Production Tasks Research Articles

Training Finnish morphology with a smartphone application in adult beginner level learners

The rich inflectional grammar of Finnish is often considered a challenge for second language (L2) learners. However, the inflectional variation is based on relatively systematic morphological and morphophonological rules. Smartphone applications could offer an effective way to train these rules by utilizing adaptive spaced repetition exercises. Currently there is little research on morphology learning via Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) applications in morphologically rich languages. The present study introduces a newly developed Finnish Morphology Application (FMA) that aims to teach beginner-level Finnish morphology. In a randomized controlled trial, the test group participants (n = 33) practiced Finnish morphology with the FMA during a three-week period, and their improvements were compared to those of an active control group using a general Finnish language learning application (n = 38). The practiced morphological operations comprised transparent and semi-transparent inflections. Pre- and posttests included a visual lexical decision task and a morphological production task. In comparison to the control group, the FMA group improved substantially in written morphological production skills, especially in transparent inflections. In visual lexical decision task, there was an improvement in accuracy for trained words in the FMA group, but this improvement applied to both transparent and semi-transparent inflections as well as monomorphemic nouns. In reaction times, there were no differences between the groups. Self-ratings of perceived efficacy of the FMA regarding grammar and vocabulary varied from neutral to positive. The results suggest that the FMA is particularly useful for learning inflectional production skills in Finnish by adult beginner level learners but can also be used to train word recognition.

Digital thread-driven cloud-fog-edge collaborative disturbance mitigation mechanism for adaptive production in digital twin discrete manufacturing workshop

The collaborative capacity among various computing layers within a digital twin workshop directly impacts the handling of disturbances in discrete manufacturing processes. However, the intricate nature of the cross-space (physical and virtual space) and cross-layer (cloud, fog, and edge) interactions within a digital twin system poses challenges to construct a comprehensive data model and interoperable data flow, leading to a fragmented state of computing layers. To tackle these challenges, this study presents a digital thread-driven theory and method for cloud-fog-edge collaboration in digital twin discrete manufacturing workshops. Firstly, the five-dimensions production information that cross spaces and layers is concatenated and integrated by constructing digital thread models. Subsequently, a disturbance response model is conducted based on these digital thread models to detect, track, and evaluate disturbances. Furthermore, corresponding cloud-fog-edge collaboration strategies are devised for different types and severity of disturbances, facilitating the dynamic production tasks adjustments. Finally, a case study to discuss the performance of the proposed method regarding the maturity of the digital thread model, disturbance response capability, and production self-adaptive adjustment capability. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates makespan and machine idle time under gradual and abrupt disturbances, and saves 46.22% of computing processing time.

The shaping of an idea as temporal, multimodal, and collaborative activity: exploring how students develop a board game in L1

Brainstorming activities are quite common in L1 education. However, limited attention has been paid to the concrete unfolding of students’ idea development as a temporal, multimodal, and collaborative process. In this article, we explore how a group of four upper primary students in Year 5 (age 11–12) design a board game in a teaching unit on young people’s communication and toxic language use on social media. The unit was part of an intervention carried out in a study on game-based learning in the school subject Danish L1. Our detailed analysis shows how the students’ development process involved an interplay of different timescales at the micro, meso, and macro level, and a use of different semiotic resources such as spoken and written language as well as drawn sketches for a game board. The layers of meaning expressed through the students’ dialogic talk resulted in a metaphorical chain of reasoning, where the students’ initial loose idea was gradually transformed into a final game concept. This reasoning across modalities was enforced through the choice of bringing in paper and pen for drawing. The study concludes by discussing how we can understand idea generation as a non-linear multimodal process in the L1 classroom, which may have implications for other productive tasks.

Speech production and perception data collection in R: A tutorial for web-based methods using speechcollectr.

This tutorial is designed for speech scientists familiar with the R programming language who wish to construct experiment interfaces in R. We begin by discussing some of the benefits of building experiment interfaces in R-including R's existing tools for speech data analysis, platform independence, suitability for web-based testing, and the fact that R is open source. We explain basic concepts of reactive programming in R, and we apply these principles by detailing the development of two sample experiments. The first of these experiments comprises a speech production task in which participants are asked to read words with different emotions. The second sample experiment involves a speech perception task, in which participants listen to recorded speech and identify the emotion the talker expressed with forced-choice questions and confidence ratings. Throughout this tutorial, we introduce the new R package speechcollectr, which provides functions uniquely suited to web-based speech data collection. The package streamlines the code required for speech experiments by providing functions for common tasks like documenting participant consent, collecting participant demographic information, recording audio, checking the adequacy of a participant's microphone or headphones, and presenting audio stimuli. Finally, we describe some of the difficulties of remote speech data collection, along with the solutions we have incorporated into speechcollectr to meet these challenges.

Enhancing productivity through work study - A case of electric power pole cross arm fabrication

In the area of globalization any manufacturing industry must be competent in terms of productivity, quality, cost and delivery. A fundamental improvement in production is necessary to succeed in the international markets. Work study is one of the earliest scientific management methods used to determine the best way to perform production tasks in order to reduce idle time and worker fatigue as a result, increase productivity. Kombolcha Steel Products Industry, the member of MIDROC Ethiopia Technology Group, producing a variety of metal and engineering products, such as steel poles, steel structures, structural hot dip galvanization, corrugated sheet metal, etc. The company's main focus was meeting the delivery deadlines, with little attention to implementing standard working method and procedures during the production. The inefficient method of piercing the holes in the u-channels to fabricate the electric pole cross arms is causing a drop in productivity.The primary objective of the current study is to identify the bottlneck in the process of electric power poles cross arms fabrication, to set standard time for the process and reduce the cycle time. Time and method studies were used to identify the flaws in the current fabrication process and layout design. The efficient technique to manufacture the product has been replaced by redesigning and implementing a new layout. This arrangement accelerated the process by reducing the idle time for the three punching machines that undertake the piercing operations. The modified layout raised production from the target daily production of 420 pieces to 720 pieces in 8 h, resulting in a 71 % reduction in the previous work cycle from 65 to 39 s. After a time and method study, a simple change in the layout with no capital investment not only increased the company's productivity and profitability, but it also reduced worker fatigue due to extra material handling operations of raw materials and intermediate products.

Dynamics analysis and chatter control of a polishing and milling nonideal flexible manipulator

Some robots are designed to be lightweight and flexible, enabling them to access small and challenging paths in various applications. These features enable robots to collaborate with humans in performing specific production tasks. However,the movement of the flexible manipulator can become self-excited when handling a cutting tool on a workpiece, which can lead to a control problem. This article presents a control solution for lightweight robotic manipulators with rotating tools, such as polishing and milling, using smart actuators. The control discretization method is also introduced to facilitate integration into digital controllers. The paper starts by describing the governing equations of the non-ideal flexible manipulator for polishing and milling and analysing its dynamic behavior. Subsequently, models for the controllers of the DC motor-only actuators and the hybrid (shape memory alloy and DC motors) actuators were formulated using shape memory alloy and a suboptimal control scheme known as the discrete state-dependent Riccati equation. The coupled system was analysed dynamically, and it was observed that it exhibits chaotic behavior. The results suggest that incorporating smart actuators into the motor group of the system could decrease the positioning error of the manipulator and significantly reduce the oscillation of the robot’s end-effector.

