Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition

The paper aims at investigating the idea of a symbolic nature of sounds and its implications for in the acquisition of foreign language phonology. Firstly, it will present an overview of universal trends in phonetic symbolism, i.e. non-arbitrary representations of a phoneme by specific semantic criteria. Secondly, the results of a preliminary study on different manifestations of sound symbolism including emotionally-loaded representations of phonemes and other synaesthetic associations shall be discussed. Finally, practical pedagogical implications of sound symbolism will be explored and a number of innovative classroom activities involving sound symbolic associations will be presented

Marketing and Advertising Translation: Humans vs Machines in the field of cosmetics

This undergraduate thesis focuses on a very specific field of specialized translation: advertising and marketing translation. Indeed, the high degree of specialization involved in this activity provides a testing ground for a reconsideration of the importance of the human translator and a reformulation of their role. The constant development of new technologies creates ever more sophisticated translation programs, which in turn revives the long-standing machine vs human translation debate. The aim of this project is to conduct a practical exercise targeted at verifying whether specialization in translation always requires the supervision of humans equipped with the relevant linguistic knowledge and technical background, or whether, on the contrary, machine translation can at present provide valid enough results and a sufficient level of reliability.El presente Trabajo de Fin de Grado se centra en un campo muy concreto de la traducción especializada: la traducción para la publicidad y la mercadotecnia. De hecho, el alto grado de especialización que implica esta actividad proporciona un campo de pruebas para una reconsideración de la importancia del traductor humano y una reformulación de su papel. El desarrollo creciente e ininterrumpido de las nuevas tecnologías está produciendo programas de traducción cada vez más sofisticados, lo que a su vez reaviva el viejo debate que confronta la traducción humana y la traducción automática. El objetivo de este proyecto es llevar a cabo un ejercicio práctico destinado a verificar si la especialización en la traducción siempre requiere la supervisión de personas con la formación lingüística y los conocimientos técnicos pertinentes, o si, por el contrario, la traducción automática puede en la actualidad proporcionar por si sola resultados suficientes y un nivel suficiente de fiabilidad.Grado en Estudios Inglese

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Decline and fall:a biological, developmental, and psycholinguistic account of deliberative language processes and ageing

Background: This paper reviews the role of deliberative processes in language: those language processes that require central resources, in contrast to the automatic processes of lexicalisation, word retrieval, and parsing. 10 Aims: We describe types of deliberative processing, and show how these processes underpin high-level processes that feature strongly in language. We focus on metalin- guistic processing, strategic processing, inhibition, and planning. We relate them to frontal-lobe function and the development of the fronto-striate loop. We then focus on the role of deliberative processes in normal and pathological development and ageing, 15 and show how these processes are particularly susceptible to deterioration with age. In particular, many of the commonly observed language impairments encountered in ageing result from a decline in deliberative processing skills rather than in automatic language processes. Main Contribution: We argue that central processing plays a larger and more important 20 role in language processing and acquisition than is often credited. Conclusions: Deliberative language processes permeate language use across the lifespan. They are particularly prone to age-related loss. We conclude by discussing implications for therapy

Adults can be trained to acquire synesthetic experiences

Synesthesia is a condition where presentation of one perceptual class consistently evokes additional experiences in different perceptual categories. Synesthesia is widely considered a congenital condition, although an alternative view is that it is underpinned by repeated exposure to combined perceptual features at key developmental stages. Here we explore the potential for repeated associative learning to shape and engender synesthetic experiences. Non-synesthetic adult participants engaged in an extensive training regime that involved adaptive memory and reading tasks, designed to reinforce 13 specific letter-color associations. Following training, subjects exhibited a range of standard behavioral and physiological markers for grapheme-color synesthesia; crucially, most also described perceiving color experiences for achromatic letters, inside and outside the lab, where such experiences are usually considered the hallmark of genuine synesthetes. Collectively our results are consistent with developmental accounts of synesthesia and illuminate a previously unsuspected potential for new learning to shape perceptual experience, even in adulthood

Beyond English text: Multilingual and multimedia information retrieval.

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Talking in the present, caring for the future: Language and environment

This paper identifies a new source that explains environmental behaviour: the presence of future tense marking in language. We predict that languages that grammatically mark the future affect speakers' intertemporal preferences and thereby reduce their willingness to address environmental problems. We first show that speakers of languages with future tense marking are less likely to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours and to support policies to prevent environmental damage. We then document that this effect holds across countries: future tense marking is an important determinant of climate change policies and global environmental cooperation. The results suggest that there may be deep and surprising obstacles for attempts to address climate change