Profiling vocabulary acquisition in Irish

Investigations into early vocabulary development, including the timing of the acquisition of nouns, verbs and closed-class words, have produced conflicting results, both within and across languages. Studying vocabulary development in Irish can contribute to this area, as it has potentially informative features such as a VSO word order, and semantically rich prepositions. This study used a parent report adapted for Irish, to measure vocabulary development longitudinally for children aged between 1;04 and 3;04. The findings indicated that the children learned closed-class words at relatively smaller vocabulary sizes compared to children acquiring other languages, and had a strong preference for nouns

Maternal Voice Onset Time in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech: Characteristics and Possible Impacts on Language Development

Infant-directed speech (IDS) contains many unique characteristics that may facilitate language development. One acoustic cue that may differ in IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) is voice onset time (VOT). The present study examines the VOT of open- and closed-class words in speech to infants at 10/11, 18, and 24 months of age, as well as in speech to adults. This study also looks at correlations between clarification of VOT in speech to infants, and language outcomes at 2 years. Results show that VOT clarification in IDS did not differ significantly at any of the ages. Overlap between voicing categories for open class words was significantly less in ADS than IDS. The overlap for closed class words at 18 months was significantly related to language outcomes, with lower overlap relating to higher outcome scores. Possible explanations are discussed

Marker-based filtering of bilingual phrase pairs for SMT

State-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems make use of a large translation table obtained after scoring a set of bilingual phrase pairs automatically extracted from a parallel corpus. The number of bilingual phrase pairs extracted from a pair of aligned sentences grows exponentially as the length of the sentences increases; therefore, the number of entries in the phrase table used to carry out the translation may become unmanageable, especially when online, 'on demand' translation is required in real time. We describe the use of closed-class words to filter the set of bilingual phrase pairs extracted from the parallel corpus by taking into account the alignment information and the type of the words involved in the alignments. On four European language pairs, we show that our simple yet novel approach can filter the phrase table by up to a third yet still provide competitive results compared to the baseline. Furthermore, it provides a nice balance between the unfiltered approach and pruning using stop words, where the deterioration in translation quality is unacceptably high

A Modern Standard Arabic Closed-Class Word List

This document describes a list of Modern Standard Arabic closed-class words, which can be used as a stop list for a variety of natural language processing applications. The list contains 740 inflected words and clitics in the Arabic Treebank (ATB) tokenization scheme (Maamouri et al., 2004; Habash, 2010). The inflected words are based on 309 lemmas from the Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer, SAMA (Graff et al., 2009). To get a copy of the full list, please contact the authors

Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology

thesisThis investigation examined the effect of repeated sampling (i.e., test- retest) produced within the context of discourse elicited by the Nicholas and Brookshire (1993) discourse elicitation and language analysis procedures. The Nicholas and Brookshire (1993) Correct Information Units (CIUs) are extensively used in aphasic literature to gauge treatment outcomes, but few researchers have examined the temporal stability of this language measure in individuals with aphasia. Eighteen individuals with aphasia produced language samples over three sampling times. A repeated measures, group design was used to examine the stability of language measures over repeated sampling occasions. The following measurements were calculated and compared: total number of CIUs, percent CIU productivity, number of CIU nouns, number of CIU verbs, open class CIU words, CIU closed class words, well-formed sentences, and lexical diversity. Values for correlation coefficients were used to assess group stability of performance and standard error of measurement was used to assess individual stability of performance. Measures stable enough to use in group research included number of words, number of CIUs, percent CIUs, number of CIU nouns, number of CIU verbs, number of CIU open class words, and number of CIU closed class words. At the individual level, no participants achieved stability in performance across all measures, but 1 participant achieved stability in performance for all but CIU open class words. The majority of the participants were not stable in performance for the majority of the measures. Researchers and clinicians using the Nicholas and Brookshire (1993) language elicitation system can expect stability in performance for the examined language measures in groups of participants. For individuals, performance for the examined language measures is expected to be not stable in performance for some and stable in performance for others

Bilingual example segmentation based on markers hypothesis

The Marker Hypothesis was first defined by Thomas Green in 1979. It is a psycho-linguistic hypothesis defining that there is a set of words in every language that marks boundaries of phrases in a sentence. While it remains a hypothesis because nobody has proved it, tests have shows that results are comparable to basic shallow parsers with higher efficiency. The chunking algorithm based on the Marker Hypothesis is simple, fast and almost language independent. It depends on a list of closed-class words, that are already available for most languages. This makes it suitable for bilingual chunking (there is not the requirement for separate language shallow parsers). This paper discusses the use of the Marker Hypothesis combined with Probabilistic Translation Dictionaries for example-based machine translation resources extraction from parallel corpora

Estudio longitudinal de la producción de deícticos en castellano en niños de 12 a 36 meses durante las actividades cotidianas

This longitudinally study examined the rate of production of deictics in four Spanish 1-and 2-year-old children, in interactive situations with their mothers at home over a one-year-period. First, we compared the production of deictics with that of open-and-closed-class words and related it to the mean length of the utterances in which at least one deictic was used. Second, we observed the order of emergence of deictic words. Third, we analysed changes in the production of deictics, taking into account their semantic dimensions (spatial, personal and temporal), their grammatical categories (pronouns, adjectives, adverbs), and their morphological features (gender, number, distance). The results of the different analyses indicated that deictic words help to anchor the speaker's and the addressee's discourse to the deictic center (I, here, now, this). The spatial domain seemed to be relevant for the development of personal deictics

Vocabulary Development in Greek Children: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison Using the Language Development Survey

This study investigated vocabulary size and vocabulary composition in Greek children aged 1; 6 to 2; 11 using a Greek adaptation of Rescorla\u27s Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989). Participants were 273 toddlers coming from monolingual Greek-speaking families. Greek LDS data were compared with US LDS data obtained from the instrument\u27s normative sample (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000). Vocabulary size increased markedly with age, but Greek toddlers appeared to get off to a slower start in early word learning than US children. The correlation between percentage word use scores in Greek and US samples was moderate in size, indicating considerable overlap but some differences. Common nouns were the largest category among the fifty most frequent words in both samples. Numbers of adjectives and verbs were comparable across languages, but people and closed-class words were more numerous in the Greek sample. Finally, Greek late talkers showed similar patterns of vocabulary composition to those observed in typically developing Greek children

Developmental Stages of Perception and Language Acquisition in a Perceptually Grounded Robot

The objective of this research is to develop a system for language learning based on a minimum of pre-wired language-specific functionality, that is compatible with observations of perceptual and language capabilities in the human developmental trajectory. In the proposed system, meaning (in terms of descriptions of events and spatial relations) is extracted from video images based on detection of position, motion, physical contact and their parameters. Mapping of sentence form to meaning is performed by learning grammatical constructions that are retrieved from a construction inventory based on the constellation of closed class items uniquely identifying the target sentence structure. The resulting system displays robust acquisition behavior that reproduces certain observations from developmental studies, with very modest “innate” language specificity