The study of in-situ calibration technology of redocking torque parameter of performance test system for space station redocking mechanism

Abstract The redocking manipulator performance test system is the necessary equipment in the development stage of a redocking manipulator. The measurement parameters such as redocking torque are the key parameters used by the test system to simulate the redocking process of the space station, which directly affect the simulation accuracy of the whole test system and the correctness of the test results of the redocking manipulator. In this paper, the in-situ calibration technology of redocking torque is studied. Firstly, the calibration theory is analyzed based on the sensor comparison method. Secondly, the in-situ calibration device of redocking torque is established by using a special loading mechanism and calibration tooling, and the measurement uncertainty is evaluated. Finally, the application verification test of the test system is carried out to verify the feasibility of the calibration device, which provides a metrological guarantee for the successful completion of the development and production task of the redocking manipulator of the space station.

The Acquisition of a Diglossic Language by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: Evidence From a Sentence Production Task.

The current study aimed to examine morphosyntactic errors in sentences produced by DHH students, who are signers of Israeli Sign Language, and also users of Palestinian Colloquial Arabic (PCA) and written Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Nineteen school-age DHH students participated in a sentence elicitation task in which they retold events portrayed in 24 videos in PCA and MSA. A control group of 19 hearing students was tested with the same task. Sentences in each language variety were coded for grammatical versus ungrammatical productions and for type of morphosyntactic errors for the latter. In addition, code-switched words were counted. The hearing group showed no morphosyntactic errors, whereas the DHH students showed morphosyntactic errors in both PCA and MSA. In addition, both groups code-switched in both PCA and MSA, with more code-switching in the MSA task than in the PCA task. Furthermore, an interaction with age revealed that young students code-switched more in MSA and older students code-switched more in PCA. It is suggested that the morphosyntactic abilities of DHH students are incomplete in both language varieties. Lack of spoken language input may negatively influence the acquisition of spoken language, which impacts further the acquisition of the standard language in diglossic contexts. Code-switching is explained as both due to lexical gaps, when occurring in MSA, and an effort to raise the register in PCA.

Aesthetic Production in Clay Molding: Mental and Dynamically Embodied Action Mediate Between Formal and Material Aspects of Experience

Aesthetic production, that is, the processing of material with a focus on the experiential and formal qualities of resulting objects and the process itself, encompasses basic dimensions of art, creativity, craft, and design. To explore these dimensions, we propose the Rubicon model of action phases as a general framework. Additionally, we introduce Schiller's aesthetics as an interactive account of formal/mental and material/physical aspects of aesthetic production and derive testable hypotheses from it. First, we expect form- and material-related experience to converge over an aesthetic production task; second, we assume that physical and mental actions occur with different prevalence across the action phases. These hypotheses were strengthened in a quasi-experimental mixed-methods study on a clay-molding task in an educational real-world setting ( N = 30). The results suggest understanding aesthetic production as a dynamic intertwining of object-related and subject-related experience, action, and embodiment, which supports the transdisciplinary significance of aesthetic production for self-development.

“I WISH COCA HAD…” – LEARNER PERCEPTIONS ON HANDS-ON CORPUS USE IN EFL CONTEXT

A growing body of research has examined the integration of corpora into foreign language classrooms in the last few decades. A sub-line of research concerning the interaction between the two fields has been student perceptions. Additionally, the growing integration of online learning into curricula, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, has aroused a necessity to explore the application of data-driven learning in online learning environments. The current study, therefore, attempted to elicit learner perceptions on learning vocabulary targeted particularly for speaking skill through direct data-driven learning in an online learning context. The data gathered from the participants (N=28) through a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview revealed that the participants found the use of data-driven learning activities in conjunction with the coursebook and oral production tasks helpful to boost their learning. They did not evaluate corpus consultation as a very challenging task to tackle in general. Overall, the study revealed two significant findings: First, it highlighted that collaborative learning might play a significant role in data-driven learning applications. Second, the findings emphasized the necessity for integration of the audio data to the large, publicly available corpora, such as COCA, which could contribute to future research on exploring the efficiency of data-driven learning for speaking skills.

