Macalester College Bulletin

This publication is the Macalester College Bulletin, 1975-76 Supplement. Annual college catalog listing courses of study, historical sketch, calendar, honorary degrees, admission requirements, descriptions of departments, lists of faculty and board of trustee committees, summary of students, and lists of faculty and trustees

Progressive modularization: Reframing our understanding of typical and atypical language development

The ability to acquire language is a critical part of human development. Yet there is no consensus on how the skill emerges in early development. Does it constitute an innately-specified, language-processing module or is it acquired progressively? One of Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s (1938–2016) key contributions to developmental science addresses this very question. Karmiloff-Smith persistently maintained that the process of development itself constitutes a crucial factor in phenotypic outcomes. She proposed that cognitive modules gradually emerge through a developmental process – ‘progressive modularization’. This concept helped to advance the field beyond the stale nature–nurture controversy. It enabled language researchers to develop more nuanced transactional frameworks that take seriously the integration of genes and environment. In homage to Karmiloff-Smith, the current article describes the importance of her work to the field of developmental psychology and language research. It examines how the concept of progressive modularization could be applied to language development as well as how it has greatly advanced our understanding of language difficulties in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Finally, it discusses how Karmiloff-Smith’s approach is inspiring current and future research

The Spoken Language Program Of The Army Japanese Language School At The University Of Michigan 1

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98238/1/j.1467-1770.1948.tb00876.x.pd

Modal Markers in Japanese: A Study of Learners’ Use before and after Study Abroad

Japanese discourse requires speakers to index, in a relatively explicit manner, their stance toward the propositional information as well as the hearer. This is done, among other things, by means of a grammaticalized set of modal markers. Although previous research suggests that the use of modal expressions by second language learners differs from that of native users, little is known about “typical” native or non-native behavior. This study aims (a) to delineate native and non-native usage by a quantitative examination of a broad range of Japanese modal categories, and qualitative analyses of a subset of potentially problematic categories among them, and (b) to identify possible developmental trajectories, by means of a longitudinal observation of learners’ verbal production before and after study abroad in Japan. We find that modal categories realized by non- transparent or non-salient markers (e.g., explanatory modality no da, or utterance modality sentence-final particles) pose particular challenges in spite of their relatively high availability in the input, and we discuss this finding in terms of processing constraints that arguably affect learners’ acquisition of the grammaticalized modal markers

Grammar Sharing Techniques for Rule-Based Multilingual NLP Systems

Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) pp. 253-260

Open Microphone Speech Understanding: Correct Discrimination Of In Domain Speech

An ideal spoken dialogue system listens continually and determines which utterances were spoken to it, understands them and responds appropriately while ignoring the rest This paper outlines a simple method for achieving this goal which involves trading a slightly higher false rejection rate of in domain utterances for a higher correct rejection rate of Out of Domain (OOD) utterances. The system recognizes semantic entities specified by a unification grammar which is specialized by Explanation Based Learning (EBL). so that it only uses rules which are seen in the training data. The resulting grammar has probabilities assigned to each construct so that overgeneralizations are not a problem. The resulting system only recognizes utterances which reduce to a valid logical form which has meaning for the system and rejects the rest. A class N-gram grammar has been trained on the same training data. This system gives good recognition performance and offers good Out of Domain discrimination when combined with the semantic analysis. The resulting systems were tested on a Space Station Robot Dialogue Speech Database and a subset of the OGI conversational speech database. Both systems run in real time on a PC laptop and the present performance allows continuous listening with an acceptably low false acceptance rate. This type of open microphone system has been used in the Clarissa procedure reading and navigation spoken dialogue system which is being tested on the International Space Station

Beyond writing: The development of literacy in the Ancient Near East

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components