L1 Counterparts Research Articles

Iteratively Reweighted <named-content content-type="math" xlink:type="simple"><inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell_1$</tex-math></inline-formula> </named-content> Approaches to Sparse Composite Regularization

Motivated by the observation that a given signal ${x}$ admits sparse representations in multiple dictionaries ${\Psi}_d$ but with varying levels of sparsity across dictionaries, we propose two new algorithms for the reconstruction of (approximately) sparse signals from noisy linear measurements. Our first algorithm, Co-L1, extends the well-known lasso algorithm from the L1 regularizer $\Vert{\Psi x}\Vert_1$ to composite regularizers of the form $\sum_d \lambda_d \Vert{\Psi}_d {x}\Vert_1$ while self-adjusting the regularization weights $\lambda_d$ . Our second algorithm, Co-IRW-L1, extends the well-known iteratively reweighted L1 algorithm to the same family of composite regularizers. We provide several interpretations of both algorithms: 1) majorization-minimization (MM) applied to a non-convex log-sum-type penalty; 2) MM applied to an approximate $\ell_0$ -type penalty; 3) MM applied to Bayesian MAP inference under a particular hierarchical prior; and 4) variational expectation maximization (VEM) under a particular prior with deterministic unknown parameters. A detailed numerical study suggests that our proposed algorithms yield significantly improved recovery SNR when compared to their noncomposite L1 and IRW-L1 counterparts.

Estimating Korean EFL listeners’ perception of English vowels with reference to cross-language labelling

This paper explores whether Korean EFL listeners perception of English vowels and their English vowel category development can be estimated from cross-language labelling between English and Korean. The paper also investigates whether cross-language labelling makes different predictions for General American English (GAE) vowels and British English (Received Pronunciation, RP) vowels, given that vowel category variation exists between the two accents. Thirty-six university students in Seoul completed cross-language labelling and English vowel identification. Fit indices were calculated based on cross-language labelling for both GAE and RP vowels in order to answer the questions posed. Specifically, the paper tested the assumption of the Speech Learning Model (SLM) that L2 category development is closely related to the perceived phonetic distance between L1 and L2 sounds by calculating fit indices. The results reveal that the fit indices computed had limitations in accounting for the identification accuracy of L2 vowels. The fit indices also made similar predictions for GAE and RP vowels, but there were accent and vowel category variations between GAE and RP. Thus, the overall results suggest that L2 vowel perception or L2 vowel category learning depends on factors such as L2 learners’ target language accent and their overall interlanguage phonological system, as well as the perceived phonetic distance between an L2 sound and its closest L1 counterpart.

Epistemic Modality in the Argumentative Essays of Chinese EFL Learners

Central to argumentative writing is the proper use of epistemic devices (EDs), which distinguish writers’ opinions from facts and evaluate the degree of certainty expressed in their statements. Important as these devices are, they turn out to constitute a thorny area for non-native speakers (NNS). Previous research indicates that Chinese EFL learners differ significantly from the native speakers (NS) in marking epistemic modality. One problem of previous studies is that the essay topics are not well controlled, which makes it somewhat ambiguous as to whether the observed linguistic discrepancies are caused by the NNS/NS difference or by the topic differences. This paper sets out to explore much more comparable data from International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). The results show that while both NS group and NNS groups are heavily dependent on a restricted range of items, the manipulation of epistemic modality is particularly problematic for the L2 students who employ syntactically simpler constructions and rely on a more limited range of devices, as already discovered in the previous studies. Nevertheless, this study also shows that the most proficient L2 students modify their statements with less certainty markers and more tentative expressions than do their L1 counterparts, and that all learner groups, regardless of their overall language proficiency, use less boosters than L1 writers, which is in sharp contrast with previous studies. The ability to mark epistemic modality has much to do with L2 proficiency. While lower-band students exhibit a heavy reliance on a narrower range of items for strong assertions, higher-band students tend to be more tentative and demonstrate a more native-like use of some Eds. The observed patterns are explained in the light of the inherent properties of English EDs, the imperfect modal instruction and learner factors.

Acoustic Analysis of Persian EFL Learners' Pronunciation of English Vowels

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on non-native production of English vowels. Two groups of Persian EFL learners varying in language proficiency were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of American English. Vowel production accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements. Ladefoged and Maddison’s (1996) F1 F2 measurements for American English vowel space were used as reference values to be compared with the measurements obtained from the production of Persian EFL learners. The acoustic measurements revealed that learners were not able to control acoustic parameters of vowel quality, even for the more similar vowels in the two languages, in a native-like manner due to interference from their native vowel system. Spectral accuracy measures also did not progress toward more native-like values in the productions of the more proficient learners. Interestingly, the positions achieved for the more dissimilar vowels were neither close to their closest L1 counterparts nor close to their native categories. Interpreting this latter result within the Perceptual Assimilation Model proposed by Best (1994), it could be stated that learners established new phonetic categories for the vowel contrasts that were not used in their native phonological system.

The Role of the Colloquial Varieties in the Acquisition of the Standard Variety: The Case of Arabic Heritage Speakers

AbstractThe study investigated the acquisition of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by second language (L2) learners and by heritage speakers of the colloquial varieties of Arabic. The study focused on three questions: (1) whether heritage speakers who enroll in college‐level elementary MSA classes have an advantage over their L2 counterparts, (2) whether any potential advantage that heritage speakers may bring into the classroom carries on to a later stage of their MSA learning, and (3) the role of positive or negative transfer from the colloquial variety in the acquisition of MSA in a formal setting. Thirty‐five heritage speakers (19 elementary and 16 advanced), 28 advanced L2 learners, and 16 native‐speaker controls completed five negation tasks. The results indicated that, whereas elementary heritage speakers entered the MSA classroom with an advantage over their L2 counterparts in the area under study, the advanced heritage speakers exhibited patterns that were comparable to those of the L2 learners. Unlike their L2 counterparts, however, the advanced heritage speakers displayed positive and negative transfer effects from colloquial Arabic. The findings are discussed in the framework of three models/hypotheses of first language transfer to a third language, and their pedagogical implications for Arabic language teaching and learning are explicated.

Role of first language dialect in the production of second language German vowels

A methodological shortcoming in previous second language (L2) acquisition studies has been that researchers have assumed an overly homogenous first language (L1) ignoring dialect differences. In the current study English and German vowel production data were collected from 72 English-speaking learners of German from three distinct North American English dialect regions – the Inland North, North Central, and Western Canada. Following Flege (e.g., 1995), who proposed that L2 segments with L1 counterparts would be more difficult to perceive and produce than new L2 segments, we show that subjects did not transfer their L1 /u/ to German but rather produced the German counterpart in a manner expected in neither German nor English. Instead, this was reflected in terms of formant (F1, F2 or F3) values that varied according to the L1 dialect of the learner. In particular, learners from the North Central dialect region whose English /u/ was produced with the lowest F2 values – though not significantly different from the Inland North learners' /u/ – produced the German /u:/ with the highest F2 values of all three dialect regions. Speakers from all dialect regions were also able to manipulate their acoustic space to allow for the addition of the new German segment /y:/; however, they differed in how they ultimately established the German /u:/–/y:/ contrast. Learners from the two American dialect regions contrasted these vowels according to F2 values, while learners from Western Canada made the contrast utilizing F3. Based on these results, we conclude that L2 vowel formant values differ by dialect region even when the learners' L1 dialects differ only subtly. Lastly, results provide further evidence that this influence is not simply the result of direct L1 transfer.

How similar are adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers? Spanish clitics and word order

ABSTRACTRecent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners and 24 Spanish heritage speakers. Results of an oral production task, a written grammaticality judgment task, and a speeded comprehension task showed that, overall, heritage speakers seem to possess more nativelike knowledge of Spanish than their L2 counterparts. Implications for theories that stress the role of age and experience in L2 ultimate attainment and for the field of heritage language acquisition and teaching are discussed.

Median-Based Classifiers for High-Dimensional Data

Conventional distance-based classifiers use standard Euclidean distance, and so can suffer from excessive volatility if vector components have heavy-tailed distributions. This difficulty can be alleviated by replacing the L2 distance by its L1 counterpart. For example, the L1 version of the popular centroid classifier would allocate a new data value to the population to whose centroid it was closest in L1 terms. However, this approach can lead to inconsistency, because the centroid is defined using L2, rather than L1 distance. In particular, by mixing L1 and L2 approaches, we produce a classifier that can seriously misidentify data in cases where the means and medians of marginal distributions take different values. These difficulties motivate replacing centroids by medians. However, in the very-high-dimensional settings commonly encountered today, this can be problematic if we attempt to work with a conventional spatial median. Therefore, we suggest using componentwise medians to construct a robust classifier that is relatively insensitive to the difficulties caused by heavy-tailed data and entails straightforward computation. We also consider generalizations and extensions of this approach based on, for example, using data truncation to achieve additional robustness. Using both empirical and theoretical arguments, we explore the properties of these methods, and show that the resulting classifiers can be particularly effective. Supplementary materials are available online.

Control of chicken CR1 retrotransposons is independent of Dicer-mediated RNA interference pathway

BackgroundDicer is an RNase III-ribonuclease that initiates the formation of small interfering RNAs as a defence against genomic parasites such as retrotransposons. Despite intensive characterization in mammalian species, the biological functions of Dicer in controlling retrotransposable elements of the non-mammalian vertebrate are poorly understood. In this report, we examine the role of chicken Dicer in controlling the activity of chicken CR1 retrotransposable elements in a chicken-human hybrid DT40 cell line employing a conditional loss-of-Dicer function.ResultsRetrotransposition is detrimental to host genome stability and thus eukaryotic cells have developed mechanisms to limit the expansion of retrotransposons by Dicer-mediated RNAi silencing pathways. However, the mechanisms that control the activity and copy numbers of transposable elements in chicken remain unclear. Here, we describe how the loss of Dicer in chicken cells does not reactivate endogenous chicken CR1 retrotransposons with impaired RNAi machinery, suggesting that the control of chicken CR1 is independent of Dicer-induced RNAi silencing. In contrast, upon introduction of a functionally active human L1 retrotransposable element that contains an active 5' UTR promoter, the Dicer-deficient chicken cells show a strong increase in the accumulation of human L1 transcripts and retrotransposition activity, highlighting a major difference between chicken CR1 and other mammalian L1 retrotransposons.ConclusionOur data provide evidence that chicken CR1 retrotransposons, unlike their mammalian L1 counterparts, do not undergo retrotransposition because most CR1 retrotransposons are truncated or mutated at their 5'UTR promoters and thus are not subjected to Dicer-mediated RNAi-silencing control.

General auditory processing, Chinese tone processing, English phonemic processing and English reading skill: a comparison between Chinese-English and Korean-English bilingual children

In the present study, we investigated the relationship between general auditory processing, Chinese tone processing, English phonemic processing and English reading skill in a group of Chinese-English bilingual children with a tonal L1 and Korean-English counterparts with a non-tonal L1. We found that general auditory processing contributed to variance in English word reading skill for Chinese children after controlling for Chinese tone and English phoneme deletion skill. English phonemic processing, on the other hand, explained a significant amount of unique variance in English reading for Korean children after controlling for general auditory and Chinese tone skill. These findings suggest that Chinese children relied more on general auditory processing in reading English, whereas Korean children relied more on phonemic skill in reading English. These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of cross-language differences in bilingual reading acquisition.

The effect of phonetic similarity on L2 speakers in discerning L1 and L2 consonants

This study investigated how L1 and L2 sounds of different degrees of similarity are perceived by L2 speakers. Twenty-six participants were tested with six Mandarin-English C-/i/ syllable pairs varying in degrees of similarity in the initial consonant. Two competing models were examined, the speech learning model (Flege, 1995) and the perceptual assimilation model (Best, 1995). The former proposes that the greater the perceived dissimilarity between an L2 sound and its closest L1 counterpart, the easier it is for L2 speakers to discern the difference, while the latter proposes that L2-to-L1 assimilation corresponds to their articulatory distance. As for two L2 sounds corresponding to the same L1 target, perceptual performance may still differ depending on how similar the L2 sounds are to the target. Results showed that perceptual performance was independent of L2 proficiency. The SLM is supported in that the accuracy for discerning individual consonants of ‘‘dissimilar’’ pairs was higher than that for ‘‘similar’’ pairs, which in turn was higher than that for ‘‘identical’’ pairs. However, the accuracy for discerning ‘‘identical’’ pairs was still significantly higher than the chance level, indicating that L2 speakers are still able to tell the difference, which can be better explained by the PAM.

