Mobile Application with Augmented Reality to Improve the Process of Learning Sign Language

Language for a long time is an indispensable tool for society, since it allows communication and interaction between people. Learning sign language is a very big problem, either because access to information is scarce, there are no interpreters of this language or because learning of this language is not taught from an early age. This document shows the development of a mobile application with augmented reality following the mobile methodology and determining the influence it has on the Peruvian sign language learning process, with a sample of 30 students as a control group and an experimental group. It started with a performance percentage of 23 percent and using the mobile application significantly improved the performance of the sign language student by 65 percent

Zone-Features based Nearest Neighbor Classification of Images of Kannada Printed and Handwritten Vowel and Consonant Primitives

The characters of any languages having scripts are formed by basic units called primitives. It is necessary to practice writing the primitives and their appropriate combinations while writing different characters. In order to automate character generation, primitives201F; recognition becomes important. In this paper, we propose a zone-features based nearest neighbor classification of Kannada printed and handwritten vowel and consonant primitives. The normalized character image is divided into 49 zones, each of size 4x4 pixels. The classifier based on nearest neighbor using Euclidean distances is deployed. Experiments are performed on images of printed and handwritten primitives of Kannada vowels and consonants. We have considered 9120 images of printed and 3800 images of handwritten 38 primitives. A K-fold cross validation method is used for computation of results. We have observed average recognition accuracies are in the range [90%, 93%] and [93% to 94%] for printed and handwritten primitives respectively. The work is useful in multimedia teaching, animation; Robot based assistance in handwriting, etc

Literate Change Agents Working in Oral Communities: Navigating Paradigm Shifts

This research documents the experience of 12 local leaders implementing an oral curriculum over 13 months in Karnataka, India. These leaders were Change Agents interested in influencing a community with new information. They created audio materials referred to as “content” in their group’s mother tongue: In a Kannada-Telegu mix for the Madiga group (a Scheduled Caste); in Vaagri Booli for the Hakkipikki group (a Scheduled Tribe); and in Kannada for the Kannadiga group. The first two languages are unwritten. The Kannada language is the official language of Karnataka state. The oral curriculum followed the Spoken Worldwide® model. Each team of local leaders designed their content by combining a topic, a local proverb, and an informative resource in story form. Next, the individual leaders facilitated discussion groups in their community centered on the content. Eighteen men were interviewed; this included six community discussion group members. The Connected Learning Framework was the conceptual lens for this research. It consists of four constructs—relationship, relevance, oral modes of communication, and mutual respect. Relationships played a primary role because the learners preferred to work with individuals they knew, or with individuals who were approved by the community’s leaders. Content that centered on what was relevant to community members was well-received by the listeners. The leaders used modes of communication that were familiar to community members by presenting content in the mother tongue and including local proverbs. By facilitating discussion after presenting the content, the leaders demonstrated mutual respect ensuring a multidirectional flow of information. This informed how the leaders created subsequent content. This research found that introducing new ideas, specifically Christian Scripture as a source of wisdom, was received positively by almost all audiences. In addition, the Team Leaders who had more experience using oral modes of communication, specifically telling Bible stories, and facilitating discussion were more consistent in implementing the Spoken process and principles and modeled the process during the content creation sessions with their Local Leaders or in presenting the content in their Leader’s gatherings. These leaders who had more experience with Connect Learning strategies were able to navigate further in the oral learning paradigm

Consequences of bi-literacy in bilingual individuals: in the healthy and neurologically impaired

