Language acquisition in developmental disorders

In this chapter, I review recent research into language acquisition in developmental disorders, and the light that these findings shed on the nature of language acquisition in typically developing children. Disorders considered include Specific Language Impairment, autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. I argue that disorders of language should be construed in terms of differences in the constraints that shape the learning process, rather than in terms of the normal system with components missing or malfunctioning. I outline the integrative nature of this learning process and how properties such as redundancy and compensation may be key characteristics of learning systems with atypical constraints. These ideas, as well as the new methodologies now being used to study variations in pathways of language acquisition, are illustrated with case studies from Williams syndrome and Specific Language Impairment

Special Issue on Language Learning : Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education is based on the workshop SCIAL'93 (Cognitive Science, Computer Science and Language Learning) held in October 1993 in Clermont-Ferrand, France (Chanier, Renié & Fouqueré, 1993). The workshop gathered researchers who consider the development of interactive language learning environments as a field of multidisciplinary collaboration. Researchers belonged to several disciplines from the domain of cognitive science: linguistics (in its broad meaning, including theoretical and applied linguistics as well as language teaching), computational linguistics, computer science, psycholinguistics. The workshop was directed by Thierry Chanier, University of Clermont 2, France, who is also the editor of this special issue. New versions of selected papers focusing on Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) more specifically have been assembled here so as to introduce JAIED readers to the current research interests in ICALL. The workshop version of the papers had been selected by its multidisciplinary program committee, and then new versions have been reviewed in the normal JAIED manner

Operationalising and measuring language dominance

The paper offers a new way to measure language ability in bilinguals, based on measures of lexical richness. The validity of proposed approach is tested in a variety of ways

Encoding of phonology in a recurrent neural model of grounded speech

We study the representation and encoding of phonemes in a recurrent neural network model of grounded speech. We use a model which processes images and their spoken descriptions, and projects the visual and auditory representations into the same semantic space. We perform a number of analyses on how information about individual phonemes is encoded in the MFCC features extracted from the speech signal, and the activations of the layers of the model. Via experiments with phoneme decoding and phoneme discrimination we show that phoneme representations are most salient in the lower layers of the model, where low-level signals are processed at a fine-grained level, although a large amount of phonological information is retain at the top recurrent layer. We further find out that the attention mechanism following the top recurrent layer significantly attenuates encoding of phonology and makes the utterance embeddings much more invariant to synonymy. Moreover, a hierarchical clustering of phoneme representations learned by the network shows an organizational structure of phonemes similar to those proposed in linguistics.Comment: Accepted at CoNLL 201

Words: structure, meaning, acquisition, processing

By bringing together experts of various scientific domains and different theoretical inclinations, the second NetWordS Summer school contributed to advance the current awareness of theoretical, typological, psycholinguistic, computational and neurophysiological evidence on the structure and processing of words, with a view to fostering novel methods of research and assessment for grammar architecture and language physiology

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo