Can Individuals with Down Syndrome Improve Their Grammar?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sepulveda, Esther Moraleda; Lopez-Villasenor, Miguel Lazaro; Heinze, Elena Garayzabal

2013-01-01

Morphosyntax constitutes one of the most complex areas of language. It takes into account the structure of the word and that of the sentence, and its development allows one to establish adequately agreements both within the nominal phrase and in the rest of the sentence. Morphosyntax is particularly impaired in individuals with Down syndrome. To…

On directionality of phrase structure building.

PubMed

Chesi, Cristiano

2015-02-01

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at the elementary restrictions that apply to Merge (i.e., selection and licensing of functional features), we could conclude that a re-orientation of the syntactic derivation (from bottom-up/right-left to top-down/left-right) is necessary to make the theory simpler, especially for long-distance (filler-gap) dependencies, and is also empirically more adequate. If the structure building operations would assemble lexical items in the order they are pronounced (Phillips in Order and structure. PhD thesis, MIT, 1996; Chesi in Phases and cartography in linguistic computation: Toward a cognitively motivated computational model of linguistic competence. PhD thesis, Università di Siena, 2004; Chesi in Competence and computation: Toward a processing friendly minimalist grammar. Unipress, Padova, 2012), on-line performance data could better fit the grammatical model, without resorting to external "performance factors." The phase-based, top-down (and, as a consequence, left-right) Minimalist Grammar here discussed goes in this direction, ultimately showing how strong Islands (Huang in Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. PhD thesis, MIT, 1982) and intervention effects (Gordon et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27:1411-1423, 2001, Gordon et al. in J Mem Lang 51:97-114, 2004) could be better explained in structural terms assuming this unconventional derivational direction.

Stimulus-Response Theory of Finite Automata, Technical Report No. 133.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suppes, Patrick

The central aim of this paper and its projected successors is to prove in detail that stimulus-response theory, or at least a mathematically precise version, can give an account of the learning of many phrase-structure grammars. Section 2 is concerned with standard notions of finite and probabilistic automata. An automaton is defined as a device…

On the Application of Syntactic Methodologies in Automatic Text Analysis.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Salton, Gerard; And Others

1990-01-01

Summarizes various linguistic approaches proposed for document analysis in information retrieval environments. Topics discussed include syntactic analysis; use of machine-readable dictionary information; knowledge base construction; the PLNLP English Grammar (PEG) system; phrase normalization; and statistical and syntactic phrase evaluation used…

morphogen: Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages with Synthetic Phrases

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-10-01

specific trans - lation phrases. These “synthetic phrases” augment the standard translation grammars and decoding proceeds normally with a standard...Genitive case grandparent(poss) Hebrew Suffix ים ( masculine plural) parent=NNS after=NNS Prefix א (first person sing. + future) child(nsubj)=I child(aux

Preliminary Analysis of a Breadth-First Parsing Algorithm: Theoretical and Experimental Results.

DTIC Science & Technology

1981-06-01

present discussion we will assume that phrases have one or two daughters, or more formally, that the grammar is in Chomsky Normal Form [1].) This... grammar point of view, these pairs contrast Chomsky Normal Form [1] with Categorial Grammars [2], and from a representational point of view, these pairs...chart(i, k) * chart(k, j) bottom-up ( Chomsky Normal Form) (9) chart(k, j) = chart(i, ) top-down (Categorial Grammars )chart(i, k) Earley’s Algorithm [8

On the Nature of Syntactic Irregularity.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lakoff, George

This dissertation is an attempt to characterize the notion "exception to a rule of grammar" within the context of Chomsky's conception of grammar as given in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." This notion depends on a prior notion of "rule government"--in each phrase marker on which a transformational rule may…

Kanasi: A Brief Grammar Sketch.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pappenhagen, Ronald W.

An outline of the grammar of Kanasi, a non-Austronesian language in the Indo-Pacific family of the Daga branch and spoken in Papua New Guinea, includes analysis of noun phrases (numerals and descriptive modifiers, genitive constructions, and adpositions); verbs (affixes; tense, aspect, and moods; and causation); predicate nominals; existential,…

Attribute And-Or Grammar for Joint Parsing of Human Pose, Parts and Attributes.

PubMed

Park, Seyoung; Nie, Xiaohan; Zhu, Song-Chun

2017-07-25

This paper presents an attribute and-or grammar (A-AOG) model for jointly inferring human body pose and human attributes in a parse graph with attributes augmented to nodes in the hierarchical representation. In contrast to other popular methods in the current literature that train separate classifiers for poses and individual attributes, our method explicitly represents the decomposition and articulation of body parts, and account for the correlations between poses and attributes. The A-AOG model is an amalgamation of three traditional grammar formulations: (i)Phrase structure grammar representing the hierarchical decomposition of the human body from whole to parts; (ii)Dependency grammar modeling the geometric articulation by a kinematic graph of the body pose; and (iii)Attribute grammar accounting for the compatibility relations between different parts in the hierarchy so that their appearances follow a consistent style. The parse graph outputs human detection, pose estimation, and attribute prediction simultaneously, which are intuitive and interpretable. We conduct experiments on two tasks on two datasets, and experimental results demonstrate the advantage of joint modeling in comparison with computing poses and attributes independently. Furthermore, our model obtains better performance over existing methods for both pose estimation and attribute prediction tasks.

Probing the links between language and mathematical conceptualisation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bell, Garry; Woo, Jeong Ho

1998-04-01

Although it is well known that the number-naming grammars of some Asian languages affect the number conceptualisation and operational capacity of the young children who use them, language structure in other fields of the mathematical register appears to have been underemphasised in explanations of the differential mathematical attainment of East Asian and western students. This study probed the conceptual structures which samples of Year 9 students in Korea and Australia had constructed for various geometrical terms. The two samples of students exhibited major differences in definition ranking preferences on angle, and in semantic profiles for parallelogram, triangle, square, circle, cylinder, trapezium and line. It is hypothesised that these differences may be due in part to the noun phrase grammar differences between Korean and English, and to the syntax and semantic transparency of some Korean geometrical names. Results indicated reinforcement for the Vygotskian view that culturally imposed language structures directly influence the cognitive development of the learner.

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language.

PubMed

Jackendoff, Ray; Wittenberg, Eva

2017-02-01

We suggest that one way to approach the evolution of language is through reverse engineering: asking what components of the language faculty could have been useful in the absence of the full complement of components. We explore the possibilities offered by linear grammar, a form of language that lacks syntax and morphology altogether, and that structures its utterances through a direct mapping between semantics and phonology. A language with a linear grammar would have no syntactic categories or syntactic phrases, and therefore no syntactic recursion. It would also have no functional categories such as tense, agreement, and case inflection, and no derivational morphology. Such a language would still be capable of conveying certain semantic relations through word order-for instance by stipulating that agents should precede patients. However, many other semantic relations would have to be based on pragmatics and discourse context. We find evidence of linear grammar in a wide range of linguistic phenomena: pidgins, stages of late second language acquisition, home signs, village sign languages, language comprehension (even in fully syntactic languages), aphasia, and specific language impairment. We also find a full-blown language, Riau Indonesian, whose grammar is arguably close to a pure linear grammar. In addition, when subjects are asked to convey information through nonlinguistic gesture, their gestures make use of semantically based principles of linear ordering. Finally, some pockets of English grammar, notably compounds, can be characterized in terms of linear grammar. We conclude that linear grammar is a plausible evolutionary precursor of modern fully syntactic grammar, one that is still active in the human mind.

Individual differences in adult foreign language learning: the mediating effect of metalinguistic awareness.

PubMed

Brooks, Patricia J; Kempe, Vera

2013-02-01

In this study, we sought to identify cognitive predictors of individual differences in adult foreign-language learning and to test whether metalinguistic awareness mediated the observed relationships. Using a miniature language-learning paradigm, adults (N = 77) learned Russian vocabulary and grammar (gender agreement and case marking) over six 1-h sessions, completing tasks that encouraged attention to phrases without explicitly teaching grammatical rules. The participants' ability to describe the Russian gender and case-marking patterns mediated the effects of nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning on grammar learning and generalization. Hence, even under implicit-learning conditions, individual differences stemmed from explicit metalinguistic awareness of the underlying grammar, which, in turn, was linked to nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning. Prior knowledge of languages with grammatical gender (predominantly Spanish) predicted learning of gender agreement. Transfer of knowledge of gender from other languages to Russian was not mediated by awareness, which suggests that transfer operates through an implicit process akin to structural priming.

Feedback Visualization in a Grammar-Based E-Learning System for German: A Preliminary User Evaluation with the COMPASS System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harbusch, Karin; Hausdörfer, Annette

2016-01-01

COMPASS is an e-learning system that can visualize grammar errors during sentence production in German as a first or second language. Via drag-and-drop dialogues, it allows users to freely select word forms from a lexicon and to combine them into phrases and sentences. The system's core component is a natural-language generator that, for every new…

Modeling children's early grammatical knowledge

PubMed Central

Bannard, Colin; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael

2009-01-01

Theories of grammatical development differ in how much abstract knowledge they attribute to young children. Here, we report a series of experiments using a computational model to evaluate the explanatory power of child grammars based not on abstract rules but on concrete words and phrases and some local abstractions associated with these words and phrases. We use a Bayesian procedure to extract such item-based grammars from transcriptions of 28+ h of each of two children's speech at 2 and 3 years of age. We then use these grammars to parse all of the unique multiword utterances from transcriptions of separate recordings of these same children at each of the two ages. We found that at 2 years of age such a model had good coverage and predictive fit, with the children showing radically limited productivity. Furthermore, adding expert-annotated parts of speech to the induction procedure had little effect on coverage, with the exception of the category of noun. At age 3, the children's productivity sharply increased and the addition of a verb and a noun category markedly improved the model's performance. PMID:19805057

Syntactic Complexity and Frequency in the Neurocognitive Language System.

PubMed

Yang, Yun-Hsuan; Marslen-Wilson, William D; Bozic, Mirjana

2017-09-01

Prominent neurobiological models of language follow the widely accepted assumption that language comprehension requires two principal mechanisms: a lexicon storing the sound-to-meaning mapping of words, primarily involving bilateral temporal regions, and a combinatorial processor for syntactically structured items, such as phrases and sentences, localized in a left-lateralized network linking left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior temporal areas. However, recent research showing that the processing of simple phrasal sequences may engage only bilateral temporal areas, together with the claims of distributional approaches to grammar, raise the question of whether frequent phrases are stored alongside individual words in temporal areas. In this fMRI study, we varied the frequency of words and of short and long phrases in English. If frequent phrases are indeed stored, then only less frequent items should generate selective left frontotemporal activation, because memory traces for such items would be weaker or not available in temporal cortex. Complementary univariate and multivariate analyses revealed that, overall, simple words (verbs) and long phrases engaged LIFG and temporal areas, whereas short phrases engaged bilateral temporal areas, suggesting that syntactic complexity is a key factor for LIFG activation. Although we found a robust frequency effect for words in temporal areas, no frequency effects were found for the two phrasal conditions. These findings support the conclusion that long and short phrases are analyzed, respectively, in the left frontal network and in a bilateral temporal network but are not retrieved from memory in the same way as simple words during spoken language comprehension.

Processing Elided Verb Phrases with Flawed Antecedents: the Recycling Hypothesis

PubMed Central

Arregui, Ana; Clifton, Charles; Frazier, Lyn; Moulton, Keir

2006-01-01

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g. “Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.”) categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they “undergenerate”); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and explaining the data on verb phrase-ellipsis. Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a “VP recycling hypothesis,” which claims that when a syntactically-matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand. Experiments 1 and 2 used verb phrase ellipsis sentences with antecedents ranging from perfect (a verb phrase in matrix verb phrase position) to impossible (a verb phrase containing only a deverbal word). Experiments 3 and 4 contrasted antecedents in verbal versus nominal gerund subjects. Experiment 5 explored the possibility that speakers are particularly likely to go beyond the grammar and produce elided constituents without perfect matching antecedents when the antecedent needed is less marked than the antecedent actually produced. This experiment contrasted active (unmarked) and passive antecedents to show that readers seem to honor such a tendency. PMID:17710192

Implicit memory in music and language.

PubMed

Ettlinger, Marc; Margulis, Elizabeth H; Wong, Patrick C M

2011-01-01

Research on music and language in recent decades has focused on their overlapping neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings, ranging from the mechanism for encoding basic auditory cues to the mechanism for detecting violations in phrase structure. These overlaps have most often been identified in musicians with musical knowledge that was acquired explicitly, through formal training. In this paper, we review independent bodies of work in music and language that suggest an important role for implicitly acquired knowledge, implicit memory, and their associated neural structures in the acquisition of linguistic or musical grammar. These findings motivate potential new work that examines music and language comparatively in the context of the implicit memory system.

English: Basic Mechanics Modules 4 and 5.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pipeline, 1983

1983-01-01

"English: Basic Mechanics" is a series of computer-based lessons for the Apple II that allow students to practice applying the fundamentals of English grammar and punctuation. The two newest modules covering use of subordinate clauses and use of subordinate phrases are described. (JN)

Implicit Memory in Music and Language

PubMed Central

Ettlinger, Marc; Margulis, Elizabeth H.; Wong, Patrick C. M.

2011-01-01

Research on music and language in recent decades has focused on their overlapping neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings, ranging from the mechanism for encoding basic auditory cues to the mechanism for detecting violations in phrase structure. These overlaps have most often been identified in musicians with musical knowledge that was acquired explicitly, through formal training. In this paper, we review independent bodies of work in music and language that suggest an important role for implicitly acquired knowledge, implicit memory, and their associated neural structures in the acquisition of linguistic or musical grammar. These findings motivate potential new work that examines music and language comparatively in the context of the implicit memory system. PMID:21927608

Kiswahili Book for Peace Corps Tanzania.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simba, Esther M.; And Others

This guide is designed for the Swahili language training of Peace Corps volunteers and focuses on daily communication needs in that context. It consists of a series of 76 lessons, each containing vocabulary and phrase lists, dialogue, grammar notes, and exercises. Lesson topics include: greetings and introductions; numbers; commands; questions;…

Breaking the language barrier: machine assisted diagnosis using the medical speech translator.

PubMed

Starlander, Marianne; Bouillon, Pierrette; Rayner, Manny; Chatzichrisafis, Nikos; Hockey, Beth Ann; Isahara, Hitoshi; Kanzaki, Kyoko; Nakao, Yukie; Santaholma, Marianne

2005-01-01

In this paper, we describe and evaluate an Open Source medical speech translation system (MedSLT) intended for safety-critical applications. The aim of this system is to eliminate the language barriers in emergency situation. It translates spoken questions from English into French, Japanese and Finnish in three medical subdomains (headache, chest pain and abdominal pain), using a vocabulary of about 250-400 words per sub-domain. The architecture is a compromise between fixed-phrase translation on one hand and complex linguistically-based systems on the other. Recognition is guided by a Context Free Grammar Language Model compiled from a general unification grammar, automatically specialised for the domain. We present an evaluation of this initial prototype that shows the advantages of this grammar-based approach for this particular translation task in term of both reliability and use.

Korean Basic Course. Volume Two.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Park, B. Nam

Volume Two of the Korean Basic Course contains Units 29 through 47. Most units consist of (1) a basic dialog, (2) notes on the basic dialog, (3) additional vocabulary and phrases, (4) grammar notes, (5) drills, (6) a supplementary dialog for comprehension, (7) a narrative for comprehension and reading, and (8) exercises. Two of the last units…

Gagana Samoa Mo Pisikoa. Peace Corps Samoan Language Handbook.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaslano, Auimatagi S., Comp.

This manual is designed for the language training of Peace Corps volunteers serving in Samoa, and focuses on daily communication skills needed in that context. It consists of 48 lessons, which include targeted competencies, phrase and vocabulary lists, cultural and usage notes, notes on grammar, and exercises. Lesson topics include: the Samoan…

Peace Corps/Zambia PST 1995 Special Lessons: Bemba.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peace Corps (Zambia).

This manual is designed for the Bemba language training of Peace Corps volunteers and focuses on daily communication needs in that context. They consist of: a list of useful "survival" phrases and vocabulary; a noun and affix chart; the national anthem; a section on verb tenses and negation, with extensive grammar and usage notes; notes…

ENGLISH-QUECHUA DICTIONARY--CUZCO, AYACUCHO, COCHABAMBA.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

PARKER, GARY; AND OTHERS

WRITTEN TO SUPPLEMENT THE AUTHORS' SPOKEN QUECHUA MATERIALS, THIS TRIDIALECTAL DICTIONARY PROVIDES THE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH WHO HAS HAD SOME TRAINING IN QUECHUA GRAMMAR WITH A MEANS OF ACCESS TO ADDITIONAL VOCABULARY IN THE CUZCO, AYACUCHO, AND COCHABAMBA DIALECTS. ALL THE QUECHUA WORDS AND PHRASES INCLUDED ARE IN ACTUAL USE AND WERE GATHERED FROM…

Vocational Education in the 19th Century American Academy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Law, Gordon F.

The phrase "all things useful and all things ornamental," coined by Benjamin Franklin, describes the stated mission of most of the approximately 6,000 educational academies flourishing in America in the mid-19th century. Built upon the roots of Latin grammar schools, the academies evolved to include courses in many areas, from classical…

Normative Topographic ERP Analyses of Speed of Speech Processing and Grammar Before and After Grammatical Treatment

PubMed Central

Yoder, Paul J.; Molfese, Dennis; Murray, Micah M.; Key, Alexandra P. F.

2013-01-01

Typically developing (TD) preschoolers and age-matched preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) received event-related potentials (ERPs) to four monosyllabic speech sounds prior to treatment and, in the SLI group, after 6 months of grammatical treatment. Before treatment, the TD group processed speech sounds faster than the SLI group. The SLI group increased the speed of their speech processing after treatment. Post-treatment speed of speech processing predicted later impairment in comprehending phrase elaboration in the SLI group. During the treatment phase, change in speed of speech processing predicted growth rate of grammar in the SLI group. PMID:24219693

An Overview of OWL, a Language for Knowledge Representation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Szolovits, Peter; And Others

This is a description of the motivation and overall organization of the OWL language for knowledge representation. OWL consists of a linguistic memory system (LMS), a memory of concepts in terms of which all English phrases and all knowledge of an application domain are represented; a theory of English grammar which tells how to map English…

Morphological Variability in Interlanguage Grammars: New Evidence from the Acquisition of Gender and Number in Italian Determiner Phrases and Direct Object Pronouns

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Santoro, Maurizio

2012-01-01

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

Manuel de Espanol para Profesores del Cuerpo de Paz--Chile (Peace Corps Teacher's Manual for Spanish--Chile). Second Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Polanco, Patricia

This teaching manual is designed for the Spanish language training of Peace Corps volunteers serving in Chile, and focuses on daily communication skills needed in that context. It contains 12 topical lessons outlining targeted language and communication competencies, suggested classroom activities, phrase and vocabulary lists, grammar and usage…

Language disorders as a window on universal grammar: an abstract theory of agreement for IP, DP, and V-PP.

PubMed

Roeper, T; Ramos, E; Seymour, H; Abdul-Karim, L

2001-06-01

A new concept of Agreement (AGR) has been represented as a Formal Feature that can appear in a wide range of different configurations (Chomsky, 1998). A case study from language disorders supports and extends this abstract concept. The child shows no agreement in Inflectional Phrase me can and Determiner Phrase them eyes. We then extend the notion of AGR to include verb-Prepositional Phrase relations, where the child also systematically avoids certain prepositions (go beach). The analysis is supported by intuitional data from compounds (sweep with broom --> broom-swept). We also define a systematic notion of Possible deficit as a premature fixation of functional items which normally require additional Phi-features. The notion of Maximization of Formal Features then emerges as a significant feature of learnability from both a normal and disordered perspective. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

The declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar.

PubMed

Ullman, M T

2001-01-01

Our use of language depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon of memorized words and a mental grammar of rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of lexical forms into predictably structured larger words, phrases, and sentences. The declarative/procedural model posits that the lexicon/grammar distinction in language is tied to the distinction between two well-studied brain memory systems. On this view, the memorization and use of at least simple words (those with noncompositional, that is, arbitrary form-meaning pairings) depends upon an associative memory of distributed representations that is subserved by temporal-lobe circuits previously implicated in the learning and use of fact and event knowledge. This "declarative memory" system appears to be specialized for learning arbitrarily related information (i.e., for associative binding). In contrast, the acquisition and use of grammatical rules that underlie symbol manipulation is subserved by frontal/basal-ganglia circuits previously implicated in the implicit (nonconscious) learning and expression of motor and cognitive "skills" and "habits" (e.g., from simple motor acts to skilled game playing). This "procedural" system may be specialized for computing sequences. This novel view of lexicon and grammar offers an alternative to the two main competing theoretical frameworks. It shares the perspective of traditional dual-mechanism theories in positing that the mental lexicon and a symbol-manipulating mental grammar are subserved by distinct computational components that may be linked to distinct brain structures. However, it diverges from these theories where they assume components dedicated to each of the two language capacities (that is, domain-specific) and in their common assumption that lexical memory is a rote list of items. Conversely, while it shares with single-mechanism theories the perspective that the two capacities are subserved by domain-independent computational mechanisms, it diverges from them where they link both capacities to a single associative memory system with broad anatomic distribution. The declarative/procedural model, but neither traditional dual- nor single-mechanism models, predicts double dissociations between lexicon and grammar, with associations among associative memory properties, memorized words and facts, and temporal-lobe structures, and among symbol-manipulation properties, grammatical rule products, motor skills, and frontal/basal-ganglia structures. In order to contrast lexicon and grammar while holding other factors constant, we have focused our investigations of the declarative/procedural model on morphologically complex word forms. Morphological transformations that are (largely) unproductive (e.g., in go-went, solemn-solemnity) are hypothesized to depend upon declarative memory. These have been contrasted with morphological transformations that are fully productive (e.g., in walk-walked, happy-happiness), whose computation is posited to be solely dependent upon grammatical rules subserved by the procedural system. Here evidence is presented from studies that use a range of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches with children and adults. It is argued that converging evidence from these studies supports the declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar.

Phenomenology-Based Inverse Scattering for Sensor Information Fusion

DTIC Science & Technology

2006-09-15

abilities in the past. Rule -based systems and mathematics of logic implied significant similarities between the two: Thoughts, words, and phrases...all are logical statements. The situation has changed, in part due to the fact that logic- rule systems have not been sufficiently powerful to explain...references]. 3 Language mechanisms of our mind include abilities to acquire a large vocabulary, rules of grammar, and to use the finite set of

Cognitive biases, linguistic universals, and constraint-based grammar learning.

PubMed

Culbertson, Jennifer; Smolensky, Paul; Wilson, Colin

2013-07-01

According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology-the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world's languages-and can be probed with artificial grammar experiments on child and adult learners. Beginning with a widely successful approach to typology (Optimality Theory), and adapting techniques from computational approaches to statistical learning, we develop a Bayesian model of cognitive biases and show that it accounts for the detailed pattern of results of artificial grammar experiments on noun-phrase word order (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). Our proposal has several novel properties that distinguish it from prior work in the domains of linguistic theory, computational cognitive science, and machine learning. This study illustrates how ideas from these domains can be synthesized into a model of language learning in which biases range in strength from hard (absolute) to soft (statistical), and in which language-specific and domain-general biases combine to account for data from the macro-level scale of typological distribution to the micro-level scale of learning by individuals. Copyright © 2013 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Explanation production by expert planners

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bridges, Susan; Jhannes, James D.

1988-01-01

Although the explanation capability of expert systems is usually listed as one of the distinguishing characteristics of these systems, the explanation facilities of most existing systems are quite primitive. Computer generated explanations are typically produced from canned text or by direct translation of the knowledge structures. Explanations produced in this manner bear little resemblance to those produced by humans for similar tasks. The focus of our research in explanation is the production of justifications for decisions by expert planning systems. An analysis of justifications written by people for planning tasks has been taken as the starting point. The purpose of this analysis is two-fold. First, analysis of the information content of the justifications will provide a basis for deciding what knowledge must be represented if human-like justifications are to be produced. Second, an analysis of the textual organization of the justifications will be used in the development of a mechanism for selecting and organizing the knowledge to be included in a computer-produced explanation. This paper describes a preliminary analysis done of justifications written by people for a planning task. It is clear that these justifications differ significantly from those that would be produced by an expert system by tracing the firing of production rules. The results from the text analysis have been used to develop an augmented phrase structured grammar (APSG) describing the organization of the justifications. The grammar was designed to provide a computationally feasible method for determining textual organization that will allow the necessary information to be communicated in a cohesive manner.

Can Intonational Phrase Structure be Primed (like Syntactic Structure)?

PubMed Central

Tooley, Kristen M.; Konopka, Agnieszka E.; Watson, Duane G.

2013-01-01

In three experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries was manipulated such that the recording either included no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, in a preferred location, or in both locations. In Experiment 1, participants repeated the sentences to test whether they would reproduce the prosodic structure they had just heard. Experiments 2 and 3 used a prime-target paradigm to evaluate whether the intonational phrase structure heard in the prime sentence might influence that of a novel target sentence. Experiment 1 showed that participants did repeat back sentences that they just heard with the original intonational phrase structure, yet Experiments 2 and 3 found that exposure to intonational phrase boundaries on prime trials did not influence how a novel target sentence was prosodically phrased. These results suggest that speakers may retain the intonational phrasing of a sentence, but this effect is not long-lived and does not generalize across unrelated sentences. Furthermore, these findings provide no evidence that intonational phrase structure is formulated during a planning stage that is separate from other sources of linguistic information. PMID:24188467

Commitment-Based Learning of Hidden Linguistic Structures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akers, Crystal Gayle

2012-01-01

Learners must simultaneously learn a grammar and a lexicon from observed forms, yet some structures that the grammar and lexicon reference are unobservable in the acoustic signal. Moreover, these "hidden" structures interact: the grammar maps an underlying form to a particular interpretation. Learning one structure depends on learning…

Cognitive Adequacy in Structural-Functional Theories of Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butler, Christopher S.

2008-01-01

This paper discusses the role played by cognition in three linguistic theories which may be labelled as "structural-functional": Functional (Discourse) Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar. It argues that if we are to achieve true cognitive adequacy, we must go well beyond the grammar itself to include the processes…

Implicit Learning of Recursive Context-Free Grammars

PubMed Central

Rohrmeier, Martin; Fu, Qiufang; Dienes, Zoltan

2012-01-01

Context-free grammars are fundamental for the description of linguistic syntax. However, most artificial grammar learning experiments have explored learning of simpler finite-state grammars, while studies exploring context-free grammars have not assessed awareness and implicitness. This paper explores the implicit learning of context-free grammars employing features of hierarchical organization, recursive embedding and long-distance dependencies. The grammars also featured the distinction between left- and right-branching structures, as well as between centre- and tail-embedding, both distinctions found in natural languages. People acquired unconscious knowledge of relations between grammatical classes even for dependencies over long distances, in ways that went beyond learning simpler relations (e.g. n-grams) between individual words. The structural distinctions drawn from linguistics also proved important as performance was greater for tail-embedding than centre-embedding structures. The results suggest the plausibility of implicit learning of complex context-free structures, which model some features of natural languages. They support the relevance of artificial grammar learning for probing mechanisms of language learning and challenge existing theories and computational models of implicit learning. PMID:23094021

La Grammaire: Lectures (Grammar: Readings).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arrive, Michel; Chevalier, Jean-Claude

A historical perspective of French grammar is developed in this chronologically arranged reader. Part One includes material on French grammar from the 16th to the 19th century: (1) the "Premiere Epoque": 1530-1660, (2) the general grammar of Port-Royal, and (3) the "philosophical grammars" treating syntax, sentence structure, and discourse…

An Event Related Field Study of Rapid Grammatical Plasticity in Adult Second-Language Learners

PubMed Central

Bastarrika, Ainhoa; Davidson, Douglas J.

2017-01-01

The present study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate how Spanish adult learners of Basque respond to morphosyntactic violations after a short period of training on a small fragment of Basque grammar. Participants (n = 17) were exposed to violation and control phrases in three phases (pretest, training, generalization-test). In each phase participants listened to short Basque phrases and they judged whether they were correct or incorrect. During the pre-test and generalization-test, participants did not receive any feedback. During the training blocks feedback was provided after each response. We also ran two Spanish control blocks before and after training. We analyzed the event-related magnetic- field (ERF) recorded in response to a critical word during all three phases. In the pretest, classification was below chance and we found no electrophysiological differences between violation and control stimuli. Then participants were explicitly taught a Basque grammar rule. From the first training block participants were able to correctly classify control and violation stimuli and an evoked violation response was present. Although the timing of the electrophysiological responses matched participants' L1 effect, the effect size was smaller for L2 and the topographical distribution differed from the L1. While the L1 effect was bilaterally distributed on the auditory sensors, the L2 effect was present at right frontal sensors. During training blocks two and three, the violation-control effect size increased and the topography evolved to a more L1-like pattern. Moreover, this pattern was maintained in the generalization test. We conclude that rapid changes in neuronal responses can be observed in adult learners of a simple morphosyntactic rule, and that native-like responses can be achieved at least in small fragments of second language. PMID:28174530

Discussion. How Far Does a Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure Take Us in Understanding Children's Language Development?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Journal of Child Language, 1998

1998-01-01

Presents the responses of 12 authors to Michael Tomasello's essay, which comments on Adele Goldberg's recent book, "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure." Goldberg's book develops the theory of construction grammar for a set of problems associated with verb-argument structure. (SM)

Necessity of Grammar Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Jianyun

2009-01-01

Grammar is often misunderstood in the language teaching field. The misconception lies in the view that grammar is a collection of arbitrary rules about static structures in the language. Further questionable claims are that the structures do not have to be thought, learners will acquire them on their own, or if the structures are taught, the…

Stereotypic and complex phrase types provide structural evidence for a multi-message display in humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae).

PubMed

Murray, Anita; Dunlop, Rebecca A; Noad, Michael J; Goldizen, Anne W

2018-02-01

Male humpback whales produce a mating display called "song." Behavioral studies indicate song has inter- and/or intra-sexual functionality, suggesting song may be a multi-message display. Multi-message displays often include stereotypic components that convey group membership for mate attraction and/or male-male interactions, and complex components that convey individual quality for courtship. Humpback whale song contains sounds ("units") arranged into sequences ("phrases"). Repetitions of a specific phrase create a "theme." Within a theme, imperfect phrase repetitions ("phrase variants") create variability among phrases of the same type ("phrase type"). The hypothesis that song contains stereotypic and complex phrase types, structural characteristics consistent with a multi-message display, is investigated using recordings of 17 east Australian males (8:2004, 9:2011). Phrase types are categorized as stereotypic or complex using number of unit types, number of phrase variants, and the proportion of phrases that is unique to an individual versus shared amongst males. Unit types are determined using self-organizing maps. Phrase variants are determined by Levenshtein distances between phrases. Stereotypic phrase types have smaller numbers of unit types and shared phrase variants. Complex phrase types have larger numbers of unit types and unique phrase variants. This study supports the hypothesis that song could be a multi-message display.

Order of the major constituents in sign languages: implications for all language

PubMed Central

Napoli, Donna Jo; Sutton-Spence, Rachel

2014-01-01

A survey of reports of sign order from 42 sign languages leads to a handful of generalizations. Two accounts emerge, one amodal and the other modal. We argue that universal pressures are at work with respect to some generalizations, but that pressure from the visual modality is at work with respect to others. Together, these pressures conspire to make all sign languages order their major constituents SOV or SVO. This study leads us to the conclusion that the order of S with regard to verb phrase (VP) may be driven by sensorimotor system concerns that feed universal grammar. PMID:24860523

Chinese lexical networks: The structure, function and formation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Jianyu; Zhou, Jie; Luo, Xiaoyue; Yang, Zhanxin

2012-11-01

In this paper Chinese phrases are modeled using complex networks theory. We analyze statistical properties of the networks and find that phrase networks display some important features: not only small world and the power-law distribution, but also hierarchical structure and disassortative mixing. These statistical traits display the global organization of Chinese phrases. The origin and formation of such traits are analyzed from a macroscopic Chinese culture and philosophy perspective. It is interesting to find that Chinese culture and philosophy may shape the formation and structure of Chinese phrases. To uncover the structural design principles of networks, network motif patterns are studied. It is shown that they serve as basic building blocks to form the whole phrase networks, especially triad 38 (feed forward loop) plays a more important role in forming most of the phrases and other motifs. The distinct structure may not only keep the networks stable and robust, but also be helpful for information processing. The results of the paper can give some insight into Chinese language learning and language acquisition. It strengthens the idea that learning the phrases helps to understand Chinese culture. On the other side, understanding Chinese culture and philosophy does help to learn Chinese phrases. The hub nodes in the networks show the close relationship with Chinese culture and philosophy. Learning or teaching the hub characters, hub-linking phrases and phrases which are meaning related based on motif feature should be very useful and important for Chinese learning and acquisition.

A general natural-language text processor for clinical radiology.

PubMed Central

Friedman, C; Alderson, P O; Austin, J H; Cimino, J J; Johnson, S B

1994-01-01

OBJECTIVE: Development of a general natural-language processor that identifies clinical information in narrative reports and maps that information into a structured representation containing clinical terms. DESIGN: The natural-language processor provides three phases of processing, all of which are driven by different knowledge sources. The first phase performs the parsing. It identifies the structure of the text through use of a grammar that defines semantic patterns and a target form. The second phase, regularization, standardizes the terms in the initial target structure via a compositional mapping of multi-word phrases. The third phase, encoding, maps the terms to a controlled vocabulary. Radiology is the test domain for the processor and the target structure is a formal model for representing clinical information in that domain. MEASUREMENTS: The impression sections of 230 radiology reports were encoded by the processor. Results of an automated query of the resultant database for the occurrences of four diseases were compared with the analysis of a panel of three physicians to determine recall and precision. RESULTS: Without training specific to the four diseases, recall and precision of the system (combined effect of the processor and query generator) were 70% and 87%. Training of the query component increased recall to 85% without changing precision. PMID:7719797

(In)Flexibility of Constituency in Japanese in Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kubota, Yusuke

2010-01-01

This dissertation proposes a theory of categorial grammar called Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology. The central feature that distinguishes this theory from the majority of contemporary syntactic theories is that it decouples (without completely segregating) two aspects of syntax--hierarchical organization (reflecting…

Association and Phrase Structure in Sentence Recall.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rosenberg, Sheldon

The effect of within- and between-phrase normative controlled association and phrase structure upon word integration in sentence recall was studied in two experiments. The two experiments differed only with respect to the type of two-phrase sentence used. In both experiments, one group of subjects was given four study-test trials on a list of four…

Grammar as a Programming Language. Artificial Intelligence Memo 391.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rowe, Neil

Student projects that involve writing generative grammars in the computer language, "LOGO," are described in this paper, which presents a grammar-running control structure that allows students to modify and improve the grammar interpreter itself while learning how a simple kind of computer parser works. Included are procedures for…

English Grammar in School Textbooks: A Critical Survey.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collis, Peter; Hollo, Carmella; Mar, Juliet

1997-01-01

Reports findings from a critical analysis of English grammar books and language books with grammar content used in New South Wales (Australia) elementary and secondary schools. Books surveyed showed a low level of awareness of developments in contemporary linguistics, particularly the structural approach to grammar instruction. (Author/MSE)

CHINESE GRAMMARS AND THE COMPUTER AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY. PRELIMINARY REPORT.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

MEYERS, L.F.; YANG, J.

SAMPLE OUTPUT SENTENCES OF VARIOUS COMIT AND SNOBOL PROGRAMS FOR TESTING A CHINESE GENERATIVE GRAMMAR ARE PRESENTED. THE GRAMMAR CHOSEN FOR EXPERIMENTATION IS A PRELIMINARY VERSION OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. ALL OF THE COMIT PROGRAMS AND ONE OF THE SNOBOL PROGRAMS USE A LINEARIZED REPRESENTATION OF TREE STRUCTURES, WITH ADDITIONAL NUMERICAL…

Something Old, Something New--An Eclectic Grammar for Learning.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Donnell, Roy C.

Formal grammar study is important in schools above the elementary level because it can lead to improved understanding of the nature and functions of language. Although newer grammars, based on structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar, have not met the needs of the schools, their potential should not be ignored with a return…

Learning of pitch and time structures in an artificial grammar setting.

PubMed

Prince, Jon B; Stevens, Catherine J; Jones, Mari Riess; Tillmann, Barbara

2018-04-12

Despite the empirical evidence for the power of the cognitive capacity of implicit learning of structures and regularities in several modalities and materials, it remains controversial whether implicit learning extends to the learning of temporal structures and regularities. We investigated whether (a) an artificial grammar can be learned equally well when expressed in duration sequences as when expressed in pitch sequences, (b) learning of the artificial grammar in either duration or pitch (as the primary dimension) sequences can be influenced by the properties of the secondary dimension (invariant vs. randomized), and (c) learning can be boosted when the artificial grammar is expressed in both pitch and duration. After an exposure phase with grammatical sequences, learning in a subsequent test phase was assessed in a grammaticality judgment task. Participants in both the pitch and duration conditions showed incidental (not fully implicit) learning of the artificial grammar when the secondary dimension was invariant, but randomizing the pitch sequence prevented learning of the artificial grammar in duration sequences. Expressing the artificial grammar in both pitch and duration resulted in disproportionately better performance, suggesting an interaction between the learning of pitch and temporal structure. The findings are relevant to research investigating the learning of temporal structures and the learning of structures presented simultaneously in 2 dimensions (e.g., space and time, space and objects). By investigating learning, the findings provide further insight into the potential specificity of pitch and time processing, and their integrated versus independent processing, as previously debated in music cognition research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Delta's Key to the Next Generation TOEFL[R] Test: Essential Grammar for the iBT

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gallagher, Nancy

2012-01-01

Although the TOEFL iBT does not have a discrete grammar section, knowledge of English sentence structure is important throughout the test. Essential Grammar for the iBT reviews the skills that are fundamental to success on tests. Content includes noun and verb forms, clauses, agreement, parallel structure, punctuation, and much more. The book may…

Syntactic Functions in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar: An Evaluative Comparison

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butler, Christopher S.