Spelling performance of Chinese children using English as a second language: Lexical and visual–orthographic processes

The present study compared lexical and visual–orthographic processing in the spelling performance of 30 Cantonese Chinese children who are English as a second language (ESL) learners to that of 33 native English-speaking (L1) children. Chinese ESL children showed poorer performance in spelling to dictation of pseudowords than L1 children. The difference between real word and pseudoword spelling performances for ESL children was significantly greater than that for L1 children. Moreover, Chinese ESL children outperformed their L1 counterparts in a confrontation spelling task of orthographically legitimate and illegitimate letter strings. In line with their advantage in spelling visually presented materials, the difference between spelling performance on legitimate and illegitimate letter strings for the Chinese children was significantly smaller than that for the L1 children. These findings are discussed in terms of early transfer of L1 literacy skills in second language literacy acquisition and support for a multiroute reading model.

Japanese learners’ acquisition of English manner-of-motion verbs with locational/directional PPs

This study investigated first language (L1) influence on second language (L2) argument structure in a situation where an L2 argument structure forms a superset of its L1 counterpart. In such a situation, a partial fit between the L1 and the L2 may trigger L1 transfer, whereas availability of positive evidence may allow the learner to arrive at the L2 grammar (White, 1991b). This study tested these predictions by investigating whether Japanese speakers can recognize the directional reading of English manner-of-motion verbs ( walk, swim) with locational/directional PPs ( under, behind), such as John swam under the bridge, where under the bridge can be either the goal of John’s swimming (directional) or the location of John’s swimming (locational). By contrast, their Japanese counterparts allow only a locational reading, as Japanese is more restricted than English in allowing only directed motion verbs ( go) to appear with a phrase expressing a goal. Thirty-five intermediate Japanese learners of English and 23 English speakers were tested using a picture-matching task. Results show that, unlike English speakers, Japanese speakers consistently failed to recognize a directional reading. I suggest that positive evidence need not only be available but also be frequent and clear in order to be used by L2 learners to broaden their interlanguage grammar.

Avoidance of idioms in a second language: The effect of L1‐L2 degree of similarity

The study investigates whether avoidance of L2 (English) idioms is determined by the degree of similarity to their L1 (Hebrew) counterparts. Four degrees of similarity were established through a three‐dimensional framework for L1‐L2 comparison. 56 university English majors were tested on 20 idioms (5 per each type), elicited by a fill‐in translation test. The totals of idiomatic and non‐idiomatic responses were compared for each student, for each idiom type. Results showed that idioms as a category were not avoided, that L2 proficiency was a factor in idiom avoidance and that avoidance of specific idiom types was related to L1‐L2 degrees of similarity.

Research Paper Writing Strategies of Professional Japanese EFL Writers

Four Japanese university professors were interviewed on their processes and strategies for writing a research paper in English as a Foreign language (EFL). The results show that these professional EFL writers use strategies similar to those used by skilled native English and proficient ESL writers as reported in previous studies, have an explicit view of writing as a nonlinear dynamic process and as a way of discovering meaning and ideas, supplement writing at the computer with writing with pen and paper, and basically do not rely on L1 Japanese in the EFL writing process. It was also found that their L2 research paper writing process is perceived as virtually equivalent to their L1 counterpart, which suggests that already existing L1 writing strategies transfer to L2 writing.

Language Teachers Should Rush in Where Good Translators Fear to Tread

Abstract In this paper we will support the basic Saussurian view that every language is an individual and independent system which is exploited in a unique, creative and specific way by speakers of that language, in order to communicate what may be termed as 'language-specific' messages, which may very well be 'untranslatable' from one language to another. Examples from Modern Hebrew will be provided on the word-formation, word, structure and discourse levels of language to illustrate that the process of translation may not necessarily be an automatic 'mapping' of LI linguistic forms and structures to their most accurate, equivalent and fluent L2 counterparts in order to convey the same (or as similar as possible) communicative messages. We will contend that this 'untranslatability' existing between languages, which may be systematically discovered through theoretical linguistic and stylistic analyses, should be applied to teaching foreign language students the unique system of the language they are studying.