Background. In the current global, cross-cultural scenario, being bilingual or multilingual is a norm rather than an exception. In such an environment an individual may be actively involved in reading and writing in all their languages in addition to speaking them. Regular use of two or more languages is termed as bilingualism and being able to read and write in both of them is referred to as bi-literacy. Research indicates that bilingualism has an impact on language production and cognition, specifically executive functions. Given the impact of literacy and bilingualism, the reasonable question that arises, is whether bi-literacy would offer an additional impact on language production and cognition. This becomes even more relevant in a multilingual, multi-cultural society such as India. We examined the impact of bi-literacy on oral language production (at word and connected speech level), comprehension and on non-verbal executive function measures in bi-literate bilingual healthy adults in an immigrant diaspora living in the UK. In addition to English, they were speakers of one of the South Indian languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu). The significance of bi-literacy among bilinguals assumes further importance in aphasia (language impairment due to brain damage). For those who have aphasia in one or more languages due to brain damage, the severity of impairment maybe different in both languages, also the modalities of language may be differentially affected. In particular, reading and writing maybe impaired differently in the languages used by a bi/multilingual. Manifestation of reading impairments are also dependent on the nature of the script of the language being read [e.g., Raman & Weekes (2005) report differential dyslexia in a Turkish-English speaker who exhibited surface dyslexia in English and deep dysgraphia in Turkish]. Our study contributes to the field of bilingual aphasia by focusing specifically on reading differing from the existing literature of aphasia in bilinguals, where the focus has predominantly been on language production and comprehension. Studying reading impairments provides a better understanding of how the reading impairments are manifested in the two languages, which will aid appropriate assessment and intervention. This research investigated the impact of bi-literacy in both populations (healthy adults and neurologically impaired) in two phases: Phase I (in UK) and Phase II (in India). Aim. Phase I investigated the impact of bi-literacy on oral language production (at word level and connected speech), comprehension and non-verbal executive function in bi-literate bilingual healthy adults. Phase II examined the reading impairments in two languages of bilingual persons with aphasia (BPWA). Methods. For Phase I, participants were thirty-four bi-literate bilingual healthy adults with English as their L2 and one of the Dravidian languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu) as their L1. We have used the term ‘print exposure’ as a proxy for literacy. They were divided into a high print exposure (HPE, n=22) and a low print exposure (LPE, n=12) group based on their performance on two tasks measuring L2 print exposure- grammaticality judgement task and sentence verification task. We also quantified their bilingual characteristics- proficiency, reading and writing characteristics and dominance. The groups were matched on years of education, age and gender. Participants completed a set of oral language production tasks in L2 (at word level) namely -verbal fluency, word and non-word repetition; comprehension tasks in L2 namely synonymy triplets task and sentence comprehension task (Chapter 2); oral narrative task in L2 (at connected speech level) (Chapter 3) followed by non-verbal executive function tasks tapping into inhibitory control (Spatial Stroop and Flanker tasks), working memory (visual n-back and auditory n-back) and task switching (colour-shape task) (Chapter 4). For Phase II, we characterized the reading abilities of four BPWA who spoke one of the Dravidian languages (Kannada, Tamil, Telugu) (alpha-syllabic) as their L1 and English (alphabetic) as their L2. We quantified their bilingual characteristics- proficiency, reading and writing characteristics and dominance. Subtests from the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA; Kay, Lesser & Coltheart, 1992) were used to document the reading profile of BPWA in English and reading subtests from Reading Acquisition Profile (RAP-K; Rao, 1997) and words from Bilingual Aphasia test -Hindi (BAT; Paradis & Libben, 1987) were used to document the reading profile of BPWA in Kannada and Hindi respectively. Findings. Based on the findings of Phase I (i.e., results from Chapter 2-4), we found prominent differences between HPE and LPE on comprehension measures (synonymy triplets and sentence comprehension tasks). This is in contrast to the results observed in monolingual adults, were semantics is less impacted by print exposure. Moreover, our predictions that HPE will result in better oral language production skills were borne out in specific conditions-semantic fluency and non-word repetition task (at word level) and higher number of words in the narrative, higher verbs per utterance and fewer repetitions (at connected speech level). In addition, the non-verbal executive functions, we found no direct link between print exposure (in L2) and non-verbal executive functions in bi-literate bilinguals excepting working memory (auditory N-back task). Additionally, another consistency in our findings is that there seems to be a strong link between print exposure and semantic processing in our research. The findings on the semantic tasks have been consistent across comprehension (synonymy triplets task and sentence comprehension task) and production (semantic fluency) favouring HPE. The findings from Phase II (Chapter 5) reveal differences of reading characteristics in the two languages (with different scripts) of the four BPWA. This research provides preliminary evidence that a script related difference exists in the manifestation of dyslexia in bi-scriptal BPWA speaking a combination of alphabetic and alpha-syllabic languages. Conclusions. Our research contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the relationship between bi-literacy and language production, comprehension and non-verbal cognition where bi-literacy seems to have a higher impact on language than cognition. The contrary findings from the monolinguals and children literature, highlight the importance for considering nuances of bilingual research and specifically challenges the notion that semantic comprehension is not significantly affected by literacy. In the neurologically impaired population, our research provides a comprehensive profiling of reading abilities in BPWA in the Indian population with languages having different scripts. Using this profiling and classification, we are able to affirm the findings previously found in literature emphasizing the importance of script in the assessment of reading abilities in BPWA. Such profiling and classification assist in the development of bilingual models of reading aloud and classifying different types of reading impairments

Internationalization prospects of Finnish language technology SMEs in rural India

Rural India is an emerging business area with a population of over 800 million people. Despite the strong two-decade long economic growth, most of these people have to cope with a poor selection of both private and public services due to consumer limitations and deficiencies in service infrastructure. Mobile services are rapidly becoming one important exception. Mobile phones are enabling access to various services from banking to agriculture and from healthcare to education for the rural people, and this consequently creates large scale business opportunities for international mobile service developers. In multilingual India, services have to be scaled to various languages and they have to overcome the obstacle of illiteracy in order to reach entire rural audience. The utilization of language technology is one possibility to deal with both issues cost-effectively. This thesis takes a novel approach on internationalization research by examining the prospects that Finnish language technology companies have in the commercial development of multilingual mobile services in rural India through a case study of six SMEs. The results suggest that the prospects are characterized by the internationalization orientation and knowledge orientation of the company, and that Finnish language technology companies are prone to reactive internationalization at best when it comes to developing areas

Internationalization prospects of Finnish language technology SMEs in rural India

Rural India is an emerging business area with a population of over 800 million people. Despite the strong two-decade long economic growth, most of these people have to cope with a poor selection of both private and public services due to consumer limitations and deficiencies in service infrastructure. Mobile services are rapidly becoming one important exception. Mobile phones are enabling access to various services from banking to agriculture and from healthcare to education for the rural people, and this consequently creates large scale business opportunities for international mobile service developers. In multilingual India, services have to be scaled to various languages and they have to overcome the obstacle of illiteracy in order to reach entire rural audience. The utilization of language technology is one possibility to deal with both issues cost-effectively. This thesis takes a novel approach on internationalization research by examining the prospects that Finnish language technology companies have in the commercial development of multilingual mobile services in rural India through a case study of six SMEs. The results suggest that the prospects are characterized by the internationalization orientation and knowledge orientation of the company, and that Finnish language technology companies are prone to reactive internationalization at best when it comes to developing areas