2012-01-01

The aim of this paper is to compare the treatment of syntactic functions, and more particularly those traditionally labelled as Subject and Object, in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar. Relevant aspects of the overall structure of the two theories are briefly described. The concept of alignment between levels of the…

Interface Problems: Structural Constraints on Interpretation?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Frazier, Lyn; Clifton, Charles; Rayner, Keith; Deevy, Patricia; Koh, Sungryong; Bader, Markus

2005-01-01

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…

Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements ⋆

PubMed Central

Staub, Adrian; Clifton, Charles; Frazier, Lyn

2006-01-01

Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb’s direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb, which was either obligatorily transitive or had a high transitivity bias (e.g., Jack praised/watched from the stands his daughter’s attempt to shoot a basket). Experiment 2 compared unshifted sentences to sentences in which an adverb intervened between the verb and its object, and obligatorily transitive verbs to optionally transitive verbs with widely varying transitivity biases. In both experiments, evidence of processing difficulty appeared on the material that intervened between the verb and its object when the verb was obligatorily transitive, and on the shifted direct object when the verb was optionally transitive, regardless of transitivity bias. We conclude that the parser adopts the heavy NP shift analysis only when it is forced to by the grammar, which we interpret in terms of a preference for immediate incremental interpretation. PMID:17047731

Efficient Grammar Induction Algorithm with Parse Forests from Real Corpora

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kurihara, Kenichi; Kameya, Yoshitaka; Sato, Taisuke

The task of inducing grammar structures has received a great deal of attention. The reasons why researchers have studied are different; to use grammar induction as the first stage in building large treebanks or to make up better language models. However, grammar induction has inherent computational complexity. To overcome it, some grammar induction algorithms add new production rules incrementally. They refine the grammar while keeping their computational complexity low. In this paper, we propose a new efficient grammar induction algorithm. Although our algorithm is similar to algorithms which learn a grammar incrementally, our algorithm uses the graphical EM algorithm instead of the Inside-Outside algorithm. We report results of learning experiments in terms of learning speeds. The results show that our algorithm learns a grammar in constant time regardless of the size of the grammar. Since our algorithm decreases syntactic ambiguities in each step, our algorithm reduces required time for learning. This constant-time learning considerably affects learning time for larger grammars. We also reports results of evaluation of criteria to choose nonterminals. Our algorithm refines a grammar based on a nonterminal in each step. Since there can be several criteria to decide which nonterminal is the best, we evaluate them by learning experiments.

The New English Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, Charles Lamar

This "new English grammar" textbook blends four systems of grammar: (1) the traditional, providing most of the terminology; (2) the historical, providing the historical background; (3) the structural, providing the sentence patterns; and (4) the transformational, providing the variations of the sentence patterns. The author points out the…

A Grammar Library for Information Structure

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Song, Sanghoun

2014-01-01

This dissertation makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with an eye toward creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The aim of the present dissertation is to create a grammar library of information structure for the…

A Sociolinguistic Approach to Teaching Spanish Grammatical Structures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shin, Naomi L.; Hudgens Henderson, Mary

2017-01-01

Advanced grammar courses often present standardized grammar rules to students without considering sociolinguistic variation. As a result, many native/heritage students feel that they speak "incorrectly," and many second language learners do not get an accurate picture of the target language's real-world grammar. This article describes…

Syntactic Structure and Artificial Grammar Learning: The Learnability of Embedded Hierarchical Structures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Vries, Meinou H.; Monaghan, Padraic; Knecht, Stefan; Zwitserlood, Pienie

2008-01-01

Embedded hierarchical structures, such as "the rat the cat ate was brown", constitute a core generative property of a natural language theory. Several recent studies have reported learning of hierarchical embeddings in artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, and described the functional specificity of Broca's area for processing such structures.…

Multiple Grammars and the Logic of Learnability in Second Language Acquisition.

PubMed

Roeper, Tom W

2016-01-01

The core notion of modern Universal Grammar is that language ability requires abstract representation in terms of hierarchy, movement operations, abstract features on words, and fixed mapping to meaning. These mental structures are a step toward integrating representational knowledge of all kinds into a larger model of cognitive psychology. Examining first and second language at once provides clues as to how abstractly we should represent this knowledge. The abstract nature of grammar allows both the formulation of many grammars and the possibility that a rule of one grammar could apply to another grammar. We argue that every language contains Multiple Grammars which may reflect different language families. We develop numerous examples of how the same abstract rules can apply in various languages and develop a theory of how language modules (case-marking, topicalization, and quantification) interact to predict L2 acquisition paths. In particular we show in depth how Germanic Verb-second operations, based on Verb-final structure, can apply in English. The argument is built around how and where V2 from German can apply in English, seeking to explain the crucial contrast: "nothing" yelled out Bill/(*)"nothing" yelled Bill out in terms of the necessary abstractness of the V2 rule.

When global structure "Explains Away" local grammar: a Bayesian account of rule-induction in tone sequences.

PubMed

Dawson, Colin; Gerken, Louann

2011-09-01

While many constraints on learning must be relatively experience-independent, past experience provides a rich source of guidance for subsequent learning. Discovering structure in some domain can inform a learner's future hypotheses about that domain. If a general property accounts for particular sub-patterns, a rational learner should not stipulate separate explanations for each detail without additional evidence, as the general structure has "explained away" the original evidence. In a grammar-learning experiment using tone sequences, manipulating learners' prior exposure to a tone environment affects their sensitivity to the grammar-defining feature, in this case consecutive repeated tones. Grammar-learning performance is worse if context melodies are "smooth" -- when small intervals occur more than large ones -- as Smoothness is a general property accounting for a high rate of repetition. We present an idealized Bayesian model as a "best case" benchmark for learning repetition grammars. When context melodies are Smooth, the model places greater weight on the small-interval constraint, and does not learn the repetition rule as well as when context melodies are not Smooth, paralleling the human learners. These findings support an account of abstract grammar-induction in which learners rationally assess the statistical evidence for underlying structure based on a generative model of the environment. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Television Linguistics Program. 1967 Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Glassner, Leonard E.

The program teaches comtemporary English grammar through principles of linguistic science to 12,000 students in Pittsburgh. Structural grammar is presented to eighth and ninth grade students, and transformational grammar to tenth graders. In 1966-67, the effectiveness of the program was evaluated by data processing of final examination results.…

Creative Grammar and Art Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cunliffe, Leslie

2011-01-01

The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the "articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others." Steiner's description of creative grammar is consistent with Lev Vygotsky's comment that "art is the social within us, and…

Grammar-Guided Writing for AAC Users

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hunnicutt, Sheri; Magnuson, Tina

2007-01-01

A method of grammar-guided writing has been devised to guide graphic sign users through the construction of text messages for use in e-mail and other applications with a remote receiver. The purpose is to promote morphologically and syntactically correct sentences. The available grammatical structures in grammar-guided writing are the highest…

A Grammar of Northern Mao (Mawes Aas'e)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ahland, Michael Bryan

2012-01-01

Northern Mao is an endangered Afroasiatic-Omotic language of western Ethiopia with fewer than 5,000 speakers. This study is a comprehensive grammar of the language, written from a functional/typological perspective which embraces historical change as an explanation for synchronic structure. The grammar introduces the Northern Mao people, aspects…

The Journalism Writing Course: Evaluation of Hybrid versus Online Grammar Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, Jensen; Jones, Khristen

2015-01-01

This study examined introductory journalism writing courses and compared hybrid (part online/part classroom) versus online grammar instruction. The hybrid structure allowed for grammar topics to be taught online, with a pretest following, and then reviewing missed/difficult pretest concepts in class prior to a posttest. The quasi-experimental…

A REFERENCE GRAMMAR OF ADAMAWA FULANI. AFRICAN LANGUAGE MONOGRAPH NUMBER 8.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

STENNES, LESLIE H.

THIS REFERENCE WORK IS A STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR OF THE ADAMAWA DIALECT OF FULANI AS SPOKEN IN NIGERIA AND CAMEROUN. IT IS PRIMARILY WRITTEN FOR LINGUISTS AND THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW FULANI. THE GRAMMAR IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS--(1) PHONEMICS AND MORPHOPHONEMICS, DISCUSSING SEGMENTAL AND SUPRASEGMENTAL PHONEMES, PERMITTED SEQUENCES OF PHONEMES,…

The Role of Teaching Grammar in First Language Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Demir, Sezgin; Erdogan, Ayse

2018-01-01

Grammar; while originating from the natural structure of the language also is the system which makes it possible for different language functions meet within the body of common rules especially communication. Having command of the language used, speaking and writing it correctly require strong grammar knowledge actually. However only knowing the…

Terminator Detection by Support Vector Machine Utilizing aStochastic Context-Free Grammar

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Francis-Lyon, Patricia; Cristianini, Nello; Holbrook, Stephen

2006-12-30

A 2-stage detector was designed to find rho-independent transcription terminators in the Escherichia coli genome. The detector includes a Stochastic Context Free Grammar (SCFG) component and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) component. To find terminators, the SCFG searches the intergenic regions of nucleotide sequence for local matches to a terminator grammar that was designed and trained utilizing examples of known terminators. The grammar selects sequences that are the best candidates for terminators and assigns them a prefix, stem-loop, suffix structure using the Cocke-Younger-Kasaami (CYK) algorithm, modified to incorporate energy affects of base pairing. The parameters from this inferred structure aremore » passed to the SVM classifier, which distinguishes terminators from non-terminators that score high according to the terminator grammar. The SVM was trained with negative examples drawn from intergenic sequences that include both featureless and RNA gene regions (which were assigned prefix, stem-loop, suffix structure by the SCFG), so that it successfully distinguishes terminators from either of these. The classifier was found to be 96.4% successful during testing.« less

Multiple Grammars and the Logic of Learnability in Second Language Acquisition

PubMed Central

Roeper, Tom W.

2016-01-01

The core notion of modern Universal Grammar is that language ability requires abstract representation in terms of hierarchy, movement operations, abstract features on words, and fixed mapping to meaning. These mental structures are a step toward integrating representational knowledge of all kinds into a larger model of cognitive psychology. Examining first and second language at once provides clues as to how abstractly we should represent this knowledge. The abstract nature of grammar allows both the formulation of many grammars and the possibility that a rule of one grammar could apply to another grammar. We argue that every language contains Multiple Grammars which may reflect different language families. We develop numerous examples of how the same abstract rules can apply in various languages and develop a theory of how language modules (case-marking, topicalization, and quantification) interact to predict L2 acquisition paths. In particular we show in depth how Germanic Verb-second operations, based on Verb-final structure, can apply in English. The argument is built around how and where V2 from German can apply in English, seeking to explain the crucial contrast: “nothing” yelled out Bill/*“nothing” yelled Bill out in terms of the necessary abstractness of the V2 rule. PMID:26869945

A stochastic context free grammar based framework for analysis of protein sequences

PubMed Central

Dyrka, Witold; Nebel, Jean-Christophe

2009-01-01

Background In the last decade, there have been many applications of formal language theory in bioinformatics such as RNA structure prediction and detection of patterns in DNA. However, in the field of proteomics, the size of the protein alphabet and the complexity of relationship between amino acids have mainly limited the application of formal language theory to the production of grammars whose expressive power is not higher than stochastic regular grammars. However, these grammars, like other state of the art methods, cannot cover any higher-order dependencies such as nested and crossing relationships that are common in proteins. In order to overcome some of these limitations, we propose a Stochastic Context Free Grammar based framework for the analysis of protein sequences where grammars are induced using a genetic algorithm. Results This framework was implemented in a system aiming at the production of binding site descriptors. These descriptors not only allow detection of protein regions that are involved in these sites, but also provide insight in their structure. Grammars were induced using quantitative properties of amino acids to deal with the size of the protein alphabet. Moreover, we imposed some structural constraints on grammars to reduce the extent of the rule search space. Finally, grammars based on different properties were combined to convey as much information as possible. Evaluation was performed on sites of various sizes and complexity described either by PROSITE patterns, domain profiles or a set of patterns. Results show the produced binding site descriptors are human-readable and, hence, highlight biologically meaningful features. Moreover, they achieve good accuracy in both annotation and detection. In addition, findings suggest that, unlike current state-of-the-art methods, our system may be particularly suited to deal with patterns shared by non-homologous proteins. Conclusion A new Stochastic Context Free Grammar based framework has been introduced allowing the production of binding site descriptors for analysis of protein sequences. Experiments have shown that not only is this new approach valid, but produces human-readable descriptors for binding sites which have been beyond the capability of current machine learning techniques. PMID:19814800

Corpus-based Statistical Screening for Phrase Identification

PubMed Central

Kim, Won; Wilbur, W. John

2000-01-01

Purpose: The authors study the extraction of useful phrases from a natural language database by statistical methods. The aim is to leverage human effort by providing preprocessed phrase lists with a high percentage of useful material. Method: The approach is to develop six different scoring methods that are based on different aspects of phrase occurrence. The emphasis here is not on lexical information or syntactic structure but rather on the statistical properties of word pairs and triples that can be obtained from a large database. Measurements: The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) incorporates a large list of humanly acceptable phrases in the medical field as a part of its structure. The authors use this list of phrases as a gold standard for validating their methods. A good method is one that ranks the UMLS phrases high among all phrases studied. Measurements are 11-point average precision values and precision-recall curves based on the rankings. Result: The authors find of six different scoring methods that each proves effective in identifying UMLS quality phrases in a large subset of MEDLINE. These methods are applicable both to word pairs and word triples. All six methods are optimally combined to produce composite scoring methods that are more effective than any single method. The quality of the composite methods appears sufficient to support the automatic placement of hyperlinks in text at the site of highly ranked phrases. Conclusion: Statistical scoring methods provide a promising approach to the extraction of useful phrases from a natural language database for the purpose of indexing or providing hyperlinks in text. PMID:10984469

The relationship between strategic control and conscious structural knowledge in artificial grammar learning.

PubMed

Norman, Elisabeth; Scott, Ryan B; Price, Mark C; Dienes, Zoltan

2016-05-01

We address Jacoby's (1991) proposal that strategic control over knowledge requires conscious awareness of that knowledge. In a two-grammar artificial grammar learning experiment all participants were trained on two grammars, consisting of a regularity in letter sequences, while two other dimensions (colours and fonts) varied randomly. Strategic control was measured as the ability to selectively apply the grammars during classification. For each classification, participants also made a combined judgement of (a) decision strategy and (b) relevant stimulus dimension. Strategic control was found for all types of decision strategy, including trials where participants claimed to lack conscious structural knowledge. However, strong evidence of strategic control only occurred when participants knew or guessed that the letter dimension was relevant, suggesting that strategic control might be associated with - or even causally requires - global awareness of the nature of the rules even though it does not require detailed knowledge of their content. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

CONSTRAINTS ON VARIABLES IN SYNTAX.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

ROSS, JOHN ROBERT

IN ATTEMPTING TO DEFINE "SYNTACTIC VARIABLE," THE AUTHOR BASES HIS DISCUSSION ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT SYNTACTIC FACTS ARE A COLLECTION OF TWO TYPES OF RULES--CONTEXT-FREE PHRASE STRUCTURE RULES (GENERATING UNDERLYING OR DEEP PHRASE MARKERS) AND GRAMMATICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, WHICH MAP UNDERLYING PHRASE MARKERS ONTO SUPERFICIAL (OR SURFACE) PHRASE…

A Grammar of Buem, the Lelemi Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Allan, Edward Jay

A detailed grammar of Buem, one of the Togo-Remnant Languages spoken in Ghana's Volta region, describes the major structures and many minor structures occurring in informal and semi-formal speech. The phonetics and much of the phonology are described in taxonomic terms, and the vowel harmony system, syntax, and morphology are described in a…

The Current Scene in Linguistics: Present Directions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chomsky, Noam

1966-01-01

Two traditions are distinguishable in modern linguistic theory: the tradition of "universal grammar" which flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the tradition of structural or descriptive linguistics which reached its peak 15 or 20 years ago. Universal grammar was concerned with (1) the relation of deep structure to surface forms and to…

The minimalist grammar of action

PubMed Central

Pastra, Katerina; Aloimonos, Yiannis

2012-01-01

Language and action have been found to share a common neural basis and in particular a common ‘syntax’, an analogous hierarchical and compositional organization. While language structure analysis has led to the formulation of different grammatical formalisms and associated discriminative or generative computational models, the structure of action is still elusive and so are the related computational models. However, structuring action has important implications on action learning and generalization, in both human cognition research and computation. In this study, we present a biologically inspired generative grammar of action, which employs the structure-building operations and principles of Chomsky's Minimalist Programme as a reference model. In this grammar, action terminals combine hierarchically into temporal sequences of actions of increasing complexity; the actions are bound with the involved tools and affected objects and are governed by certain goals. We show, how the tool role and the affected-object role of an entity within an action drives the derivation of the action syntax in this grammar and controls recursion, merge and move, the latter being mechanisms that manifest themselves not only in human language, but in human action too. PMID:22106430

Parallel firing strategy on Petri nets: A review

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mavlankulov, Gairatzhan; Turaev, Sherzod; Zhumabaeva, Laula; Zhukabayeva, Tamara

2015-05-01

In this paper we review the recent results related on Petri net controlled grammars and the close related topics. Though the theme of regulated grammars is one of the classic topics in formal language theory, a Petri net controlled grammar is still interesting subject for the investigation for many reasons. This type of grammars can successfully be used in modeling new problems emerging in manufacturing systems, systems biology and other areas. Moreover, the graphically illustrability, the ability to represent both a grammar and its control in one structure, and the possibility to unify different regulated rewritings make this formalization attractive for the study. We also summarize the obtained results and propose a new conception such as parallel firing strategy on Petri Nets.

The Structure of Jarai Clauses and Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jensen, Joshua Martin

2013-01-01

This dissertation provides a syntactic account for the Jarai noun phrase and for the three regions of the Jarai clause: the operator domain, the inflectional domain, and the theta domain. Within the noun phrase, I argue that demonstrative-final word order involves phrasal movement of the demonstrative's complement into Spec,D, where it…

The Dependency Structure of Coordinate Phrases: A Corpus Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Temperley, David

2005-01-01

Hudson (1990) proposes that each conjunct in a coordinate phrase forms dependency relations with heads or dependents outside the coordinate phrase (the "multi-head" view). This proposal is tested through corpus analysis of Wall Street Journal text. For right-branching constituents (such as direct-object NPs), a short-long preference for conjunct…

The Effects of Organization and Instructional Set on Story Memory. Technical Report No. 68.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stein, Nancy L.; Nezworski, Teresa

Sixty four college students participated in a study which sought to validate a set of predictions about story memory, derived from a story-grammar approach to comprehension. The grammar describes the higher-order structures regulating the organization and retrieval of incoming story information. These structures, defined by a basic set of rewrite…

The Impact of Adjacent-Dependencies and Staged-Input on the Learnability of Center-Embedded Hierarchical Structures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lai, Jun; Poletiek, Fenna H.

2011-01-01

A theoretical debate in artificial grammar learning (AGL) regards the learnability of hierarchical structures. Recent studies using an A[superscript n]B[superscript n] grammar draw conflicting conclusions ([Bahlmann and Friederici, 2006] and [De Vries et al., 2008]). We argue that 2 conditions crucially affect learning A[superscript…

Proactive interference effects on sentence production

PubMed Central

FERREIRA, VICTOR S.; FIRATO, CARLA E.

2007-01-01

Proactive interference refers to recall difficulties caused by prior similar memory-related processing. Information-processing approaches to sentence production predict that retrievability affects sentence form: Speakers may word sentences so that material that is difficult to retrieve is spoken later. In this experiment, speakers produced sentence structures that could include an optional that, thereby delaying the mention of a subsequent noun phrase. This subsequent noun phrase was either (1) conceptually similar to three previous noun phrases in the same sentence, leading to greater proactive interference, or (2) conceptually dissimilar, leading to less proactive interference. Speakers produced more thats (and were more disfluencies) before conceptually similar noun phrases, suggesting that retrieval difficulties during sentence production affect the syntactic structures of sentences that speakers produce. PMID:12613685

Poverty of the stimulus revisited.

PubMed

Berwick, Robert C; Pietroski, Paul; Yankama, Beracah; Chomsky, Noam

2011-01-01

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect "the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience" and that "might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge" (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various "poverty of stimulus" (POS) arguments suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire. Copyright © 2011 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Processing Coordination Ambiguity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Engelhardt, Paul E.; Ferreira, Fernanda

2010-01-01

We examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as "put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel." Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase "the pan" will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based…

Comments on Skinner's grammar

PubMed Central

Mabry, John H.

1993-01-01

The strong tradition of “school room” grammars may have had a negative influence on the reception given a functional analysis of verbal behavior, both within and without the field of behavior analysis. Some of the failings of those traditional grammars, and their largely prescriptive nature were outlined through reference to other critics, and conflicting views. Skinner's own treatment of grammatical issues was presented, emphasizing his view of a functional unit and his use of the autoclitic and intraverbal functions to describe alternatives to a formal or structural analysis. Finally, the relevance of stimulus control variables to some recurring questions about verbal behavior and, specifically grammar, were mentioned. PMID:22477082

On Directionality of Phrase Structure Building

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chesi, Cristiano

2015-01-01

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in "The minimalist program." MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in…

The Linguistic Core Approach to StructuredTranslation and Analysis of Low Resource Languages

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-09-02

grammars from no training data and partial training data (as given by GFL). We are now anno - tating GFL for English, Portuguese, Chinese and...translation. In Proc. EMNLP, 2014. [20] F. Drewes, H.- J . Kreowski, and A. Habel. Hyperedge replacement graph grammars. Handbook of Graph Grammars, 1:95–162...tory, Jena, 2015. [41] B. Jones, J . Andreas, D. Bauer, K-M. Hermann, and K. Knight. Semantics- based machine translation with hyperedge replacement

Inference for Transition Network Grammars,

DTIC Science & Technology

1976-01-01

If the arc Is followed. language L(G) is said to be structurally complete if The power of an augmented transition network (Am) is each rewriting rule ...Clearly, a context-sensitive grammar can be represented as a context—free grarmar plus a set of transformationDbbbbb Eabbbbbb Dbb~~bb Ebbbbbb rules ...are the foun— as a CFG (base) and a set of transformationa l rules . datIons of grammars of different complexities. The The CSL Is obtained by appl

Phase structure rewrite systems in information retrieval

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Klingbiel, P. H.

1985-01-01

Operational level automatic indexing requires an efficient means of normalizing natural language phrases. Subject switching requires an efficient means of translating one set of authorized terms to another. A phrase structure rewrite system called a Lexical Dictionary is explained that performs these functions. Background, operational use, other applications and ongoing research are explained.

Effects on communicative requesting and speech development of the Picture Exchange Communication System in children with characteristics of autism.

PubMed

Ganz, Jennifer B; Simpson, Richard L

2004-08-01

Few studies on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems have addressed the potential for such systems to impact word utterances in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is an AAC system designed specifically to minimize difficulties with communication skills experienced by individuals with ASD. The current study examined the role of PECS in improving the number of words spoken, increasing the complexity and length of phrases, and decreasing the non-word vocalizations of three young children with ASD and developmental delays (DD) with related characteristics. Participants were taught Phases 1-4 of PECS (i.e., picture exchange, increased distance, picture discrimination, and sentence construction). The results indicated that PECS was mastered rapidly by the participants and word utterances increased in number of words and complexity of grammar.

LANGUAGE AND THE MIND.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

CHOMSKY, NOAM

WITHIN THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES THE LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE STUDY OF GRAMMAR AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR, AND HOW THIS RELATIONSHIP CORRELATES WITH THE MECHANISMS OF HUMAN PERCEPTION AND LEARNING. HE EMPHASIZES THAT LANGUAGE IS NEITHER ENTIRELY INNOVATIVE NOR A "HABIT STRUCTURE," BUT RATHER IS…

Upending the Grammar of the Conventional Religious School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aron, Isa

2014-01-01

This article provides an overview and analysis of a relatively new phenomenon: congregational schools that have altered the conventional grammar of schooling, either through their structural arrangements or through their curricular approaches. Five pre-bar/bat mitzvah models are discussed: family schools, schools as communities,…

Grammaire et communication (Grammar and Communication).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stirman-Langlois, Martine

1994-01-01

A technique for teaching French grammar that involves reading, rereading, and analyzing the language in authentic materials is discussed. The student is led to recognition and generalization of structures in the text. Text examples used here include a comic strip and a publicity blurb for a French city. (MSE)

Managing ambiguity in reference generation: the role of surface structure.

PubMed

Khan, Imtiaz H; van Deemter, Kees; Ritchie, Graeme

2012-04-01

This article explores the role of surface ambiguities in referring expressions, and how the risk of such ambiguities should be taken into account by an algorithm that generates referring expressions, if these expressions are to be optimally effective for a hearer. We focus on the ambiguities that arise when adjectives occur in coordinated structures. The central idea is to use statistical information about lexical co-occurrence to estimate which interpretation of a phrase is most likely for human readers, and to avoid generating phrases where misunderstandings are likely. Various aspects of the problem were explored in three experiments in which responses by human participants provided evidence about which reading was most likely for certain phrases, which phrases were deemed most suitable for particular referents, and the speed at which various phrases were read. We found a preference for ''clear'' expressions to ''unclear'' ones, but if several of the expressions are ''clear,'' then brief expressions are preferred over non-brief ones even though the brief ones are syntactically ambiguous and the non-brief ones are not; the notion of clarity was made precise using Kilgarriff's Word Sketches. We outline an implemented algorithm that generates noun phrases conforming to our hypotheses. Copyright © 2011 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Technical structure of the global nanoscience and nanotechnology literature

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kostoff, Ronald N.; Koytcheff, Raymond G.; Lau, Clifford G. Y.

2007-10-01

Text mining was used to extract technical intelligence from the open source global nanotechnology and nanoscience research literature. An extensive nanotechnology/nanoscience-focused query was applied to the Science Citation Index/Social Science Citation Index (SCI/SSCI) databases. The nanotechnology/nanoscience research literature technical structure (taxonomy) was obtained using computational linguistics/document clustering and factor analysis. The infrastructure (prolific authors, key journals/institutions/countries, most cited authors/journals/documents) for each of the clusters generated by the document clustering algorithm was obtained using bibliometrics. Another novel addition was the use of phrase auto-correlation maps to show technical thrust areas based on phrase co-occurrence in Abstracts, and the use of phrase-phrase cross-correlation maps to show technical thrust areas based on phrase relations due to the sharing of common co-occurring phrases. The ˜400 most cited nanotechnology papers since 1991 were grouped, and their characteristics generated. Whereas the main analysis provided technical thrusts of all nanotechnology papers retrieved, analysis of the most cited papers allowed their characteristics to be displayed. Finally, most cited papers from selected time periods were extracted, along with all publications from those time periods, and the institutions and countries were compared based on their representation in the most cited documents list relative to their representation in the most publications list.

Endogenous sources of variation in language acquisition.

PubMed

Han, Chung-Hye; Musolino, Julien; Lidz, Jeffrey

2016-01-26

A fundamental question in the study of human language acquisition centers around apportioning explanatory force between the experience of the learner and the core knowledge that allows learners to represent that experience. We provide a previously unidentified kind of data identifying children's contribution to language acquisition. We identify one aspect of grammar that varies unpredictably across a population of speakers of what is ostensibly a single language. We further demonstrate that the grammatical knowledge of parents and their children is independent. The combination of unpredictable variation and parent-child independence suggests that the relevant structural feature is supplied by each learner independent of experience with the language. This structural feature is abstract because it controls variation in more than one construction. The particular case we examine is the position of the verb in the clause structure of Korean. Because Korean is a head-final language, evidence for the syntactic position of the verb is both rare and indirect. We show that (i) Korean speakers exhibit substantial variability regarding this aspect of the grammar, (ii) this variability is attested between speakers but not within a speaker, (iii) this variability controls interpretation in two surface constructions, and (iv) it is independent in parents and children. According to our findings, when the exposure language is compatible with multiple grammars, learners acquire a single systematic grammar. Our observation that children and their parents vary independently suggests that the choice of grammar is driven in part by a process operating internal to individual learners.

Bootstrapping language acquisition.

PubMed

Abend, Omri; Kwiatkowski, Tom; Smith, Nathaniel J; Goldwater, Sharon; Steedman, Mark

2017-07-01

The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that children acquire their native language through exposure to sentences of the language paired with structured representations of their meaning, whose component substructures can be associated with words and syntactic structures used to express these concepts. The child's task is then to learn a language-specific grammar and lexicon based on (probably contextually ambiguous, possibly somewhat noisy) pairs of sentences and their meaning representations (logical forms). Starting from these assumptions, we develop a Bayesian probabilistic account of semantically bootstrapped first-language acquisition in the child, based on techniques from computational parsing and interpretation of unrestricted text. Our learner jointly models (a) word learning: the mapping between components of the given sentential meaning and lexical words (or phrases) of the language, and (b) syntax learning: the projection of lexical elements onto sentences by universal construction-free syntactic rules. Using an incremental learning algorithm, we apply the model to a dataset of real syntactically complex child-directed utterances and (pseudo) logical forms, the latter including contextually plausible but irrelevant distractors. Taking the Eve section of the CHILDES corpus as input, the model simulates several well-documented phenomena from the developmental literature. In particular, the model exhibits syntactic bootstrapping effects (in which previously learned constructions facilitate the learning of novel words), sudden jumps in learning without explicit parameter setting, acceleration of word-learning (the "vocabulary spurt"), an initial bias favoring the learning of nouns over verbs, and one-shot learning of words and their meanings. The learner thus demonstrates how statistical learning over structured representations can provide a unified account for these seemingly disparate phenomena. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Learning a generative probabilistic grammar of experience: a process-level model of language acquisition.

PubMed

Kolodny, Oren; Lotem, Arnon; Edelman, Shimon

2015-03-01

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given a stream of linguistic input, our model incrementally learns a grammar that captures its statistical patterns, which can then be used to parse or generate new data. The grammar constructed in this manner takes the form of a directed weighted graph, whose nodes are recursively (hierarchically) defined patterns over the elements of the input stream. We evaluated the model in seventeen experiments, grouped into five studies, which examined, respectively, (a) the generative ability of grammar learned from a corpus of natural language, (b) the characteristics of the learned representation, (c) sequence segmentation and chunking, (d) artificial grammar learning, and (e) certain types of structure dependence. The model's performance largely vindicates our design choices, suggesting that progress in modeling language acquisition can be made on a broad front-ranging from issues of generativity to the replication of human experimental findings-by bringing biological and computational considerations, as well as lessons from prior efforts, to bear on the modeling approach. Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Yes, We Still Need Universal Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lidz, Jeffrey; Gleitman, Lila R.

2004-01-01

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. "Cognition," 87, 151-178], we provided cross-linguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument…

Improving DHH Students' Grammar through an Individualized Software Program

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cannon, Joanna E.; Easterbrooks, Susan R.; Gagne, Phill; Beal-Alvarez, Jennifer

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine if the frequent use of a targeted, computer software grammar instruction program, used as an individualized classroom activity, would influence the comprehension of morphosyntax structures (determiners, tense, and complementizers) in deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) participants who use American Sign Language…

Papers in Warlpiri Grammar: In Memory of Lothar Jagst. Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A, Volume 6.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Swartz, Stephen M., Ed.

Five papers on the grammar of Warlpiri, an Australian Aboriginal language, include: "A Tentative Description of Ngardilpa (Warlpiri) Verbs" (Lothar H. Jagst); "Syntactic Structure of Warlpiri Clauses" (Stephen M. Swartz); "A Preliminary Description of Propositional Particles in Warlpiri" (Mary Laughren);…

Nigel: A Systemic Grammar for Text Generation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mann, William C.; Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.

This three-paper report describes Nigel, a large, programmed grammar of English which has been created in the framework of systemic linguistics begun by Halliday, and which, in addition to specifying functions and structures of English, has a novel semantic stratum which specifies the situations for use of each grammatical feature. The…

Chomsky's 'Ideal' Native Speaker: Sexism in Synchronic Linguistics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stanley, Julia Penelope

Drawing on recent research on sexism in English and the ways in which social forces affect language structure, this paper shows how prescriptive statements about English have been incorporated into linguistic grammars as descriptions of language. It is claimed that Chomsky's "universal grammar" is masculinist and that it is contradicted…

Parallel functional category deficits in clauses and nominal phrases: The case of English agrammatism

PubMed Central

Wang, Honglei; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K.

2015-01-01

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia exhibit restricted patterns of impairment of functional morphemes, however, syntactic characterization of the impairment is controversial. Previous studies have focused on functional morphology in clauses only. This study extends the empirical domain by testing functional morphemes in English nominal phrases in aphasia and comparing patients’ impairment to their impairment of functional morphemes in English clauses. In the linguistics literature, it is assumed that clauses and nominal phrases are structurally parallel but exhibit inflectional differences. The results of the present study indicated that aphasic speakers evinced similar impairment patterns in clauses and nominal phrases. These findings are consistent with the Distributed Morphology Hypothesis (DMH), suggesting that the source of functional morphology deficits among agrammatics relates to difficulty implementing rules that convert inflectional features into morphemes. Our findings, however, are inconsistent with the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH), which suggests that patients have difficulty building complex hierarchical structures. PMID:26379370

Mining Quality Phrases from Massive Text Corpora

PubMed Central

Liu, Jialu; Shang, Jingbo; Wang, Chi; Ren, Xiang; Han, Jiawei

2015-01-01

Text data are ubiquitous and play an essential role in big data applications. However, text data are mostly unstructured. Transforming unstructured text into structured units (e.g., semantically meaningful phrases) will substantially reduce semantic ambiguity and enhance the power and efficiency at manipulating such data using database technology. Thus mining quality phrases is a critical research problem in the field of databases. In this paper, we propose a new framework that extracts quality phrases from text corpora integrated with phrasal segmentation. The framework requires only limited training but the quality of phrases so generated is close to human judgment. Moreover, the method is scalable: both computation time and required space grow linearly as corpus size increases. Our experiments on large text corpora demonstrate the quality and efficiency of the new method. PMID:26705375

An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection.

PubMed

Newman, Aaron J; Ullman, Michael T; Pancheva, Roumyana; Waligura, Diane L; Neville, Helen J

2007-01-01

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, "irregular" English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over midline parietal sites (P600s), and seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory.

Mathematical formula recognition using graph grammar

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lavirotte, Stephane; Pottier, Loic

1998-04-01

This paper describes current results of Ofr, a system for extracting and understanding mathematical expressions in documents. Such a tool could be really useful to be able to re-use knowledge in scientific books which are not available in electronic form. We currently also study use of this system for direct input of formulas with a graphical tablet for computer algebra system softwares. Existing solutions for mathematical recognition have problems to analyze 2D expressions like vectors and matrices. This is because they often try to use extended classical grammar to analyze formulas, relatively to baseline. But a lot of mathematical notations do not respect rules for such a parsing and that is the reason why they fail to extend text parsing technic. We investigate graph grammar and graph rewriting as a solution to recognize 2D mathematical notations. Graph grammar provide a powerful formalism to describe structural manipulations of multi-dimensional data. The main two problems to solve are ambiguities between rules of grammar and construction of graph.

El Sistema de Formas en Colores for Teaching Grammar in Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nailon, James

2010-01-01

Sistema de formas en colores (SFC) is a symbols-based system for teaching Spanish grammatical structures and concepts within a communicative context in the elementary school. The (ACTFL) Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century states that, "While grammar and vocabulary are essential tools for communication, it is…

What Artificial Grammar Learning Reveals about the Neurobiology of Syntax

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Petersson, Karl-Magnus; Folia, Vasiliki; Hagoort, Peter

2012-01-01

In this paper we examine the neurobiological correlates of syntax, the processing of structured sequences, by comparing FMRI results on artificial and natural language syntax. We discuss these and similar findings in the context of formal language and computability theory. We used a simple right-linear unification grammar in an implicit artificial…

The Role of Input and Output Tasks in Grammar Instruction: Theoretical, Empirical and Pedagogical Considerations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benati, Alessandro

2017-01-01

In this paper, a review of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition is provided. Several pedagogical interventions in grammar instruction (e.g., processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks) are presented and their effectiveness reviewed. A final and overall evaluation…

Real Reality Revisited: An Experimental Communicative Course in ESL.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Montgomery, Carol; Eisenstein, Miriam

1985-01-01

Describes an experimental oral communication course designed around weekly, structured field trips to sites where students typically need to communicate in English. Students taking this course were also enrolled in a grammar-based English as a second-language course and were compared with a control group taking only the grammar-based course. (SED)

New Structural Patterns in Moribund Grammar: Case Marking in Heritage German

PubMed Central

Yager, Lisa; Hellmold, Nora; Joo, Hyoun-A; Putnam, Michael T.; Rossi, Eleonora; Stafford, Catherine; Salmons, Joseph

2015-01-01

Research treats divergences between monolingual and heritage grammars in terms of performance—‘L1 attrition,’ e.g., lexical retrieval—or competence—‘incomplete acquisition’, e.g., lack of overt tense markers (e.g., Polinsky, 1995; Sorace, 2004; Montrul, 2008; Schmid, 2010). One classic difference between monolingual and Heritage German is reduction in morphological case in the latter, especially loss of dative marking. Our evidence from several Heritage German varieties suggests that speakers have not merely lost case, but rather developed innovative structures to mark it. More specifically, Heritage German speakers produce dative forms in line with established patterns of Differential Object Marking (Bossong, 1985, 1991; Aissen, 2003), suggesting a reallocated mapping of case. We take this as evidence for innovative reanalysis in heritage grammars (Putnam and Sánchez, 2013). Following Kamp and Reyle (1993) and Wechsler (2011, 2014), the dative adopts a more indexical discourse function, forging a tighter connection between morphosyntax and semantic properties. Moribund grammars deploy linguistic resources in novel ways, a finding which can help move us beyond simple narratives of ‘attrition’ and ‘incomplete acquisition.’ PMID:26635649

Fullerene data mining using bibliometrics and database tomography

PubMed

Kostoff; Braun; Schubert; Toothman; Humenik

2000-01-01

Database tomography (DT) is a textual database analysis system consisting of two major components: (1) algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequencies and phrase proximities (physical closeness of the multiword technical phrases) from any type of large textual database, to augment (2) interpretative capabilities of the expert human analyst. DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a fullerenes database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phrase frequency analysis by the technical domain experts provided the pervasive technical themes of the fullerenes database, and phrase proximity analysis provided the relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysis of the fullerenes literature supplemented the DT results with author/journal/institution publication and citation data. Comparisons of fullerenes results with past analyses of similarly structured near-earth space, chemistry, hypersonic/supersonic flow, aircraft, and ship hydrodynamics databases are made. One important finding is that many of the normalized bibliometric distribution functions are extremely consistent across these diverse technical domains and could reasonably be expected to apply to broader chemical topics than fullerenes that span multiple structural classes. Finally, lessons learned about integrating the technical domain experts with the data mining tools are presented.