An exploratory characterization of speech- and fine-motor coordination in verbal children with Autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder often associated with difficulties in speech production and fine-motor tasks. Thus, there is a need to develop objective measures to assess and understand speech production and other fine-motor challenges in individuals with ASD. In addition, recent research suggests that difficulties with speech production and fine-motor tasks may contribute to language difficulties in ASD. In this paper, we explore the utility of an off-body recording platform, from which we administer a speech- and fine-motor protocol to verbal children with ASD and neurotypical controls. We utilize a correlation-based analysis technique to develop proxy measures of motor coordination from signals derived from recordings of speech- and fine-motor behaviors. Eigenvalues of the resulting correlation matrix are inputs to Gaussian Mixture Models to discriminate between highly-verbal children with ASD and neurotypical controls. These eigenvalues also characterize the complexity (underlying dimensionality) of representative signals of speech- and fine-motor movement dynamics, and form the feature basis to estimate scores on an expressive vocabulary measure. Based on a pilot dataset (15 ASD and 15 controls), features derived from an oral story reading task are used in discriminating between the two groups with AUCs > 0.80, and highlight lower complexity of coordination in children with ASD. Features derived from handwriting and maze tracing tasks led to AUCs of 0.86 and 0.91, however features derived from ocular tasks did not aid in discrimination between the ASD and neurotypical groups. In addition, features derived from free speech and sustained vowel tasks are strongly correlated with expressive vocabulary scores. These results indicate the promise of a correlation-based analysis in elucidating motor differences between individuals with ASD and neurotypical controls.

Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German?

Abstract This paper shows (a) how the concept of the linguistic market can be operationalized as an index to enable its inclusion as a factor in variationist analysis and (b) how this index helps to explain sociolinguistic variation in a diglossic situation. To do this, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in Swiss Standard German among 16 L1-dialect-speakers aged between 19 and 40 from Biel/Bienne in western Switzerland. Drawing from participants’ self-assessments of the importance of Standard German in their professional life, a linguistic market index (LMI) was created and cross-validated with external assessments. Our variationist analysis considered four phonetic-phonological variables—/k/, /ç/, /aː/, /ɛ-ɛː/—for which typical Swiss variants (i.e., sociolinguistic stereotypes) exist. Findings show that the LMI is crucial for explaining variation in all the variables tested. Other social (i.e., gender and formality of the language production task) and linguistic factors (e.g., phonetic environment) show partial effects as well.

Grammatical correction and morphological productivity tasks as potential identifiers of developmental language disorder in Spanish-Catalan bilingual children: a pilot study

ABSTRACT A critical problem for Catalan-Spanish bilinguals is the lack of assessment tools to conduct valid and accurate oral language evaluations. The purpose of this preliminary study was to provide pilot data for a new potential assessment tool in Catalan. We examined the possibility that two novel tasks, a grammatical correction (GramCorr) and morphological productivity (MP; nonword and word subtasks), could differentiate between Catalan-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) with good diagnostic accuracy. Twenty-seven school-aged children with DLD (M age = 9;1 years) and twenty-seven age/sex-matched typically developing (TD) children (M age = 9;0 years) participated in the study. Group differences and diagnostic accuracy analyses (sensitivity and specificity and likelihood ratios) were conducted. Results showed that the overall accuracy of children with DLD was significantly poorer than that of the TD controls in the two tasks. The preliminary diagnostic accuracy results suggested that the overall test (GramCorr+MP) could be useful in identifying children with DLD (cut-off point 62.1%; sensitivity (.929)/specificity (.893); +LH (8.67)/-LH (0.80). Moreover, the overall MP task (nonword + word subtasks; cut-off point 60%; sensitivity (.897)/specificity (.931), +LH (13.00)/-LH (0.111)) appears to provide adequate information to help in detecting DLD. The nature of both tasks, their usefulness for practitioners and future steps in the design of valid tools for the identification of Catalan speaking children with DLD are discussed.

