What can co-speech gestures in aphasia tell us about the relationship between language and gesture?: A single case study of a participant with Conduction Aphasia

Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that language typology influences how people gesture when using ‘manner-of-motion’ verbs (Kita 2000; Kita & Özyürek 2003) and that this is due to ‘online’ lexical and syntactic choices made at the time of speaking (Kita, Özyürek, Allen, Brown, Furman & Ishizuka, 2007). This paper attempts to relate these findings to the co-speech iconic gesture used by an English speaker with conduction aphasia (LT) and five controls describing a Sylvester and Tweety1 cartoon. LT produced co-speech gesture which showed distinct patterns which we relate to different aspects of her language impairment, and the lexical and syntactic choices she made during her narrative

Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars

This paper explores the use of Adaptor Grammars, a nonparametric Bayesian modelling framework, for minimally supervised morphological segmentation. We compare three training methods: unsupervised training, semi-supervised training, and a novel model selection method. In the model selection method, we train unsupervised Adaptor Grammars using an over-articulated metagrammar, then use a small labelled data set to select which potential morph boundaries identified by the metagrammar should be returned in the final output. We evaluate on five languages and show that semi-supervised training provides a boost over unsupervised training, while the model selection method yields the best average results over all languages and is competitive with state-of-the-art semi-supervised systems. Moreover, this method provides the potential to tune performance according to different evaluation metrics or downstream tasks.12 page(s

The role of linguistics in language teaching: the case of two, less widely taught languages - Finnish and Hungarian

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well suited for less widely used and less taught languages as it enables students to draw comparative and historical parallels, question terminologies and raise their sociolinguistic and pragmatic awareness. A linguistic approach also provides students with skills for further language learning