Developmental Constraints on Learning Artificial Grammars with Fixed, Flexible and Free Word Order

PubMed Central

Nowak, Iga; Baggio, Giosuè

2017-01-01

Human learning, although highly flexible and efficient, is constrained in ways that facilitate or impede the acquisition of certain systems of information. Some such constraints, active during infancy and childhood, have been proposed to account for the apparent ease with which typically developing children acquire language. In a series of experiments, we investigated the role of developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with a distinction between shorter and relatively frequent words (‘function words,’ F-words) and longer and less frequent words (‘content words,’ C-words). We constructed 4 finite-state grammars, in which the order of F-words, relative to C-words, was either fixed (F-words always occupied the same positions in a string), flexible (every F-word always followed a C-word), or free. We exposed adults (N = 84) and kindergarten children (N = 100) to strings from each of these artificial grammars, and we assessed their ability to recognize strings with the same structure, but a different vocabulary. Adults were better at recognizing strings when regularities were available (i.e., fixed and flexible order grammars), while children were better at recognizing strings from the grammars consistent with the attested distribution of function and content words in natural languages (i.e., flexible and free order grammars). These results provide evidence for a link between developmental constraints on learning and linguistic typology. PMID:29089910

On Anaphora and the Binding Principles in Categorial Grammar

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Morrill, Glyn; Valentín, Oriol

In type logical categorial grammar the analysis of an expression is a resource-conscious proof. Anaphora represents a particular challenge to this approach in that the antecedent resource is multiplied in the semantics. This duplication, which corresponds logically to the structural rule of contraction, may be treated lexically or syntactically. Furthermore, anaphora is subject to constraints, which Chomsky (1981) formulated as Binding Principles A, B, and C. In this paper we consider English anaphora in categorial grammar including reference to the binding principles. We invoke displacement calculus, modal categorial calculus, categorial calculus with limited contraction, and entertain addition of negation as failure.

The Indris Have Got Rhythm! Timing and Pitch Variation of a Primate Song Examined between Sexes and Age Classes

PubMed Central

Gamba, Marco; Torti, Valeria; Estienne, Vittoria; Randrianarison, Rose M.; Valente, Daria; Rovara, Paolo; Bonadonna, Giovanna; Friard, Olivier; Giacoma, Cristina

2016-01-01

A crucial, common feature of speech and music is that they show non-random structures over time. It is an open question which of the other species share rhythmic abilities with humans, but in most cases the lack of knowledge about their behavioral displays prevents further studies. Indris are the only lemurs who sing. They produce loud howling cries that can be heard at several kilometers, in which all members of a group usually sing. We tested whether overlapping and turn-taking during the songs followed a precise pattern by analysing the temporal structure of the individuals' contribution to the song. We found that both dominants (males and females) and non-dominants influenced the onset timing one another. We have found that the dominant male and the dominant female in a group overlapped each other more frequently than they did with the non-dominants. We then focused on the temporal and frequency structure of particular phrases occurring during the song. Our results show that males and females have dimorphic inter-onset intervals during the phrases. Moreover, median frequencies of the unit emitted in the phrases also differ between the sexes, with males showing higher frequencies when compared to females. We have not found an effect of age on the temporal and spectral structure of the phrases. These results indicate that singing in indris has a high behavioral flexibility and varies according to social and individual factors. The flexible spectral structure of the phrases given during the song may underlie perceptual abilities that are relatively unknown in other non-human primates, such as the ability to recognize particular pitch patterns. PMID:27378834

AN ERP STUDY OF REGULAR AND IRREGULAR ENGLISH PAST TENSE INFLECTION

PubMed Central

Newman, Aaron J.; Ullman, Michael T.; Pancheva, Roumyana; Waligura, Diane L.; Neville, Helen J.

2006-01-01

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs (“regulars”) is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, “irregular” English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over right parietal sites (P600s), and which seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory. PMID:17070703

Commentary to "Multiple Grammars and Second Language Representation," by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pérez-Leroux, Ana T.

2014-01-01

In this commentary, the author defends the Multiple Grammars (MG) theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roepe (A&R) in the present issue. Topics discussed include second language acquisition, the concept of developmental optionality, and the idea that structural decisions involve the lexical dimension. The author states that A&R's…

Parsing Protocols Using Problem Solving Grammars. AI Memo 385.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Mark L.; Goldstein, Ira P.

A theory of the planning and debugging of computer programs is formalized as a context free grammar, which is used to reveal the constituent structure of problem solving episodes by parsing protocols in which programs are written, tested, and debugged. This is illustrated by the detailed analysis of an actual session with a beginning student…

The Teaching of Grammar: The Relationship of Structure to Communication. ACTFL Master Lecture Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Higgs, Theodore V.

Teaching grammar for its own sake is largely counterproductive when the goal of instruction is to have students communicate spontaneously, fluently, and accurately in the target language. The ideal foreign language program is one providing the best possible environment for language acquisition to take place. Explicit teaching about the language…

Completing the Task Procedure or Focusing on Form: Contextualizing Grammar Instruction via Task-Based Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saraç, Hatice Sezgi

2018-01-01

In this study, it was aimed to compare two distinct methodologies of grammar instruction: task-based and form-focused teaching. Within the application procedure, which lasted for one academic term, two groups of tertiary level learners (N = 53) were exposed to the same sequence of target structures, extensive writing activities and evaluation…

A No-Grammar Approach to Sentence Power: John C. Mellon's Sentence-Combining Games.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cooper, Charles R.

1971-01-01

This study is concerned with increasing the rate at which children progress toward more highly differentiated sentence structure. The study recommends sentence-combining practices that will accelerate this progress. The two main purposes of grammar study have been to prevent errors in writing and to present the full range of sentence structures…

Chomsky's Universal Grammar and Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics: An Appraisal and a Compromise

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bavali, Mohammad; Sadighi, Firooz

2008-01-01

Recent developments in theories of language (grammars) seem to share a number of tenets which mark a drastic shift from traditional disentangled descriptions of language: emphasis on a big number of discrete grammatical rules or a corpus of structure patterns has given way to a more unitary, explanatory powerful description of language informed by…

Content Validation of the Comprehension of Written Grammar Assessment for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cannon, Joanna E.; Hubley, Anita M.

2014-01-01

Content validation is a crucial, but often neglected, component of good test development. In the present study, content validity evidence was collected to determine the degree to which elements (e.g., grammatical structures, items, picture responses, administration, and scoring instructions) of the Comprehension of Written Grammar (CWG) test are…

A Phrase-Based Matching Function.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Galbiati, Giulia

1991-01-01

Describes the development of an information retrieval system designed for nonspecialist users that is based on the binary vector model. The syntactic structure of phrases used for indexing is examined, queries using an experimental collection of documents are described, and precision values are examined. (19 references) (LRW)

Parallel Architecture, Parallel Acquisition Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Nominal and Verbal Domains

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sutton, Brett R.

2017-01-01

This dissertation explores parallels between Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Determiner Phrase (DP) semantics, syntax, and morphology--including similarities in case-assignment, subject-verb and possessor-possessum agreement, subject and possessor semantics, and overall syntactic structure--in first language acquisition. Applying theoretical…

The P600 in Implicit Artificial Grammar Learning.

PubMed

Silva, Susana; Folia, Vasiliki; Hagoort, Peter; Petersson, Karl Magnus

2017-01-01

The suitability of the artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm to capture relevant aspects of the acquisition of linguistic structures has been empirically tested in a number of EEG studies. Some have shown a syntax-related P600 component, but it has not been ruled out that the AGL P600 effect is a response to surface features (e.g., subsequence familiarity) rather than the underlying syntax structure. Therefore, in this study, we controlled for the surface characteristics of the test sequences (associative chunk strength) and recorded the EEG before (baseline preference classification) and after (preference and grammaticality classification) exposure to a grammar. After exposure, a typical, centroparietal P600 effect was elicited by grammatical violations and not by unfamiliar subsequences, suggesting that the AGL P600 effect signals a response to structural irregularities. Moreover, preference and grammaticality classification showed a qualitatively similar ERP profile, strengthening the idea that the implicit structural mere-exposure paradigm in combination with preference classification is a suitable alternative to the traditional grammaticality classification test. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Memory Operations and Structures in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Ellipsis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Andrea Eyleen

2010-01-01

Natural language often contains dependencies that span words, phrases, or even sentences. Thus, language comprehension relies on recovering recently processed information from memory for subsequent interpretation. This dissertation investigates the memory operations that subserve dependency resolution through the lens of "verb-phrase ellipsis"…

A python tool for the implementation of domain-specific languages

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dejanović, Igor; Vaderna, Renata; Milosavljević, Gordana; Simić, Miloš; Vuković, Željko

2017-07-01

In this paper we describe textX, a meta-language and a tool for building Domain-Specific Languages. It is implemented in Python using Arpeggio PEG (Parsing Expression Grammar) parser library. From a single language description (grammar) textX will build a parser and a meta-model (a.k.a. abstract syntax) of the language. The parser is used to parse textual representations of models conforming to the meta-model. As a result of parsing, a Python object graph will be automatically created. The structure of the object graph will conform to the meta-model defined by the grammar. This approach frees a developer from the need to manually analyse a parse tree and transform it to other suitable representation. The textX library is independent of any integrated development environment and can be easily integrated in any Python project. The textX tool works as a grammar interpreter. The parser is configured at run-time using the grammar. The textX tool is a free and open-source project available at GitHub.

Grammar-based Automatic 3D Model Reconstruction from Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yu, Q.; Helmholz, P.; Belton, D.; West, G.

2014-04-01

The automatic reconstruction of 3D buildings has been an important research topic during the last years. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to automatically reconstruct the 3D building models from segmented data based on pre-defined formal grammar and rules. Such segmented data can be extracted e.g. from terrestrial or mobile laser scanning devices. Two steps are considered in detail. The first step is to transform the segmented data into 3D shapes, for instance using the DXF (Drawing Exchange Format) format which is a CAD data file format used for data interchange between AutoCAD and other program. Second, we develop a formal grammar to describe the building model structure and integrate the pre-defined grammars into the reconstruction process. Depending on the different segmented data, the selected grammar and rules are applied to drive the reconstruction process in an automatic manner. Compared with other existing approaches, our proposed method allows the model reconstruction directly from 3D shapes and takes the whole building into account.

How do verbal short-term memory and working memory relate to the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar? A comparison between first and second language learners.

PubMed

Verhagen, Josje; Leseman, Paul

2016-01-01

Previous studies show that verbal short-term memory (VSTM) is related to vocabulary learning, whereas verbal working memory (VWM) is related to grammar learning in children learning a second language (L2) in the classroom. In this study, we investigated whether the same relationships apply to children learning an L2 in a naturalistic setting and to monolingual children. We also investigated whether relationships with verbal memory differ depending on the type of grammar skill investigated (i.e., morphology vs. syntax). Participants were 63 Turkish children who learned Dutch as an L2 and 45 Dutch monolingual children (mean age = 5 years). Children completed a series of VSTM and VWM tasks, a Dutch vocabulary task, and a Dutch grammar task. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that VSTM and VWM represented two separate latent factors in both groups. Structural equation modeling showed that VSTM, treated as a latent factor, significantly predicted vocabulary and grammar. VWM, treated as a latent factor, predicted only grammar. Both memory factors were significantly related to the acquisition of morphology and syntax. There were no differences between the two groups. These results show that (a) VSTM and VWM are differentially associated with language learning and (b) the same memory mechanisms are employed for learning vocabulary and grammar in L1 children and in L2 children who learn their L2 naturalistically. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Effect of Dynamic Assessment on L2 Grammar Acquisition by Iranian EFL Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kamali, Mojtaba; Abbasi, Mehdi; Sadighi, Firooz

2018-01-01

This study investigated the effect of dynamic Assessment (DA) on the acquisition of L2 grammar by EFL learners. The focus was on teaching Conditional Type II, or Unreal Conditional, which is a difficult structure for language learners to acquire. To this end, two intact classes of intermediate EFL learners, each consisting of 23 male students were…

The P600 in Implicit Artificial Grammar Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Silva, Susana; Folia, Vasiliki; Hagoort, Peter; Petersson, Karl Magnus

2017-01-01

The suitability of the artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm to capture relevant aspects of the acquisition of linguistic structures has been empirically tested in a number of EEG studies. Some have shown a syntax-related P600 component, but it has not been ruled out that the AGL P600 effect is a response to surface features (e.g.,…

Evolving Agents: Communication and Cognition

DTIC Science & Technology

2005-06-01

systems [11] and the first Chomsky ideas concerning mechanisms of language grammar related to deep structure [12] encountered CC of rules. Model-based...Perennial (2000) 3. Jackendoff, R.: Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar , Evolution. Oxford University Press, New York, NY (2002) 4. Pinker, S... University Press, Princeton, NJ (1961) 11. Minsky, M.L.: Semantic Information Processing. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1968) 12. Chomsky , N

Making Grammar Explicit in the Classroom: An Illustration Using the Spanish Subjunctive.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kilroe, Patricia

1988-01-01

It is proposed that explicit explanations of grammar concepts in the first language can be useful in teaching the related structures in a second language. The example used is that of the subjunctive mood, taught first in English and then in Spanish. Specific procedures for presenting the concept in English are outlined, including a set of…

SWAHILI GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX. DUQUESNE STUDIES, AFRICAN SERIES 1.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

LOOGMAN, ALFONS

THIS COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF SWAHILI, ONE OF THE BANTU LANGUAGES IN THE NIGER-CONGO GROUP, IS BASED ON THE AUTHOR'S 37 YEARS OF WRITING AND TEACHING EXPERIENCE IN EAST AFRICA. THE STUDY IS INTENDED TO PRESENT THE SWAHILI LANGUAGE IN TERMS OF ITS OWN STRUCTURE, RATHER THAN IN TERMS OF LATIN OR ENGLISH GRAMMARS. A PRELIMINARY SECTION IN PART ONE…

Effects of Noun Phrase Type on Sentence Complexity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gordon, Peter C.; Hendrick, Randall; Johnson, Marcus

2004-01-01

A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…

Grammar of Binding in the languages of the world: Innate or learned?

PubMed

Cole, Peter; Hermon, Gabriella; Yanti

2015-08-01

Languages around the world often appear to manifest nearly identical grammatical properties, but, at the same time, the grammatical differences can also be great, sometimes even seeming to support Joos's (1958) claim that "languages can differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable way" (p. 96). This state of affairs provides a puzzle for both nativist approaches to language like Generative Grammar that posit a fixed "Universal Grammar", and for approaches that minimize the contribution of innate grammatical structure. We approach this puzzling state of affairs by looking at one area of grammar, "Binding", the system of local and long distance anaphoric elements in a language. This is an area of grammar that has long been central to the Generative approach to language structure. We compare the anaphoric systems found in "familiar" (European-like) languages that contain dedicated classes of bound and free anaphors (pronouns and reflexives) with the anaphoric systems in endangered Austronesian languages of Indonesia, languages in which there is overlap or no distinction between pronouns and reflexives (Peranakan Javanese and Jambi Malay). What is of special interest about Jambi anaphora is not only that conservative dialects of Jambi Malay do not distinguish between pronouns and reflexives, but that Jambi anaphora appear to constitute a live snapshot of a unitary class of anaphora in the process of grammaticalization as a distinct system of pronouns and reflexives. We argue that the facts of Jambi anaphora cannot be explained by theories positing a Universal Grammar of Binding. Thus, these facts provide evidence that complex grammatical systems like Binding cannot be innate. Our results from Austronesian languages are confirmed by data from signed and creole languages. Our conclusion is that the human language learning capacity must include the ability to model the full complexity found in the syntax of the world's languages. From the perspective of child language acquisition, these conclusions suggest that Universal Grammar does not provide a general solution to the problem of poverty of the stimulus, and the solution to that problem must reside at least in part in special properties of the grammar construction tools available to the language learner rather than simply in a fixed set of grammatical rules hard wired into the brains of speakers. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Interface of Syntax with Pragmatics and Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

PubMed

Terzi, Arhonto; Marinis, Theodoros; Francis, Kostantinos

2016-08-01

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with ASD fell behind typically developing children in comprehending and producing simple clitics and producing noun phrases in focus structures. The two groups performed similarly in comprehending and producing clitics in clitic left dislocation and in producing noun phrases in non-focus structures. We argue that children with ASD have difficulties at the interface of (morpho)syntax with pragmatics and prosody, namely, distinguishing a discourse prominent element, and considering intonation relevant for a particular interpretation that excludes clitics.

On the Factor Structure of the Grammar Section of University of Tehran English Proficiency Test (UTEPT)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Salehi, Mohammad; Rezaee, Abbas Ali

2009-01-01

The study was conducted with 3,385 participants who took an English language proficiency test as a partial requirement for entering a PhD program in different fields of education. This test has three sections which are grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension. To determine the construct validity of the test, a series of analyses were done.…

Sociolinguistics: Current Trends and Prospects; Report of the 23rd Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies. Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics No. 25.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shuy, Roger W., Ed.

The papers included in this volume discuss the relationship of sociolinguistics to social interaction, sociolinguistic surveys, the intersection of sociolinguistics with education, and the influence of linguistics and sociology on sociolinguistics. The papers include: "Optional Rules in Grammar" (Fraser); "The Structure of Polylectal Grammars"…

Comprehension of Written Grammar Test: Reliability and Known-Groups Validity Study with Hearing and Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cannon, Joanna E.; Hubley, Anita M.; Millhoff, Courtney; Mazlouman, Shahla

2016-01-01

The aim of the current study was to gather validation evidence for the "Comprehension of Written Grammar" (CWG; Easterbrooks, 2010) receptive test of 26 grammatical structures of English print for use with children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Reliability and validity data were collected for 98 participants (49 DHH and 49…

Discovery of a Recursive Principle: An Artificial Grammar Investigation of Human Learning of a Counting Recursion Language.

PubMed

Cho, Pyeong Whan; Szkudlarek, Emily; Tabor, Whitney

2016-01-01

Learning is typically understood as a process in which the behavior of an organism is progressively shaped until it closely approximates a target form. It is easy to comprehend how a motor skill or a vocabulary can be progressively learned-in each case, one can conceptualize a series of intermediate steps which lead to the formation of a proficient behavior. With grammar, it is more difficult to think in these terms. For example, center embedding recursive structures seem to involve a complex interplay between multiple symbolic rules which have to be in place simultaneously for the system to work at all, so it is not obvious how the mechanism could gradually come into being. Here, we offer empirical evidence from a new artificial language (or "artificial grammar") learning paradigm, Locus Prediction, that, despite the conceptual conundrum, recursion acquisition occurs gradually, at least for a simple formal language. In particular, we focus on a variant of the simplest recursive language, a (n) b (n) , and find evidence that (i) participants trained on two levels of structure (essentially ab and aabb) generalize to the next higher level (aaabbb) more readily than participants trained on one level of structure (ab) combined with a filler sentence; nevertheless, they do not generalize immediately; (ii) participants trained up to three levels (ab, aabb, aaabbb) generalize more readily to four levels than participants trained on two levels generalize to three; (iii) when we present the levels in succession, starting with the lower levels and including more and more of the higher levels, participants show evidence of transitioning between the levels gradually, exhibiting intermediate patterns of behavior on which they were not trained; (iv) the intermediate patterns of behavior are associated with perturbations of an attractor in the sense of dynamical systems theory. We argue that all of these behaviors indicate a theory of mental representation in which recursive systems lie on a continuum of grammar systems which are organized so that grammars that produce similar behaviors are near one another, and that people learning a recursive system are navigating progressively through the space of these grammars.

Structural Influences on Initial Accent Placement in French

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Astesano, Corine; Bard, Ellen Gurman; Turk, Alice

2007-01-01

In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically…

The Recipe for Success: Syntactic Features of "la chronique gastronomique."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Engel, Dulcie M.

1997-01-01

Analyzes the syntactic structure of noun phrases and verb phrases in recipes and cookery articles in the French press and argues that the complexity of writing about cooking parallels the complexity of the cooking process itself, demonstrating how syntax can reflect function and meaning in a restricted text-type. (Author/MSE)

Are Subject Small Clauses Really Small Clauses?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kubo, Miori

1993-01-01

This paper discusses the ongoing debate over small clauses concerning the structure of the verb phrase in "I consider Bill smart." It is demonstrated that the subject constituent in question is not a small clause, but a Noun Phrase (NP), following Noun (N). It is shown that some peculiar phenomena under the small clause analysis are…

A new method of cardiographic image segmentation based on grammar

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hamdi, Salah; Ben Abdallah, Asma; Bedoui, Mohamed H.; Alimi, Adel M.

2011-10-01

The measurement of the most common ultrasound parameters, such as aortic area, mitral area and left ventricle (LV) volume, requires the delineation of the organ in order to estimate the area. In terms of medical image processing this translates into the need to segment the image and define the contours as accurately as possible. The aim of this work is to segment an image and make an automated area estimation based on grammar. The entity "language" will be projected to the entity "image" to perform structural analysis and parsing of the image. We will show how the idea of segmentation and grammar-based area estimation is applied to real problems of cardio-graphic image processing.

Closure properties of Watson-Crick grammars

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zulkufli, Nurul Liyana binti Mohamad; Turaev, Sherzod; Tamrin, Mohd Izzuddin Mohd; Azeddine, Messikh

2015-12-01

In this paper, we define Watson-Crick context-free grammars, as an extension of Watson-Crick regular grammars and Watson-Crick linear grammars with context-free grammar rules. We show the relation of Watson-Crick (regular and linear) grammars to the sticker systems, and study some of the important closure properties of the Watson-Crick grammars. We establish that the Watson-Crick regular grammars are closed under almost all of the main closure operations, while the differences between other Watson-Crick grammars with their corresponding Chomsky grammars depend on the computational power of the Watson-Crick grammars which still need to be studied.

The Study of Familiarity of Iranian ESP Teachers and ESP Course Learners with Academic Rhetoric within a Systemic Functional Grammar at Graduate Level

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jafarian, Tahereh; Azizifar, Akbar; Gowhary, Habib; Jamalinesari, Ali

2014-01-01

Publication of research articles (RAs) in English seems a challenging task for native and non-native writers. The acquisition of rhetorical structure and function grammar can be very helpful for academicians to achieve the wanted goal which is, of course, the publication of their RAs. This study aims to investigate the current level of familiarity…

GrammarViz 3.0: Interactive Discovery of Variable-Length Time Series Patterns

DOE PAGES

Senin, Pavel; Lin, Jessica; Wang, Xing; ...

2018-02-23

The problems of recurrent and anomalous pattern discovery in time series, e.g., motifs and discords, respectively, have received a lot of attention from researchers in the past decade. However, since the pattern search space is usually intractable, most existing detection algorithms require that the patterns have discriminative characteristics and have its length known in advance and provided as input, which is an unreasonable requirement for many real-world problems. In addition, patterns of similar structure, but of different lengths may co-exist in a time series. In order to address these issues, we have developed algorithms for variable-length time series pattern discoverymore » that are based on symbolic discretization and grammar inference—two techniques whose combination enables the structured reduction of the search space and discovery of the candidate patterns in linear time. In this work, we present GrammarViz 3.0—a software package that provides implementations of proposed algorithms and graphical user interface for interactive variable-length time series pattern discovery. The current version of the software provides an alternative grammar inference algorithm that improves the time series motif discovery workflow, and introduces an experimental procedure for automated discretization parameter selection that builds upon the minimum cardinality maximum cover principle and aids the time series recurrent and anomalous pattern discovery.« less

GrammarViz 3.0: Interactive Discovery of Variable-Length Time Series Patterns

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Senin, Pavel; Lin, Jessica; Wang, Xing

The problems of recurrent and anomalous pattern discovery in time series, e.g., motifs and discords, respectively, have received a lot of attention from researchers in the past decade. However, since the pattern search space is usually intractable, most existing detection algorithms require that the patterns have discriminative characteristics and have its length known in advance and provided as input, which is an unreasonable requirement for many real-world problems. In addition, patterns of similar structure, but of different lengths may co-exist in a time series. In order to address these issues, we have developed algorithms for variable-length time series pattern discoverymore » that are based on symbolic discretization and grammar inference—two techniques whose combination enables the structured reduction of the search space and discovery of the candidate patterns in linear time. In this work, we present GrammarViz 3.0—a software package that provides implementations of proposed algorithms and graphical user interface for interactive variable-length time series pattern discovery. The current version of the software provides an alternative grammar inference algorithm that improves the time series motif discovery workflow, and introduces an experimental procedure for automated discretization parameter selection that builds upon the minimum cardinality maximum cover principle and aids the time series recurrent and anomalous pattern discovery.« less

Using Wikipedia and Conceptual Graph Structures to Generate Questions for Academic Writing Support

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Ming; Calvo, R. A.; Aditomo, A.; Pizzato, L. A.

2012-01-01

In this paper, we present a novel approach for semiautomatic question generation to support academic writing. Our system first extracts key phrases from students' literature review papers. Each key phrase is matched with a Wikipedia article and classified into one of five abstract concept categories: Research Field, Technology, System, Term, and…

Phrase Units as Determinants of Visual Processing in Music Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sloboda, John A.

1977-01-01

Keyboard musicians sight-read passages of music in which the amount of information about the presence of phrase units was systematically varied. Results suggest a clear analogy between the cognition of music and language, in that knowledge of abstract structure is of importance in the organization of immediate visual processing of text. (Editor/RK)

The Processing and Interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis Constructions by Children at Normal and Slowed Speech Rates

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Callahan, Sarah M.; Walenski, Matthew; Love, Tracy

2012-01-01

Purpose: To examine children's comprehension of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis constructions in light of their automatic, online structural processing abilities and conscious, metalinguistic reflective skill. Method: Forty-two children ages 5 through 12 years listened to VP ellipsis constructions involving the strict/sloppy ambiguity (e.g., "The…

Complexity, Training Paradigm Design, and the Contribution of Memory Subsystems to Grammar Learning

PubMed Central

Ettlinger, Marc; Wong, Patrick C. M.

2016-01-01

Although there is variability in nonnative grammar learning outcomes, the contributions of training paradigm design and memory subsystems are not well understood. To examine this, we presented learners with an artificial grammar that formed words via simple and complex morphophonological rules. Across three experiments, we manipulated training paradigm design and measured subjects' declarative, procedural, and working memory subsystems. Experiment 1 demonstrated that passive, exposure-based training boosted learning of both simple and complex grammatical rules, relative to no training. Additionally, procedural memory correlated with simple rule learning, whereas declarative memory correlated with complex rule learning. Experiment 2 showed that presenting corrective feedback during the test phase did not improve learning. Experiment 3 revealed that structuring the order of training so that subjects are first exposed to the simple rule and then the complex improved learning. The cumulative findings shed light on the contributions of grammatical complexity, training paradigm design, and domain-general memory subsystems in determining grammar learning success. PMID:27391085

An Investigation of the Communicative Approach Teaching in Primary English Textbooks in Hong Kong and Malaysia: A Search into Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) Textbooks, and How CLT Is Applied in Textbooks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ko, Charles

2014-01-01

In the present research, it will be shown how grammar activities in textbooks still retain the structural method of teaching grammar. The results found by previous scholars' research will be covered, and illustrated by excerpts of textbooks, including comparison of Hong Kong and Malaysian textbooks. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)…

An approach to multiscale modelling with graph grammars.

PubMed

Ong, Yongzhi; Streit, Katarína; Henke, Michael; Kurth, Winfried

2014-09-01

Functional-structural plant models (FSPMs) simulate biological processes at different spatial scales. Methods exist for multiscale data representation and modification, but the advantages of using multiple scales in the dynamic aspects of FSPMs remain unclear. Results from multiscale models in various other areas of science that share fundamental modelling issues with FSPMs suggest that potential advantages do exist, and this study therefore aims to introduce an approach to multiscale modelling in FSPMs. A three-part graph data structure and grammar is revisited, and presented with a conceptual framework for multiscale modelling. The framework is used for identifying roles, categorizing and describing scale-to-scale interactions, thus allowing alternative approaches to model development as opposed to correlation-based modelling at a single scale. Reverse information flow (from macro- to micro-scale) is catered for in the framework. The methods are implemented within the programming language XL. Three example models are implemented using the proposed multiscale graph model and framework. The first illustrates the fundamental usage of the graph data structure and grammar, the second uses probabilistic modelling for organs at the fine scale in order to derive crown growth, and the third combines multiscale plant topology with ozone trends and metabolic network simulations in order to model juvenile beech stands under exposure to a toxic trace gas. The graph data structure supports data representation and grammar operations at multiple scales. The results demonstrate that multiscale modelling is a viable method in FSPM and an alternative to correlation-based modelling. Advantages and disadvantages of multiscale modelling are illustrated by comparisons with single-scale implementations, leading to motivations for further research in sensitivity analysis and run-time efficiency for these models.

An approach to multiscale modelling with graph grammars

PubMed Central

Ong, Yongzhi; Streit, Katarína; Henke, Michael; Kurth, Winfried

2014-01-01

Background and Aims Functional–structural plant models (FSPMs) simulate biological processes at different spatial scales. Methods exist for multiscale data representation and modification, but the advantages of using multiple scales in the dynamic aspects of FSPMs remain unclear. Results from multiscale models in various other areas of science that share fundamental modelling issues with FSPMs suggest that potential advantages do exist, and this study therefore aims to introduce an approach to multiscale modelling in FSPMs. Methods A three-part graph data structure and grammar is revisited, and presented with a conceptual framework for multiscale modelling. The framework is used for identifying roles, categorizing and describing scale-to-scale interactions, thus allowing alternative approaches to model development as opposed to correlation-based modelling at a single scale. Reverse information flow (from macro- to micro-scale) is catered for in the framework. The methods are implemented within the programming language XL. Key Results Three example models are implemented using the proposed multiscale graph model and framework. The first illustrates the fundamental usage of the graph data structure and grammar, the second uses probabilistic modelling for organs at the fine scale in order to derive crown growth, and the third combines multiscale plant topology with ozone trends and metabolic network simulations in order to model juvenile beech stands under exposure to a toxic trace gas. Conclusions The graph data structure supports data representation and grammar operations at multiple scales. The results demonstrate that multiscale modelling is a viable method in FSPM and an alternative to correlation-based modelling. Advantages and disadvantages of multiscale modelling are illustrated by comparisons with single-scale implementations, leading to motivations for further research in sensitivity analysis and run-time efficiency for these models. PMID:25134929

Symmetric and Asymmetric Patterns of Attraction Errors in Producing Subject-Predicate Agreement in Hebrew: An Issue of Morphological Structure

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deutsch, Avital; Dank, Maya

2011-01-01

A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…

Auditory Temporal Structure Processing in Dyslexia: Processing of Prosodic Phrase Boundaries Is Not Impaired in Children with Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geiser, Eveline; Kjelgaard, Margaret; Christodoulou, Joanna A.; Cyr, Abigail; Gabrieli, John D. E.

2014-01-01

Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--"temporal grouping"--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase…

The Pistol that Injured the Cowboy: Difficulty with Inanimate Subject-Verb Integration Is Reduced by Structural Separation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C.

2012-01-01

Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking…

Domain-specific learning of grammatical structure in musical and phonological sequences.

PubMed

Bly, Benjamin Martin; Carrión, Ricardo E; Rasch, Björn

2009-01-01

Artificial grammar learning depends on acquisition of abstract structural representations rather than domain-specific representational constraints, or so many studies tell us. Using an artificial grammar task, we compared learning performance in two stimulus domains in which respondents have differing tacit prior knowledge. We found that despite grammatically identical sequence structures, learning was better for harmonically related chord sequences than for letter name sequences or harmonically unrelated chord sequences. We also found transfer effects within the musical and letter name tasks, but not across the domains. We conclude that knowledge acquired in implicit learning depends not only on abstract features of structured stimuli, but that the learning of regularities is in some respects domain-specific and strongly linked to particular features of the stimulus domain.

The role of prominence in determining the scope of boundary-related lengthening in Greek.

PubMed

Katsika, Argyro

2016-03-01

This study aims at examining and accounting for the scope of the temporal effect of phrase boundaries. Previous research has indicated that there is an interaction between boundary-related lengthening and prominence such that the former extends towards the nearby prominent syllable. However, it is unclear whether this interaction is due to lexical stress and/or phrasal prominence (marked by pitch accent) and how far towards the prominent syllable the effect extends. Here, we use an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study of Greek to examine the scope of boundary-related lengthening as a function of lexical stress and pitch accent separately. Boundaries are elicited by the means of a variety of syntactic constructions.. The results show an effect of lexical stress. Phrase-final lengthening affects the articulatory gestures of the phrase-final syllable that are immediately adjacent to the boundary in words with final stress, but is initiated earlier within phrase-final words with non-final stress. Similarly, the articulatory configurations during inter-phrasal pauses reach their point of achievement later in words with final stress than in words with non-final stress. These effects of stress hold regardless of whether the phrase-final word is accented or de-accented. Phrase-initial lengthening, on the other hand, is consistently detected on the phrase-initial constriction, independently of where the stress is within the preceding, phrase-final, word. These results indicate that the lexical aspect of prominence plays a role in determining the scope of boundary-related lengthening in Greek. Based on these results, a gestural account of prosodic boundaries in Greek is proposed in which lexical and phrasal prosody interact in a systematic and coordinated fashion. The cross-linguistic dimensions of this account and its implications for prosodic structure are discussed.

Information status and word order in Croatian Sign Language.

PubMed

Milkovic, Marina; Bradaric-Joncic, Sandra; Wilbur, Ronnie B

2007-01-01

This paper presents the results of research on information structure and word order in narrative sentences taken from signed short stories in Croatian Sign Language (HZJ). The basic word order in HZJ is SVO. Factors that result in other word orders include: reversible arguments, verb categories, locative constructions, contrastive focus, and prior context. Word order in context depends on communication rules, based on the relationship between old (theme) and new (rheme) information, which is predicated of the theme. In accordance with Grice's Maxim of Quantity, HZJ has a tendency to omit old information, or to reduce it to pronominal status. If old information is overtly signed in non-pronominal form, it precedes the rheme. We have observed a variety of sign language mechanisms that are used to show items of reduced contextual significance: use of assigned spatial location for previously introduced referents; eyegaze to indicate spatial location of previously introduced referents; use of the non-dominant hand for backgrounded information; use of a special category of signs known as classifiers as pronominal indicators of previously introduced referents; and complex noun phrases that allow a single occurrence of a noun to simultaneously serve multiple functions. These devices permit information to be conveyed without the need for separate signs for every referent, which would create longer constructions that could be taxing to both production and perception. The results of this research are compatible with well-known word order generalizations - HZJ has its own grammar, independent of spoken language, like any other sign language.

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish.

PubMed

Gattei, Carolina A; Dickey, Michael W; Wainselboim, Alejandro J; París, Luis

2015-01-01

Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand "who did what to whom" in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models.

Mirror system activity for action and language is embedded in the integration of dorsal and ventral pathways.

PubMed

Arbib, Michael A

2010-01-01

We develop the view that the involvement of mirror neurons in embodied experience grounds brain structures that underlie language, but that many other brain regions are involved. We stress the cooperation between the dorsal and ventral streams in praxis and language. Both have perceptual and motor schemas but the perceptual schemas in the dorsal path are affordances linked to specific motor schemas for detailed motor control, whereas the ventral path supports planning and decision making. This frames the hypothesis that the mirror system for words evolved from the mirror system for actions to support words-as-phonological-actions, with semantics provided by the linkage to neural systems supporting perceptual and motor schemas. We stress the importance of computational models which can be linked to the parametric analysis of data and conceptual analysis of these models to support new patterns of understanding of the data. In the domain of praxis, we assess the FARS model of the canonical system for grasping, the MNS models for the mirror system for grasping, and the Augmented Competitive Queuing model that extends the control of action to the opportunistic scheduling of action sequences and also offers a new hypothesis on the role of mirror neurons in self action. Turning to language, we use Construction Grammar as our linguistic framework to get beyond single words to phrases and sentences, and initiate analysis of what brain functions must complement mirror systems to support this functionality. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Language acquisition and use: learning and applying probabilistic constraints.

PubMed

Seidenberg, M S

1997-03-14

What kinds of knowledge underlie the use of language and how is this knowledge acquired? Linguists equate knowing a language with knowing a grammar. Classic "poverty of the stimulus" arguments suggest that grammar identification is an intractable inductive problem and that acquisition is possible only because children possess innate knowledge of grammatical structure. An alternative view is emerging from studies of statistical and probabilistic aspects of language, connectionist models, and the learning capacities of infants. This approach emphasizes continuity between how language is acquired and how it is used. It retains the idea that innate capacities constrain language learning, but calls into question whether they include knowledge of grammatical structure.

Defense et illustration de la grammaire philologique (An Example and a Defense of Philological Grammar)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dupont, Louis

1972-01-01

Author cites philological grammar" as one of three ways of treating language. The other two approaches to language are traditional grammar and linguistic grammar or transformational generative grammar. Philological grammar stresses the art of reading. (DS)

The relationship between the structural mere exposure effect and the implicit learning process.

PubMed

Newell, B R; Bright, J E

2001-11-01

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much they liked novel items, and second whether or not they thought items conformed to the rules of the grammar. A small but consistent effect of grammaticality was found on subjects' liking ratings (a "structural mere exposure effect") in all three experiments, but only when encoding and testing conditions were consistent. A change in the surface representation of stimuli between encoding and test (Experiment 1), memorizing fragments of items and being tested on whole items (Experiment 2), and a mismatch of processing operations between encoding and test (Experiment 3) all removed the SMEE. In contrast, the effect of grammaticality on rule judgements remained intact in the face of all three manipulations. It is suggested that rule judgements reflect attempts to explicitly recall information about training items, whereas the SMEE can be explained in terms of an attribution of processing fluency.

Developing JSequitur to Study the Hierarchical Structure of Biological Sequences in a Grammatical Inference Framework of String Compression Algorithms.

PubMed

Galbadrakh, Bulgan; Lee, Kyung-Eun; Park, Hyun-Seok

2012-12-01

Grammatical inference methods are expected to find grammatical structures hidden in biological sequences. One hopes that studies of grammar serve as an appropriate tool for theory formation. Thus, we have developed JSequitur for automatically generating the grammatical structure of biological sequences in an inference framework of string compression algorithms. Our original motivation was to find any grammatical traits of several cancer genes that can be detected by string compression algorithms. Through this research, we could not find any meaningful unique traits of the cancer genes yet, but we could observe some interesting traits in regards to the relationship among gene length, similarity of sequences, the patterns of the generated grammar, and compression rate.