Dual-branch information extraction and local attention anchor-free network for defect detection

In the production process, the presence of surface defects seriously affects the quality of industrial products. Existing defect detectors are not suitable for surface with scattered distribution and complex texture of defects. In this study, a dual-branch information extraction and local attention anchor-free network for defect detection (DLA-FCOS), which is based on the fully convolutional one-stage network, is proposed to accurately locate and detect surface defects of industrial products. Firstly, a dual-branch feature extraction network (DFENeT) is proposed and used to improve the extraction ability of complex defects. Then, a local feature enhancement module is proposed, and a residual connection is established to enrich local semantic information. Meanwhile, the self-attention mechanism is introduced to form local attentional residual feature pyramid networks (LA-RFPN) to eliminate the influences of feature misalignments. The mean average accuracy (mAP) and frames per second (FPS) of the proposed DLA-FCOS on the cut layer of the tobacco packet defect dataset (CLTP-DD) are 96.8% and 20.7, respectively, which meets the requirements for accurate and real-time defect detection. Meanwhile, the average accuracy of the proposed DLA-FCOS on the NEU-DET and GC10-DET datasets is 78.4% and 67.7%, respectively. The results demonstrate that the DLA-FCOS has good feasibility and high generalization capability to perform defect detection tasks of industrial products.

Trajectories of the Creative Process: A Multiple-Drafts Analysis of Graphic Design

ABSTRACT Most experimental analyses of creativity look at one-shot production tasks. However, real-world creativity occurs over long periods of time and involves extensive exploration and revision. We carried out a week-long study in which graphic design students created an advertisement for a fictional business, submitting daily drafts of their evolving ad. By analyzing the successive changes to these ads across the 7 daily drafts, we sought to characterize the trajectory of the creative process for each designer. In doing so, we elaborated on the core concept of the Geneplore model (i.e. generation + exploration) by proposing a 2 × 2 predictive scheme of creative trajectories in which a) the generative phase specifies either a global plan of the final product or merely a kernel idea for it, and b) the exploratory phase proceeds in either a linear or nonlinear manner, thereby resulting in four basic trajectories. We analyzed the relative frequency of these trajectory-types in our 37 graphic design students using a novel “change analysis” method. In addition, we examined how the novelty, quality, and stylistic features of the final ad related to the trajectory-type of the creator. The results revealed that there are multiple routes toward achieving a comparable level of novelty in a creative product.

The Effects of Relative Performance Information and Transparency on Knowledge Sharing and Productive Effort

Using a real-effort experiment, we investigate individuals’ simultaneous decisions regarding how much effort to exert and how to allocate this effort when working on a productive task (productive effort) and sharing knowledge (knowledge-sharing effort). Specifically, we examine the effects of relative performance information (RPI) and the transparency of individual knowledge-sharing decisions (transparency). We find that RPI increases productive effort but reduces knowledge-sharing effort over time. In contrast, transparency does not influence productive effort but increases knowledge-sharing effort. Furthermore, the results indicate that transparency can counteract the adverse effect of RPI on knowledge-sharing effort over time without impeding productive effort. We link our results to the psychological concepts of social comparison, impression management, and reciprocity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Development of derivational morphological knowledge in monolingual and bilingual children: Effects of modality and lexicality.

This study mapped the trajectory of developing derivational morphological knowledge in Hebrew monolingual and Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We investigated 2nd and 4th graders, using a two-by-two structure along the dimensions of modality (comprehension, production) and type of word (real-word, pseudo-word). Performance in the morphological analogies comprehension tasks improved with grade, and monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well. A different pattern was evident in production tasks. In real-word production, monolingual children were more accurate than bilingual children, but this group difference narrowed with age. In pseudo-word production, monolingual children used more morphological elements than bilingual children, and there was also a tendency towards group differences narrowing with age. Detailed error analyses across all tasks revealed that monolingual children recruited more morphological elements than bilingual children. We present implications for assessment of morphological knowledge, and suggest that morphological intervention is a promising avenue for promoting bilingual children's success.

