Multimedia Games for Fun and Learning English in Preschool

Based on the assumption that educational software addressing Primary school learners must comprise a set of features to encourage children’s creativity and development, the appropriate design of second language hypermedia adaptive games for Primary School children can pose a wide range of challenges for both the language teacher and computer specialist alike. Factors such as the educational context, cognitive abilities, linguistic constraints, conceptual and psychomotor restrictions, and so on, contribute to challenging professionals with linguistic, content and technology adaptation queries to be coped with. Based on the results from multi-factorial analysis, this paper aims firstly to demonstrate that the design of hypermedia tasks can be optimally implemented by following previous phases of data collection on preferred items, questioning approach for the creation of a hypermedia system which has led us to analyze learning factors in order to deal with the possible linguistic, conceptual and technological demands in the children’s learning environment. General results in the preliminary phases of the study indicate the need to veer the path towards a more adapted means of communicating with children, findings from which we have devised a set of hypermedia tasks which provide the adaptation of the information presented to the student according to individual objectives, interests and/or knowledge

Multimodality and Polyculturalism of Modern Design

Drawing on the means and methods of classical art, design creates its own plastic language, forms of communicative practice, and methodology. Design goes beyond traditions, opening new life-changing opportunities, and catering for a variety of human needs. This article analyzes the limitations and problems of linguistic corpora utilization and attempts to solve them. The analysis revealed that among the main advantages of a significant part of the corpora, the possibility of analyzing large text fragments   to determine their frequency of use in different contexts, as well as the high quality and speed of information processing can be noted, which contributes to time savings while working with corpora. In addition, a high degree of objectivity of studies using the corpus methodology is achieved with the help of wide possibilities for verifying quantitative data. Among the main limitations of most of the corpora we indicated the impossibility of discursive marking of the corpus, paid access to the corpus data or the limitations of the data available for work and the lack of meaningful context. The computer program Linguistica providing the basis for a web application of the same name, is designed to create different types of linguistic corpora: research and training, monolingual and multilingual and others. Linguistica web application can also contribute to fulfilling the research projects of teachers and students specializing in linguistics as well as to increasing the attractiveness of the electronic environment of the university. Keywords: communicative practices, design, form, function, style, multimodality, polyculturalism, virtual realit

Compiling of Phonetic Database Structure

The voice corpus of language is the essential part of the linguistic resources, and it contains the phonetic database. A phonetic database is a structured collection of software-delivered speech fragments. Nowadays, phonetic database or voice corpus became like a new element in speech technologies, and much investigation has taken place according to this event. The investigators' interest in voice corpus is related to the development of a speech recognition system. Today it is enough to experience in preparation of a phonetic database. Equipped with unique information on the preparation and usage of everyday speech corpus, the development level of speech technologies and the increasing power of computer technologies allow for the investigation of various language materials, largescale, and statistical phonetic research. These developed directions of linguistics were investigated in this article. Speech corpora are a valuable source of information for phonological research and the study of sound patterns. The study of speech corpora is in its infancy compared to other field studies in linguistics. Existing speech corpora form the part of the world's languages and do not fully represent all the dialects and speech forms by phonological aspect. The article analyses the history, structure, and importance of developing speech corpses, a branch of corpus linguistics and has developed in recent years. The article also lists the main features to be considered in the design of the speech corpus

Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs

© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each other’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in human–computer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated human–computer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in human–computer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for human–computer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the system’s grammar and lexicon

A model of the dynamics of organizational communication

We propose a model of the dynamics of organizational communication. Our model specifies the mechanics by which communication impact is fed back to communication inputs and closes the gap between sender and receiver of messages. We draw on language critique, a branch of language philosophy, and derive joint linguistic actions of interlocutors to explain the emergence and adaptation of communication on the group level. The model is framed by Te'eni's cognitive-affective model of organizational communication