Popular song and lyrics synchronization and its application to music information retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Kai; Gao, Sheng; Zhu, Yongwei; Sun, Qibin

2006-01-01

An automatic synchronization system of the popular song and its lyrics is presented in the paper. The system includes two main components: a) automatically detecting vocal/non-vocal in the audio signal and b) automatically aligning the acoustic signal of the song with its lyric using speech recognition techniques and positioning the boundaries of the lyrics in its acoustic realization at the multiple levels simultaneously (e.g. the word / syllable level and phrase level). The GMM models and a set of HMM-based acoustic model units are carefully designed and trained for the detection and alignment. To eliminate the severe mismatch due to the diversity of musical signal and sparse training data available, the unsupervised adaptation technique such as maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) is exploited for tailoring the models to the real environment, which improves robustness of the synchronization system. To further reduce the effect of the missed non-vocal music on alignment, a novel grammar net is build to direct the alignment. As we know, this is the first automatic synchronization system only based on the low-level acoustic feature such as MFCC. We evaluate the system on a Chinese song dataset collecting from 3 popular singers. We obtain 76.1% for the boundary accuracy at the syllable level (BAS) and 81.5% for the boundary accuracy at the phrase level (BAP) using fully automatic vocal/non-vocal detection and alignment. The synchronization system has many applications such as multi-modality (audio and textual) content-based popular song browsing and retrieval. Through the study, we would like to open up the discussion of some challenging problems when developing a robust synchronization system for largescale database.

A range of complex probabilistic models for RNA secondary structure prediction that includes the nearest-neighbor model and more.

PubMed

Rivas, Elena; Lang, Raymond; Eddy, Sean R

2012-02-01

The standard approach for single-sequence RNA secondary structure prediction uses a nearest-neighbor thermodynamic model with several thousand experimentally determined energy parameters. An attractive alternative is to use statistical approaches with parameters estimated from growing databases of structural RNAs. Good results have been reported for discriminative statistical methods using complex nearest-neighbor models, including CONTRAfold, Simfold, and ContextFold. Little work has been reported on generative probabilistic models (stochastic context-free grammars [SCFGs]) of comparable complexity, although probabilistic models are generally easier to train and to use. To explore a range of probabilistic models of increasing complexity, and to directly compare probabilistic, thermodynamic, and discriminative approaches, we created TORNADO, a computational tool that can parse a wide spectrum of RNA grammar architectures (including the standard nearest-neighbor model and more) using a generalized super-grammar that can be parameterized with probabilities, energies, or arbitrary scores. By using TORNADO, we find that probabilistic nearest-neighbor models perform comparably to (but not significantly better than) discriminative methods. We find that complex statistical models are prone to overfitting RNA structure and that evaluations should use structurally nonhomologous training and test data sets. Overfitting has affected at least one published method (ContextFold). The most important barrier to improving statistical approaches for RNA secondary structure prediction is the lack of diversity of well-curated single-sequence RNA secondary structures in current RNA databases.

A range of complex probabilistic models for RNA secondary structure prediction that includes the nearest-neighbor model and more

PubMed Central

Rivas, Elena; Lang, Raymond; Eddy, Sean R.

2012-01-01

The standard approach for single-sequence RNA secondary structure prediction uses a nearest-neighbor thermodynamic model with several thousand experimentally determined energy parameters. An attractive alternative is to use statistical approaches with parameters estimated from growing databases of structural RNAs. Good results have been reported for discriminative statistical methods using complex nearest-neighbor models, including CONTRAfold, Simfold, and ContextFold. Little work has been reported on generative probabilistic models (stochastic context-free grammars [SCFGs]) of comparable complexity, although probabilistic models are generally easier to train and to use. To explore a range of probabilistic models of increasing complexity, and to directly compare probabilistic, thermodynamic, and discriminative approaches, we created TORNADO, a computational tool that can parse a wide spectrum of RNA grammar architectures (including the standard nearest-neighbor model and more) using a generalized super-grammar that can be parameterized with probabilities, energies, or arbitrary scores. By using TORNADO, we find that probabilistic nearest-neighbor models perform comparably to (but not significantly better than) discriminative methods. We find that complex statistical models are prone to overfitting RNA structure and that evaluations should use structurally nonhomologous training and test data sets. Overfitting has affected at least one published method (ContextFold). The most important barrier to improving statistical approaches for RNA secondary structure prediction is the lack of diversity of well-curated single-sequence RNA secondary structures in current RNA databases. PMID:22194308

Topological Entropy Measure of Artificial Grammar Complexity for Use in Designing Experiments on Human Performance in Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Tasks

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-04-02

grammar may be stated as AA 6→ AA, so not form AAA xB 6→ BB, so not form xBB xS 6→ SS, so not form xSS SA 6→ AB, so not form SAB BA 6→ AS, so not form BAS... 350 . Dienes, Z., & Scott, R. (2005). Measuring Unconscious Knowledge: Distinguishing Structural Knowledge and Judgment Knowledge. Psychological

Towards automated processing of clinical Finnish: sublanguage analysis and a rule-based parser.

PubMed

Laippala, Veronika; Ginter, Filip; Pyysalo, Sampo; Salakoski, Tapio

2009-12-01

In this paper, we present steps taken towards more efficient automated processing of clinical Finnish, focusing on daily nursing notes in a Finnish Intensive Care Unit (ICU). First, we analyze ICU Finnish as a sublanguage, identifying its specific features facilitating, for example, the development of a specialized syntactic analyser. The identified features include frequent omission of finite verbs, limitations in allowed syntactic structures, and domain-specific vocabulary. Second, we develop a formal grammar and a parser for ICU Finnish, thus providing better tools for the development of further applications in the clinical domain. The grammar is implemented in the LKB system in a typed feature structure formalism. The lexicon is automatically generated based on the output of the FinTWOL morphological analyzer adapted to the clinical domain. As an additional experiment, we study the effect of using Finnish constraint grammar to reduce the size of the lexicon. The parser construction thus makes efficient use of existing resources for Finnish. The grammar currently covers 76.6% of ICU Finnish sentences, producing highly accurate best-parse analyzes with F-score of 91.1%. We find that building a parser for the highly specialized domain sublanguage is not only feasible, but also surprisingly efficient, given an existing morphological analyzer with broad vocabulary coverage. The resulting parser enables a deeper analysis of the text than was previously possible.

Implicit structured sequence learning: an fMRI study of the structural mere-exposure effect

PubMed Central

Folia, Vasiliki; Petersson, Karl Magnus

2014-01-01

In this event-related fMRI study we investigated the effect of 5 days of implicit acquisition on preference classification by means of an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm based on the structural mere-exposure effect and preference classification using a simple right-linear unification grammar. This allowed us to investigate implicit AGL in a proper learning design by including baseline measurements prior to grammar exposure. After 5 days of implicit acquisition, the fMRI results showed activations in a network of brain regions including the inferior frontal (centered on BA 44/45) and the medial prefrontal regions (centered on BA 8/32). Importantly, and central to this study, the inclusion of a naive preference fMRI baseline measurement allowed us to conclude that these fMRI findings were the intrinsic outcomes of the learning process itself and not a reflection of a preexisting functionality recruited during classification, independent of acquisition. Support for the implicit nature of the knowledge utilized during preference classification on day 5 come from the fact that the basal ganglia, associated with implicit procedural learning, were activated during classification, while the medial temporal lobe system, associated with explicit declarative memory, was consistently deactivated. Thus, preference classification in combination with structural mere-exposure can be used to investigate structural sequence processing (syntax) in unsupervised AGL paradigms with proper learning designs. PMID:24550865

Implicit structured sequence learning: an fMRI study of the structural mere-exposure effect.

PubMed

Folia, Vasiliki; Petersson, Karl Magnus

2014-01-01

In this event-related fMRI study we investigated the effect of 5 days of implicit acquisition on preference classification by means of an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm based on the structural mere-exposure effect and preference classification using a simple right-linear unification grammar. This allowed us to investigate implicit AGL in a proper learning design by including baseline measurements prior to grammar exposure. After 5 days of implicit acquisition, the fMRI results showed activations in a network of brain regions including the inferior frontal (centered on BA 44/45) and the medial prefrontal regions (centered on BA 8/32). Importantly, and central to this study, the inclusion of a naive preference fMRI baseline measurement allowed us to conclude that these fMRI findings were the intrinsic outcomes of the learning process itself and not a reflection of a preexisting functionality recruited during classification, independent of acquisition. Support for the implicit nature of the knowledge utilized during preference classification on day 5 come from the fact that the basal ganglia, associated with implicit procedural learning, were activated during classification, while the medial temporal lobe system, associated with explicit declarative memory, was consistently deactivated. Thus, preference classification in combination with structural mere-exposure can be used to investigate structural sequence processing (syntax) in unsupervised AGL paradigms with proper learning designs.

Lexical Noun Phrases in Texts Written by Deaf Children and Adults with Different Proficiency Levels in Sign Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Beijsterveldt, Liesbeth Maria; van Hell, Janet

2010-01-01

We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in…

Grammar A and Grammar B: Rhetorical Life and Death.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guinn, Dorothy Margaret

In the past, writers have chosen stylistic devices within the parameters of the traditional grammar of style, "Grammar A," characterized by analyticity, coherence, and clarity. But many contemporary writers are creating a new grammar of style, "Grammar B," characterized by synchronicity, discontinuity, and ambiguity, which…

Representational Issues in Systemic Functional Grammar and Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification Grammar. ISI Reprint Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matthiessen, Christian; Kasper, Robert

Consisting of two separate papers, "Representational Issues in Systemic Functional Grammar," by Christian Matthiessen and "Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification Grammar," by Robert Kasper, this document deals with systemic aspects of natural language processing and linguistic theory and with computational applications of…

The Unification Space implemented as a localist neural net: predictions and error-tolerance in a constraint-based parser.

PubMed

Vosse, Theo; Kempen, Gerard

2009-12-01

We introduce a novel computer implementation of the Unification-Space parser (Vosse and Kempen in Cognition 75:105-143, 2000) in the form of a localist neural network whose dynamics is based on interactive activation and inhibition. The wiring of the network is determined by Performance Grammar (Kempen and Harbusch in Verb constructions in German and Dutch. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2003), a lexicalist formalism with feature unification as binding operation. While the network is processing input word strings incrementally, the evolving shape of parse trees is represented in the form of changing patterns of activation in nodes that code for syntactic properties of words and phrases, and for the grammatical functions they fulfill. The system is capable, at least qualitatively and rudimentarily, of simulating several important dynamic aspects of human syntactic parsing, including garden-path phenomena and reanalysis, effects of complexity (various types of clause embeddings), fault-tolerance in case of unification failures and unknown words, and predictive parsing (expectation-based analysis, surprisal effects). English is the target language of the parser described.

How we developed Doctors Speak Up: an evidence-based language and communication skills open access resource for International Medical Graduates.

PubMed

Woodward-Kron, Robyn; Fraser, Catriona; Pill, John; Flynn, Eleanor

2015-01-01

Some International Medical Graduates (IMGs) need to develop language and communication skills for patient-centred care but have limited opportunities to do so. To develop an evidence-based, language and communication skills web resource for IMG doctors and supervisors, focussing on culturally challenging patient interviews. Forty-eight IMGs participated in four practice OSCEs. We video-recorded the interactions and applied discourse analytic methods to investigate salient language and communication features. The findings from the OSCE workshops showed that many participants demonstrated aspects of patient-centred interviewing but were hindered by limited interactional competence to elicit information and negotiate behaviours as well as a limited repertoire of English grammar, vocabulary, and phonological phrasing for effective interaction. These findings guided the choice of content and pedagogy for the development of the web-based resource Doctors Speak Up. Evaluation and uptake of the Doctors Speak Up website confirm the demand for a resource combining targeted communication skills and language instruction. Over 19 500 users visited the website between March 2012 and November 2013.

Does the Owl Fly out of the Tree or Does the Owl Exit the Tree Flying? How L2 Learners Overcome Their L1 Lexicalization Biases

PubMed Central

Song, Lulu; Pulverman, Rachel; Pepe, Christina; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy

2016-01-01

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared to English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as ascender (‘to move upward’) and salir (‘to go out’), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., run, jog) and expresses path in prepositional phrases (e.g., out of the barn). The way in which a language encodes an event is known as its lexicalization pattern or bias. Using a written sentence elicitation task, we asked whether adult Spanish learners whose L1 was English adopted Spanish lexicalization biases, and what types of L2 exposure facilitated the learning of lexicalization biases. Results showed that advanced, but not intermediate, adult Spanish learners showed a path bias comparable to that found in native speakers of Spanish. Furthermore, study abroad experience is associated with better acquisition of L2 lexicalization biases when describing certain types of events. PMID:27103880

Grammar and Grammaring: Toward Modes for English Grammar Teaching in China

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nan, Chengyu

2015-01-01

The value of grammar instruction in foreign language learning and teaching has been a focus of debate for quite some time, which has resulted in different views on grammar and grammar teaching as well as different teaching approaches based on different perspectives or in different language learning contexts. To explore some modes for grammar…

Exploration of picture grammars, grammar learning, and inductive logic programming for image understanding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ducksbury, P. G.; Kennedy, C.; Lock, Z.

2003-09-01

Grammars have been used for the formal specification of programming languages, and there are a number of commercial products which now use grammars. However, these have tended to be focused mainly on flow control type applications. In this paper, we consider the potential use of picture grammars and inductive logic programming in generic image understanding applications, such as object recognition. A number of issues are considered, such as what type of grammar needs to be used, how to construct the grammar with its associated attributes, difficulties encountered with parsing grammars followed by issues of automatically learning grammars using a genetic algorithm. The concept of inductive logic programming is then introduced as a method that can overcome some of the earlier difficulties.

Grammar Predicts Procedural Learning and Consolidation Deficits in Children with Specific Language Impairment

PubMed Central

Hedenius, Martina; Persson, Jonas; Tremblay, Antoine; Adi-Japha, Esther; Veríssimo, João; Dye, Cristina D.; Alm, Per; Jennische, Margareta; Tomblin, J. Bruce; Ullman, Michael T.

2011-01-01

The Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) posits that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) can be largely explained by abnormalities of brain structures that subserve procedural memory. The PDH predicts impairments of procedural memory itself, and that such impairments underlie the grammatical deficits observed in the disorder. Previous studies have indeed reported procedural learning impairments in SLI, and have found that these are associated with grammatical difficulties. The present study extends this research by examining the consolidation and longer-term procedural sequence learning in children with SLI. The Alternating Serial Reaction Time (ASRT) task was given to children with SLI and typically-developing (TD) children in an initial learning session and an average of three days later to test for consolidation and longer-term learning. Although both groups showed evidence of initial sequence learning, only the TD children showed clear signs of consolidation, even though the two groups did not differ in longer-term learning. When the children were re-categorized on the basis of grammar deficits rather than broader language deficits, a clearer pattern emerged. Whereas both the grammar impaired and normal grammar groups showed evidence of initial sequence learning, only those with normal grammar showed consolidation and longer-term learning. Indeed, the grammar-impaired group appeared to lose any sequence knowledge gained during the initial testing session. These findings held even when controlling for vocabulary or a broad non-grammatical language measure, neither of which were associated with procedural memory. When grammar was examined as a continuous variable over all children, the same relationships between procedural memory and grammar, but not vocabulary or the broader language measure, were observed. Overall, the findings support and further specify the PDH. They suggest that consolidation and longer-term procedural learning are impaired in SLI, but that these impairments are specifically tied to the grammatical deficits in the disorder. The possibility that consolidation and longer-term learning are problematic in the disorder suggests a locus of potential study for therapeutic approaches. In sum, this study clarifies our understanding of the underlying deficits in SLI, and suggests avenues for further research. PMID:21840165

Acoustic foundations of the speech-to-song illusion.

PubMed

Tierney, Adam; Patel, Aniruddh D; Breen, Mara

2018-06-01

In the "speech-to-song illusion," certain spoken phrases are heard as highly song-like when isolated from context and repeated. This phenomenon occurs to a greater degree for some stimuli than for others, suggesting that particular cues prompt listeners to perceive a spoken phrase as song. Here we investigated the nature of these cues across four experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate how song-like spoken phrases were after each of eight repetitions. Initial ratings were correlated with the consistency of an underlying beat and within-syllable pitch slope, while rating change was linked to beat consistency, within-syllable pitch slope, and melodic structure. In Experiment 2, the within-syllable pitch slope of the stimuli was manipulated, and this manipulation changed the extent to which participants heard certain stimuli as more musical than others. In Experiment 3, the extent to which the pitch sequences of a phrase fit a computational model of melodic structure was altered, but this manipulation did not have a significant effect on musicality ratings. In Experiment 4, the consistency of intersyllable timing was manipulated, but this manipulation did not have an effect on the change in perceived musicality after repetition. Our methods provide a new way of studying the causal role of specific acoustic features in the speech-to-song illusion via subtle acoustic manipulations of speech, and show that listeners can rapidly (and implicitly) assess the degree to which nonmusical stimuli contain musical structure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of feedback in implicit and explicit artificial grammar learning: a comparison between dyslexic and non-dyslexic adults.

PubMed

Schiff, Rachel; Sasson, Ayelet; Star, Galit; Kahta, Shani

2017-10-01

The importance of feedback for learning has been firmly established over the past few decades. The question of whether feedback plays a significant role in the statistical learning abilities of adults with dyslexia, however, is currently unresolved. Here, we examined the role of feedback in grammaticality judgment, type of structural knowledge, and confidence rating in both typically developed and dyslexic adults. We implemented two artificial grammar learning experiments: implicit and explicit. The second experiment was directly analogous to the first experiment in all respects except training format: the standard memorization instruction was replaced with an explicit rule-search instruction. Each experiment was conducted with and without performance feedback. While both groups showed significantly improved learning in the feedback-based explicit artificial grammar learning task, only the typically developed adults demonstrated higher levels of conscious structural knowledge. The present study demonstrates that the basis for the grammaticality judgment of adults with dyslexia differs from that of typically developed adults, regardless of increase in the level of explicitness.

Two models of minimalist, incremental syntactic analysis.

PubMed

Stabler, Edward P

2013-07-01

Minimalist grammars (MGs) and multiple context-free grammars (MCFGs) are weakly equivalent in the sense that they define the same languages, a large mildly context-sensitive class that properly includes context-free languages. But in addition, for each MG, there is an MCFG which is strongly equivalent in the sense that it defines the same language with isomorphic derivations. However, the structure-building rules of MGs but not MCFGs are defined in a way that generalizes across categories. Consequently, MGs can be exponentially more succinct than their MCFG equivalents, and this difference shows in parsing models too. An incremental, top-down beam parser for MGs is defined here, sound and complete for all MGs, and hence also capable of parsing all MCFG languages. But since the parser represents its grammar transparently, the relative succinctness of MGs is again evident. Although the determinants of MG structure are narrowly and discretely defined, probabilistic influences from a much broader domain can influence even the earliest analytic steps, allowing frequency and context effects to come early and from almost anywhere, as expected in incremental models. Copyright © 2013 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Prosodic structure shapes the temporal realization of intonation and manual gesture movements.

PubMed

Esteve-Gibert, Núria; Prieto, Pilar

2013-06-01

Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the gesture apex is anchored in the intonation peak and (b) the upcoming prosodic boundary influences the timing of gesture and intonation movements. Fifteen Catalan speakers pointed at a screen while pronouncing a target word with different metrical patterns in a contrastive focus condition and followed by a phrase boundary. A total of 702 co-speech deictic gestures were acoustically and gesturally analyzed. Intonation peaks and gesture apexes showed parallel behavior with respect to their position within the accented syllable: They occurred at the end of the accented syllable in non-phrase-final position, whereas they occurred well before the end of the accented syllable in phrase-final position. Crucially, the position of intonation peaks and gesture apexes was correlated and was bound by prosodic structure. The results refine the phonological synchronization rule (McNeill, 1992), showing that gesture apexes are anchored in intonation peaks and that gesture and prosodic movements are bound by prosodic phrasing.

Teaching Grammar and Testing Grammar in the English Primary School: The Impact on Teachers and Their Teaching of the Grammar Element of the Statutory Test in Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Safford, Kimberly

2016-01-01

The research examined the impact on teachers of the grammar element of a new statutory test in Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) in primary schools in England. The research aimed to evaluate the nature and the extent of changes to the teaching of grammar and to wider literacy teaching since the introduction of the test in 2013. The research…

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children.

PubMed

Chern, Alexander; Tillmann, Barbara; Vaughan, Chloe; Gordon, Reyna L

2018-09-01

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The current study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5-8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-participants design) followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences upon which they were asked to perform a grammaticality judgment task. Rhythmically regular musical sequences improved performance in grammaticality judgment compared with rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two nonlinguistic control tasks, suggesting a neural overlap between rhythm processing and mechanisms recruited during grammar processing. These findings build on previous research investigating the effect of rhythmic priming by extending the paradigm to a different language, testing a younger population, and employing nonlanguage control tasks. These findings of an immediate influence of rhythm on grammar states (temporarily augmented grammaticality judgment performance) also converge with previous findings of associations between rhythm and grammar traits (stable generalized grammar abilities) in children. Taken together, the results of this study provide additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music and warrant future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Grammar! A Conference Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

King, Lid, Ed.; Boaks, Peter, Ed.

Papers from a conference on the teaching of grammar, particularly in second language instruction, include: "Grammar: Acquisition and Use" (Richard Johnstone); "Grammar and Communication" (Brian Page); "Linguistic Progression and Increasing Independence" (Bernardette Holmes); "La grammaire? C'est du bricolage!" ("Grammar? That's Hardware!") (Barry…

The Grammar Gallimaufry: Teaching Students to Challenge the Grammar Gods

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

House, Jeff

2009-01-01

How a person teaches grammar depends on what he or she believes it does. Some see grammar as a set of rules, inherited from wise forefathers. For them, teaching grammar means making students aware of, and then holding them to, these rules. Others see grammar as an expression of style, an invitation to the writer to explore how to create a…

Searching the ASRS Database Using QUORUM Keyword Search, Phrase Search, Phrase Generation, and Phrase Discovery

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

McGreevy, Michael W.; Connors, Mary M. (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

To support Search Requests and Quick Responses at the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), four new QUORUM methods have been developed: keyword search, phrase search, phrase generation, and phrase discovery. These methods build upon the core QUORUM methods of text analysis, modeling, and relevance-ranking. QUORUM keyword search retrieves ASRS incident narratives that contain one or more user-specified keywords in typical or selected contexts, and ranks the narratives on their relevance to the keywords in context. QUORUM phrase search retrieves narratives that contain one or more user-specified phrases, and ranks the narratives on their relevance to the phrases. QUORUM phrase generation produces a list of phrases from the ASRS database that contain a user-specified word or phrase. QUORUM phrase discovery finds phrases that are related to topics of interest. Phrase generation and phrase discovery are particularly useful for finding query phrases for input to QUORUM phrase search. The presentation of the new QUORUM methods includes: a brief review of the underlying core QUORUM methods; an overview of the new methods; numerous, concrete examples of ASRS database searches using the new methods; discussion of related methods; and, in the appendices, detailed descriptions of the new methods.

A Gradualist Scenario for Language Evolution: Precise Linguistic Reconstruction of Early Human (and Neandertal) Grammars

PubMed Central

Progovac, Ljiljana

2016-01-01

In making an argument for the antiquity of language, based on comparative evidence, Dediu and Levinson (2013) express hope that some combinations of structural features will prove so conservative that they will allow deep linguistic reconstruction. I propose that the earliest stages of syntax/grammar as reconstructed in Progovac (2015a), based on a theoretical and data-driven linguistic analysis, provide just such a conservative platform, which would have been commanded also by Neandertals and the common ancestor. I provide a fragment of this proto-grammar, which includes flat verb-noun compounds used for naming and insult (e.g., rattle-snake, cry-baby, scatter-brain), and paratactic (loose) combinations of such flat structures (e.g., Come one, come all; You seek, you find). This flat, binary, paratactic platform is found in all languages, and can be shown to serve as foundation for any further structure building. However, given the degree and nature of variation across languages in elaborating syntax beyond this proto-stage, I propose that hierarchical syntax did not emerge once and uniformly in all its complexity, but rather multiple times, either within Africa, or after dispersion from Africa. If so, then, under the uniregional hypothesis, our common ancestor with Neandertals, H. heidelbergensis, could not have commanded hierarchical syntax, but “only” the proto-grammar. Linguistic reconstructions of this kind are necessary for formulating precise and testable hypotheses regarding language evolution. In addition to the hominin timeline, this reconstruction can also engage, and negotiate between, the fields of neuroscience and genetics, as I illustrate with one specific scenario involving FOXP2 gene. PMID:27877146

GenoCAD Plant Grammar to Design Plant Expression Vectors for Promoter Analysis.

PubMed

Coll, Anna; Wilson, Mandy L; Gruden, Kristina; Peccoud, Jean

2016-01-01

With the rapid advances in prediction tools for discovery of new promoters and their cis-elements, there is a need to improve plant expression methodologies in order to facilitate a high-throughput functional validation of these promoters in planta. The promoter-reporter analysis is an indispensible approach for characterization of plant promoters. It requires the design of complex plant expression vectors, which can be challenging. Here, we describe the use of a plant grammar implemented in GenoCAD that will allow the users to quickly design constructs for promoter analysis experiments but also for other in planta functional studies. The GenoCAD plant grammar includes a library of plant biological parts organized in structural categories to facilitate their use and management and a set of rules that guides the process of assembling these biological parts into large constructs.

Discovery of a Recursive Principle: An Artificial Grammar Investigation of Human Learning of a Counting Recursion Language

PubMed Central

Cho, Pyeong Whan; Szkudlarek, Emily; Tabor, Whitney

2016-01-01

Learning is typically understood as a process in which the behavior of an organism is progressively shaped until it closely approximates a target form. It is easy to comprehend how a motor skill or a vocabulary can be progressively learned—in each case, one can conceptualize a series of intermediate steps which lead to the formation of a proficient behavior. With grammar, it is more difficult to think in these terms. For example, center embedding recursive structures seem to involve a complex interplay between multiple symbolic rules which have to be in place simultaneously for the system to work at all, so it is not obvious how the mechanism could gradually come into being. Here, we offer empirical evidence from a new artificial language (or “artificial grammar”) learning paradigm, Locus Prediction, that, despite the conceptual conundrum, recursion acquisition occurs gradually, at least for a simple formal language. In particular, we focus on a variant of the simplest recursive language, anbn, and find evidence that (i) participants trained on two levels of structure (essentially ab and aabb) generalize to the next higher level (aaabbb) more readily than participants trained on one level of structure (ab) combined with a filler sentence; nevertheless, they do not generalize immediately; (ii) participants trained up to three levels (ab, aabb, aaabbb) generalize more readily to four levels than participants trained on two levels generalize to three; (iii) when we present the levels in succession, starting with the lower levels and including more and more of the higher levels, participants show evidence of transitioning between the levels gradually, exhibiting intermediate patterns of behavior on which they were not trained; (iv) the intermediate patterns of behavior are associated with perturbations of an attractor in the sense of dynamical systems theory. We argue that all of these behaviors indicate a theory of mental representation in which recursive systems lie on a continuum of grammar systems which are organized so that grammars that produce similar behaviors are near one another, and that people learning a recursive system are navigating progressively through the space of these grammars. PMID:27375543

Neural correlates of lexicon and grammar: evidence from the production, reading, and judgment of inflection in aphasia.

PubMed

Ullman, Michael T; Pancheva, Roumyana; Love, Tracy; Yee, Eiling; Swinney, David; Hickok, Gregory

2005-05-01

Are the linguistic forms that are memorized in the mental lexicon and those that are specified by the rules of grammar subserved by distinct neurocognitive systems or by a single computational system with relatively broad anatomic distribution? On a dual-system view, the productive -ed-suffixation of English regular past tense forms (e.g., look-looked) depends upon the mental grammar, whereas irregular forms (e.g., dig-dug) are retrieved from lexical memory. On a single-mechanism view, the computation of both past tense types depends on associative memory. Neurological double dissociations between regulars and irregulars strengthen the dual-system view. The computation of real and novel, regular and irregular past tense forms was investigated in 20 aphasic subjects. Aphasics with non-fluent agrammatic speech and left frontal lesions were consistently more impaired at the production, reading, and judgment of regular than irregular past tenses. Aphasics with fluent speech and word-finding difficulties, and with left temporal/temporo-parietal lesions, showed the opposite pattern. These patterns held even when measures of frequency, phonological complexity, articulatory difficulty, and other factors were held constant. The data support the view that the memorized words of the mental lexicon are subserved by a brain system involving left temporal/temporo-parietal structures, whereas aspects of the mental grammar, in particular the computation of regular morphological forms, are subserved by a distinct system involving left frontal structures.

Teaching Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crawford, William J.

2013-01-01

Grammar is a component in all language skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Teachers need to know rules of grammar (teacher knowledge) as well as techniques that help students use grammar effectively and effortlessly (teaching knowledge). Using reflective practice to help teachers become comfortable with teaching grammar, this…

The dependency structure of coordinate phrases: a corpus approach.

PubMed

Temperley, David

2005-11-01

Hudson (1990) proposes that each conjunct in a coordinate phrase forms dependency relations with heads or dependents outside the coordinate phrase (the "multi-head" view). This proposal is tested through corpus analysis of Wall Street Journal text. For right-branching constituents (such as direct-object NPs), a short-long preference for conjunct ordering is observed; this is predicted by the multi-head view, under the assumption that structures resulting in shorter dependencies are preferred. A short-long preference is also observed for left-branching constituents (such as subject NPs), which is less obviously accommodated by the multi-head view but not incompatible with it. The repetition of determiners was also examined (the dog and cat versus the dog and the cat), and a stronger preference was found for repetition with singular count nouns as opposed to mass or plural nouns; this accords well with the multi-head view, under the reasoning that single-determiner constructions require crossing dependencies with count nouns but not with plural or mass nouns.

A bootstrapping method for development of Treebank

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zarei, F.; Basirat, A.; Faili, H.; Mirain, M.

2017-01-01

Using statistical approaches beside the traditional methods of natural language processing could significantly improve both the quality and performance of several natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The effective usage of these approaches is subject to the availability of the informative, accurate and detailed corpora on which the learners are trained. This article introduces a bootstrapping method for developing annotated corpora based on a complex and rich linguistically motivated elementary structure called supertag. To this end, a hybrid method for supertagging is proposed that combines both of the generative and discriminative methods of supertagging. The method was applied on a subset of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in order to annotate its sentences with a set of linguistically motivated elementary structures of the English XTAG grammar that is using a lexicalised tree-adjoining grammar formalism. The empirical results confirm that the bootstrapping method provides a satisfactory way for annotating the English sentences with the mentioned structures. The experiments show that the method could automatically annotate about 20% of WSJ with the accuracy of F-measure about 80% of which is particularly 12% higher than the F-measure of the XTAG Treebank automatically generated from the approach proposed by Basirat and Faili [(2013). Bridge the gap between statistical and hand-crafted grammars. Computer Speech and Language, 27, 1085-1104].

LeadMine: a grammar and dictionary driven approach to entity recognition.

PubMed

Lowe, Daniel M; Sayle, Roger A

2015-01-01

Chemical entity recognition has traditionally been performed by machine learning approaches. Here we describe an approach using grammars and dictionaries. This approach has the advantage that the entities found can be directly related to a given grammar or dictionary, which allows the type of an entity to be known and, if an entity is misannotated, indicates which resource should be corrected. As recognition is driven by what is expected, if spelling errors occur, they can be corrected. Correcting such errors is highly useful when attempting to lookup an entity in a database or, in the case of chemical names, converting them to structures. Our system uses a mixture of expertly curated grammars and dictionaries, as well as dictionaries automatically derived from public resources. We show that the heuristics developed to filter our dictionary of trivial chemical names (from PubChem) yields a better performing dictionary than the previously published Jochem dictionary. Our final system performs post-processing steps to modify the boundaries of entities and to detect abbreviations. These steps are shown to significantly improve performance (2.6% and 4.0% F1-score respectively). Our complete system, with incremental post-BioCreative workshop improvements, achieves 89.9% precision and 85.4% recall (87.6% F1-score) on the CHEMDNER test set. Grammar and dictionary approaches can produce results at least as good as the current state of the art in machine learning approaches. While machine learning approaches are commonly thought of as "black box" systems, our approach directly links the output entities to the input dictionaries and grammars. Our approach also allows correction of errors in detected entities, which can assist with entity resolution.

LeadMine: a grammar and dictionary driven approach to entity recognition

PubMed Central

2015-01-01

Background Chemical entity recognition has traditionally been performed by machine learning approaches. Here we describe an approach using grammars and dictionaries. This approach has the advantage that the entities found can be directly related to a given grammar or dictionary, which allows the type of an entity to be known and, if an entity is misannotated, indicates which resource should be corrected. As recognition is driven by what is expected, if spelling errors occur, they can be corrected. Correcting such errors is highly useful when attempting to lookup an entity in a database or, in the case of chemical names, converting them to structures. Results Our system uses a mixture of expertly curated grammars and dictionaries, as well as dictionaries automatically derived from public resources. We show that the heuristics developed to filter our dictionary of trivial chemical names (from PubChem) yields a better performing dictionary than the previously published Jochem dictionary. Our final system performs post-processing steps to modify the boundaries of entities and to detect abbreviations. These steps are shown to significantly improve performance (2.6% and 4.0% F1-score respectively). Our complete system, with incremental post-BioCreative workshop improvements, achieves 89.9% precision and 85.4% recall (87.6% F1-score) on the CHEMDNER test set. Conclusions Grammar and dictionary approaches can produce results at least as good as the current state of the art in machine learning approaches. While machine learning approaches are commonly thought of as "black box" systems, our approach directly links the output entities to the input dictionaries and grammars. Our approach also allows correction of errors in detected entities, which can assist with entity resolution. PMID:25810776

Constraining Multiple Grammars

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hopp, Holger

2014-01-01

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue. Multiple Grammars advances the claim that optionality is a constitutive characteristic of any one grammar, with interlanguage grammars being perhaps the clearest examples of a…

The grammar of visual narrative: Neural evidence for constituent structure in sequential image comprehension.

PubMed

Cohn, Neil; Jackendoff, Ray; Holcomb, Phillip J; Kuperberg, Gina R

2014-11-01

Constituent structure has long been established as a central feature of human language. Analogous to how syntax organizes words in sentences, a narrative grammar organizes sequential images into hierarchic constituents. Here we show that the brain draws upon this constituent structure to comprehend wordless visual narratives. We recorded neural responses as participants viewed sequences of visual images (comics strips) in which blank images either disrupted individual narrative constituents or fell at natural constituent boundaries. A disruption of either the first or the second narrative constituent produced a left-lateralized anterior negativity effect between 500 and 700ms. Disruption of the second constituent also elicited a posteriorly-distributed positivity (P600) effect. These neural responses are similar to those associated with structural violations in language and music. These findings provide evidence that comprehenders use a narrative structure to comprehend visual sequences and that the brain engages similar neurocognitive mechanisms to build structure across multiple domains. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The grammar of visual narrative: Neural evidence for constituent structure in sequential image comprehension

PubMed Central

Cohn, Neil; Jackendoff, Ray; Holcomb, Phillip J.; Kuperberg, Gina R.

2014-01-01

Constituent structure has long been established as a central feature of human language. Analogous to how syntax organizes words in sentences, a narrative grammar organizes sequential images into hierarchic constituents. Here we show that the brain draws upon this constituent structure to comprehend wordless visual narratives. We recorded neural responses as participants viewed sequences of visual images (comics strips) in which blank images either disrupted individual narrative constituents or fell at natural constituent boundaries. A disruption of either the first or the second narrative constituent produced a left-lateralized anterior negativity effect between 500-700ms. Disruption of the second constituent also elicited a posteriorly-distributed positivity (P600) effect. These neural responses are similar to those associated with structural violations in language and music. These findings provide evidence that comprehenders use a narrative structure to comprehend visual sequences and that the brain engages similar neurocognitive mechanisms to build structure across multiple domains. PMID:25241329

What English Teachers Need to Know about Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Murdick, William

1996-01-01

Suggests that English teachers need to know that grammar is a difficult subject; know what children know about grammar; know that grammatical error is complex; and know more about language than just grammar. Concludes with the advice of Noam Chomsky--that grammar should be taught for its own intrinsic interest. (RS)

Pourquoi les exercices de grammaire? (Why Grammar Exercises?)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bastuji, Jacqueline

1977-01-01

Recent theories and experiementation running the gamut from the absolute necessity of grammar to its uselessness in teaching a language form the basis of this article. Topics covered are: a typology of the grammar exercise; explicit grammar and linguistic competence; grammar exercises responding to real needs. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Implementation of a Natural Language Processor Using Functional Grammar.

DTIC Science & Technology

1985-12-01

in a completely different manner. [Ref. 5:pp. 81-883 ; "C. CASE GRAMMAR When Chomsky published his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 0 many linguists...approach was developed at Stanford University .[Ref. 7:pp. 187-2473 E. FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR Shortly after Transformational Grammar and Case Grammar ... Grammar is a radical approach to linguistic theory when looked at from the Chomsky point of view. However, it compares favorably with the traditional

The Role of Simple Semantics in the Process of Artificial Grammar Learning.

PubMed

Öttl, Birgit; Jäger, Gerhard; Kaup, Barbara

2017-10-01

This study investigated the effect of semantic information on artificial grammar learning (AGL). Recursive grammars of different complexity levels (regular language, mirror language, copy language) were investigated in a series of AGL experiments. In the with-semantics condition, participants acquired semantic information prior to the AGL experiment; in the without-semantics control condition, participants did not receive semantic information. It was hypothesized that semantics would generally facilitate grammar acquisition and that the learning benefit in the with-semantics conditions would increase with increasing grammar complexity. Experiment 1 showed learning effects for all grammars but no performance difference between conditions. Experiment 2 replicated the absence of a semantic benefit for all grammars even though semantic information was more prominent during grammar acquisition as compared to Experiment 1. Thus, we did not find evidence for the idea that semantics facilitates grammar acquisition, which seems to support the view of an independent syntactic processing component.