Exploring the Affordances and Propensities of Multimodality in Narrative Pedagogies through Multimodal Ethnography

This paper seeks to reflect on the propensities and advantages of multimodality in teaching and learning, and its rich exploration through multimodal research. It will also report and reflect upon the findings of a small-scale multimodal ethnographic study that was conducted over one scholastic year. This investigated whether, and how, the use of multimodal creative productions can facilitate adolescents’ search for meaning through the re-configuration and re-imagination of life experiences shared in a classroom context. The pedagogical context of this research consisted of RE (Religious Education), and MLE (Media Literacy Education) classrooms, enabling an exploration into a possible fruitful dialogue between these two curricular subjects. Another related aim of this paper is to investigate how a narrative-hermeneutic approach to learning can facilitate meaning-making when applied to and through multimodal production tasks in RE and MLE. The results indicate that through multimodality, made possible by the advancement of creative digital technologies, narrative pedagogies can become more effective. This transpires from the fact that multimodality expands the range of resources available for students to construct and share their narratives, as it integrates the auditory, visual, gestural, linguistic, and spatial modes, augmenting the overall narrative experience. Moreover, this study shows that multimodality can facilitate meaning-making by promoting and nurturing a pedagogy for creative expression, a pedagogy of empathy and compassion, a pedagogy of agency and authenticity, a pedagogy of vulnerability, and a pedagogy through the use of metaphor. The paper also makes specific recommendations on how a narrative-hermeneutical approach through multimodality can promote the specified pedagogies in the context of the mentioned curricular subjects.

Shared representations in cognate comprehension and production: An online picture naming and lexical decision study with bilingual children

AbstractThe cognate facilitation effect, a classic example of cross-language interaction in the bilingual lexicon, has mostly been studied in adults. We examined the extent to which such effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s word processing, to what extent these were modulated by language dominance, and to what extent this differed between comprehension and production tasks. Simultaneous bilingual Dutch-Greek children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to Greek-dominant, performed auditory lexical decision and picture-naming tasks in an online experiment. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both tasks but manifested themselves differently. In lexical decision, there was an interaction effect with language dominance in accuracy, while in picture naming there was a main effect in reaction times. These findings suggest that, similar to what has been found for adults, simultaneous bilingual children have an integrated lexicon, in which both languages are interactively connected. Effects may differ as a combined result of factors such as comprehension versus production and individual differences in language dominance. Importantly, despite such differences, our results show that cognate effects emerge across tasks and across a range of individual children’s language dominance, indicating that shared representations within the bilingual lexicon are accessed during both word comprehension and production.

The encoding of speech modes in motor speech disorders: whispered versus normal speech in apraxia of speech and hypokinetic dysarthria

ABSTRACT Speakers with motor speech disorders (MSD) present challenges in speech production, one of them being the difficulty to adapt their speech to different modes. However, it is unclear whether different types of MSD are similarly affected when it comes to adapting their speech to various communication contexts. This study investigates the encoding of speech modes in individuals with AoS following focal brain damage and in individuals with hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) secondary to Parkinson’s disease. Participants with mild-to-moderate MSD and their age-matched controls performed a delayed production task of pseudo-words in two speech modes: normal and whispered speech. While overall accuracy did not differ significantly across speech modes, participants with AoS exhibited longer response latencies for whispered speech, reflecting difficulties in the initiation of utterances requiring an unvoiced production. In contrast, participants with HD showed faster response latencies for whispered speech, indicating that this speech mode is easier to encode/control for this population. Acoustic durations followed these same trends, with participants with AoS showing greater lengthening for whispered speech as compared to controls and to participants with HD, while participants with HD exhibited milder lengthening. Contrary to the predictions of speech production models, suggesting that speech mode changes might be particularly difficult in dysarthria, the present results suggest that speech mode adaptation rather seems particularly costly for participants with AoS.