Studies towards a description of the development and functioning of children's awareness of linguistic variability

PhD ThesisChildren's language acquisition does not consist solely of the mastery,, of linguistic form and structure, children must also acquire the rules for appropriate use of that form and structure. To become competent speaker-hearers children must learn how to handle linguistic variability. Almost nothing is knoýnabout how children acquire the' sociolinguistic skills'and patterns of sociolinguistic variability which have been reported for adult speakers. This thesis therefore investigates some aspects of'the structure and functioning of linguistic variability in children's speech. It is shown that non-segmental variability-in children's speech constitutes an area of primý, importance for study. Children systematically employ the resources of non-segmental variability for a variety of social and affective purposes. The structured nature of this non-segmental variability is revealed by a quantitative analysis of the prosodic and-paralinguistic features in children's speech

The effects of child-directed speech vs adult-directed speech on attention and categorization in prelinguistic infants

The facilitative role of linguistic input on nonlinguistic categorization is frequently explained in terms of children\u27s attention to uniquely linguistic forms such as words. In the three experiments reported here, 15-month-old infants were familiarized to visual stimuli in the context of hearing either adult-directed speech (ADS) or child-directed speech (CDS) during visual fixations. Categorization was successful with CDS and ADS input when accumulated attention was not constrained (Experiment 1). Moreover, there were no differences in accumulated attention as a function of input type. When attention was constrained to 90 seconds (Experiments 2 and 3), ADS input disrupted categorization more for female than male subjects. This disruption is not predicted by current constraints/biases accounts and suggests that a psychologically real noun-category bias may not be present prior to the vocabulary explosion

Advanced Content and Interface Personalization through Conversational Behavior and Affective Embodied Conversational Agents

Conversation is becoming one of the key interaction modes in HMI. As a result, the conversational agents (CAs) have become an important tool in various everyday scenarios. From Apple and Microsoft to Amazon, Google, and Facebook, all have adapted their own variations of CAs. The CAs range from chatbots and 2D, carton-like implementations of talking heads to fully articulated embodied conversational agents performing interaction in various concepts. Recent studies in the field of face-to-face conversation show that the most natural way to implement interaction is through synchronized verbal and co-verbal signals (gestures and expressions). Namely, co-verbal behavior represents a major source of discourse cohesion. It regulates communicative relationships and may support or even replace verbal counterparts. It effectively retains semantics of the information and gives a certain degree of clarity in the discourse. In this chapter, we will represent a model of generation and realization of more natural machine-generated output

Are there nonverbal cues to commitment? An exploratory study using the zero-acquaintance video presentation paradigm

Altruism is difficult to explain evolutionarily if subtle cheaters exist in a population (Trivers, 1971). A pathway to the evolutionary maintenance of cooperation is nonverbal altruist-detection. One adaptive advantage of nonverbal altruist-detection is the formation of trustworthy division of labour partnerships (Frank, 1988). Three studies were designed to test a fundamental assumption behind altruistic partner preference models. In the first experiment perceivers (blind with respect to target altruism level) made assessments of video-clips depicting self-reported altruists and self-reported non-altruists. Video-clips were designed with attempts to control for attractiveness, expressiveness, role-playing ability, and verbal content. Overall perceivers rated altruists as more “helpful” than non-altruists. In a second experiment manipulating the payoffs for cooperation, perceivers (blind with respect to payoff condition and altruism level) assessed altruists who were helping others as more “concerned” and “attentive” than non-altruists. However perceivers assessed the same altruists as less “concerned” and “attentive” than non-altruists when the payoffs were for self. This finding suggests that perceivers are sensitive to nonverbal indicators of selfishness. Indeed the self-reported non-altruists were more likely than self-reported altruists to retain resources for themselves in an objective measure of cooperative tendencies (i.e. a dictator game). In a third study altruists and non-altruists’ facial expressions were analyzed. The smile emerged as a consistent cue to altruism. In addition, altruists exhibited more expressions that are under involuntary control (e.g., orbicularis oculi) compared to non-altruists. Findings Are there nonverbal cues to commitment? suggest that likelihood to cooperate is signaled nonverbally and the putative cues may be under involuntary control as predicted by Frank (1988)