A new variant of Petri net controlled grammars

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jan, Nurhidaya Mohamad; Turaev, Sherzod; Fong, Wan Heng; Sarmin, Nor Haniza

2015-10-01

A Petri net controlled grammar is a Petri net with respect to a context-free grammar where the successful derivations of the grammar can be simulated using the occurrence sequences of the net. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of Petri net controlled grammars, called a place-labeled Petri net controlled grammar, which is a context-free grammar equipped with a Petri net and a function which maps places of the net to productions of the grammar. The language consists of all terminal strings that can be obtained by parallelly applying multisets of the rules which are the images of the sets of the input places of transitions in a successful occurrence sequence of the Petri net. We study the effect of the different labeling strategies to the computational power and establish lower and upper bounds for the generative capacity of place-labeled Petri net controlled grammars.

Punctuation, Prosody, and Discourse: Afterthought Vs. Right Dislocation

PubMed Central

Kalbertodt, Janina; Primus, Beatrice; Schumacher, Petra B.

2015-01-01

In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punctuation is said to correlate with prosodic phrasing. With RD and AT clearly differing in discourse function (comment-topic structuring vs. disambiguation) and punctuation (comma vs. full stop), critical items in this study were manipulated with regard to the (mis-)match of these parameters. Since RD and AT are said to prosodically differ in pitch range, phrasing, and accentuation patterns, we measured the reduction of pitch range, boundary strength and prominence level. Results show an effect of both punctuation and discourse context (mediated by syntax) on phrasing and accentuation. Interestingly, for pitch range reduction no difference between RDs and ATs could be observed. Our results corroborate a language architecture model in which punctuation, prosody, syntax, and discourse-semantics are independent but interacting domains with correspondence constraints between them. Our findings suggest there are tight correspondence constraints between (i) punctuation (full stop and comma in particular) and syntax, (ii) prosody and syntax as well as (iii) prosody and discourse-semantics. PMID:26648883

Checking the Grammar Checker: Integrating Grammar Instruction with Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McAlexander, Patricia J.

2000-01-01

Notes Rei Noguchi's recommendation of integrating grammar instruction with writing instruction and teaching only the most vital terms and the most frequently made errors. Presents a project that provides a review of the grammar lessons, applies many grammar rules specifically to the students' writing, and teaches students the effective use of the…

Swahili Learners' Reference Grammar. African Language Learners' Reference Grammar Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, Katrina Daly; Schleicher, Antonia Folarin

This reference grammar is written for speakers of English who are learning Swahili. Because many language learners are not familiar with the grammatical terminology, this book explains the basic terminology and concepts of English grammar that are necessary for understanding the grammar of Swahili. It assumes no formal knowledge of English grammar…

Effective Grammar Teaching: Lessons from Confident Grammar Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Petraki, Eleni; Hill, Deborah

2011-01-01

Learning the grammar of a language is an integral part of learning a second or foreign language. Studies on teacher beliefs, teacher language awareness (TLA) and grammar teaching have reported that the majority of English language teachers recognise the importance of teaching grammar (Borg, 2001; Borg & Burns, 2008). At the same time, many…

Effect of X-Word Grammar and Traditional Grammar Instruction on Grammatical Accuracy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Livingston, Sue; Toce, Andi; Casey, Toce; Montoya, Fernando; Hart, Bonny R.; O'Flaherty, Carmela

2018-01-01

This study first briefly describes an instructional approach to teaching grammar known as X-Word Grammar and then compares its effectiveness in assisting students in achieving grammatical accuracy with traditionally taught grammar. Two groups of L2 pre-college students were taught using curricula and practice procedures in two different grammar…

Rule-Based Design of Plant Expression Vectors Using GenoCAD.

PubMed

Coll, Anna; Wilson, Mandy L; Gruden, Kristina; Peccoud, Jean

2015-01-01

Plant synthetic biology requires software tools to assist on the design of complex multi-genic expression plasmids. Here a vector design strategy to express genes in plants is formalized and implemented as a grammar in GenoCAD, a Computer-Aided Design software for synthetic biology. It includes a library of plant biological parts organized in structural categories and a set of rules describing how to assemble these parts into large constructs. Rules developed here are organized and divided into three main subsections according to the aim of the final construct: protein localization studies, promoter analysis and protein-protein interaction experiments. The GenoCAD plant grammar guides the user through the design while allowing users to customize vectors according to their needs. Therefore the plant grammar implemented in GenoCAD will help plant biologists take advantage of methods from synthetic biology to design expression vectors supporting their research projects.

Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization: a Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mccaskill, Mary K.

1990-01-01

Writing problems are addressed which are often encountered in technical documents and preferences are indicated (Langley's) when authorities do not agree. It is directed toward professional writers, editors, and proofreaders. Those whose profession lies in other areas (for example, research or management), but who have occasion to write or review others' writing will also find this information useful. A functional attitude toward grammar and punctuation is presented. Chapter 1 on grammar presents grammatical problems related to each part of speech. Chapter 2 on sentence structure concerns syntax, that is, effective arrangement of words, with emphasis on methods of revision to improve writing effectiveness. Chapter 3 addresses punctuation marks, presenting their function, situations when they are required or incorrect, and situations when they are appropriate but optional. Chapter 4 presents capitalization, which is mostly a matter of editorial style and preference rather than a matter of generally accepted rules. An index and glossary are included.

Prior familiarity with components enhances unconscious learning of relations.

PubMed

Scott, Ryan B; Dienes, Zoltan

2010-03-01

The influence of prior familiarity with components on the implicit learning of relations was examined using artificial grammar learning. Prior to training on grammar strings, participants were familiarized with either the novel symbols used to construct the strings or with irrelevant geometric shapes. Participants familiarized with the relevant symbols showed greater accuracy when judging the correctness of new grammar strings. Familiarity with elemental components did not increase conscious awareness of the basis for discriminations (structural knowledge) but increased accuracy even in its absence. The subjective familiarity of test strings predicted grammaticality judgments. However, prior exposure to relevant symbols did not increase overall test string familiarity or reliance on familiarity when making grammaticality judgments. Familiarity with the symbols increased the learning of relations between them (bigrams and trigrams) thus resulting in greater familiarity for grammatical versus ungrammatical strings. The results have important implications for models of implicit learning.

An empirical generative framework for computational modeling of language acquisition.

PubMed

Waterfall, Heidi R; Sandbank, Ben; Onnis, Luca; Edelman, Shimon

2010-06-01

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of generative grammars from raw CHILDES data and give an account of the generative performance of the acquired grammars. Next, we summarize findings from recent longitudinal and experimental work that suggests how certain statistically prominent structural properties of child-directed speech may facilitate language acquisition. We then present a series of new analyses of CHILDES data indicating that the desired properties are indeed present in realistic child-directed speech corpora. Finally, we suggest how our computational results, behavioral findings, and corpus-based insights can be integrated into a next-generation model aimed at meeting the four requirements of our modeling framework.

Model-based object classification using unification grammars and abstract representations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liburdy, Kathleen A.; Schalkoff, Robert J.

1993-04-01

The design and implementation of a high level computer vision system which performs object classification is described. General object labelling and functional analysis require models of classes which display a wide range of geometric variations. A large representational gap exists between abstract criteria such as `graspable' and current geometric image descriptions. The vision system developed and described in this work addresses this problem and implements solutions based on a fusion of semantics, unification, and formal language theory. Object models are represented using unification grammars, which provide a framework for the integration of structure and semantics. A methodology for the derivation of symbolic image descriptions capable of interacting with the grammar-based models is described and implemented. A unification-based parser developed for this system achieves object classification by determining if the symbolic image description can be unified with the abstract criteria of an object model. Future research directions are indicated.

Information Structure, Grammar and Strategy in Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stevens, Jon

2013-01-01

This dissertation examines two information-structural phenomena, Givenness and Focus, from the perspective of both syntax and pragmatics. Evidence from English, German and other languages suggests a "split" analysis of information structure--the notions of Focus and Givenness, often thought to be closely related, exist independently at…

Recent Developments in Transformational Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jacobs, Roderick A.

1969-01-01

In the years following the appearance of Noam Chomsky's book, "Syntactic Structures," in 1957, transformational grammarians modified and improved his initial model of language. The notion of a deep structure of meaning underlying a sentence's surface structure was revised to embody elements representing negation, command, and interrogation, and to…

Probabilistic grammatical model for helix‐helix contact site classification

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Hidden Markov Models power many state‐of‐the‐art tools in the field of protein bioinformatics. While excelling in their tasks, these methods of protein analysis do not convey directly information on medium‐ and long‐range residue‐residue interactions. This requires an expressive power of at least context‐free grammars. However, application of more powerful grammar formalisms to protein analysis has been surprisingly limited. Results In this work, we present a probabilistic grammatical framework for problem‐specific protein languages and apply it to classification of transmembrane helix‐helix pairs configurations. The core of the model consists of a probabilistic context‐free grammar, automatically inferred by a genetic algorithm from only a generic set of expert‐based rules and positive training samples. The model was applied to produce sequence based descriptors of four classes of transmembrane helix‐helix contact site configurations. The highest performance of the classifiers reached AUCROC of 0.70. The analysis of grammar parse trees revealed the ability of representing structural features of helix‐helix contact sites. Conclusions We demonstrated that our probabilistic context‐free framework for analysis of protein sequences outperforms the state of the art in the task of helix‐helix contact site classification. However, this is achieved without necessarily requiring modeling long range dependencies between interacting residues. A significant feature of our approach is that grammar rules and parse trees are human‐readable. Thus they could provide biologically meaningful information for molecular biologists. PMID:24350601

Proceedings of a Conference--"The Future of Grammar in American Schools" (Winchester, VA, August 10-11, 1990).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL. Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar.

Providing alternatives to the way grammar is taught, this proceedings includes every paper (or summary) except one delivered at a conference on the future of grammar in American schools. Papers in the proceedings are: "Keynote: The Future of Grammar in American Schools" (Martha Kolln); "Approaches to Grammar: Teaching &…

Understanding the Complex Processes in Developing Student Teachers' Knowledge about Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Svalberg, Agneta M.-L.

2015-01-01

This article takes the view that grammar is driven by user choices and is therefore complex and dynamic. This has implications for the teaching of grammar in language teacher education and how teachers' cognitions about grammar, and hence their own grammar teaching, might change. In this small, interpretative study, the participants--students on…

Focus Structure in Persian Interrogative Sentences: An RRG Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rezai, Vali; Hooshmand, Mozhgan

2012-01-01

The studies regarding information structure and its distribution in sentences are traced back to works of Prague School linguists such as Mathesius in 1920s. Recently, the issue of information structure has been dealt with by functionalists. In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), information structure constitutes one of the main components of…

Story Structures: Comments on Recent Literature.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peterson, Gordon

Several theories of story structure are reviewed in this paper, including those of D. Rumelhart, R. Schank, and T. van Dijk. Examples are given of Rumelhart's story grammar consisting of elements such as setting, episodes, events, and reactions that must be present to form a coherent structure. Schank's contribution to story structure theory is…

Automated insertion of sequences into a ribosomal RNA alignment: An application of computational linguistics in molecular biology

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Taylor, R.C.

This thesis involved the construction of (1) a grammar that incorporates knowledge on base invariancy and secondary structure in a molecule and (2) a parser engine that uses the grammar to position bases into the structural subunits of the molecule. These concepts were combined with a novel pinning technique to form a tool that semi-automates insertion of a new species into the alignment for the 16S rRNA molecule (a component of the ribosome) maintained by Dr. Carl Woese's group at the University of Illinois at Urbana. The tool was tested on species extracted from the alignment and on a groupmore » of entirely new species. The results were very encouraging, and the tool should be substantial aid to the curators of the 16S alignment. The construction of the grammar was itself automated, allowing application of the tool to alignments for other molecules. The logic programming language Prolog was used to construct all programs involved. The computational linguistics approach used here was found to be a useful way to attach the problem of insertion into an alignment.« less

Automated insertion of sequences into a ribosomal RNA alignment: An application of computational linguistics in molecular biology

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Taylor, Ronald C.

This thesis involved the construction of (1) a grammar that incorporates knowledge on base invariancy and secondary structure in a molecule and (2) a parser engine that uses the grammar to position bases into the structural subunits of the molecule. These concepts were combined with a novel pinning technique to form a tool that semi-automates insertion of a new species into the alignment for the 16S rRNA molecule (a component of the ribosome) maintained by Dr. Carl Woese`s group at the University of Illinois at Urbana. The tool was tested on species extracted from the alignment and on a groupmore » of entirely new species. The results were very encouraging, and the tool should be substantial aid to the curators of the 16S alignment. The construction of the grammar was itself automated, allowing application of the tool to alignments for other molecules. The logic programming language Prolog was used to construct all programs involved. The computational linguistics approach used here was found to be a useful way to attach the problem of insertion into an alignment.« less

A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition*

PubMed Central

MACWHINNEY, BRIAN

2006-01-01

Many researchers believe that there is a logical problem at the center of language acquisition theory. According to this analysis, the input to the learner is too inconsistent and incomplete to determine the acquisition of grammar. Moreover, when corrective feedback is provided, children tend to ignore it. As a result, language learning must rely on additional constraints from universal grammar. To solve this logical problem, theorists have proposed a series of constraints and parameterizations on the form of universal grammar. Plausible alternatives to these constraints include: conservatism, item-based learning, indirect negative evidence, competition, cue construction, and monitoring. Careful analysis of child language corpora has cast doubt on claims regarding the absence of positive exemplars. Using demonstrably available positive data, simple learning procedures can be formulated for each of the syntactic structures that have traditionally motivated invocation of the logical problem. Within the perspective of emergentist theory (MacWhinney, 2001), the operation of a set of mutually supportive processes is viewed as providing multiple buffering for developmental outcomes. However, the fact that some syntactic structures are more difficult to learn than others can be used to highlight areas of intense grammatical competition and processing load. PMID:15658750

Equational Sentence Structure in Eskimo.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hofmann, Th. R.

A comparison of the syntactic characteristics of mathematical equations and Eskimo syntax is made, and a proposal that Eskimo has a level of structure similar to that of equations is described. P:t performative contrast is reanalyzed. Questions and speculations on the formal treatment of this type of structure in transformational grammar, and its…

Modeling Structure-Function Relationships in Synthetic DNA Sequences using Attribute Grammars

PubMed Central

Cai, Yizhi; Lux, Matthew W.; Adam, Laura; Peccoud, Jean

2009-01-01

Recognizing that certain biological functions can be associated with specific DNA sequences has led various fields of biology to adopt the notion of the genetic part. This concept provides a finer level of granularity than the traditional notion of the gene. However, a method of formally relating how a set of parts relates to a function has not yet emerged. Synthetic biology both demands such a formalism and provides an ideal setting for testing hypotheses about relationships between DNA sequences and phenotypes beyond the gene-centric methods used in genetics. Attribute grammars are used in computer science to translate the text of a program source code into the computational operations it represents. By associating attributes with parts, modifying the value of these attributes using rules that describe the structure of DNA sequences, and using a multi-pass compilation process, it is possible to translate DNA sequences into molecular interaction network models. These capabilities are illustrated by simple example grammars expressing how gene expression rates are dependent upon single or multiple parts. The translation process is validated by systematically generating, translating, and simulating the phenotype of all the sequences in the design space generated by a small library of genetic parts. Attribute grammars represent a flexible framework connecting parts with models of biological function. They will be instrumental for building mathematical models of libraries of genetic constructs synthesized to characterize the function of genetic parts. This formalism is also expected to provide a solid foundation for the development of computer assisted design applications for synthetic biology. PMID:19816554

The Effects of Communicative Grammar Teaching on Students' Achievement of Grammatical Knowledge and Oral Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ho, Pham Vu Phi; The Binh, Nguyen

2014-01-01

So far the students of Le Hong Phong Junior High School have been taught grammar with GTM (Grammar-Translation Method), which just prepares learners for conventional grammar-paper tests. Despite their considerable knowledge of grammar, the students fail to use the language they have learnt to communicate in real-life situations. The purpose of…

Application of grammar-based codes for lossless compression of digital mammograms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Xiaoli; Krishnan, Srithar; Ma, Ngok-Wah

2006-01-01

A newly developed grammar-based lossless source coding theory and its implementation was proposed in 1999 and 2000, respectively, by Yang and Kieffer. The code first transforms the original data sequence into an irreducible context-free grammar, which is then compressed using arithmetic coding. In the study of grammar-based coding for mammography applications, we encountered two issues: processing time and limited number of single-character grammar G variables. For the first issue, we discover a feature that can simplify the matching subsequence search in the irreducible grammar transform process. Using this discovery, an extended grammar code technique is proposed and the processing time of the grammar code can be significantly reduced. For the second issue, we propose to use double-character symbols to increase the number of grammar variables. Under the condition that all the G variables have the same probability of being used, our analysis shows that the double- and single-character approaches have the same compression rates. By using the methods proposed, we show that the grammar code can outperform three other schemes: Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW), arithmetic, and Huffman on compression ratio, and has similar error tolerance capabilities as LZW coding under similar circumstances.

How Does L1 and L2 Exposure Impact L1 Performance in Bilingual Children? Evidence from Polish-English Migrants to the United Kingdom

PubMed Central

Haman, Ewa; Wodniecka, Zofia; Marecka, Marta; Szewczyk, Jakub; Białecka-Pikul, Marta; Otwinowska, Agnieszka; Mieszkowska, Karolina; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Kołak, Joanna; Miękisz, Aneta; Kacprzak, Agnieszka; Banasik, Natalia; Foryś-Nogala, Małgorzata

2017-01-01

Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing, and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migrant monolingual peers, and then investigated the influence of the cumulative exposure to L1 and L2 on bilinguals’ performance. We then examined whether high exposure to L1 could possibly minimize the gap between monolinguals and bilinguals. We analyzed data from 233 typically developing children (88 bilingual and 145 monolingual) aged 4;0 to 7;5 (years;months) on six language measures in Polish: receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, receptive grammar, productive grammar (sentence repetition), phonological processing (non-word repetition), and discourse abilities (narration). Information about language exposure was obtained via parental questionnaires. For each language task, we analyzed the data from the subsample of bilinguals who had completed all the tasks in question and from monolinguals matched one-on-one to the bilingual group on age, SES (measured by years of mother’s education), gender, non-verbal IQ, and short-term memory. The bilingual children scored lower than monolinguals in all language domains, except discourse. The group differences were more pronounced on the productive tasks (vocabulary, grammar, and phonological processing) and moderate on the receptive tasks (vocabulary and grammar). L1 exposure correlated positively with the vocabulary size and phonological processing. Grammar scores were not related to the levels of L1 exposure, but were predicted by general cognitive abilities. L2 exposure negatively influenced productive grammar in L1, suggesting possible L2 transfer effects on L1 grammatical performance. Children’s narrative skills benefitted from exposure to two languages: both L1 and L2 exposure influenced story structure scores in L1. Importantly, we did not find any evidence (in any of the tasks in which the gap was present) that the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals could be fully closed with high amounts of L1 input. PMID:28928681

Style grammars for interactive visualization of architecture.

PubMed

Aliaga, Daniel G; Rosen, Paul A; Bekins, Daniel R

2007-01-01

Interactive visualization of architecture provides a way to quickly visualize existing or novel buildings and structures. Such applications require both fast rendering and an effortless input regimen for creating and changing architecture using high-level editing operations that automatically fill in the necessary details. Procedural modeling and synthesis is a powerful paradigm that yields high data amplification and can be coupled with fast-rendering techniques to quickly generate plausible details of a scene without much or any user interaction. Previously, forward generating procedural methods have been proposed where a procedure is explicitly created to generate particular content. In this paper, we present our work in inverse procedural modeling of buildings and describe how to use an extracted repertoire of building grammars to facilitate the visualization and quick modification of architectural structures and buildings. We demonstrate an interactive application where the user draws simple building blocks and, using our system, can automatically complete the building "in the style of" other buildings using view-dependent texture mapping or nonphotorealistic rendering techniques. Our system supports an arbitrary number of building grammars created from user subdivided building models and captured photographs. Using only edit, copy, and paste metaphors, the entire building styles can be altered and transferred from one building to another in a few operations, enhancing the ability to modify an existing architectural structure or to visualize a novel building in the style of the others.

Indexing Anatomical Phrases in Neuro-Radiology Reports to the UMLS 2005AA

PubMed Central

Bashyam, Vijayaraghavan; Taira, Ricky K.

2005-01-01

This work describes a methodology to index anatomical phrases to the 2005AA release of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). A phrase chunking tool based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) was developed to identify semantically coherent phrases within medical reports. Using this phrase chunker, a set of 2,551 unique anatomical phrases was extracted from brain radiology reports. These phrases were mapped to the 2005AA release of the UMLS using a vector space model. Precision for the task of indexing unique phrases was 0.87. PMID:16778995

A Construction Grammar for the Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holme, Randal

2010-01-01

Construction grammars (Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987; Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical pre-requisites, Stanford University Press, 1987; Croft, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University…

Didactique des langues etrangeres: De quoi parle-t-on quand on parle de grammaire? (Didactic of Foreign Languages: What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Grammar?).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berche, Merce Pujol

1998-01-01

A discussion of the term "grammar" in the context of second-language teaching and learning looks at various approaches to/definitions of grammar, including linguistic, psychological, sociological, and pedagogical grammars. Pedagogical grammars are viewed as learning tools for the second-language classroom, and their properties and components are…

Syntactic transfer in artificial grammar learning.

PubMed

Beesley, T; Wills, A J; Le Pelley, M E

2010-02-01

In an artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiment, participants were trained with instances of one grammatical structure before completing a test phase in which they were required to discriminate grammatical from randomly created strings. Importantly, the underlying structure used to generate test strings was different from that used to generate the training strings. Despite the fact that grammatical training strings were more similar to nongrammatical test strings than they were to grammatical test strings, this manipulation resulted in a positive transfer effect, as compared with controls trained with nongrammatical strings. It is suggested that training with grammatical strings leads to an appreciation of set variance that aids the detection of grammatical test strings in AGL tasks. The analysis presented demonstrates that it is useful to conceptualize test performance in AGL as a form of unsupervised category learning.

Looking forwards and backwards: The real-time processing of Strong and Weak Crossover

PubMed Central

Lidz, Jeffrey; Phillips, Colin

2017-01-01

We investigated the processing of pronouns in Strong and Weak Crossover constructions as a means of probing the extent to which the incremental parser can use syntactic information to guide antecedent retrieval. In Experiment 1 we show that the parser accesses a displaced wh-phrase as an antecedent for a pronoun when no grammatical constraints prohibit binding, but the parser ignores the same wh-phrase when it stands in a Strong Crossover relation to the pronoun. These results are consistent with two possibilities. First, the parser could apply Principle C at antecedent retrieval to exclude the wh-phrase on the basis of the c-command relation between its gap and the pronoun. Alternatively, retrieval might ignore any phrases that do not occupy an Argument position. Experiment 2 distinguished between these two possibilities by testing antecedent retrieval under Weak Crossover. In Weak Crossover binding of the pronoun is ruled out by the argument condition, but not Principle C. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that antecedent retrieval accesses matching wh-phrases in Weak Crossover configurations. On the basis of these findings we conclude that the parser can make rapid use of Principle C and c-command information to constrain retrieval. We discuss how our results support a view of antecedent retrieval that integrates inferences made over unseen syntactic structure into constraints on backward-looking processes like memory retrieval. PMID:28936483

Grammar-Supported 3d Indoor Reconstruction from Point Clouds for As-Built Bim

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Becker, S.; Peter, M.; Fritsch, D.

2015-03-01

The paper presents a grammar-based approach for the robust automatic reconstruction of 3D interiors from raw point clouds. The core of the approach is a 3D indoor grammar which is an extension of our previously published grammar concept for the modeling of 2D floor plans. The grammar allows for the modeling of buildings whose horizontal, continuous floors are traversed by hallways providing access to the rooms as it is the case for most office buildings or public buildings like schools, hospitals or hotels. The grammar is designed in such way that it can be embedded in an iterative automatic learning process providing a seamless transition from LOD3 to LOD4 building models. Starting from an initial low-level grammar, automatically derived from the window representations of an available LOD3 building model, hypotheses about indoor geometries can be generated. The hypothesized indoor geometries are checked against observation data - here 3D point clouds - collected in the interior of the building. The verified and accepted geometries form the basis for an automatic update of the initial grammar. By this, the knowledge content of the initial grammar is enriched, leading to a grammar with increased quality. This higher-level grammar can then be applied to predict realistic geometries to building parts where only sparse observation data are available. Thus, our approach allows for the robust generation of complete 3D indoor models whose quality can be improved continuously as soon as new observation data are fed into the grammar-based reconstruction process. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated based on a real-world example.

Some Semantic Structures for Representing English Meanings.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simmons, R. F.

This paper defines the structure of a semantic network for use in representing discourse and lexical meanings. The structure is designed to represent underlying semantic meanings that, with a lexicon and a grammar, can generate natural-language sentences in a linguistically justifiable manner. The semantics of natural English can be defined as a…

Drawing the Line between Constituent Structure and Coherence Relations in Visual Narratives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohn, Neil; Bender, Patrick

2017-01-01

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the…

Ellipsis as a Diagnostic Tool of Feature Strength and the Syntactic Structure of Ilocano

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Michael Don

2009-01-01

This dissertation examines Ilocano, an Austronesian Filipino language, within the Minimalist Framework, in an effort to tease apart the general syntactic properties of the language. I show that Ilocano underlying structure can easily be captured within the standard syntactic structures proposed for languages generally (Universal Grammar). In my…

Strong Generative Capacity and the Empirical Base of Linguistic Theory

PubMed Central

Ott, Dennis

2017-01-01

This Perspective traces the evolution of certain central notions in the theory of Generative Grammar (GG). The founding documents of the field suggested a relation between the grammar, construed as recursively enumerating an infinite set of sentences, and the idealized native speaker that was essentially equivalent to the relation between a formal language (a set of well-formed formulas) and an automaton that recognizes strings as belonging to the language or not. But this early view was later abandoned, when the focus of the field shifted to the grammar's strong generative capacity as recursive generation of hierarchically structured objects as opposed to strings. The grammar is now no longer seen as specifying a set of well-formed expressions and in fact necessarily constructs expressions of any degree of intuitive “acceptability.” The field of GG, however, has not sufficiently acknowledged the significance of this shift in perspective, as evidenced by the fact that (informal and experimentally-controlled) observations about string acceptability continue to be treated as bona fide data and generalizations for the theory of GG. The focus on strong generative capacity, it is argued, requires a new discussion of what constitutes valid empirical evidence for GG beyond observations pertaining to weak generation. PMID:28983268

Sleep Promotes the Extraction of Grammatical Rules

PubMed Central

Nieuwenhuis, Ingrid L. C.; Folia, Vasiliki; Forkstam, Christian; Jensen, Ole; Petersson, Karl Magnus

2013-01-01

Grammar acquisition is a high level cognitive function that requires the extraction of complex rules. While it has been proposed that offline time might benefit this type of rule extraction, this remains to be tested. Here, we addressed this question using an artificial grammar learning paradigm. During a short-term memory cover task, eighty-one human participants were exposed to letter sequences generated according to an unknown artificial grammar. Following a time delay of 15 min, 12 h (wake or sleep) or 24 h, participants classified novel test sequences as Grammatical or Non-Grammatical. Previous behavioral and functional neuroimaging work has shown that classification can be guided by two distinct underlying processes: (1) the holistic abstraction of the underlying grammar rules and (2) the detection of sequence chunks that appear at varying frequencies during exposure. Here, we show that classification performance improved after sleep. Moreover, this improvement was due to an enhancement of rule abstraction, while the effect of chunk frequency was unaltered by sleep. These findings suggest that sleep plays a critical role in extracting complex structure from separate but related items during integrative memory processing. Our findings stress the importance of alternating periods of learning with sleep in settings in which complex information must be acquired. PMID:23755173

Extracting noun phrases for all of MEDLINE.

PubMed Central

Bennett, N. A.; He, Q.; Powell, K.; Schatz, B. R.

1999-01-01

A natural language parser that could extract noun phrases for all medical texts would be of great utility in analyzing content for information retrieval. We discuss the extraction of noun phrases from MEDLINE, using a general parser not tuned specifically for any medical domain. The noun phrase extractor is made up of three modules: tokenization; part-of-speech tagging; noun phrase identification. Using our program, we extracted noun phrases from the entire MEDLINE collection, encompassing 9.3 million abstracts. Over 270 million noun phrases were generated, of which 45 million were unique. The quality of these phrases was evaluated by examining all phrases from a sample collection of abstracts. The precision and recall of the phrases from our general parser compared favorably with those from three other parsers we had previously evaluated. We are continuing to improve our parser and evaluate our claim that a generic parser can effectively extract all the different phrases across the entire medical literature. PMID:10566444

Applying A Formal Language of Command and Control For Interoperability Between Systems

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-05-21

Initially, it must be determined which type of grammar is to be used. The Chomsky hierarchy specifies that grammars can be Type 0 (unrestricted...future research. 2. Development of Formal Grammars In his book “Syntactic Structures” [5], published in 1957, Noam Chomsky answered the question...be finite because recursion is allowed. 2.2 Types of Grammars Chomsky defines four types of grammar . They are ordered within what is

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading

PubMed Central

Pratt, Elizabeth; Fernández, Eva M.

2016-01-01

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish–English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry—cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing—in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats (whole sentence, word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase), rated each item for grammaticality, and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicated that while overall, message comprehension was prioritized over subject-verb agreement computation, presentation format differentially affected both measures in the L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody onto text (phrase-by-phrase presentation) enhanced performance in agreement processing, while disrupting prosodic projection via word-by-word presentation decreased comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants, however, phrase-by-phrase presentation was not significantly beneficial for agreement processing, and additionally resulted in lower comprehension accuracy. These differences point to a significant role of prosodic phrasing during agreement processing in both L1 and L2 speakers, additionally suggesting that it may contribute to a cue-based retrieval agreement model, either acting as a cue directly, or otherwise scaffolding the retrieval process. The discussion and results presented provide support both for a cue-based retrieval mechanism in agreement, and the function of prosody within such a mechanism, adding further insight into the interaction of retrieval processes, cognitive task load, and the role of implicit prosody. PMID:28018264

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading.

PubMed

Pratt, Elizabeth; Fernández, Eva M

2016-01-01

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish-English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry-cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing-in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats (whole sentence, word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase), rated each item for grammaticality, and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicated that while overall, message comprehension was prioritized over subject-verb agreement computation, presentation format differentially affected both measures in the L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody onto text (phrase-by-phrase presentation) enhanced performance in agreement processing, while disrupting prosodic projection via word-by-word presentation decreased comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants, however, phrase-by-phrase presentation was not significantly beneficial for agreement processing, and additionally resulted in lower comprehension accuracy. These differences point to a significant role of prosodic phrasing during agreement processing in both L1 and L2 speakers, additionally suggesting that it may contribute to a cue-based retrieval agreement model, either acting as a cue directly, or otherwise scaffolding the retrieval process. The discussion and results presented provide support both for a cue-based retrieval mechanism in agreement, and the function of prosody within such a mechanism, adding further insight into the interaction of retrieval processes, cognitive task load, and the role of implicit prosody.

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

PubMed Central

Dąbrowska, Ewa

2015-01-01

Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge on the same grammar in spite of the fact that they are exposed to different input), and poverty of the stimulus (children know things about language which they could not have learned from the input available to them). I argue that these arguments are based on premises which are either false or unsubstantiated. Languages differ from each other in profound ways, and there are very few true universals, so the fundamental crosslinguistic fact that needs explaining is diversity, not universality. A number of recent studies have demonstrated the existence of considerable differences in adult native speakers’ knowledge of the grammar of their language, including aspects of inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and a variety of more complex constructions, so learners do not in fact converge on the same grammar. Finally, the poverty of the stimulus argument presupposes that children acquire linguistic representations of the kind postulated by generative grammarians; constructionist grammars such as those proposed by Tomasello, Goldberg and others can be learned from the input. We are the only species that has language, so there must be something unique about humans that makes language learning possible. The extent of crosslinguistic diversity and the considerable individual differences in the rate, style and outcome of acquisition suggest that it is more promising to think in terms of a language-making capacity, i.e., a set of domain-general abilities, rather than an innate body of knowledge about the structural properties of the target system. PMID:26157406

Language and Cognition Interaction Neural Mechanisms

PubMed Central

Perlovsky, Leonid

2011-01-01

How language and cognition interact in thinking? Is language just used for communication of completed thoughts, or is it fundamental for thinking? Existing approaches have not led to a computational theory. We develop a hypothesis that language and cognition are two separate but closely interacting mechanisms. Language accumulates cultural wisdom; cognition develops mental representations modeling surrounding world and adapts cultural knowledge to concrete circumstances of life. Language is acquired from surrounding language “ready-made” and therefore can be acquired early in life. This early acquisition of language in childhood encompasses the entire hierarchy from sounds to words, to phrases, and to highest concepts existing in culture. Cognition is developed from experience. Yet cognition cannot be acquired from experience alone; language is a necessary intermediary, a “teacher.” A mathematical model is developed; it overcomes previous difficulties and leads to a computational theory. This model is consistent with Arbib's “language prewired brain” built on top of mirror neuron system. It models recent neuroimaging data about cognition, remaining unnoticed by other theories. A number of properties of language and cognition are explained, which previously seemed mysterious, including influence of language grammar on cultural evolution, which may explain specifics of English and Arabic cultures. PMID:21876687

Generic Detection of Register Realignment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ďurfina, Lukáš; Kolář, Dušan

2011-09-01

The register realignment is a method of binary obfuscation and it is used by malware writers. The paper introduces the method how register realignment can be recognized by analysis based on the scattered context grammars. Such an analysis includes exploration of bytes affected by realignment, finding new valid values for them, building the scattered context grammar and parse an obfuscated code by this grammar. The created grammar has LL property--an ability for parsing by this type of grammar.

Generic Detection of Register Realignment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Durfina, Lukáš; Kolář, Dušan

2011-09-01

The register realignment is a method of binary obfuscation and it is used by malware writers. The paper introduces the method how register realignment can be recognized by analysis based on the scattered context grammars. Such an analysis includes exploration of bytes affected by realignment, finding new valid values for them, building the scattered context grammar and parse an obfuscated code by this grammar. The created grammar has LL property—an ability for parsing by this type of grammar.

Parse Completion: A Study of an Inductive Domain

DTIC Science & Technology

1987-07-01

for Right Linear and Chomsky Normal Form grammars in detail. These two grammar classes were chosen as they can capture the classes of Regular and...Linear and Chomsky Normal Form grammars the allowed RHS formats could be divided into those which introduced new non-terminals and those which reused... Chomsky Normal Form grammars can both be shown to define a partial order over the set of grammars consistent with the examples. (Note that this is a

Effects of grammar instruction and fluency training on the learning of the and a by native speakers of japanese

PubMed Central

Shimamune, Satoru; Jitsumori, Masako

1999-01-01

In a computer-assisted sentence completion task, the effects of grammar instruction and fluency training on learning the use of the definite and indefinite articles of English were examined. Forty-eight native Japanese-speaking students were assigned to four groups: with grammar/accuracy (G/A), without grammar/accuracy (N/A), with grammar/fluency (G/F), and without grammar/fluency (N/F). In the G/A and N/A groups, training continued until performance reached 100% accuracy (accuracy criterion). In the G/F and N/F groups, training continued until 100% accuracy was reached and the correct responses were made at a high speed (fluency criterion). Grammar instruction was given to participants in the G/A and G/F groups but not to those in the N/A and N/F groups. Generalization to new sentences was tested immediately after reaching the required criterion. High levels of generalization occurred, regardless of the type of mastery criterion and whether the grammar instruction was given. Retention tests were conducted 4, 6, and 8 weeks after training. Fluency training effectively improved retention of the performance attained without the grammar instruction. This effect was diminished when grammar instruction was given during training. Learning grammatical rules was not necessary for the generalized use of appropriate definite and indefinite articles or for the maintenance of the performance attained through fluency training. PMID:22477154

Performance of children with developmental dyslexia on high and low topological entropy artificial grammar learning task.

PubMed

Katan, Pesia; Kahta, Shani; Sasson, Ayelet; Schiff, Rachel

2017-07-01

Graph complexity as measured by topological entropy has been previously shown to affect performance on artificial grammar learning tasks among typically developing children. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of graph complexity on implicit sequential learning among children with developmental dyslexia. Our goal was to determine whether children's performance depends on the complexity level of the grammar system learned. We conducted two artificial grammar learning experiments that compared performance of children with developmental dyslexia with that of age- and reading level-matched controls. Experiment 1 was a high topological entropy artificial grammar learning task that aimed to establish implicit learning phenomena in children with developmental dyslexia using previously published experimental conditions. Experiment 2 is a lower topological entropy variant of that task. Results indicated that given a high topological entropy grammar system, children with developmental dyslexia who were similar to the reading age-matched control group had substantial difficulty in performing the task as compared to typically developing children, who exhibited intact implicit learning of the grammar. On the other hand, when tested on a lower topological entropy grammar system, all groups performed above chance level, indicating that children with developmental dyslexia were able to identify rules from a given grammar system. The results reinforced the significance of graph complexity when experimenting with artificial grammar learning tasks, particularly with dyslexic participants.

The Necessity of Grammar Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Fengjuan

2010-01-01

Mastering grammar is the foundation in the proficiency of a language. Grammar teaching is also an essential part of language teaching. However, with the communicative approach was introduced into China, many foreign language teachers gradually make little of grammar teaching. In terms of the theory of linguistics, this paper specifically explores…

Overcoming the Grammar Deficit: The Role of Information Technology in Teaching German Grammar to Undergraduates.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hall, Christopher

1998-01-01

Examines how application of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and information technology can be used to overcome "grammar deficit" seen in many British undergraduate German students. A combination of explicit, implicit, and exploratory grammar teaching approaches uses diverse resources, including word processing packages,…

Teaching Grammar: What Really Works

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benjamin, Amy; Berger, Joan

2010-01-01

In this book, the authors share procedures for teaching grammar effectively and dynamically, in ways that appeal to students and teachers alike. Ideal for teachers just beginning their work in grammar instruction, this book includes day-by-day units and reproducibles to help them embed grammar lessons into writing instruction. Using visuals,…

Improved identification of noun phrases in clinical radiology reports using a high-performance statistical natural language parser augmented with the UMLS specialist lexicon.

