involves the agency of teachers, which forms part of their identity, and which they take on when integrating into the teaching community of practice. In addition, the volume explores the teachers' situated practice--the dynamic negotiation of classroom situations, socialization into the professional teaching culture, and "on the ground experimentation" with pedagogical skills/techniques.

Teach Astronomy: An Educational Resource for Formal and Informal Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Impey, Chris David

2018-01-01

Teach Astronomy is an educational resource, available in the form of a user-friendly, platform-agnostic website. Ideal for college-level, introductory astronomy courses, Teach Astronomy can be a valuable reference for astronomers at all levels, especially informal learners. Over the past year, multiple changes have been made to the infrastructure behind Teach Astronomy to provide high availability to our tens of thousands of monthly, unique users, as well as fostering in new features. Teach Astronomy contains interactive tools which supplement the free textbook, such as a Quiz Tool with real-time feedback. The site also provides a searchable collection of Chris Impey’s responses to questions frequently asked by our users. The developers and educators behind Teach Astronomy are working to create an environment which encourages astronomy students of all levels to continue to increase their knowledge and help others learn.

English Language Teaching Profile: Sweden.

Science.gov (United States)

British Council, London (England). English-Teaching Information Centre.

This profile in outline form of the English language teaching situation in Sweden discusses the role of English within Swedish society and within the Swedish educational system. The status of English as the principal foreign language since 1945 for use in business, the media and tourism is pointed out. The system of English instruction in the…

Availability and Utilization of Information Communication ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This investigation concludes that there is the need for government and educational administrators in South West Nigeria to be ICT driven in order to enhance a better performance and achieve international intelligibility for Nigerian spoken English. Key words: Information Communication Technology, Teaching and Learning, ...

Teaching autonomy: turning the teaching evaluation of the Applied Optics course from impart knowledge to the new intelligent thinking

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Huifu; Chen, Yu; Liu, Dongmei

2017-08-01

There is a saying that "The teacher, proselytizes instructs dispels doubt." Traditional teaching methods, constantly let the students learn the knowledge in order to pursue the knowledge of a solid grasp, then assess the teaching result by evaluating of the degree of knowledge and memory. This approach cannot mobilize the enthusiasm of students to learn, and hinders the development of innovative thinking of students. And this assessment results have no practical significance, decoupling from practical application. As we all know, the course of Applied Optics is based on abstract theory. If the same teaching methods using for this course by such a "duck", it is unable to mobilize students' learning initiative, and then students' study results will be affected by passive acceptance of knowledge. How to take the initiative to acquire knowledge in the class to the students, and fully mobilize the initiative of students and to explore the potential of students, finally evaluation contents more research on the practical significance? Scholars continue to innovate teaching methods, as well as teaching evaluation indicators, the best teaching effect to promote the development of students. Therefore, this paper puts forward a set of teaching evaluation model of teaching autonomy. This so-called "autonomous teaching" is that teachers put forward the request or arrange the task and students complete the learning content in the form of a group to discuss learning before the lesson, and to complete the task of the layout, then teachers accept of students' learning achievements and answer questions. Every task is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching. Every lesson should be combined with the progress of science and technology frontier of Applied Optics, let students understand the relationship between research and application in the future, mobilize the students interest in learning, training ability, learn to take the initiative to explore, team cooperation ability

Foreign body aspiration and language spoken at home: 10-year review.

Science.gov (United States)

Choroomi, S; Curotta, J

2011-07-01

To review foreign body aspiration cases encountered over a 10-year period in a tertiary paediatric hospital, and to assess correlation between foreign body type and language spoken at home. Retrospective chart review of all children undergoing direct laryngobronchoscopy for foreign body aspiration over a 10-year period. Age, sex, foreign body type, complications, hospital stay and home language were analysed. At direct laryngobronchoscopy, 132 children had foreign body aspiration (male:female ratio 1.31:1; mean age 32 months (2.67 years)). Mean hospital stay was 2.0 days. Foreign bodies most commonly comprised food matter (53/132; 40.1 per cent), followed by non-food matter (44/132; 33.33 per cent), a negative endoscopy (11/132; 8.33 per cent) and unknown composition (24/132; 18.2 per cent). Most parents spoke English (92/132, 69.7 per cent; vs non-English-speaking 40/132, 30.3 per cent), but non-English-speaking patients had disproportionately more food foreign bodies, and significantly more nut aspirations (p = 0.0065). Results constitute level 2b evidence. Patients from non-English speaking backgrounds had a significantly higher incidence of food (particularly nut) aspiration. Awareness-raising and public education is needed in relevant communities to prevent certain foods, particularly nuts, being given to children too young to chew and swallow them adequately.

Teaching & Learning Tips 1: Teaching perspectives - an introduction.

Science.gov (United States)

Rana, Jasmine; Burgin, Susan

2017-11-01

Challenge: Clinical and research responsibilities often leave little or no time to plan thoughtful teaching encounters with trainees. This "Teaching & Learning Tips" series is designed to be an accessible guide for dermatologists who want to improve their teaching skills. It is comprised of 12 articles about how to enhance teaching in various settings informed by research about how people learn and expert-derived or data-driven best practices for teaching. The series begins with a review of principles to optimize learning in any setting, including cognitive load theory, active learning strategies, and the impact of motivation and emotion on learning. It transitions into a practical "how to" guide format for common teaching scenarios in dermatology, such as lecturing, case-based teaching, and teaching procedures, among others. Herein, we kickoff the series by unpacking assumptions about teaching and learning. What does it mean to teach and learn? © 2017 The International Society of Dermatology.