ValuED: A Blockchain-based Trading Platform to EncourageStudent Engagement in Higher Education

The provision of higher education has been changing ever more quickly in the UK and worldwide, as a result of technological, economic, and geopolitical factors. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated such changes. The “student experience”—the interaction of students with their institution and with each other—has been changing accordingly, with less face-to-face contact. In this work, we have explored a way to improve student engagement in higher education. We describe “ValuED”, a blockchain-based trading platform using a cryptocurrency. It allows students both to buy and sell goods and services within their university community and to be rewarded for academic engagement. ValuED involves a reputation system to further incentivise participants. We describe the implementation and piloting of this platform and draw conclusions for its future use. The platform’s source code is publicly available

How arbitrary is language?

It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary-typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound-meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency

Letters and their sounds are not perfectly arbitrary : exploring grapho-phonemic systematicity in multiple orthography systems

Language, as a complex system, suggests coordination between subsystems. Recent studies demonstrated that semantically similar words tend to have similar pronunciation (Blasi et al., 2016; Dautrich et al., 2017; Jee, Tamariz, & Shillcock, 2022; Monaghan et al., 2014; Tamariz, 2008). The current research, for the first time, quantified mapping between letters and their canonical pronunciations, or grapho-phonemic systematicity. We examined naturally developed phonograms (Arabic, English, Greek, and Hebrew), consciously designed phonograms (Korean, Shavian alphabet, and Pitman's shorthand), a logographic orthography (Chinese) and fictitious orthography systems (Aurebesh and Klingon). We measured all the pairwise phonological distances between phonemes in the respective alphabet system, and the corresponding pairwise orthographical distances between letters. We then tested Pearson's r between these two lists of pairwise distances. The positive correlation coefficient means that similar letter-shapes have similar canonical pronunciation. In contrast, the negative correlation means that similar letter-shapes have more distinct sounds, or vice versa. We verified the significance of the correlations by conducting Monte-Carlo permutation tests. For the phonological distance, phonemes were encoded into vectors according to the articulatory features and the distance between the vectors were calculated in various ways. We applied three methods to measure the pairwise distances between letter-shapes. Pixel count simply defines the distances as the difference in the number of pixels between two characters. Perimetric complexity is defined 354 This paper is distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license

Quantified Grapho-Phonemic Systematicity in Korean Hangeul

Hangeul, the Korean orthography is well known for its scientific design that emphasizes the link between sounds and letter shapes. However, it hasn‟t been asked so far „how systematic‟ it is. We quantify, for the first time, the grapho-phonemic systematicity of hangeul. We defined Korean phonemes as binary vectors according to articulatory features and then measured the pairwise phonemic distance between phonemes using multiple methods. We measured the pairwise visual distance between letter shapes by (a) stroke share rate, which reflects the original principles of hangeul‟s creation, and (b) Hausdorff distance (Huttenlocher et al., 1993), which measures topological difference between images. We then tested the correlation between the phonological distances and the corresponding orthographical distances. Positive correlations clearly indicated that similar letters tend to have similar pronunciations in Korean hangeul. Stroke share rate maximizes hangeul‟s grapho-phonemic systematicity. Hausdorff distance, an initial step in the detailed quantifying of visual distance, allows similar calculations to be carried out with any hangeul font and with any other orthography (Jee, Tamariz, & Shillcock, 2021; 2022a; 2022b). Consciously designed to be phonologically transparent, hangeul can be considered as the gold standard of grapho-phonemic systematicity. We discuss the implications of this systematicity