PubMed

Huang, Yang; Lowe, Henry J; Klein, Dan; Cucina, Russell J

2005-01-01

The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a method of extracting noun phrases with full phrase structures from a set of clinical radiology reports using natural language processing (NLP) and to investigate the effects of using the UMLS(R) Specialist Lexicon to improve noun phrase identification within clinical radiology documents. The noun phrase identification (NPI) module is composed of a sentence boundary detector, a statistical natural language parser trained on a nonmedical domain, and a noun phrase (NP) tagger. The NPI module processed a set of 100 XML-represented clinical radiology reports in Health Level 7 (HL7)(R) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)-compatible format. Computed output was compared with manual markups made by four physicians and one author for maximal (longest) NP and those made by one author for base (simple) NP, respectively. An extended lexicon of biomedical terms was created from the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and used to improve NPI performance. The test set was 50 randomly selected reports. The sentence boundary detector achieved 99.0% precision and 98.6% recall. The overall maximal NPI precision and recall were 78.9% and 81.5% before using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and 82.1% and 84.6% after. The overall base NPI precision and recall were 88.2% and 86.8% before using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and 93.1% and 92.6% after, reducing false-positives by 31.1% and false-negatives by 34.3%. The sentence boundary detector performs excellently. After the adaptation using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, the statistical parser's NPI performance on radiology reports increased to levels comparable to the parser's native performance in its newswire training domain and to that reported by other researchers in the general nonmedical domain.

CORECLUST: identification of the conserved CRM grammar together with prediction of gene regulation.

PubMed

Nikulova, Anna A; Favorov, Alexander V; Sutormin, Roman A; Makeev, Vsevolod J; Mironov, Andrey A

2012-07-01

Identification of transcriptional regulatory regions and tracing their internal organization are important for understanding the eukaryotic cell machinery. Cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) of higher eukaryotes are believed to possess a regulatory 'grammar', or preferred arrangement of binding sites, that is crucial for proper regulation and thus tends to be evolutionarily conserved. Here, we present a method CORECLUST (COnservative REgulatory CLUster STructure) that predicts CRMs based on a set of positional weight matrices. Given regulatory regions of orthologous and/or co-regulated genes, CORECLUST constructs a CRM model by revealing the conserved rules that describe the relative location of binding sites. The constructed model may be consequently used for the genome-wide prediction of similar CRMs, and thus detection of co-regulated genes, and for the investigation of the regulatory grammar of the system. Compared with related methods, CORECLUST shows better performance at identification of CRMs conferring muscle-specific gene expression in vertebrates and early-developmental CRMs in Drosophila.

The growth of language: Universal Grammar, experience, and principles of computation.

PubMed

Yang, Charles; Crain, Stephen; Berwick, Robert C; Chomsky, Noam; Bolhuis, Johan J

2017-10-01

Human infants develop language remarkably rapidly and without overt instruction. We argue that the distinctive ontogenesis of child language arises from the interplay of three factors: domain-specific principles of language (Universal Grammar), external experience, and properties of non-linguistic domains of cognition including general learning mechanisms and principles of efficient computation. We review developmental evidence that children make use of hierarchically composed structures ('Merge') from the earliest stages and at all levels of linguistic organization. At the same time, longitudinal trajectories of development show sensitivity to the quantity of specific patterns in the input, which suggests the use of probabilistic processes as well as inductive learning mechanisms that are suitable for the psychological constraints on language acquisition. By considering the place of language in human biology and evolution, we propose an approach that integrates principles from Universal Grammar and constraints from other domains of cognition. We outline some initial results of this approach as well as challenges for future research. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Statistical learning and the challenge of syntax: Beyond finite state automata

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Elman, Jeff

2003-10-01

Over the past decade, it has been clear that even very young infants are sensitive to the statistical structure of language input presented to them, and use the distributional regularities to induce simple grammars. But can such statistically-driven learning also explain the acquisition of more complex grammar, particularly when the grammar includes recursion? Recent claims (e.g., Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, 2002) have suggested that the answer is no, and that at least recursion must be an innate capacity of the human language acquisition device. In this talk evidence will be presented that indicates that, in fact, statistically-driven learning (embodied in recurrent neural networks) can indeed enable the learning of complex grammatical patterns, including those that involve recursion. When the results are generalized to idealized machines, it is found that the networks are at least equivalent to Push Down Automata. Perhaps more interestingly, with limited and finite resources (such as are presumed to exist in the human brain) these systems demonstrate patterns of performance that resemble those in humans.

A framework for the comparative study of language.

PubMed

Uriagereka, Juan; Reggia, James A; Wilkinson, Gerald S

2013-07-18

Comparative studies of language are difficult because few language precursors are recognized. In this paper we propose a framework for designing experiments that test for structural and semantic patterns indicative of simple or complex grammars as originally described by Chomsky. We argue that a key issue is whether animals can recognize full recursion, which is the hallmark of context-free grammar. We discuss limitations of recent experiments that have attempted to address this issue, and point out that experiments aimed at detecting patterns that follow a Fibonacci series have advantages over other artificial context-free grammars. We also argue that experiments using complex sequences of behaviors could, in principle, provide evidence for fully recursive thought. Some of these ideas could also be approached using artificial life simulations, which have the potential to reveal the types of evolutionary transitions that could occur over time. Because the framework we propose has specific memory and computational requirements, future experiments could target candidate genes with the goal of revealing the genetic underpinnings of complex cognition.

Speech-Enabled Interfaces for Travel Information Systems with Large Grammars

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhao, Baoli; Allen, Tony; Bargiela, Andrzej

This paper introduces three grammar-segmentation methods capable of handling the large grammar issues associated with producing a real-time speech-enabled VXML bus travel application for London. Large grammars tend to produce relatively slow recognition interfaces and this work shows how this limitation can be successfully addressed. Comparative experimental results show that the novel last-word recognition based grammar segmentation method described here achieves an optimal balance between recognition rate, speed of processing and naturalness of interaction.

The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension.

PubMed

Thornton, R; MacDonald, M C; Arnold, J E

2000-03-01

Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.

Drawing the line between constituent structure and coherence relations in visual narratives

PubMed Central

Cohn, Neil; Bender, Patrick

2016-01-01

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of Visual Narrative Grammar posits that hierarchic “grammatical” structures operate at the discourse level using categorical roles for images, which may or may not co-occur with shifts in coherence. We therefore examined the relationship between narrative structure and coherence shifts in the segmentation of visual narrative sequences using a “segmentation task” where participants drew lines between images in order to divide them into sub-episodes. We used regressions to analyze the influence of the expected constituent structure boundary, narrative categories, and semantic coherence relationships on the segmentation of visual narrative sequences. Narrative categories were a stronger predictor of segmentation than linear coherence relationships between panels, though both influenced participants’ divisions. Altogether, these results support the theory that meaningful sequential images use a narrative grammar that extends above and beyond linear semantic shifts between discourse units. PMID:27709982

Drawing the line between constituent structure and coherence relations in visual narratives.

PubMed

Cohn, Neil; Bender, Patrick

2017-02-01

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the discourse level using categorical roles for images, which may or may not co-occur with shifts in coherence. We therefore examined the relationship between narrative structure and coherence shifts in the segmentation of visual narrative sequences using a "segmentation task" where participants drew lines between images in order to divide them into subepisodes. We used regressions to analyze the influence of the expected constituent structure boundary, narrative categories, and semantic coherence relationships on the segmentation of visual narrative sequences. Narrative categories were a stronger predictor of segmentation than linear coherence relationships between panels, though both influenced participants' divisions. Altogether, these results support the theory that meaningful sequential images use a narrative grammar that extends above and beyond linear semantic shifts between discourse units. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

"I'll Take Commas for $200": An Instructional Intervention Using Games to Help Students Master Grammar Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bullard, Sue Burzynski; Anderson, Nancy

2014-01-01

Effective writing requires mastering grammar. For journalists, this mastery is critical because research shows poor grammar erodes media credibility. College writing instructors say students do not understand basic grammar concepts, and greater numbers of students are enrolling in remedial writing classes. This quasi-experimental mixed methods…

Teacher to Teacher: What Is Your Most Compelling Reason for Teaching Grammar?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

English Journal, 2006

2006-01-01

This article presents compelling reasons from teachers why they teach grammar. Amy Benjamin from Hendrick Hudson High School says, she teaches grammar for two reasons. The first is that grammar instruction gives students metalanguage, "language about language." The second reason is that students are interested in language--its changes and…

Reframing the English Grammar Schools Debate

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morris, Rebecca; Perry, Thomas

2017-01-01

In October 2015 the Department for Education (DfE) permitted a grammar school in Tonbridge, Kent, to open up an annexe in Sevenoaks, 10 miles away. Amidst claims that the annexe was essentially a new grammar school, the decision reignited an old debate about the value of academically-selective "grammar" schools in England. The intensity…

Pupils' Word Choices and the Teaching of Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wyse, Dominic

2006-01-01

The idea that formal grammar teaching leads to improvements in school pupils' writing has been a popular one. However, the robust and extensive evidence base shows that this is not the case. Despite this, policy initiatives have continued to suggest that grammar teaching does improve pupils' writing: the "Grammar for Writing" resource is…

SPECIFICATION AND UTILIZATION OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

LIEBERMAN, D.; AND OTHERS

SCIENTIFIC REPORT NO. 1 OF THIS PROJECT CONTAINS FOUR PARTS. THE FIRST, BY P. ROSENBAUM AND D. LOCHAK, PRESENTS AND EXPLAINS THE "IBM CORE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH" AND GIVES A SET OF 66 DERIVATIONS CONSTRUCTED IN TERMS OF THE CORE GRAMMAR. PART II, "DESIGN OF A GRAMMAR TESTER" BY D. LIEBERMAN, SUMMARIZES THE DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS OF…

Impact of Consciousness-Raising Activities on Young English Language Learners' Grammar Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fatemipour, Hamidreza; Hemmati, Shiva

2015-01-01

Grammar Consciousness-Raising (GCR) is an approach to teaching of grammar which learners instead of being taught the given rules, experience language data. The data challenge them to rethink, restructure their existing mental grammar and construct an explicit rule to describe the grammatical feature which the data illustrate (Ellis, 2002). And…

Teaching the Topography of Gretel Ehrlich's Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gessell, Donna A.

When writing, few students have any concept that word placement affects the content of their writing. They seldom rework their papers at the sentence level in order to assure that their grammar reflects and enhances their content. Recognizing the relationship of grammar to meaning, composition researchers are reasserting the place of grammar in…

Foreign-Language Grammar Instruction via the Mother Tongue

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paradowski, Michal B.

2007-01-01

The chapter reports the results of a controlled experiment which suggest that foreign-language grammar instruction that forges explicit connections with the grammar of the students' mother tongue aids learning, at least as far as students' application of discrete-point grammar rules is concerned. (Contains 2 figures and 3 notes.) [This document…

Language Practice with Multimedia Supported Web-Based Grammar Revision Material

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baturay, Meltem Huri; Daloglu, Aysegul; Yildirim, Soner

2010-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the perceptions of elementary-level English language learners towards web-based, multimedia-annotated grammar learning. WEBGRAM, a system designed to provide supplementary web-based grammar revision material, uses audio-visual aids to enrich the contextual presentation of grammar and allows learners to…

Grammar Games

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Kim

2004-01-01

The mere mention of a grammar lesson can set students' eyes rolling. The fun activities described in this article can turn those blank looks into smiles. Here, the author presents grammar games namely: (1) noun tennis; (2) the minister's cat; (3) kids take action; (4) what's my adverb?; (5) and then I saw...; and (6) grammar sing-along.

A Comparative Study on the Effectiveness of Two Song-Teaching Methods: Holistic vs. Phrase-by-Phrase

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Persellin, Diane; Bateman, Laura

2009-01-01

The purpose of our study was to compare the effectiveness of two song-teaching methods: holistic and phrase-by-phrase. Thirty-two first-grade children (n = 32) from two music classes in an urban elementary school were taught two folksongs. The first class (n = 16) was taught one song through the phrase-by-phrase method and another song through the…

Roles and Relations in Language Deep Structure. Studies in Language Education, Report No. 9.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Donnell, Roy C.

This essay discusses a theory of grammar which incorporated Chomsky's distinction between deep and surface structure and accepts Fillmore's proposal to exclude such subject and concepts as direct object from the base structure. While recognizing the need for specifying an underlying set of caselike relations, it is proposed that this need can best…

The Structure-Preserving Constraint and the Universal Base Hypothesis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kravif, Diane

1973-01-01

Revised version of a paper supported by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. The universal base hypothesis states that all natural languages utilize the same base component in their transformational grammars. (DD)

Communicative Skills Acquisition: A Recommended Resource.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lang, Margaret

Communication in written and oral discourse can be enhanced by cohesive devices, linguistic structures independent of grammar. One cohesive device is that of enumeration or listing. In French, the means of expressing enumeration include such structures as: "avant...puis.../d'une part...d'autre part.../enfin.../ensuite..." and in idiolectal use,…

Universal Grammar, Crosslinguistic Variation and Second Language Acquisition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Lydia

2012-01-01

According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is…

Explicit Grammar Rules and L2 Acquisition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scheffler, Pawel; Cinciala, Marcin

2011-01-01

This article reports an empirical study that examines to what extent learners can identify and understand the grammatical structures they produce when they speak spontaneously. In the study, 20 upper-intermediate Polish learners of English were interviewed in English by the researchers. The structures used accurately by each learner were isolated…

78 FR 13544 - Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Acquisition of Tents and Other Temporary...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-02-28

... acquisition of domestic tents to include the structural components of tents, applicable to acquisitions that... rule. A. Tents and Structural Components of Tents Question: Does the term ``structural components... 225.7002-1(a)(3) and 252.225-7012(b)(3) ensures clarity that the phrase ``structural components'' only...

Structured Natural-Language Descriptions for Semantic Content Retrieval of Visual Materials.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tam, A. M.; Leung, C. H. C.

2001-01-01

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

The Construction of Semantic Memory: Grammar-Based Representations Learned from Relational Episodic Information

PubMed Central

Battaglia, Francesco P.; Pennartz, Cyriel M. A.

2011-01-01

After acquisition, memories underlie a process of consolidation, making them more resistant to interference and brain injury. Memory consolidation involves systems-level interactions, most importantly between the hippocampus and associated structures, which takes part in the initial encoding of memory, and the neocortex, which supports long-term storage. This dichotomy parallels the contrast between episodic memory (tied to the hippocampal formation), collecting an autobiographical stream of experiences, and semantic memory, a repertoire of facts and statistical regularities about the world, involving the neocortex at large. Experimental evidence points to a gradual transformation of memories, following encoding, from an episodic to a semantic character. This may require an exchange of information between different memory modules during inactive periods. We propose a theory for such interactions and for the formation of semantic memory, in which episodic memory is encoded as relational data. Semantic memory is modeled as a modified stochastic grammar, which learns to parse episodic configurations expressed as an association matrix. The grammar produces tree-like representations of episodes, describing the relationships between its main constituents at multiple levels of categorization, based on its current knowledge of world regularities. These regularities are learned by the grammar from episodic memory information, through an expectation-maximization procedure, analogous to the inside–outside algorithm for stochastic context-free grammars. We propose that a Monte-Carlo sampling version of this algorithm can be mapped on the dynamics of “sleep replay” of previously acquired information in the hippocampus and neocortex. We propose that the model can reproduce several properties of semantic memory such as decontextualization, top-down processing, and creation of schemata. PMID:21887143

Computation-Friendly Shape Grammars with Application to Determining the Interior Layout of Buildings from Image Data

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yue, Kui

2009-01-01

A shape grammar is a formalism that has been widely applied, in many different fields, to analyzing designs. Computer implementation of a shape grammar interpreter is vital to both research and application. However, implementing a shape grammar interpreter is hard, especially for parametric shapes defined by open terms. This dissertation…

English Grammar in American Schools before 1850. Bulletin, 1921, No. 12

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lyman, Rollo LaVerne

1922-01-01

English grammar, as a formal subject, distinct from other branches of instruction in the vernacular, made but sporadic appearances in the American schools before 1775. After the Revolution its rise was extremely rapid. English grammar gained momentum as the hold of Latin grammar weakened, and by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth…

The Association between Expressive Grammar Intervention and Social and Emergent Literacy Outcomes for Preschoolers with SLI

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Washington, Karla N.

2013-01-01

Purpose: To determine whether (a) expressive grammar intervention facilitated social and emergent literacy outcomes better than no intervention and (b) expressive grammar gains and/or initial expressive grammar level predicted social and emergent literacy outcomes. Method: This investigation was a follow-up to a recently published study exploring…

Learning English Grammar with a Corpus: Experimenting with Concordancing in a University Grammar Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vannestal, Maria Estling; Lindquist, Hans

2007-01-01

Corpora have been used for pedagogical purposes for more than two decades but empirical studies are relatively rare, particularly in the context of grammar teaching. The present study focuses on students' attitudes towards grammar and how these attitudes are affected by the introduction of concordancing. The principal aims of the project were to…

Grammar Making a Comeback in Composition Teaching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCleary, Bill

1995-01-01

This journal article focuses on the return of grammar in composition teaching. After about 2 decades of virtual banishment from the higher reaches of English teaching theory, grammar has returned as a subject of serious discussion. This is the result in part of a new assertiveness by a group of people who never lost interest in grammar as part of…

Direct versus Indirect Explicit Methods of Enhancing EFL Students' English Grammatical Competence: A Concept Checking-Based Consciousness-Raising Tasks Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dang, Trang Thi Doan; Nguyen, Huong Thu

2013-01-01

Two approaches to grammar instruction are often discussed in the ESL literature: direct explicit grammar instruction (DEGI) (deduction) and indirect explicit grammar instruction (IEGI) (induction). This study aims to explore the effects of indirect explicit grammar instruction on EFL learners' mastery of English tenses. Ninety-four…

The Philosophical Significance of Universal Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hinzen, Wolfram

2012-01-01

Throughout its long history, the project of a science of grammar has always been an inherently philosophical one, in which the study of grammar was taken to have special epistemological significance. I ask why 20th and 21st century inquiry into Universal Grammar (UG) has largely lost this dimension, a fact that I argue is partially responsible for…

A Comparative Study on Beliefs of Grammar Teaching between High School English Teachers and Students in China

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deng, Fangfang; Lin, Yuewu

2016-01-01

Grammar is "a system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence" (Brown 1994) which can facilitate the acquisition of a foreign language and is conducive for cultivating comprehensive language competence. Most teachers regard grammar as a frame of English learning. The grammar teaching beliefs…

Analysis of humpback whale sounds in shallow waters of the Southeastern Arabian Sea: An indication of breeding habitat.

PubMed

Mahanty, Madan M; Latha, G; Thirunavukkarasu, A

2015-06-01

The primary objective of this work was to present the acoustical identification of humpback whales, detected by using an autonomous ambient noise measurement system, deployed in the shallow waters of the Southeastern Arabian Sea (SEAS) during the period January to May 2011. Seven types of sounds were detected. These were characteristically upsweeps and downsweeps along with harmonics. Sounds produced repeatedly in a specific pattern were referred to as phrases (PQRS and ABC). Repeated phrases in a particular pattern were referred to as themes, and from the spectrographic analysis, two themes (I and II) were identified. The variation in the acoustic characteristics such as fundamental frequency, range, duration of the sound unit, and the structure of the phrases and themes are discussed. Sound units were recorded from mid-January to mid-March, with a peak in February, when the mean SST is approx. 28 degree C, and no presence was recorded after mid-March. The temporal and thematic structures strongly determine the functions of the humpback whale song form. Given the use of song in the SEAS, this area is possibly used as an active breeding habitat by humpback whales during the winter season.

Identifying well-formed biomedical phrases in MEDLINE® text.

PubMed

Kim, Won; Yeganova, Lana; Comeau, Donald C; Wilbur, W John

2012-12-01

In the modern world people frequently interact with retrieval systems to satisfy their information needs. Humanly understandable well-formed phrases represent a crucial interface between humans and the web, and the ability to index and search with such phrases is beneficial for human-web interactions. In this paper we consider the problem of identifying humanly understandable, well formed, and high quality biomedical phrases in MEDLINE documents. The main approaches used previously for detecting such phrases are syntactic, statistical, and a hybrid approach combining these two. In this paper we propose a supervised learning approach for identifying high quality phrases. First we obtain a set of known well-formed useful phrases from an existing source and label these phrases as positive. We then extract from MEDLINE a large set of multiword strings that do not contain stop words or punctuation. We believe this unlabeled set contains many well-formed phrases. Our goal is to identify these additional high quality phrases. We examine various feature combinations and several machine learning strategies designed to solve this problem. A proper choice of machine learning methods and features identifies in the large collection strings that are likely to be high quality phrases. We evaluate our approach by making human judgments on multiword strings extracted from MEDLINE using our methods. We find that over 85% of such extracted phrase candidates are humanly judged to be of high quality. Published by Elsevier Inc.

A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Generic Noun Phrases in English and Mandarin.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gelman, Susan A.; Tardif, Twila

1998-01-01

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales

PubMed Central

Garland, Ellen C.; Rendell, Luke; Lamoni, Luca; Poole, M. Michael; Noad, Michael J.

2017-01-01

Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before an individual totally adopts the new song. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 9,300 phrases recorded during two song revolutions across the South Pacific Ocean, allowing fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. In hybrid songs the current and new songs were spliced together in two specific ways: (i) singers placed a single hybrid phrase, in which content from both songs were combined, between the two song types when transitioning from one to the other, and/or (ii) singers spliced complete themes from the revolutionary song into the current song. Sequence analysis indicated that both processes were governed by structural similarity rules. Hybrid phrases or theme substitutions occurred at points in the songs where both songs contained “similar sounds arranged in a similar pattern.” Songs appear to be learned as segments (themes/phrase types), akin to birdsong and human language acquisition, and these can be combined in predictable ways if the underlying structural pattern is similar. These snapshots of song change provide insights into the mechanisms underlying song learning in humpback whales, and comparative perspectives on the evolution of human language and culture. PMID:28739940

Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales.

PubMed

Garland, Ellen C; Rendell, Luke; Lamoni, Luca; Poole, M Michael; Noad, Michael J

2017-07-24

Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before an individual totally adopts the new song. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 9,300 phrases recorded during two song revolutions across the South Pacific Ocean, allowing fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. In hybrid songs the current and new songs were spliced together in two specific ways: ( i ) singers placed a single hybrid phrase, in which content from both songs were combined, between the two song types when transitioning from one to the other, and/or ( ii ) singers spliced complete themes from the revolutionary song into the current song. Sequence analysis indicated that both processes were governed by structural similarity rules. Hybrid phrases or theme substitutions occurred at points in the songs where both songs contained "similar sounds arranged in a similar pattern." Songs appear to be learned as segments (themes/phrase types), akin to birdsong and human language acquisition, and these can be combined in predictable ways if the underlying structural pattern is similar. These snapshots of song change provide insights into the mechanisms underlying song learning in humpback whales, and comparative perspectives on the evolution of human language and culture.

The Ungrounded Transformer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Noss, R. B.

1972-01-01

Paper presented before the linguistic section of The Siam Society on May 12, 1971. Stresses the need for grammar theories which do not prevent linguists from identifying unusual syntactic structures in the less-studied languages of the world. (VM)

An Exploration of the Relationship between Vietnamese Students' Knowledge of L1 Grammar and Their English Grammar Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tran, Tammie M.

2010-01-01

The problem. This research study explores an important issue in the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and second language acquisition (SLA). Its purpose is to examine the relationship between Vietnamese students' L1 grammar knowledge and their English grammar proficiency. Furthermore, it investigates the extent to…

The "Contextual Contact" in Grammar Microteachings in Teaching English as a Foreign Language: A Teacher Training Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sarigöz, Iskender Hakki

2015-01-01

The grammar microteachings carried out by trainees in teacher education is a critical issue due to the fact that the teaching of grammar has always been a controversial issue throughout the foreign language teaching (FLT) acculturation. There is always some negative reaction to isolated teaching of grammar in communicative language teaching…

Bolivian Indian Grammars: I and II. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matteson, Esther, Ed.

Ten grammars of indigenous Bolivian languages are presented in these two volumes of Bolivian Indian Grammars. The data were gathered and analyzed by members of the Bolivian Branch of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which has carried on linguistic investigations in Bolivia since 1955. The grammars are presented in the tagmemic model of Pike…

Computer Experiments in Transformational Grammar; French I. Department of Computer and Communication Sciences Natural Language Studies No. 3.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morin, Yves Ch.

Described in this paper is the implementation of Querido's French grammar ("Grammaire I, Description transformationelle d'un sous-ensemble du Francais," 1969) on the computer system for transformational grammar at the University of Michigan (Friedman 1969). The purpose was to demonstrate the ease of transcribing a relative formal grammar into the…

Grammar Correction in the Writing Centre: Expectations and Experiences of Monolingual and Multilingual Writers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eckstein, Grant

2016-01-01

Although most writing centres maintain policies against providing grammar correction during writing tutorials, it is undeniable that students expect some level of grammar intervention there. Just how much students expect and receive is a matter of speculation. This article examines the grammar-correction issue by reporting on a survey of L1, L2,…

Indirect Positive Evidence in the Acquisition of a Subset Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwartz, Misha; Goad, Heather

2017-01-01

This article proposes that second language learners can use indirect positive evidence (IPE) to acquire a phonological grammar that is a subset of their L1 grammar. IPE is evidence from errors in the learner's L1 made by native speakers of the learner's L2. It has been assumed that subset grammars may be acquired using direct or indirect negative…

ANTLR Tree Grammar Generator and Extensions

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Craymer, Loring

2005-01-01

A computer program implements two extensions of ANTLR (Another Tool for Language Recognition), which is a set of software tools for translating source codes between different computing languages. ANTLR supports predicated- LL(k) lexer and parser grammars, a notation for annotating parser grammars to direct tree construction, and predicated tree grammars. [ LL(k) signifies left-right, leftmost derivation with k tokens of look-ahead, referring to certain characteristics of a grammar.] One of the extensions is a syntax for tree transformations. The other extension is the generation of tree grammars from annotated parser or input tree grammars. These extensions can simplify the process of generating source-to-source language translators and they make possible an approach, called "polyphase parsing," to translation between computing languages. The typical approach to translator development is to identify high-level semantic constructs such as "expressions," "declarations," and "definitions" as fundamental building blocks in the grammar specification used for language recognition. The polyphase approach is to lump ambiguous syntactic constructs during parsing and then disambiguate the alternatives in subsequent tree transformation passes. Polyphase parsing is believed to be useful for generating efficient recognizers for C++ and other languages that, like C++, have significant ambiguities.

On the Form of a Systemic Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCord, Michael C.

1975-01-01

This paper concerns the theory of systemic grammar developed by Halliday, Hudson and others. It suggests modifications of Hudson's generative version, and the model presented resembles transformational grammar. (CHK)

Phonology without universal grammar

PubMed Central

Archangeli, Diana; Pulleyblank, Douglas

2015-01-01

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the human mind. The articulation patterns of American English rhotics illustrate categorization and systems; the distribution of vowels in Bantu vowel harmony uses frequencies of particular sequences to argue against Universal Grammar and in favor of Emergent Grammar; prefix allomorphy in Esimbi illustrates the Emergent symbolic system integrating phonological and morphological generalizations. The Esimbi case has been treated as an example of phonological opacity in a Universal Grammar account; the Emergent analysis resolves the pattern without opacity concerns. PMID:26388791

Group Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Adams, Karen

2015-01-01

In this article Karen Adams demonstrates how to incorporate group grammar techniques into a classroom activity. In the activity, students practice using the target grammar to do something they naturally enjoy: learning about each other.

It Takes Two: Contrasting Tasks and Contrasting Structures.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eisenstein, Miriam; And Others

1982-01-01

Examines and compares two measures of adult second language learner performance: cued production and elicited imitation. Discusses the utility of each in terms of the contrasting results of the tasks on a carefully delineated area of grammar, namely the related structure of third person simple present and present progressive in WH-questions. (EKN)

Situational Meanings and Functions of Korean Speech Styles

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yoon, Sangseok

2010-01-01

This study aims to provide a perspective which allows honorifics to be seen beyond the frame of politeness and/or formality in social structures. Korean school grammar explains honorifics as linguistic forms that reflect relative social positional difference (e.g., K-H. Lee, 2010), and has assumed that social structure and language use have a…

Protein linguistics - a grammar for modular protein assembly?

PubMed

Gimona, Mario

2006-01-01

The correspondence between biology and linguistics at the level of sequence and lexical inventories, and of structure and syntax, has fuelled attempts to describe genome structure by the rules of formal linguistics. But how can we define protein linguistic rules? And how could compositional semantics improve our understanding of protein organization and functional plasticity?

Structural Facilitation: Mere Exposure Effects for Grammatical Acceptability as Evidence for Syntactic Priming in Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Luka, B.J.; Barsalou, L.W.

2005-01-01

In five experiments, participants first read grammatical sentences of English and later rated identical, structurally similar, or novel sentences for grammatical acceptability. The experimental method was modeled after ''mere exposure'' and artificial grammar learning paradigms in which preference ratings are enhanced by prior experience with the…

THE SOUND PATTERN OF ENGLISH.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

CHOMSKY, NOAM; HALLE, MORRIS

"THE SOUND PATTERN OF ENGLISH" PRESENTS A THEORY OF SOUND STRUCTURE AND A DETAILED ANALYSIS OF THE SOUND STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. IN THE PREFACE TO THIS BOOK THE AUTHORS STATE THAT THEIR "WORK IN THIS AREA HAS REACHED A POINT WHERE THE GENERAL OUTLINES AND MAJOR THEORETICAL PRINCIPLES ARE FAIRLY CLEAR" AND…

Implicit preferences: the role(s) of familiarity in the structural mere exposure effect.

PubMed

Zizak, Diane M; Reber, Arthur S

2004-06-01

In four experiments using an artificial grammar (AG) learning procedure, the authors examined the links between the "classic" mere exposure effect [heightened affect for previously encountered stimulus items (Bornstein, 1989; Zajonc, 1968)] and the "structural" mere exposure effect [greater hedonic appreciation for novel stimuli that conform to an implicitly acquired underlying rule system (Gordon & Holyoak, 1983)]. After learning, participants: (a) classified stimuli according to whether they conformed to the principles of the grammar and, (b) rated them in terms of how much they liked them. In some experiments unusual and unfamiliar symbols were used to instantiate the AG, in others highly familiar characters were used. In all cases participants showed standard AG learning. However, whether the two exposure effects emerged was dependent on symbol familiarity. Symbols with high a priori familiarity produced a structural mere exposure effect. Moderately familiar symbols produced only the classic, but not the structural, mere exposure effect. Highly unfamiliar symbols produced neither exposure effect. Results are discussed in the context of implicit learning theory and implications for a general theory of aesthetics are presented.

The Role of Grammar in the Writing Curriculum: A Review of the Literature

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Myhill, Debra; Watson, Annabel

2014-01-01

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995;…

Comment faire de la grammaire sans trahir le discours: Le cas des exercices grammaticaux (How to Teach Grammar without Betraying Discourse: The Case of Grammatical Exercises).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Calve, Pierre

1994-01-01

Discusses the various functions of grammar in second-language (SL) education, and examines the relationship between discourse and grammar in SL education. Two problems are then examined concerning the relationship between discourse and grammar within grammatical exercises, and with the help of concrete examples, suggestions are offered to better…

Neural Correlates of Phrase Rhythm: An EEG Study of Bipartite vs. Rondo Sonata Form.

PubMed

Martínez-Rodrigo, Arturo; Fernández-Sotos, Alicia; Latorre, José Miguel; Moncho-Bogani, José; Fernández-Caballero, Antonio

2017-01-01

This paper introduces the neural correlates of phrase rhythm. In short, phrase rhythm is the rhythmic aspect of phrase construction and the relationships between phrases. For the sake of establishing the neural correlates, a musical experiment has been designed to induce music-evoked stimuli related to phrase rhythm. Brain activity is monitored through electroencephalography (EEG) by using a brain-computer interface. The power spectral value of each EEG channel is estimated to obtain how power variance distributes as a function of frequency. Our experiment shows statistical differences in theta and alpha bands in the phrase rhythm variations of two classical sonatas, one in bipartite form and the other in rondo form.

Neural Correlates of Phrase Rhythm: An EEG Study of Bipartite vs. Rondo Sonata Form

PubMed Central

Martínez-Rodrigo, Arturo; Fernández-Sotos, Alicia; Latorre, José Miguel; Moncho-Bogani, José; Fernández-Caballero, Antonio

2017-01-01

This paper introduces the neural correlates of phrase rhythm. In short, phrase rhythm is the rhythmic aspect of phrase construction and the relationships between phrases. For the sake of establishing the neural correlates, a musical experiment has been designed to induce music-evoked stimuli related to phrase rhythm. Brain activity is monitored through electroencephalography (EEG) by using a brain–computer interface. The power spectral value of each EEG channel is estimated to obtain how power variance distributes as a function of frequency. Our experiment shows statistical differences in theta and alpha bands in the phrase rhythm variations of two classical sonatas, one in bipartite form and the other in rondo form. PMID:28496406

All Together Now: Concurrent Learning of Multiple Structures in an Artificial Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Romberg, Alexa R.; Saffran, Jenny R.

2013-01-01

Natural languages contain many layers of sequential structure, from the distribution of phonemes within words to the distribution of phrases within utterances. However, most research modeling language acquisition using artificial languages has focused on only one type of distributional structure at a time. In two experiments, we investigated adult…

The Structure of Esperanto.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, John

1980-01-01

Gives a brief description of the features of Esperanto: phonetic spelling, a regular grammar with no exceptions to rules, an international vocabulary with a rule for adding new words, and a word-building system making full use of affixes. (Author/MES)

Improving DHH students' grammar through an individualized software program.

PubMed

Cannon, Joanna E; Easterbrooks, Susan R; Gagné, Phill; Beal-Alvarez, Jennifer

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine if the frequent use of a targeted, computer software grammar instruction program, used as an individualized classroom activity, would influence the comprehension of morphosyntax structures (determiners, tense, and complementizers) in deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) participants who use American Sign Language (ASL). Twenty-six students from an urban day school for the deaf participated in this study. Two hierarchical linear modeling growth curve analyses showed that the influence of LanguageLinks: Syntax Assessment and Intervention (LL) resulted in statistically significant gains in participants' comprehension of morphosyntax structures. Two dependent t tests revealed statistically significant results between the pre- and postintervention assessments on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Norm Referenced. The daily use of LL increased the morphosyntax comprehension of the participants in this study and may be a promising practice for DHH students who use ASL.

Humans Rapidly Learn Grammatical Structure in a New Musical Scale

PubMed Central

Loui, Psyche; Wessel, David L.; Hudson Kam, Carla L.

2010-01-01

Knowledge of musical rules and structures has been reliably demonstrated in humans of different ages, cultures, and levels of music training, and has been linked to our musical preferences. However, how humans acquire knowledge of and develop preferences for music remains unknown. The present study shows that humans rapidly develop knowledge and preferences when given limited exposure to a new musical system. Using a non-traditional, unfamiliar musical scale (Bohlen-Pierce scale), we created finite-state musical grammars from which we composed sets of melodies. After 25–30 min of passive exposure to the melodies, participants showed extensive learning as characterized by recognition, generalization, and sensitivity to the event frequencies in their given grammar, as well as increased preference for repeated melodies in the new musical system. Results provide evidence that a domain-general statistical learning mechanism may account for much of the human appreciation for music. PMID:20740059

Humans Rapidly Learn Grammatical Structure in a New Musical Scale.

PubMed

Loui, Psyche; Wessel, David L; Hudson Kam, Carla L

2010-06-01

Knowledge of musical rules and structures has been reliably demonstrated in humans of different ages, cultures, and levels of music training, and has been linked to our musical preferences. However, how humans acquire knowledge of and develop preferences for music remains unknown. The present study shows that humans rapidly develop knowledge and preferences when given limited exposure to a new musical system. Using a non-traditional, unfamiliar musical scale (Bohlen-Pierce scale), we created finite-state musical grammars from which we composed sets of melodies. After 25-30 min of passive exposure to the melodies, participants showed extensive learning as characterized by recognition, generalization, and sensitivity to the event frequencies in their given grammar, as well as increased preference for repeated melodies in the new musical system. Results provide evidence that a domain-general statistical learning mechanism may account for much of the human appreciation for music.

Should Textbooks Be Politically Correct?...and Several Other Issues.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mader, Diane Castellano

By getting hold of the dominating verbal structures, political correctness has tried (according to Paul Berman) to "get everyone to abandon certain previously unanalyzed phrases that contain the entire structure of oppressive social domination." Unfortunately, "political correctness" has become a pejorative term used to…

ADJECTIVES AS NOUN PHRASES.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

ROSS, JOHN ROBERT

THIS ANALYSIS OF UNDERLYING SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE IS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE PARTS OF SPEECH CALLED "VERBS" AND "ADJECTIVES" ARE TWO SUBCATEGORIES OF ONE MAJOR LEXICAL CATEGORY, "PREDICATE." FROM THIS ASSUMPTION, THE HYPOTHESIS IS ADVANCED THAT, IN LANGUAGES EXHIBITING THE COPULA, THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES CONTAINING PREDICATE…

Effective Web and Desktop Retrieval with Enhanced Semantic Spaces

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Daoud, Amjad M.

We describe the design and implementation of the NETBOOK prototype system for collecting, structuring and efficiently creating semantic vectors for concepts, noun phrases, and documents from a corpus of free full text ebooks available on the World Wide Web. Automatic generation of concept maps from correlated index terms and extracted noun phrases are used to build a powerful conceptual index of individual pages. To ensure scalabilty of our system, dimension reduction is performed using Random Projection [13]. Furthermore, we present a complete evaluation of the relative effectiveness of the NETBOOK system versus the Google Desktop [8].

The Effect of Target Language and Code-Switching on the Grammatical Performance and Perceptions of Elementary-Level College French Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Viakinnou-Brinson, Lucie; Herron, Carol; Cole, Steven P.; Haight, Carrie

2012-01-01

Grammar instruction is at the center of the target language (TL) and code-switching debate. Discussion revolves around whether grammar should be taught in the TL or using the TL and the native language (L1). This study investigated the effects of French-only grammar instruction and French/English grammar instruction on elementary-level students'…

Modelling dynamics with context-free grammars

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

García-Huerta, Juan-M.; Jiménez-Hernández, Hugo; Herrera-Navarro, Ana-M.; Hernández-Díaz, Teresa; Terol-Villalobos, Ivan

2014-03-01

This article presents a strategy to model the dynamics performed by vehicles in a freeway. The proposal consists on encode the movement as a set of finite states. A watershed-based segmentation is used to localize regions with high-probability of motion. Each state represents a proportion of a camera projection in a two-dimensional space, where each state is associated to a symbol, such that any combination of symbols is expressed as a language. Starting from a sequence of symbols through a linear algorithm a free-context grammar is inferred. This grammar represents a hierarchical view of common sequences observed into the scene. Most probable grammar rules express common rules associated to normal movement behavior. Less probable rules express themselves a way to quantify non-common behaviors and they might need more attention. Finally, all sequences of symbols that does not match with the grammar rules, may express itself uncommon behaviors (abnormal). The grammar inference is built with several sequences of images taken from a freeway. Testing process uses the sequence of symbols emitted by the scenario, matching the grammar rules with common freeway behaviors. The process of detect abnormal/normal behaviors is managed as the task of verify if any word generated by the scenario is recognized by the grammar.