ESL development in a mainstream classroom : A case study

Learning English as a second language is a challenge faced by many children. This research has focused on the language learning and acquisition of a middle primary school student, new to Australia, from France. The English language development of this French student in a mainstream classroom of a primary school within Western Australia has been examined. The student, Rene, is a nine year old male child who is a fluent speaker of the French language. His English language development was studied over a ten week period where he was taught in a mainstream classroom with the assistance of a bilingual English I French support teacher. He started the year as a beginner in English in the mainstream class and with an understanding that his L 1 would continue to be used. The study identified the early movement from Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BIGS) to the beginnings of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) and showed a relationship between these language skills and Mohan\u27s Six Major Knowledge Structures. Understanding of vocabulary which contained complex concepts was made possible through bilingual education. The presence of a person on staff who was available to work as a partner in the classroom, in a bilingual speaking capacity was invaluable, particularly in the early days when communication with the child was limited

Classroom Challenges: Working with Pupils with Communication Disorders.

The challenge of actively involving students with communication disorders in the formal education systems prompted this desktop study on some of the challenges and problems associated with students with communication disorders in the classroom. This paper examines the relationship between communication disorders and learning from a very basic and simplified point of view. The intention is not to get deep into the jargon of disability studies, but to assist teachers in having basic understanding of pupils with communication disorders so that they also actively engage them in their teaching approaches. As such, the paper does not claim to be a professional and expert point of reference. It is derived from and built on simple desktop literature study and document analysis. The thrust of the paper is simply to make sure that students with communication disorders are fully and actively involved in their classroom learning activities. It argues that teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin. We thus conclude that when people talk about teachers’ effectiveness, they are talking about actual student learning. Generally there are as many teaching and learning methods as there are teachers. These have been grouped into basically two philosophies of teaching and learning: the traditional teacher-centred philosophy and the contemporary student-centred philosophy. In the modern world, the most accepted criterion for measuring good teaching is the rate and level of learning taking place among students. It has been established that people largely learn by doing, hence the widely accepted belief that between the above two philosophies, the student centred approach is the best. This paper argues that, if this is the case, then there is a risk of students with communication disorders being excluded from effective learning that goes on, unless measures are taken to make sure they are fully and actively involved in the learning process.. Keywords: Challenges, communication disorders, classroom, pupils, teachers, students, teaching, learning

A Multimodal evaluation of Malala Yousafzai's speech at Harvard University

XIX Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2014)Through language speakers express thoughts, experiences, feelings, values and attitudes. Nevertheless, language is not only verbal communication, as multiple devices are included in interaction in order to make something coherent. Thus, people inform others about feelings through a combination of verbal and non-verbal interactions. Language is not made up exclusively of words, phrases and sentences but also of images as it is the main resource for conveying meaning. Non-verbal behaviour covers all forms of non-spoken human conduct possessing the capacity to construct communicative messages. Hence, the nature of the connection between speech and gestures has become a popular topic to study among researchers in the field of linguistics among others. This paper presents a multimodal evaluation of an academic speech performed at Sanders Theater, Harvard University, September 27th, 2013, by Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner 2014. Even though the speech is a monologue, the speaker achieves interaction and engagement with the audience by means of using both verbal expressions and nonlinguistic resources throughout her presentation. This study exhibits an evaluation of how non-linguistic resources such as paralanguage and kinetics are used as complementary tools in spoken discourse

Gender detection in children’s speech utterances for human-robot interaction

The human voice speech essentially includes paralinguistic information used in many real-time applications. Detecting the children’s gender is considered a challenging task compared to the adult’s gender. In this study, a system for human-robot interaction (HRI) is proposed to detect the gender in children’s speech utterances without depending on the text. The robot's perception includes three phases: Feature’s extraction phase where four formants are measured at each glottal pulse and then a median is calculated across these measurements. After that, three types of features are measured which are formant average (AF), formant dispersion (DF), and formant position (PF). Feature’s standardization phase where the measured feature dimensions are standardized using the z-score method. The semantic understanding phase is where the children’s gender is detected accurately using the logistic regression classifier. At the same time, the action of the robot is specified via a speech response using the text to speech (TTS) technique. Experiments are conducted on the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Kids dataset to measure the suggested system’s performance. In the suggested system, the overall accuracy is 98%. The results show a relatively clear improvement in terms of accuracy of up to 13% compared to related works that utilized the CMU Kids dataset