Flexible processing and the design of grammar.

PubMed

Sag, Ivan A; Wasow, Thomas

2015-02-01

We explore the consequences of letting the incremental and integrative nature of language processing inform the design of competence grammar. What emerges is a view of grammar as a system of local monotonic constraints that provide a direct characterization of the signs (the form-meaning correspondences) of a given language. This "sign-based" conception of grammar has provided precise solutions to the key problems long thought to motivate movement-based analyses, has supported three decades of computational research developing large-scale grammar implementations, and is now beginning to play a role in computational psycholinguistics research that explores the use of underspecification in the incremental computation of partial meanings.

A Grammatical Approach to RNA-RNA Interaction Prediction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kato, Yuki; Akutsu, Tatsuya; Seki, Hiroyuki

2007-11-01

Much attention has been paid to two interacting RNA molecules involved in post-transcriptional control of gene expression. Although there have been a few studies on RNA-RNA interaction prediction based on dynamic programming algorithm, no grammar-based approach has been proposed. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new modeling for RNA-RNA interaction based on multiple context-free grammar (MCFG). We present a polynomial time parsing algorithm for finding the most likely derivation tree for the stochastic version of MCFG, which is applicable to RNA joint secondary structure prediction including kissing hairpin loops. Also, elementary tests on RNA-RNA interaction prediction have shown that the proposed method is comparable to Alkan et al.'s method.

Using conceptual metaphor and functional grammar to explore how language used in physics affects student learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Brookes, David T.; Etkina, Eugenia

2007-06-01

This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students and physicists talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists’ language encodes different varieties of analogical models through the use of grammar and conceptual metaphor. We hypothesize that students categorize concepts into ontological categories based on the grammatical structure of physicists’ language. We also hypothesize that students overextend and misapply conceptual metaphors in physicists’ speech and writing. Using our theory, we will show how, in some cases, we can explain student difficulties in quantum mechanics as difficulties with language.

Limits on the role of retrieval cues in memory for actions: enactment effects in the absence of object cues in the environment.

PubMed

Steffens, Melanie C; Buchner, Axel; Wender, Karl F; Decker, Claudia

2007-12-01

Verb-object phrases (open the umbrella, knock on the table) are usually remembered better if they have been enacted during study (also called subject-performed tasks) than if they have merely been learned verbally (verbal tasks). This enactment effect is particularly pronounced for phrases for which the objects (table) are present as cues in the study and test contexts. In previous studies with retrieval cues for some phrases, the enactment effect in free recall for the other phrases has been surprisingly small or even nonexistent. The present study tested whether the often replicated enactment effect in free recall can be found if none of the phrases contains context cues. In Experiment 1, we tested, and corroborated, the suppression hypothesis: The enactment effect for a given type of phrase (marker phrases) is modified by the presence or absence of cues for the other phrases in the list (experimental phrases). Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the enactment effect for phrases without cues. Experiment 2 also showed that the presence of cues either at study or at test is sufficient for obtaining a suppression effect, and Experiment 3 showed that the enactment effect may disappear altogether if retrieval cues are very salient.

Effects on Text Simplification: Evaluation of Splitting up Noun Phrases

PubMed Central

Leroy, Gondy; Kauchak, David; Hogue, Alan

2016-01-01

To help increase health literacy, we are developing a text simplification tool that creates more accessible patient education materials. Tool development is guided by data-driven feature analysis comparing simple and difficult text. In the present study, we focus on the common advice to split long noun phrases. Our previous corpus analysis showed that easier texts contained shorter noun phrases. Subsequently, we conduct a user study to measure the difficulty of sentences containing noun phrases of different lengths (2-gram, 3-gram and 4-gram), conditions (split or not) and, to simulate unknown terms, use of pseudowords (present or not). We gathered 35 evaluations for 30 sentences in each condition (3×2×2 conditions) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N=12,600). We conducted a three-way ANOVA for perceived and actual difficulty. Splitting noun phrases had a positive effect on perceived difficulty but a negative effect on actual difficulty. The presence of pseudowords increased perceived and actual difficulty. Without pseudowords, longer noun phrase led to increased perceived and actual difficulty. A follow-up study using the phrases (N = 1,350) showed that measuring awkwardness may indicate when to split noun phrases. We conclude that splitting noun phrases benefits perceived difficulty, but hurts actual difficulty when the phrasing becomes less natural. PMID:27043754

Improved Identification of Noun Phrases in Clinical Radiology Reports Using a High-Performance Statistical Natural Language Parser Augmented with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon

PubMed Central

Huang, Yang; Lowe, Henry J.; Klein, Dan; Cucina, Russell J.

2005-01-01

Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a method of extracting noun phrases with full phrase structures from a set of clinical radiology reports using natural language processing (NLP) and to investigate the effects of using the UMLS® Specialist Lexicon to improve noun phrase identification within clinical radiology documents. Design: The noun phrase identification (NPI) module is composed of a sentence boundary detector, a statistical natural language parser trained on a nonmedical domain, and a noun phrase (NP) tagger. The NPI module processed a set of 100 XML-represented clinical radiology reports in Health Level 7 (HL7)® Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)–compatible format. Computed output was compared with manual markups made by four physicians and one author for maximal (longest) NP and those made by one author for base (simple) NP, respectively. An extended lexicon of biomedical terms was created from the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and used to improve NPI performance. Results: The test set was 50 randomly selected reports. The sentence boundary detector achieved 99.0% precision and 98.6% recall. The overall maximal NPI precision and recall were 78.9% and 81.5% before using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and 82.1% and 84.6% after. The overall base NPI precision and recall were 88.2% and 86.8% before using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and 93.1% and 92.6% after, reducing false-positives by 31.1% and false-negatives by 34.3%. Conclusion: The sentence boundary detector performs excellently. After the adaptation using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, the statistical parser's NPI performance on radiology reports increased to levels comparable to the parser's native performance in its newswire training domain and to that reported by other researchers in the general nonmedical domain. PMID:15684131

Accelerated probabilistic inference of RNA structure evolution

PubMed Central

Holmes, Ian

2005-01-01

Background Pairwise stochastic context-free grammars (Pair SCFGs) are powerful tools for evolutionary analysis of RNA, including simultaneous RNA sequence alignment and secondary structure prediction, but the associated algorithms are intensive in both CPU and memory usage. The same problem is faced by other RNA alignment-and-folding algorithms based on Sankoff's 1985 algorithm. It is therefore desirable to constrain such algorithms, by pre-processing the sequences and using this first pass to limit the range of structures and/or alignments that can be considered. Results We demonstrate how flexible classes of constraint can be imposed, greatly reducing the computational costs while maintaining a high quality of structural homology prediction. Any score-attributed context-free grammar (e.g. energy-based scoring schemes, or conditionally normalized Pair SCFGs) is amenable to this treatment. It is now possible to combine independent structural and alignment constraints of unprecedented general flexibility in Pair SCFG alignment algorithms. We outline several applications to the bioinformatics of RNA sequence and structure, including Waterman-Eggert N-best alignments and progressive multiple alignment. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm on test examples from the RFAM database. Conclusion A program, Stemloc, that implements these algorithms for efficient RNA sequence alignment and structure prediction is available under the GNU General Public License. PMID:15790387

Grammar as a Joint Achievement: Co-Constructions in L2 Interactions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Family, Neiloufar; Durus, Natalia; Ziegler, Gudrun

2015-01-01

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14…

When Global Structure "Explains Away" Local Grammar: A Bayesian Account of Rule-Induction in Tone Sequences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dawson, Colin; Gerken, LouAnn

2011-01-01

While many constraints on learning must be relatively experience-independent, past experience provides a rich source of guidance for subsequent learning. Discovering structure in some domain can inform a learner's future hypotheses about that domain. If a general property accounts for particular sub-patterns, a rational learner should not…

Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Huck, Geoffrey J.; Goldsmith, John A.

A revisionist account of the development of ideas about semantics in modern theories of language is presented, focusing on the rift between Noam Chomsky and Generative Semanticists about the concept of deep structure, or the role of meaning in grammar. The discussion re-appraises the paradigm that has dominated American linguistics since the…

Correcting Erroneous N+N Structures in the Productions of French Users of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Garnier, Marie

2012-01-01

This article presents the preliminary steps to the implementation of detection and correction strategies for the erroneous use of N+N structures in the written productions of French-speaking advanced users of English. This research is carried out as part of the grammar checking project "CorrecTools", in which errors are detected and corrected…

Representing and Practising Meaningful Differences in a Well-Structured but Complex Art Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cunliffe, Leslie

2010-01-01

This paper conceptualizes the secondary art curriculum as a well-structured but complex knowledge-domain, with the aim of emphasizing meaningful differences in the way creative grammar operates in the following gatherings of art practices: Pre-historic and non-European cultures; Ancient and European cultures before c. 1800; Romantic and Modern…

Quelques problemes poses a la grammaire casuelle (Some Problems Regarding Case Grammar)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fillmore, Charles J.

1975-01-01

Discusses problems related to case grammar theory, including: the organizations of a case grammar; determination of semantic roles; definition and hierarchy of cases; cause-effect relations; and formalization and notation. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The Poetics of Argumentation: The Relevance of Conversational Repetition for Two Theories of Emergent Mathematical Reasoning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Staats, Susan

2017-01-01

Poetic structures emerge in spoken language when speakers repeat grammatical phrases that were spoken before. They create the potential to amend or comment on previous speech, and to convey meaning through the structure of discourse. This paper considers the ways in which poetic structure analysis contributes to two perspectives on emergent…

An Overview of the Nigel Text Generation Grammar.

DTIC Science & Technology

1983-04-01

34 76b, Hudson 76, Halliday 81, de Joia 80, Fawcett 80].3 1.2. Design Goals for the Grammar Three kinds of goals have guided the work of creating Nigel...Davey 79] Davey, A., Discourse Production, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1979. [ de Joia 80] de Joia , A., and A. Stenton, Terms in Systemic...1 1.1. The Text Generation Task as a Stimulus for Grammar Design .........................1I -1.2. Design Goals for the Grammar

Capturing the complexity of uncertainty language to maximise its use.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Juanchich, Marie; Sirota, Miroslav

2016-04-01

Uncertainty is often communicated verbally, using uncertainty phrases such as 'there is a small risk of earthquake', 'flooding is possible' or 'it is very likely the sea level will rise'. Prior research has only examined a limited number of properties of uncertainty phrases: mainly the probability conveyed (e.g., 'a small chance' convey a small probability whereas 'it is likely' convey a high probability). We propose a new analytical framework that captures more of the complexity of uncertainty phrases by studying their semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties. Further, we argue that the complexity of uncertainty phrases is functional and can be leveraged to best describe uncertain outcomes and achieve the goals of speakers. We will present findings from a corpus study and an experiment where we assessed the following properties of uncertainty phrases: probability conveyed, subjectivity, valence, nature of the subject, grammatical category of the uncertainty quantifier and whether the quantifier elicits a positive or a negative framing. Natural language processing techniques applied to corpus data showed that people use a very large variety of uncertainty phrases representing different configurations of the properties of uncertainty phrases (e.g., phrases that convey different levels of subjectivity, phrases with different grammatical construction). In addition, the corpus analysis uncovered that uncertainty phrases commonly studied in psychology are not the most commonly used in real life. In the experiment we manipulated the amount of evidence indicating that a fact was true and whether the participant was required to prove the fact was true or that it was false. Participants produced a phrase to communicate the likelihood that the fact was true (e.g., 'it is not sure…', 'I am convinced that…'). The analyses of the uncertainty phrases produced showed that participants leveraged the properties of uncertainty phrases to reflect the strength of evidence but also to achieve their personal goals. For example, participants aiming to prove that the fact was true chose words that conveyed a more positive polarity and a higher probability than participants aiming to prove that the fact was false. We discuss the utility of the framework for harnessing the properties of uncertainty phrases in geosciences.

Prosody Production and Perception with Conversational Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mo, Yoonsook

2010-01-01

Speech utterances are more than the linear concatenation of individual phonemes or words. They are organized by prosodic structures comprising phonological units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, foot, word, and phrase) and the prominence relations among them. As the linguistic structure of spoken languages, prosody serves an important function…

Nominal and Verbal Semantic Structure: Analogies and Interactions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Filip, Hanna

2001-01-01

Examines parallels in semantic structure between noun phrases and verbal predicates in constructions in which they are mutually constraining and contribute to the expression of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. Data are drawn mainly from English and Slavic languages, which are compared to German and Finnish. (Author/VWL)

Input-Based Approaches to Teaching Grammar: A Review of Classroom-Oriented Research.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ellis, Rod

1999-01-01

Examines the theoretical rationales (universal grammar, information-processing theories, skill-learning theories) for input-based grammar teaching and reviews classroom-oriented research (i.e., enriched-input studies, input-processing studies) that has integrated this option. (Author/VWL)

Quel Eclectisme en grammaire? (What Eclecticism in Grammar?)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beacco, Jean-Claude

1987-01-01

The teaching of grammar provides more options for teacher strategies than almost any other area of language teaching, but because of the nature of grammar and classroom language instruction, using a variety of approaches is a more appropriate strategy. (MSE)

On Wh-Operators in Kenyang.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Enoh, Tabe Florence Ako

2000-01-01

Examined the syntactic behavior of wh-operators in Kenyang, a Bantu language. Following Chomsky's minimalist programme (1993, 1995), describes the nature of universal grammar and accounts for certain specific parametrized variations of that system into the nature of interrogative structures in Kenyang. (Author/VWL)

The role of parallelism in the real-time processing of anaphora.

PubMed

Poirier, Josée; Walenski, Matthew; Shapiro, Lewis P

2012-06-01

Parallelism effects refer to the facilitated processing of a target structure when it follows a similar, parallel structure. In coordination, a parallelism-related conjunction triggers the expectation that a second conjunct with the same structure as the first conjunct should occur. It has been proposed that parallelism effects reflect the use of the first structure as a template that guides the processing of the second. In this study, we examined the role of parallelism in real-time anaphora resolution by charting activation patterns in coordinated constructions containing anaphora, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and Noun-Phrase Traces (NP-traces). Specifically, we hypothesised that an expectation of parallelism would incite the parser to assume a structure similar to the first conjunct in the second, anaphora-containing conjunct. The speculation of a similar structure would result in early postulation of covert anaphora. Experiment 1 confirms that following a parallelism-related conjunction, first-conjunct material is activated in the second conjunct. Experiment 2 reveals that an NP-trace in the second conjunct is posited immediately where licensed, which is earlier than previously reported in the literature. In light of our findings, we propose an intricate relation between structural expectations and anaphor resolution.

The role of parallelism in the real-time processing of anaphora

PubMed Central

Poirier, Josée; Walenski, Matthew; Shapiro, Lewis P.

2012-01-01

Parallelism effects refer to the facilitated processing of a target structure when it follows a similar, parallel structure. In coordination, a parallelism-related conjunction triggers the expectation that a second conjunct with the same structure as the first conjunct should occur. It has been proposed that parallelism effects reflect the use of the first structure as a template that guides the processing of the second. In this study, we examined the role of parallelism in real-time anaphora resolution by charting activation patterns in coordinated constructions containing anaphora, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and Noun-Phrase Traces (NP-traces). Specifically, we hypothesised that an expectation of parallelism would incite the parser to assume a structure similar to the first conjunct in the second, anaphora-containing conjunct. The speculation of a similar structure would result in early postulation of covert anaphora. Experiment 1 confirms that following a parallelism-related conjunction, first-conjunct material is activated in the second conjunct. Experiment 2 reveals that an NP-trace in the second conjunct is posited immediately where licensed, which is earlier than previously reported in the literature. In light of our findings, we propose an intricate relation between structural expectations and anaphor resolution. PMID:23741080

The Influence of Texting Language on Grammar and Executive Functions in Primary School Children.

PubMed

van Dijk, Chantal N; van Witteloostuijn, Merel; Vasić, Nada; Avrutin, Sergey; Blom, Elma

2016-01-01

When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children's literacy abilities. In addition, it is possible that children's grammar system is affected by textese as well, as grammar rules are often transgressed in this register. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate whether the use of textese influences children's grammar performance, and whether this effect is specific to grammar or language in general. Additionally, studies have not yet investigated the influence of textese on children's cognitive abilities. Consequently, the secondary aim of this study was to find out whether textese affects children's executive functions. To investigate this, 55 children between 10 and 13 years old were tested on a receptive vocabulary and grammar performance (sentence repetition) task and various tasks measuring executive functioning. In addition, text messages were elicited and the number of omissions and textisms in children's messages were calculated. Regression analyses showed that omissions were a significant predictor of children's grammar performance after various other variables were controlled for: the more words children omitted in their text messages, the better their performance on the grammar task. Although textisms correlated (marginally) significantly with vocabulary, grammar and selective attention scores and omissions marginally significantly with vocabulary scores, no other significant effects were obtained for measures of textese in the regression analyses: neither for the language outcomes, nor for the executive function tasks. Hence, our results show that textese is positively related to children's grammar performance. On the other hand, use of textese does not affect--positively nor negatively--children's executive functions.

The Influence of Texting Language on Grammar and Executive Functions in Primary School Children

PubMed Central

van Dijk, Chantal N.; van Witteloostuijn, Merel; Vasić, Nada; Avrutin, Sergey; Blom, Elma

2016-01-01

When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children’s literacy abilities. In addition, it is possible that children’s grammar system is affected by textese as well, as grammar rules are often transgressed in this register. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate whether the use of textese influences children’s grammar performance, and whether this effect is specific to grammar or language in general. Additionally, studies have not yet investigated the influence of textese on children’s cognitive abilities. Consequently, the secondary aim of this study was to find out whether textese affects children’s executive functions. To investigate this, 55 children between 10 and 13 years old were tested on a receptive vocabulary and grammar performance (sentence repetition) task and various tasks measuring executive functioning. In addition, text messages were elicited and the number of omissions and textisms in children’s messages were calculated. Regression analyses showed that omissions were a significant predictor of children’s grammar performance after various other variables were controlled for: the more words children omitted in their text messages, the better their performance on the grammar task. Although textisms correlated (marginally) significantly with vocabulary, grammar and selective attention scores and omissions marginally significantly with vocabulary scores, no other significant effects were obtained for measures of textese in the regression analyses: neither for the language outcomes, nor for the executive function tasks. Hence, our results show that textese is positively related to children’s grammar performance. On the other hand, use of textese does not affect—positively nor negatively—children’s executive functions. PMID:27031708

Applying Semantic-based Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar to Medical Language Processing – A Preliminary Study on Parsing Medication Sentences

PubMed Central

Xu, Hua; AbdelRahman, Samir; Lu, Yanxin; Denny, Joshua C.; Doan, Son

2011-01-01

Semantic-based sublanguage grammars have been shown to be an efficient method for medical language processing. However, given the complexity of the medical domain, parsers using such grammars inevitably encounter ambiguous sentences, which could be interpreted by different groups of production rules and consequently result in two or more parse trees. One possible solution, which has not been extensively explored previously, is to augment productions in medical sublanguage grammars with probabilities to resolve the ambiguity. In this study, we associated probabilities with production rules in a semantic-based grammar for medication findings and evaluated its performance on reducing parsing ambiguity. Using the existing data set from 2009 i2b2 NLP (Natural Language Processing) challenge for medication extraction, we developed a semantic-based CFG (Context Free Grammar) for parsing medication sentences and manually created a Treebank of 4,564 medication sentences from discharge summaries. Using the Treebank, we derived a semantic-based PCFG (probabilistic Context Free Grammar) for parsing medication sentences. Our evaluation using a 10-fold cross validation showed that the PCFG parser dramatically improved parsing performance when compared to the CFG parser. PMID:21856440

On the Equivalence of Formal Grammars and Machines.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lund, Bruce

1991-01-01

Explores concepts of formal language and automata theory underlying computational linguistics. A computational formalism is described known as a "logic grammar," with which computational systems process linguistic data, with examples in declarative and procedural semantics and definite clause grammars. (13 references) (CB)

Faut-il Mettre "Un Bonnet Rouge" a la grammaire francaise (Must We Put a "Bonnet Rouge" on French Grammar?).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jaussaud, Francoise

1989-01-01

An experimental approach to French grammar instruction at the American School of Madrid, based on a restructuring of the grammar around the verb, provides a promising new perspective for language pedagogy. (MSE)

Comment and Response.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

College English, 1985

1985-01-01

Critics comment on three earlier "College English" articles: Mike Rose's "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University," Elizabeth A. Nist's "Tattle's Well's Faire: English Women Authors of the Sixteenth Century," and Patrick Hartwell's "Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar." Contains responses from Mike Rose and…

Paperback Grammar for Handbook Haters.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lambert, Dorothy

1967-01-01

Students will respond better to grammar instruction if the traditional heavy handbooks are replaced with light-weight paperbacks, each full of practical suggestions and clear examples. Several inexpensive paperbacks are available for instruction in grammar and usage, spelling, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. Unlike the conventional…

The Differences between Spoken and Written Grammar in English, in Comparison with Vietnamese (Las Diferencias entre la Gramática Oral y Escrita del Idioma Inglés en Comparación con el Idioma Vietnamita)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thanh, Nguyen Cao

2015-01-01

The fundamental point of this paper is to describe and evaluate some differences between spoken and written grammar in English, and compare some of the points with Vietnamese. This paper illustrates that spoken grammar is less rigid than written grammar. Moreover, it highlights the distinction between speaking and writing in terms of subordination…

Form and Function of Linguistic Elements. Formal Systems for Representing Changing Situations. Dynamic Information Systems: Notes on some systems of grammar and interpretation

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-02-20

Chomsky (1957) and continued into the frameworks from around Chomsky’s Aspects (1965). The main thrust was to move from grammars centered on covering...Miminalist Program Grammars Work by Chomsky , starting around 1995 ( Chomsky 1995) represents a move toward radically simplified systems. A number...particular theories can be formulated as choices within such a general scheme or metatheory. 14 We take Richard Montague’s Universal Grammar

The relation between receptive grammar and procedural, declarative, and working memory in specific language impairment.

PubMed

Conti-Ramsden, Gina; Ullman, Michael T; Lum, Jarrad A G

2015-01-01

What memory systems underlie grammar in children, and do these differ between typically developing (TD) children and children with specific language impairment (SLI)? Whilst there is substantial evidence linking certain memory deficits to the language problems in children with SLI, few studies have investigated multiple memory systems simultaneously, examining not only possible memory deficits but also memory abilities that may play a compensatory role. This study examined the extent to which procedural, declarative, and working memory abilities predict receptive grammar in 45 primary school aged children with SLI (30 males, 15 females) and 46 TD children (30 males, 16 females), both on average 9;10 years of age. Regression analyses probed measures of all three memory systems simultaneously as potential predictors of receptive grammar. The model was significant, explaining 51.6% of the variance. There was a significant main effect of learning in procedural memory and a significant group × procedural learning interaction. Further investigation of the interaction revealed that procedural learning predicted grammar in TD but not in children with SLI. Indeed, procedural learning was the only predictor of grammar in TD. In contrast, only learning in declarative memory significantly predicted grammar in SLI. Thus, different memory systems are associated with receptive grammar abilities in children with SLI and their TD peers. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to demonstrate a significant group by memory system interaction in predicting grammar in children with SLI and their TD peers. In line with Ullman's Declarative/Procedural model of language and procedural deficit hypothesis of SLI, variability in understanding sentences of varying grammatical complexity appears to be associated with variability in procedural memory abilities in TD children, but with declarative memory, as an apparent compensatory mechanism, in children with SLI.

Re-Examining the Content Validation of a Grammar Test: The (Im)Possibility of Distinguishing Vocabulary and Structural Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alderson, J. Charles; Kremmel, Benjamin

2013-01-01

"Vocabulary and structural knowledge" (Grabe, 1991, p. 379) appears to be a key component of reading ability. However, is this component to be taken as a unitary one or is structural knowledge a separate factor that can therefore also be tested in isolation in, say, a test of syntax? If syntax can be singled out (e.g. in order to…

Esquisse d'une grammaire de l'imaginaire (Sketch of a Grammar of the Fanciful).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ruck, Heribert

1986-01-01

Proposes an approach to teaching grammar that calls on the student's imagination and frees the learning process from classroom routine. The technique uses examples of specific constructions in French poetry to illustrate principles of grammar and discourse. (MSE)

Can mathematics explain the evolution of human language?

PubMed

Witzany, Guenther

2011-09-01

Investigation into the sequence structure of the genetic code by means of an informatic approach is a real success story. The features of human language are also the object of investigation within the realm of formal language theories. They focus on the common rules of a universal grammar that lies behind all languages and determine generation of syntactic structures. This universal grammar is a depiction of material reality, i.e., the hidden logical order of things and its relations determined by natural laws. Therefore mathematics is viewed not only as an appropriate tool to investigate human language and genetic code structures through computer science-based formal language theory but is itself a depiction of material reality. This confusion between language as a scientific tool to describe observations/experiences within cognitive constructed models and formal language as a direct depiction of material reality occurs not only in current approaches but was the central focus of the philosophy of science debate in the twentieth century, with rather unexpected results. This article recalls these results and their implications for more recent mathematical approaches that also attempt to explain the evolution of human language.

The difficult mountain: enriched composition in adjective–noun phrases

PubMed Central

Pickering, Martin J.; McElree, Brian

2012-01-01

When readers need to go beyond the straightforward compositional meaning of a sentence (i.e., when enriched composition is required), costly additional processing is the norm. However, this conclusion is based entirely on research that has looked at enriched composition between two phrases or within the verb phrase (e.g., the verb and its complement in … started the book …) where there is a discrepancy between the semantic expectations of the verb and the semantics of the noun. We carried out an eye-tracking experiment investigating enriched composition within a single noun phrase, as in the difficult mountain. As compared with adjective–noun phrases that allow a straightforward compositional interpretation (the difficult exercise), the coerced phrases were more difficult to process. These results indicate that coercion effects can be found in the absence of a typing violation and within a single noun phrase. PMID:21826403

Naive Physics, Event Perception, Lexical Semantics, and Language Acquisition

DTIC Science & Technology

1993-04-01

settings within a framework of universal grammar. His central claim is that children use primarily unembedded material as evidence for the parameter...differentiate embedded from unembedded material. Deriving such structural information requires that the learner determine constituent order prior io ot her

Comment on se rappelle et on resume des histoires (How We Remember and Summarize Stories)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kintsch, Walter; Van Dijk, Teun A.

1975-01-01

Working from theories of text grammar and logic, the authors suggest and tentatively confirm several hypotheses concerning the role of micro- and macro-structures in comprehension and recall of texts. (Text is in French.) (DB)

Comparing Noun Phrasing Techniques for Use with Medical Digital Library Tools.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tolle, Kristin M.; Chen, Hsinchun

2000-01-01

Describes a study that investigated the use of a natural language processing technique called noun phrasing to determine whether it is a viable technique for medical information retrieval. Evaluates four noun phrase generation tools for their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts, focusing on precision and recall.…

An examination of the association between interviewer question type and story-grammar detail in child witness interviews about abuse.

PubMed

Feltis, Brooke B; Powell, Martine B; Snow, Pamela C; Hughes-Scholes, Carolyn H

2010-06-01

This study compared the effects of open-ended versus specific questions, and various types of open-ended questions, in eliciting story-grammar detail in child abuse interviews. The sample included 34 police interviews with child witnesses aged 5-15 years (M age=9 years, 9 months). The interviewers' questions and their relative sub-types were classified according to definitions reported in the child interview training literature. The children's responses were classified according to the proportion of story grammar and the prevalence of individual story grammar elements as defined by Stein and Glenn (1979). Open-ended questions were more effective at eliciting story grammar than specific questions. This finding was revealed across three age groups, two interview phases and irrespective of how question effectiveness was measured. However, not all types of open-ended questions were equally effective. Open-ended questions that encouraged a broad response, or asked the child to elaborate on a part of their account, elicited more story-grammar detail compared to open-ended questions that requested clarification of concepts or descriptions of the next (or another) activity or detail within a sequence. This study demonstrates that children's ability to provide story-grammar detail is maximised when there is minimal prompting from the interviewer. Given the association between story grammar production and victim credibility, greater guidance is warranted in interviewer training programs in relation to the effects and administration of different types of open-ended questions. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PubMed Phrases, an open set of coherent phrases for searching biomedical literature

PubMed Central

Kim, Sun; Yeganova, Lana; Comeau, Donald C.; Wilbur, W. John; Lu, Zhiyong

2018-01-01

In biomedicine, key concepts are often expressed by multiple words (e.g., ‘zinc finger protein’). Previous work has shown treating a sequence of words as a meaningful unit, where applicable, is not only important for human understanding but also beneficial for automatic information seeking. Here we present a collection of PubMed® Phrases that are beneficial for information retrieval and human comprehension. We define these phrases as coherent chunks that are logically connected. To collect the phrase set, we apply the hypergeometric test to detect segments of consecutive terms that are likely to appear together in PubMed. These text segments are then filtered using the BM25 ranking function to ensure that they are beneficial from an information retrieval perspective. Thus, we obtain a set of 705,915 PubMed Phrases. We evaluate the quality of the set by investigating PubMed user click data and manually annotating a sample of 500 randomly selected noun phrases. We also analyze and discuss the usage of these PubMed Phrases in literature search. PMID:29893755

Learning New Grammatical Structures in Task-Based Language Learning: The Effects of Recasts and Prompts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Van de Guchte, Marrit; Braaksma, Martine; Rijlaarsdam, Gert; Bimmel, Peter

2015-01-01

In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one…

Is Grammar Spared in Autism Spectrum Disorder? Data from Judgments of Verb Argument Structure Overgeneralization Errors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ambridge, Ben; Bannard, Colin; Jackson, Georgina H.

2015-01-01

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 11-13 (N = 16) and an IQ-matched typically developing (TD) group aged 7-12 (N = 16) completed a graded grammaticality judgment task, as well as a standardized test of cognitive function. In a departure from previous studies, the judgment task involved verb argument structure overgeneralization…

Young children pause on phrase boundaries in self-paced music listening: The role of harmonic cues.

PubMed

Kragness, Haley E; Trainor, Laurel J

2018-05-01

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults' perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children's musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether dwell times index young children's musical phrase grouping and, if so, (2) whether children dwell longer on phrase boundaries defined by harmonic cues specifically. In Experiment 1, we asked 3-year-old children to self-pace through chord progressions from Bach chorales (sequences in which metrical, harmonic, and melodic contour grouping cues aligned) by pressing a computer key to present each chord in the sequence. Participants dwelled longer on chords in the 8th position, which corresponded to phrase endings. In Experiment 2, we tested 3-, 4-, and 7-year-old children's sensitivity to harmonic cues to phrase grouping when metrical regularity cues and melodic contour cues were misaligned with the harmonic phrase boundaries. In this case, 7 and 4 year olds but not 3 year olds dwelled longer on harmonic phrase boundaries, suggesting that the influence of harmonic cues on phrase boundary perception develops substantially between 3 and 4 years of age in Western children. Overall, we show that the musical dwell time method is child-friendly and can be used to investigate various aspects of young children's musical understanding, including phrase grouping and harmonic knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Generalized Categorial Grammar for Unbounded Dependencies Recovery

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nguyen, Luan Viet

2014-01-01

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument dependencies is vital for interpretation tasks like information extraction and question answering, and unbounded dependencies may account for a significant portion of the dependencies in any given text. This thesis describes a Generalized Categorial Grammar (GCG) which, like other categorial grammars,…

A Positive Approach to Good Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kuehner, Alison V.

2016-01-01

Correct grammar is important for precise, accurate, academic prose, but the traditional skills-based approach to teaching grammar is not effective if the goal is good writing. The sentence-combining approach shows promise. However, sentence modeling is more likely to produce strong writing and enhance reading comprehension. Through sentence…

Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Lydia

1990-01-01

Discusses the motivation for Universal Grammar (UG), as assumed in the principles and parameters framework of generative grammar (Chomsky, 1981), focusing on the logical problem of first-language acquisition and the potential role of UG in second-language acquisition. Recent experimental research regarding the second-language status of the…

Exploring Dyslexics' Phonological Deficit II: Phonological Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Szenkovits, Gayaneh; Darma, Quynliaan; Darcy, Isabelle; Ramus, Franck

2016-01-01

Language learners have to acquire the phonological grammar of their native language, and different levels of representations on which the grammar operates. Developmental dyslexia is associated with a phonological deficit, which is commonly assumed to stem from degraded phonological representations. The present study investigates one aspect of the…

Inclusive Education Practice in Southwestern Nigeria: A Situational Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Adeniyi, Samuel Olufemi; Adeyemi, Akinkunmi Oluwadamilare

2015-01-01

This study presented situational analysis of inclusive educational practice in southwestern Nigeria. The study employed descriptive survey research design. Samples of 131 teachers, 51 parents and 51 head teachers/principals were purposively selected from State Grammar School, Ipakodo Junior Grammar School, Methodist Grammar School, Ijokodo High…

Grammaire nouvelle? Questions pour des questions (New Grammar? Questions about Questions).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lamy, Andre

1987-01-01

Implications of the "new grammar" approach to teaching French are examined, including the issues of nomenclature, definition, rules and generalizations, and native language use in the second language class. Grammar itself has not changed, and the principal concern is still good usage. (MSE)

Pratiquer une grammaire textuelle (Practicing Textual Grammar).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bourdet, Jean-Francois

1992-01-01

A discussion of textual, as contrasted with traditional, grammar for French second-language instruction argues that textual grammar is essential for acquisition of communicative competence because it identifies grammatical facts relevant to everyday communication and allows the student to experience the construction of meaning through them. (MSE)

What Constitutes a Phrase in Sound-Based Music? A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Perception and Acoustics.

PubMed

Olsen, Kirk N; Dean, Roger T; Leung, Yvonne

2016-01-01

Phrasing facilitates the organization of auditory information and is central to speech and music. Not surprisingly, aspects of changing intensity, rhythm, and pitch are key determinants of musical phrases and their boundaries in instrumental note-based music. Different kinds of speech (such as tone- vs. stress-languages) share these features in different proportions and form an instructive comparison. However, little is known about whether or how musical phrasing is perceived in sound-based music, where the basic musical unit from which a piece is created is commonly non-instrumental continuous sounds, rather than instrumental discontinuous notes. This issue forms the target of the present paper. Twenty participants (17 untrained in music) were presented with six stimuli derived from sound-based music, note-based music, and environmental sound. Their task was to indicate each occurrence of a perceived phrase and qualitatively describe key characteristics of the stimulus associated with each phrase response. It was hypothesized that sound-based music does elicit phrase perception, and that this is primarily associated with temporal changes in intensity and timbre, rather than rhythm and pitch. Results supported this hypothesis. Qualitative analysis of participant descriptions showed that for sound-based music, the majority of perceived phrases were associated with intensity or timbral change. For the note-based piano piece, rhythm was the main theme associated with perceived musical phrasing. We modeled the occurrence in time of perceived musical phrases with recurrent event 'hazard' analyses using time-series data representing acoustic predictors associated with intensity, spectral flatness, and rhythmic density. Acoustic intensity and timbre (represented here by spectral flatness) were strong predictors of perceived musical phrasing in sound-based music, and rhythm was only predictive for the piano piece. A further analysis including five additional spectral measures linked to timbre strengthened the models. Overall, results show that even when little of the pitch and rhythm information important for phrasing in note-based music is available, phrasing is still perceived, primarily in response to changes of intensity and timbre. Implications for electroacoustic music composition and music recommender systems are discussed.

What Constitutes a Phrase in Sound-Based Music? A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Perception and Acoustics

PubMed Central

Olsen, Kirk N.; Dean, Roger T.; Leung, Yvonne

2016-01-01

Phrasing facilitates the organization of auditory information and is central to speech and music. Not surprisingly, aspects of changing intensity, rhythm, and pitch are key determinants of musical phrases and their boundaries in instrumental note-based music. Different kinds of speech (such as tone- vs. stress-languages) share these features in different proportions and form an instructive comparison. However, little is known about whether or how musical phrasing is perceived in sound-based music, where the basic musical unit from which a piece is created is commonly non-instrumental continuous sounds, rather than instrumental discontinuous notes. This issue forms the target of the present paper. Twenty participants (17 untrained in music) were presented with six stimuli derived from sound-based music, note-based music, and environmental sound. Their task was to indicate each occurrence of a perceived phrase and qualitatively describe key characteristics of the stimulus associated with each phrase response. It was hypothesized that sound-based music does elicit phrase perception, and that this is primarily associated with temporal changes in intensity and timbre, rather than rhythm and pitch. Results supported this hypothesis. Qualitative analysis of participant descriptions showed that for sound-based music, the majority of perceived phrases were associated with intensity or timbral change. For the note-based piano piece, rhythm was the main theme associated with perceived musical phrasing. We modeled the occurrence in time of perceived musical phrases with recurrent event ‘hazard’ analyses using time-series data representing acoustic predictors associated with intensity, spectral flatness, and rhythmic density. Acoustic intensity and timbre (represented here by spectral flatness) were strong predictors of perceived musical phrasing in sound-based music, and rhythm was only predictive for the piano piece. A further analysis including five additional spectral measures linked to timbre strengthened the models. Overall, results show that even when little of the pitch and rhythm information important for phrasing in note-based music is available, phrasing is still perceived, primarily in response to changes of intensity and timbre. Implications for electroacoustic music composition and music recommender systems are discussed. PMID:27997625

The Application of Morpho-Syntactic Language Processing to Effective Phrase Matching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sheridan, Paraic; Smeaton, Alan F.

1992-01-01

Describes a process of morpho-syntactic language analysis for information retrieval. Tree Structured Analytics (TSA) used for text representation is summarized; the matching process developed for such structures is outlined with an example appended; and experiments carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of TSA matching are discussed. (26…

Sensing the Sentence: An Embodied Simulation Approach to Rhetorical Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rule, Hannah J.

2017-01-01

This article applies the neuroscientific concept of embodied simulation--the process of understanding language through visual, motor, and spatial modalities of the body--to rhetorical grammar and sentence-style pedagogies. Embodied simulation invigorates rhetorical grammar instruction by attuning writers to the felt effects of written language,…

Teaching Grammar to Adult English Language Learners: Focus on Form. CAELA Network Brief

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gallup Rodriguez, Amber

2009-01-01

Many adult English language learners place a high value on learning grammar. Perceiving a link between grammatical accuracy and effective communication, they associate excellent grammar with opportunities for employment and promotion, the attainment of educational goals, and social acceptance by native speakers. Reflecting the disagreement that…

Flexible Processing and the Design of Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sag, Ivan A.; Wasow, Thomas

2015-01-01

We explore the consequences of letting the incremental and integrative nature of language processing inform the design of competence grammar. What emerges is a view of grammar as a system of local monotonic constraints that provide a direct characterization of the signs (the form-meaning correspondences) of a given language. This…

Grammar and the Lexicon. Working Papers in Linguistics 16.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

University of Trondheim Working Papers in Linguistics, 1993

1993-01-01

In this volume, five working papers are presented. "Minimal Signs and Grammar" (Lars Hellan) proposes that a significant part of the "production" of grammar is incremental, building larger and larger constructs, with lexical objects called minimal signs as the first steps. It also suggests that the basic lexical information in…

Assessing the Need for Change in J-School Grammar Curricula.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Seamon, Marc

2001-01-01

Surveys 100 journalism schools investigating: (1) whether journalism schools treat spelling, punctuation, grammar, and AP style as important factors in improving the state of journalism; (2) how journalism schools are teaching and assessing spelling, punctuation, grammar, and AP style; and (3) whether journalism schools are using entrance or exit…

A Papago Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zepeda, Ofelia

A Papago grammar, intented to help Papago and other junior high, high school and college students learn and appreciate the language and give linguists an overview of the language, contains background information on the language and the book, two grammar units, a unit of five conversations in Papago, and a section of supplementary material. Text…

A Grammar of Belep

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCracken, Chelsea Leigh

2012-01-01

This dissertation is a description of the grammar of Belep [yly], an Austronesian language variety spoken by about 1600 people in and around the Belep Isles in New Caledonia. The grammar begins with a summary of the cultural and linguistic background of Belep speakers, followed by chapters on Belep phonology and phonetics, morphology and word…

Effective Intervention for Expressive Grammar in Children with Specific Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith-Lock, Karen M.; Leitao, Suze; Lambert, Lara; Nickels, Lyndsey

2013-01-01

Background: Children with specific language impairment are known to struggle with expressive grammar. While some studies have shown successful intervention under laboratory conditions, there is a paucity of evidence for the effectiveness of grammar treatment in young children in community settings. Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness of a…

Have You Considered?--Teaching Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rutan, Jessica

2003-01-01

Provides examples of a journey the author has recently experienced to consider if understanding the rules of grammar impact how a struggling adolescent reads. Suggests that the study of grammar will help her students become better users of the language. Notes that they will become effective listeners and speakers, but more importantly proficient…

Research into Practice: Grammar Learning and Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Larsen-Freeman, Diane

2015-01-01

This selective review of the second language acquisition and applied linguistics research literature on grammar learning and teaching falls into three categories: where research has had little impact (the non-interface position), modest impact (form-focused instruction), and where it potentially can have a large impact (reconceiving grammar).…

A Tool for Intersecting Context-Free Grammars and Its Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Gange, Graeme; Navas, Jorge A.; Schachte, Peter; Sondergaard, Harald; Stuckey, Peter J.

2015-01-01

This paper describes a tool for intersecting context-free grammars. Since this problem is undecidable the tool follows a refinement-based approach and implements a novel refinement which is complete for regularly separable grammars. We show its effectiveness for safety verification of recursive multi-threaded programs.

Mobile-Assisted Grammar Exercises: Effects on Self-Editing in L2 Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Li, Zhi; Hegelheimer, Volker

2013-01-01

In this paper, we report on the development and implementation of a web-based mobile application, "Grammar Clinic," for an ESL writing class. Drawing on insights from the interactionist approach to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the Noticing Hypothesis, and mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), "Grammar Clinic" was…

The Place of Grammar in the Language Arts Curriculum.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Einarsson, Robert

The history of grammar instruction includes two approaches: the handbook approach, which is practiced today, and the textbook approach. The handbook approach focuses on rules for correct writing and is an error-based view, while the textbook approach would treat grammar holistically and interpretively and would systematically explain new concepts…

Reading and Grammar Learning through Mobile Phones

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Shudong; Smith, Simon

2013-01-01

This paper describes an ongoing language-learning project, three years into its development. We examine both the feasibility and the limitations of developing English reading and grammar skills through the interface of mobile phones. Throughout the project, reading and grammar materials were regularly sent to students' mobile phones. Students read…

The Role of Simple Semantics in the Process of Artificial Grammar Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Öttl, Birgit; Jäger, Gerhard; Kaup, Barbara

2017-01-01

This study investigated the effect of semantic information on artificial grammar learning (AGL). Recursive grammars of different complexity levels (regular language, mirror language, copy language) were investigated in a series of AGL experiments. In the with-semantics condition, participants acquired semantic information prior to the AGL…

Grammar Teaching and Learning in L2: Necessary, but Boring?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jean, Gladys; Simard, Daphnee

2011-01-01

This descriptive inquiry-based study targeted second language (L2) high school students' (n = 2321) and teachers' (n = 45) beliefs and perceptions about grammar instruction, specifically about grammatical accuracy, corrective feedback, and diverse forms of grammar teaching and learning. Results showed only slight discrepancies between students'…

A Bemba Grammar with Exercises.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoch, Ernst

This Bemba grammar begins with an introduction which traces the history of the language, stresses the importance of learning it well and offers hints towards achieving this goal. The grammar itself is divided into three major sections: Part 1, "Phonetics," deals with the Bemba alphabet, tonality, and orthography; Part 2, "Parts of Speech,"…

Environmental Peace Education in Foreign Language Learners' English Grammar Lessons

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arikan, Arda

2009-01-01

English language teachers create contexts to teach grammar so that meaningful learning occurs. In this study, English grammar is contextualized through environmental peace education activities to raise students' awareness of global issues. Two sources provided data to evaluate the success of this instructional process. Fourth-year pre-service…

Mungbam Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lovegren, Jesse Stuart James

2013-01-01

This dissertation is an attempt to state what is known at present about the grammar of Mungbam (ISO 693-3 [mij]). Mungbam is a Niger-Congo language spoken in the Northwest Region of Cameroon. The dissertation is a descriptive grammar, covering the phonetics, phonology morphology and syntax of the language. Source data are texts and elicited data…

Automatic event recognition and anomaly detection with attribute grammar by learning scene semantics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Qi, Lin; Yao, Zhenyu; Li, Li; Dong, Junyu

2007-11-01

In this paper we present a novel framework for automatic event recognition and abnormal behavior detection with attribute grammar by learning scene semantics. This framework combines learning scene semantics by trajectory analysis and constructing attribute grammar-based event representation. The scene and event information is learned automatically. Abnormal behaviors that disobey scene semantics or event grammars rules are detected. By this method, an approach to understanding video scenes is achieved. Further more, with this prior knowledge, the accuracy of abnormal event detection is increased.

The Sentence-Composition Effect: Processing of Complex Sentences Depends on the Configuration of Common Noun Phrases versus Unusual Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnson, Marcus L.; Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C.

2011-01-01

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

Perspectives on the rhythm-grammar link and its implications for typical and atypical language development.

PubMed

Gordon, Reyna L; Jacobs, Magdalene S; Schuele, C Melanie; McAuley, J Devin

2015-03-01

This paper reviews the mounting evidence for shared cognitive mechanisms and neural resources for rhythm and grammar. Evidence for a role of rhythm skills in language development and language comprehension is reviewed here in three lines of research: (1) behavioral and brain data from adults and children, showing that prosody and other aspects of timing of sentences influence online morpho-syntactic processing; (2) comorbidity of impaired rhythm with grammatical deficits in children with language impairment; and (3) our recent work showing a strong positive association between rhythm perception skills and expressive grammatical skills in young school-age children with typical development. Our preliminary follow-up study presented here revealed that musical rhythm perception predicted variance in 6-year-old children's production of complex syntax, as well as online reorganization of grammatical information (transformation); these data provide an additional perspective on the hierarchical relations potentially shared by rhythm and grammar. A theoretical framework for shared cognitive resources for the role of rhythm in perceiving and learning grammatical structure is elaborated on in light of potential implications for using rhythm-emphasized musical training to improve language skills in children. © 2015 New York Academy of Sciences.

Exploring story grammar structure in the book reading interactions of African American mothers and their preschool children: a pilot investigation.

PubMed

Harris, Yvette R; Rothstein, Susan E

2014-01-01

The aim of this investigation was to identify the book reading behaviors and book reading styles of middle class African American mothers engaged in a shared book reading activity with their preschool children. To this end, the mothers and their children were videotaped reading one of three books, Julius, Grandfather and I, or Somewhere in Africa. Both maternal and child behaviors were coded for the frequency of occurrence of story grammar elements contained in their stories and maternal behaviors were also coded for their use of narrative eliciting strategies. In addition, mothers were queried about the quality and quantity of book reading/story telling interactions in the home environment. The results suggest that there is a great deal of individual variation in how mothers use the story grammar elements and narrative eliciting strategies to engage their children in a shared book reading activity. Findings are discussed in terms of suggestions for additional research and practical applications are offered on ways to optimally engage African American preschool children and African American families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in shared book reading interactions.

Exploring story grammar structure in the book reading interactions of African American mothers and their preschool children: a pilot investigation

PubMed Central

Harris, Yvette R.; Rothstein, Susan E.

2014-01-01

The aim of this investigation was to identify the book reading behaviors and book reading styles of middle class African American mothers engaged in a shared book reading activity with their preschool children. To this end, the mothers and their children were videotaped reading one of three books, Julius, Grandfather and I, or Somewhere in Africa. Both maternal and child behaviors were coded for the frequency of occurrence of story grammar elements contained in their stories and maternal behaviors were also coded for their use of narrative eliciting strategies. In addition, mothers were queried about the quality and quantity of book reading/story telling interactions in the home environment. The results suggest that there is a great deal of individual variation in how mothers use the story grammar elements and narrative eliciting strategies to engage their children in a shared book reading activity. Findings are discussed in terms of suggestions for additional research and practical applications are offered on ways to optimally engage African American preschool children and African American families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in shared book reading interactions. PMID:24926276

The Psychological Reality of "Grammar" in the ESL Classroom.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, H. Douglas

Examing the relationship between linguistic functions and other complex mental and emotional processes such as intellect, conceptual behavior, personality differences, egocentricity, and other important facets of cognitive and affective behavior may lead to the description of "psychologically" real grammatical structures which relate directly to…

Modelling unsupervised online-learning of artificial grammars: linking implicit and statistical learning.

PubMed

Rohrmeier, Martin A; Cross, Ian

2014-07-01

Humans rapidly learn complex structures in various domains. Findings of above-chance performance of some untrained control groups in artificial grammar learning studies raise questions about the extent to which learning can occur in an untrained, unsupervised testing situation with both correct and incorrect structures. The plausibility of unsupervised online-learning effects was modelled with n-gram, chunking and simple recurrent network models. A novel evaluation framework was applied, which alternates forced binary grammaticality judgments and subsequent learning of the same stimulus. Our results indicate a strong online learning effect for n-gram and chunking models and a weaker effect for simple recurrent network models. Such findings suggest that online learning is a plausible effect of statistical chunk learning that is possible when ungrammatical sequences contain a large proportion of grammatical chunks. Such common effects of continuous statistical learning may underlie statistical and implicit learning paradigms and raise implications for study design and testing methodologies. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Essie: A Concept-based Search Engine for Structured Biomedical Text

PubMed Central

Ide, Nicholas C.; Loane, Russell F.; Demner-Fushman, Dina

2007-01-01

This article describes the algorithms implemented in the Essie search engine that is currently serving several Web sites at the National Library of Medicine. Essie is a phrase-based search engine with term and concept query expansion and probabilistic relevancy ranking. Essie’s design is motivated by an observation that query terms are often conceptually related to terms in a document, without actually occurring in the document text. Essie’s performance was evaluated using data and standard evaluation methods from the 2003 and 2006 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics track. Essie was the best-performing search engine in the 2003 TREC Genomics track and achieved results comparable to those of the highest-ranking systems on the 2006 TREC Genomics track task. Essie shows that a judicious combination of exploiting document structure, phrase searching, and concept based query expansion is a useful approach for information retrieval in the biomedical domain. PMID:17329729

Analysis of prosody in finger braille using electromyography.

PubMed

Miyagi, Manabi; Nishida, Masafumi; Horiuchi, Yasuo; Ichikawa, Akira

2006-01-01

Finger braille is one of the communication methods for the deaf blind. The interpreter types braille codes on the fingers of deaf blind. Finger braille seems to be the most suitable medium for real-time communication by its speed and accuracy of transmitting characters. We hypothesize that the prosody information exists in the time structure and strength of finger braille typing. Prosody is the paralinguistic information that has functions to transmit the sentence structure, prominence, emotions and other form of information in real time communication. In this study, we measured the surface electromyography (sEMG) of finger movement to analyze the typing strength of finger braille. We found that the typing strength increases at the beginning of a phrase and a prominent phrase. The result shows the possibility that the prosody in the typing strength of finger braille can be applied to create an interpreter system for the deafblind.

Neurophysiological Correlates of Musical and Prosodic Phrasing: Shared Processing Mechanisms and Effects of Musical Expertise

PubMed Central

Steinhauer, Karsten; DePriest, John; Koelsch, Stefan

2016-01-01

The processing of prosodic phrase boundaries in language is immediately reflected by a specific event-related potential component called the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). A component somewhat reminiscent of the CPS in language has also been reported for musical phrases (i.e., the so-called ‘music CPS’). However, in previous studies the quantification of the music-CPS as well as its morphology and timing differed substantially from the characteristics of the language-CPS. Therefore, the degree of correspondence between cognitive mechanisms of phrasing in music and in language has remained questionable. Here, we probed the shared nature of mechanisms underlying musical and prosodic phrasing by (1) investigating whether the music-CPS is present at phrase boundary positions where the language-CPS has been originally reported (i.e., at the onset of the pause between phrases), and (2) comparing the CPS in music and in language in non-musicians and professional musicians. For the first time, we report a positive shift at the onset of musical phrase boundaries that strongly resembles the language-CPS and argue that the post-boundary ‘music-CPS’ of previous studies may be an entirely distinct ERP component. Moreover, the language-CPS in musicians was found to be less prominent than in non-musicians, suggesting more efficient processing of prosodic phrases in language as a result of higher musical expertise. PMID:27192560

Neurophysiological Correlates of Musical and Prosodic Phrasing: Shared Processing Mechanisms and Effects of Musical Expertise.

PubMed

Glushko, Anastasia; Steinhauer, Karsten; DePriest, John; Koelsch, Stefan

2016-01-01

The processing of prosodic phrase boundaries in language is immediately reflected by a specific event-related potential component called the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). A component somewhat reminiscent of the CPS in language has also been reported for musical phrases (i.e., the so-called 'music CPS'). However, in previous studies the quantification of the music-CPS as well as its morphology and timing differed substantially from the characteristics of the language-CPS. Therefore, the degree of correspondence between cognitive mechanisms of phrasing in music and in language has remained questionable. Here, we probed the shared nature of mechanisms underlying musical and prosodic phrasing by (1) investigating whether the music-CPS is present at phrase boundary positions where the language-CPS has been originally reported (i.e., at the onset of the pause between phrases), and (2) comparing the CPS in music and in language in non-musicians and professional musicians. For the first time, we report a positive shift at the onset of musical phrase boundaries that strongly resembles the language-CPS and argue that the post-boundary 'music-CPS' of previous studies may be an entirely distinct ERP component. Moreover, the language-CPS in musicians was found to be less prominent than in non-musicians, suggesting more efficient processing of prosodic phrases in language as a result of higher musical expertise.

Dual-modality impairment of implicit learning of letter-strings versus color-patterns in patients with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Chiu, Ming-Jang; Liu, Kristina; Hsieh, Ming H; Hwu, Hai-Gwo

2005-12-12

Implicit learning was reported to be intact in schizophrenia using artificial grammar learning. However, emerging evidence indicates that artificial grammar learning is not a unitary process. The authors used dual coding stimuli and schizophrenia clinical symptom dimensions to re-evaluate the effect of schizophrenia on various components of artificial grammar learning. Letter string and color pattern artificial grammar learning performances were compared between 63 schizophrenic patients and 27 comparison subjects. Four symptom dimensions derived from a Chinese Positive and Negative Symptom Scale ratings were correlated with patients' artificial grammar implicit learning performances along the two stimulus dimensions. Patients' explicit memory performances were assessed by verbal paired associates and visual reproduction subtests of the Wechsler Memory Scales Revised Version to provide a contrast to their implicit memory function. Schizophrenia severely hindered color pattern artificial grammar learning while the disease affected lexical string artificial grammar learning to a lesser degree after correcting the influences from age, education and the performance of explicit memory function of both verbal and visual modalities. Both learning performances correlated significantly with the severity of patients' schizophrenic clinical symptom dimensions that reflect poor abstract thinking, disorganized thinking, and stereotyped thinking. The results of this study suggested that schizophrenia affects various mechanisms of artificial grammar learning differently. Implicit learning, knowledge acquisition in the absence of conscious awareness, is not entirely intact in patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia affects implicit learning through an impairment of the ability of making abstractions from rules and at least in part decreasing the capacity for perceptual learning.

The Missing Link: The Use of Link Words and Phrases as a Link to Manuscript Quality

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J.

2016-01-01

In this article, I provide a typology of transition words/phrases. This typology comprises 12 dimensions of link words/phrases that capture 277 link words/phrases. Using QDA Miner, WordStat, and SPSS--a computer-assisted mixed methods data analysis software, content analysis software, and statistical software, respectively--I analyzed 74…

On search guide phrase compilation for recommending home medical products.

PubMed

Luo, Gang

2010-01-01

To help people find desired home medical products (HMPs), we developed an intelligent personal health record (iPHR) system that can automatically recommend HMPs based on users' health issues. Using nursing knowledge, we pre-compile a set of "search guide" phrases that provides semantic translation from words describing health issues to their underlying medical meanings. Then iPHR automatically generates queries from those phrases and uses them and a search engine to retrieve HMPs. To avoid missing relevant HMPs during retrieval, the compiled search guide phrases need to be comprehensive. Such compilation is a challenging task because nursing knowledge updates frequently and contains numerous details scattered in many sources. This paper presents a semi-automatic tool facilitating such compilation. Our idea is to formulate the phrase compilation task as a multi-label classification problem. For each newly obtained search guide phrase, we first use nursing knowledge and information retrieval techniques to identify a small set of potentially relevant classes with corresponding hints. Then a nurse makes the final decision on assigning this phrase to proper classes based on those hints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by compiling search guide phrases from an occupational therapy textbook.

Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

PubMed Central

Johannessen, Janne Bondi; Larsson, Ida

2015-01-01

This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the noun phrase, but not the declension of the noun. We discuss whether this means that gender is lost and has been reduced to a pure declension class, or whether gender is retained. We argue that gender is actually retained in these heritage speakers. One argument for this is that the speakers who lack agreement in complex noun phrases, have agreement intact in simpler phrases. We have thus found that the complexity of the noun phrase is crucial for some speakers. However, among the heritage speakers we also find considerable inter-individual variation, and different speakers can have partly different systems. PMID:26733114

Effect of Jigsaw I Technique on Teaching Turkish Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arslan, Akif

2016-01-01

The purpose of this study is to find out the effect of Jigsaw I technique on students' academic success and attitude towards the course in teaching Turkish grammar. For that purpose, three grammar topics (spelling and punctuation marks rules) were determined and an experimental study conforming to "control group preliminary-testing final…

Grammar Is Back, but When Will We Start Cooking?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vavra, Ed

2003-01-01

Suggests that the current "return" to grammar will fail unless educators can come to terms with definitions of fundamental grammatical concepts. Considers how educators cannot go back to teaching the traditional, because the traditional no longer exists. Argues that pedagogical grammar currently has too many cooks, all trying to prepare the same…

Construction Morphology and the Parallel Architecture of Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Booij, Geert; Audring, Jenny

2017-01-01

This article presents a systematic exposition of how the basic ideas of Construction Grammar (CxG) (Goldberg, 2006) and the Parallel Architecture (PA) of grammar (Jackendoff, 2002]) provide the framework for a proper account of morphological phenomena, in particular word formation. This framework is referred to as Construction Morphology (CxM). As…

A GRAMMAR OF SPOKEN CHINESE.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

CHAO, YUEN REN

THE AUTHOR OF THIS GRAMMAR STATES THAT THIS IS A "DISCUSSION BOOK" AND NOT AN INSTRUCTION BOOK FOR LEARNING CHINESE. HIS ANALYSIS OF CHINESE GRAMMAR IS BASED ON CURRENT LINGUISTIC METHODS AND ASSUMES THE READER HAS SOME KNOWLEDGE OF LINGUISTICS. THIS BOOK CONSTITUTES A REFERENCE WORK FOR LINGUISTS AND STUDENTS OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE. MAJOR…

A Reference Grammar of Bena

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morrison, Michelle Elizabeth

2011-01-01

This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed…

Using Three Online Course Management Systems in EFL Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Al-Jarf, Reima Sado

2005-01-01

Nicenet, WebCT and Moodle were used to teach grammar to freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. The subjects were divided into three groups and were randomly assigned to the three online courses. The same questions, discussion threads, grammar websites, daily grammar lesson, exercises…

Spoken Grammar: An Urgent Necessity in the EFL Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Al-wossabi, Sami A.

2014-01-01

Recent studies in corpus linguistics have revealed apparent inconsistencies between the prescriptive grammar presented in EFL textbooks and the type of grammar used in the speech of native speakers. Such variations and learning gaps deprive EFL learners of the actual use of English and delay their oral/aural developmental processes. The focus of…

Grammar for College Writing: A Sentence-Composing Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Killgallon, Don; Killgallon, Jenny

2010-01-01

Across America, in thousands of classrooms, from elementary school to high school, the time-tested sentence-composing approach has given students tools to become better writers. Now the authors present a much anticipated sentence-composing grammar worktext for college writing. This book presents a new and easier way to understand grammar: (1) Noun…

The Place of Grammar in the ESL/EFL Classroom: An Annotated Bibliography.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kotapish, Carl E.

This annotated bibliography includes citations of journal articles and book chapters that focus on current theories related to teaching grammar in English-as-a-Second-Language and English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms. Citations include: (1) "Field Independence-Dependence and the Teaching of Grammar" (R. G. Abraham); (2) "Making…

Teachers' Perceptions about Grammar Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thu, Tran Hoang

2009-01-01

This study investigates English as a second language (ESL) teachers' beliefs in grammar teaching. A 32-item questionnaire was administered to 11 ESL teachers in a language school in California. The results show that the participants generally believe that the formal study of grammar is essential to the eventual mastery of a foreign or second…

Assessing Grammar Teaching Methods Using a Metacognitive Framework.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burkhalter, Nancy

A study examined 3 grammar teaching methods to understand why some methods may carry over into writing better than others. E. Bialystok and E. B. Ryan's (1985) metacognitive model of language skills was adapted to plot traditional grammar, sentence combining, and the functional/inductive approach according to the amount of analyzed knowledge and…

Propelling Students into Active Grammar Participation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jurhill, Dennis A.

2011-01-01

"O! this learning, what a thing it is." -W. Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew." The aim of this action research was to find out if active grammar involvement amongst students might lead to better results. My approach was to activate my students during grammar instruction by using cooperative learning: that is a form of…

State Competency Testing for Teachers: Problems with Testing Grammar,

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shafer, Robert E.

In Arizona, beginning teachers applying for certification must take the Arizona Teacher Proficiency Examination which tests professional knowledge, reading, mathematics, and grammar. The high failure rate on the grammar test has caused a great deal of concern; 40 percent of the examinees, and a higher percentage of minority groups, failed it in…

My New Teaching Partner? Using the Grammar Checker in Writing Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Potter, Reva; Fuller, Dorothy

2008-01-01

Grammar checkers do not claim to teach grammar; they are tools to bring potential problems to the writer's attention. They also offer only formal and Standard English preferences, limiting the freer expression of some literary forms. Without guidance, students may misuse the checker, become frustrated, and feel discouraged. Users must be…

Where Is She? Gender Occurrences in Online Grammar Guides

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Amare, Nicole

2007-01-01

This article examines seven online grammar guides for instances of linguistic sexism. The grammar sentences from .edu Websites were analyzed based on NCTE's "Guidelines for Gender-Fair Use of Language" (2002) using the criteria of generic he and man; titles, labels, and names; gender stereotypes; order of mention (firstness); and ratio of male to…

EEG: Elements of English Grammar: Rules Explained Simply. Workbook.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ratti, Marianne

This workbook is a supplement to Harold Van Winkle's "Elements of English Grammar: Rules Explained Simply," a book intended for self-instruction which presents the basic rules of standard English grammar in an easy-to-understand manner. The workbook's six chapters correspond to those in the book and contain exercises on: (1) The…

GRAMMAR--THE PROTEUS OF THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

ASTON, KATHARINE O.

THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM CAN BE MADE MORE EFFECTIVE BY CONSIDERING THE SIGNIFICANT PART PLAYED BY THE COMPONENT OF GRAMMAR. THE NATIVE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH POSSESSES AN INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE RULES OF GRAMMAR AND YET CANNOT EXPLAIN WHAT HIS INTUITION KNOWS. THEREFORE, A PRECISE, ECONOMICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE LANGUAGE MECHANISM AND HOW IT FUNCTIONS…

Electrical Stimulation of Broca's Area Enhances Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Vries, Meinou H.; Barth, Andre C. R.; Maiworm, Sandra; Knecht, Stefan; Zwitserlood, Pienie; Floel, Agnes

2010-01-01

Artificial grammar learning constitutes a well-established model for the acquisition of grammatical knowledge in a natural setting. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that Broca's area (left BA 44/45) is similarly activated by natural syntactic processing and artificial grammar learning. The current study was conducted to investigate the…

A Diversity of Grammars: Breaking the Boundaries of "The Well Made Box."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sidler, Michelle

In his 1976 article, "Grammars of Style: New Options in Composition," Winston Weathers calls for a Grammar B, an alternate set of conventions which govern the construction of whole compositions. He urges compositionists to look beyond the "well-made box" and consider other options for compositional patterns and discourse…

Student Teacher Beliefs on Grammar Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Graus, Johan; Coppen, Peter-Arno

2016-01-01

The role of grammar teaching in foreign language education is a controversial one both in second language acquisition (SLA) research and language pedagogy and, as a result, a potential source of confusion to student teachers. The objective of this study was to gain insight into the beliefs on grammar teaching of student teachers of English as a…

Garfield Latin Grammar Magnet Elementary Schools: 1990-1991. Formative Evaluation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robinson-Lewis, G.

The second year of implementation of the Garfield Latin Grammar Magnet Elementary School in Kansas City, Missouri, is reported. The Latin grammar program operates in a traditional setting that includes strong emphasis on discipline and behavior, systemative and rigorous homework policies, and the strong commitment of staff, students, and parents.…

Grammaire francaise pour etudiants americains (French Grammar for American Students): Workbook and Answers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Giauque, Gerald S.

This workbook in French grammar, intended for American college students, provides instruction and practice in French morphology, syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and language style at the intermediate level. It is also designed to increase or reinforce the students' understanding of English grammar, based on the assumption that American students…

Literary Texts and Grammar Instruction: Revisiting the Inductive Presentation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paesani, Kate

2005-01-01

This article outlines an approach to explicit grammar instruction that uses literary texts as comprehensible, meaning-bearing input. In this approach, which employs strategies from the teaching of grammar and the teaching of reading, literary texts serve as the basis of the inductive presentation of new grammatical forms and as a springboard for…

Video Game Based Learning in English Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Singaravelu, G.

2008-01-01

The study enlightens the effectiveness of Video Game Based Learning in English Grammar at standard VI. A Video Game package was prepared and it consisted of self-learning activities in play way manner which attracted the minds of the young learners. Chief objective: Find out the effectiveness of Video-Game based learning in English grammar.…

Stratificational Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Algeo, John

1968-01-01

According to the author, most grammarians have been writing stratificational grammars without knowing it because they have dealt with units that are related to one another, but not simply as a whole to its parts, or as a class to its members. The question, then, is not whether a grammar is stratified but whether it is explicitly stratified. This…

Cooperative Business Education - 7725 (Reinforcing Knowledge of Grammar): Department 48 - Course 7725.08.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dade County Public Schools, Miami, FL.

The essential elements of grammar required to write business letters, memorandums, and reports are covered in this quinmester course. The course consists of a complete grammar review and the learning of proofreading skills for students in the Cooperative Business Education program in Dade County High Schools. Instruction techniques include group…

Students' Attitudes towards Learning English Grammar: A Study of Scale Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akay, Emel; Toraman, Çetin

2015-01-01

Learning a language means not only studying four skills of proficiency, but also understanding the system of rules underlying. In this respect, learners' attitudes towards grammar are also of vital importance. The main objective of this descriptive study is to determine English language learners' attitudes towards grammar and to analyze these…

Analysis of Interacting Plans as a Guide to the Understanding of Story Structure. Technical Report No. 130.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bruce, Bertram

A complete analysis of a story's structure must rely on more than a simple grammar of story components; it requires a consideration of the characters' plans as they are stated or implied in the story. Furthermore, these plans are recognized as the characters' beliefs, and beliefs about interactions among plans are crucial determinants of a story's…

Learning Complex Grammar in the Virtual Classroom: A Comparison of Processing Instruction, Structured Input, Computerized Visual Input Enhancement, and Traditional Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Russell, Victoria

2012-01-01

This study investigated the effects of processing instruction (PI) and structured input (SI) on the acquisition of the subjunctive in adjectival clauses by 92 second-semester distance learners of Spanish. Computerized visual input enhancement (VIE) was combined with PI and SI in an attempt to increase the salience of the targeted grammatical form…

AUTOMATIC ENGLISH-TO-LOGIC TRANSLATION IN A SIMPLIFIED MODEL, A STUDY IN THE LOGIC OF GRAMMAR. FINAL REPORT.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

BACKER, P.O.; BOHNERT, H.G.

THE LATEST IN A SERIES OF ENGLISH-LIKE LANGUAGES IS DESCRIBED WHICH IS TRANSLATABLE INTO FORMS OF A FIRST-ORDER PREDICATE CALCULUS NOTATION. THE STUDY IS BASED ON THE HYPOTHESIS THAT SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY ARISING FROM DIFFERENCES IN DEEP STRUCTURE CAN BE ADEQUATELY DESCRIBED ONLY IF THE DEEP STRUCTURES CAN BE SYSTEMATICALLY REPRESENTED. THE NOTATION…

"Units of Comparison" across Languages, across Time

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thomas, Margaret

2009-01-01

Lardiere's keynote article adverts to a succession of "units of comparison" that have been employed in the study of cross-linguistic differences, including mid-twentieth-century structural patterns, generative grammar's parameters, and (within contemporary Minimalism) features. This commentary expands on the idea of units of cross-linguistic…

Generative Perspectives on Language Acquisition: Empirical Findings, Theoretical Considerations, and Crosslinguistic Comparisons.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clahsen, Harald, Ed.

The collection of essays and studies concerning generative grammar and first and second language acquisition includes: "The Optional-Infinitive Stage in Child English: Evidence from Negation" (Tony Harris, Ken Wexler); "Towards a Structure-Building Model of Acquisition" (Andrew Radford); "The Underspecification of…

Modern Foreign Languages: A Refereed International Journal of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, 2001.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ying, Du, Ed; Zidong, Huang, Ed.

2001-01-01

These three issues contain the following articles written in Chinese: "On Conflated Theme in Systemic Functional Grammar" (Huang Guo-Wen); "A Cognitive Approach to the Conceptual Semantic Structures of Causation" (Cheng Qi-Long); "Falsifying the Internal Argument Hypothesis" (Zhao Yan-Chun); "Existential…

Syntax-Prosody Interface: Evidence from wh-Movement in Jordanian Arabic and Egyptian Arabic

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yasin, Ayman

2012-01-01

Richards (2006, 2010) suggests that wh-movement is prosodically driven. Based on the position of the Comp(lementizer) and the marking of prosodic phrase edges, he claims that if Comp is on one side and the language marks the opposite side of prosodic phrases, then the wh-phrase does not move since Comp and wh-phrase can create a prosodic wh-domain…

A grammar-based semantic similarity algorithm for natural language sentences.

PubMed

Lee, Ming Che; Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng

2014-01-01

This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.

Verb Biases Are Shaped through Lifelong Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ryskin, Rachel A.; Qi, Zhenghan; Duff, Melissa C.; Brown-Schmidt, Sarah

2017-01-01

Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to…

The Grammar Movie Project

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kreutner, Edith

2015-01-01

In this case study, I will show how directing a movie on grammar can help students improve their oral skills as well as their language competency, team working and planning skills, and also teach them about learning itself. I will present an innovative teaching project that uses the medium of film to get students engaged with grammar and that aims…

What Is Grammar and Why Teach It?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Greenbaum, Sidney

The word "grammar" can be used in many ways: a general theory of language description; a theory for describing one language; a description of a particular language, either in the form of a book (an "English grammar") or the contents of that book; an ideal as opposed to actual description of a language; the properties and processes of a language…

Supporting French Teachers for a Paradigm Shift in Grammar Education: A Teacher Trainer's Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thibeault, Joël

2016-01-01

This article presents a series of pedagogical workshops that was offered over two years to a cohort of 50 teachers practising in Ontarian French schools. Focusing on grammar teaching, the workshops' objectives were to: (a) contribute to the teachers' development of linguistic knowledge consistent with the grammar under new provincial standards and…

Using Dual-Task Methodology to Dissociate Automatic from Nonautomatic Processes Involved in Artificial Grammar Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hendricks, Michelle A.; Conway, Christopher M.; Kellogg, Ronald T.

2013-01-01

Previous studies have suggested that both automatic and intentional processes contribute to the learning of grammar and fragment knowledge in artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks. To explore the relative contribution of automatic and intentional processes to knowledge gained in AGL, we utilized dual-task methodology to dissociate automatic and…

Functional Grammar and Its Implications for English Teaching and Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Feng, Zhiwen

2013-01-01

Functional grammar has received more and more attention from domestic scholars in the world of linguistics since 1970s, but it is still new to most EFL teachers. In spite of controversies about its applications into classroom teaching, this new grammar model has its own advantages and can facilitate EFL students to achieve academic success. This…

Effect of Direct Grammar Instruction on Student Writing Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robinson, Lisa; Feng, Jay

2016-01-01

Grammar Instruction has an important role to play in helping students to speak and write more effectively. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of direct grammar instruction on the quality of student's writing skills. The participants in this study included 18 fifth grade students and two fifth grade teachers. Based on the results…

Noticing Grammar in L2 Writing and Problem-Solving Strategies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geist, Monika

2017-01-01

Noticing plays an important role for second language acquisition. Since the formulation of the output hypothesis (Swain, 1985), it has been proven that producing output can lead to noticing. Studies on noticing have revealed little focus on grammar, and an in-depth investigation of grammar noticing has not been conducted so far. Studies into…

Corrections on Grammar, Sentence Variety and Developing Detail to Qualify Academic Essay of Indonesian Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Solikhah, Imroatus

2017-01-01

This experimental research examines: (1) significant differences of corrections on grammar, sentence variety and developing details on the quality of the essay by Indonesian learners; and (2) different effect of corrections on grammar, sentence variety, and developing details on the quality of the essay. Treatments for each were served as follows:…

Pair Counting to Improve Grammar and Spoken Fluency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hanson, Stephanie

2017-01-01

English language learners are often more grammatically accurate in writing than in speaking. As students focus on meaning while speaking, their spoken fluency comes at a cost: their grammatical accuracy decreases. The author wanted to find a way to help her students improve their oral grammar; that is, she wanted them to focus on grammar while…

GenieTutor: A Computer Assisted Second-Language Learning System Based on Semantic and Grammar Correctness Evaluations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kwon, Oh-Woog; Lee, Kiyoung; Kim, Young-Kil; Lee, Yunkeun

2015-01-01

This paper introduces a Dialog-Based Computer-Assisted second-Language Learning (DB-CALL) system using semantic and grammar correctness evaluations and the results of its experiment. While the system dialogues with English learners about a given topic, it automatically evaluates the grammar and content properness of their English utterances, then…

Cooperative Learning as a Correction and Grammar Revision Technique: Communicative Exchanges, Self-Correction Rates and Scores

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Servetti, Sara

2010-01-01

This paper focuses on cooperative learning (CL) used as a correction and grammar revision technique and considers the data collected in six Italian parallel classes, three of which (sample classes) corrected mistakes and revised grammar through cooperative learning, while the other three (control classes) in a traditional way. All the classes…

Density of Visual Input Enhancement and Grammar Learning: A Research Proposal

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tran, Thu Hoang

2009-01-01

Research in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) has been done to ascertain the effectiveness of visual input enhancement (VIE) on grammar learning. However, one issue remains unexplored: the effects of VIE density on grammar learning. This paper presents a research proposal to investigate the effects of the density of VIE on English…

Exploring the Outcomes of a Novel Computer-Assisted Treatment Program Targeting Expressive-Grammar Deficits in Preschoolers with SLI

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Washington, Karla N.; Warr-Leeper, Genese; Thomas-Stonell, Nancy

2011-01-01

Purpose: The impact of a newly designed computer-assisted treatment ("C-AT") program, "My Sentence Builder", for the remediation of expressive-grammar deficits in children with specific language impairment (SLI) was explored. This program was specifically designed with features to directly address expressive-grammar difficulties, thought to be…

Confidence and Competence among Community College Students: Self-Efficacy and Performance in Grammar

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collins, Steve; Bissell, Kimberly

2004-01-01

Proper grammar is crucial for effective communication. Two surveys of students in an introductory writing course sought to identify predictors of grammar ability. Students demonstrated a limited grasp of the language, struggling with such issues as the distinction between "it's" and "its." Women performed better than men at the beginning of the…

Spoken Grammar Awareness Raising: Does It Affect the Listening Ability of Iranian EFL Learners?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rashtchi, Mojgan; Afzali, Mahnaz

2011-01-01

Advances in spoken corpora analysis have brought about new insights into language pedagogy and have led to an awareness of the characteristics of spoken language. Current findings have shown that grammar of spoken language is different from written language. However, most listening and speaking materials are concocted based on written grammar and…