Unfamiliar Language Research Articles

A stereoscopic system for viewing the temporal evolution of brain activity clusters in response to linguistic stimuli.

In this paper, we present a novel application, 3D+Time Brain View, for the stereoscopic visualization of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data gathered from participants exposed to unfamiliar spoken languages. An analysis technique based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is used to identify statistically significant clusters of brain activity and their changes over time during different testing sessions. That is, our system illustrates the temporal evolution of participants' brain activity as they are introduced to a foreign language through displaying these clusters as they change over time. The raw fMRI data is presented as a stereoscopic pair in an immersive environment utilizing passive stereo rendering. The clusters are presented using a ray casting technique for volume rendering. Our system incorporates the temporal information and the results of the ICA into the stereoscopic 3D rendering, making it easier for domain experts to explore and analyze the data.

The role of language familiarity in bilingual stuttering assessment

The aim of this study was to evaluate the ability of English-speaking speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to evaluate stuttering behaviour in two Spanish–English bilingual adults who stutter (AWS1 and AWS2). The English-speaking SLPs were asked to judge the frequency, severity, type, duration, and physical concomitants of stuttering in both languages of the two AWS. The combined results from the English-speaking SLPs were then compared to the judgements of three Spanish–English bilingual SLPs. Results indicated that English-speaking SLPs (1) judged stuttering frequency to be greater in Spanish than English for AWS1, and equal in Spanish and English for AWS2, (2) were more accurate at evaluating individual moments of stuttering for the English samples compared to the Spanish samples, (3) identified fewer and less severe stuttering behaviours than the bilingual SLPs in both languages, and (4) were accurate judges of overall stuttering severity in both languages. The results correspond to past research examining the accuracy of stuttering evaluations in unfamiliar languages. Possible explanations for the findings, clinical implications, and future research directions are discussed.

Familiarity, Expertise, and Change Detection: Change Deafness is Worse in Your Native Language

We first replicated the language-familiarity effect for voice discrimination and found better voice discrimination in familiar languages. However, when listeners were not cued to listen for changes, both English and Spanish speakers exhibited greater change deafness in their familiar language. Results suggest that lexical/semantic attention in a familiar language and increased indexical processing in an unfamiliar language can produce greater change deafness in familiar languages.

Ability for voice recognition is a marker for dyslexia in children.

A recent voice recognition experiment conducted by Perrachione, Del Tufo, and Gabrieli (2011) revealed that, in normal adult readers, the accuracy at identifying human voices was better in the participants' mother tongue than in an unfamiliar language, while this difference was absent in a group of adults with dyslexia. This pattern favored a view of dyslexia as due to "fundamentally impoverished native-language phonological representations." To further examine this issue, we conducted two voice recognition experiments, one with children with/without dyslexia, and the other with adults with/without dyslexia. Results revealed that children/adults with dyslexia were less accurate at identifying voices than normal readers and, importantly, this effect was independent of language. These data are more consistent with the assumption of dyslexia as due to a deficit in multisensory integration rather than a deficit based on impoverished native-language phonologically based representations.

Abordar a diversidade linguística no 1º ciclo: ideias das crianças

The awareness of the child to the languages and cultures of the world has become a concern of educational entities that seek to include it in the primary school curriculum, fostering an approach to languages that appeals to the child’s affection. In this perspective, we drew up an action plan consisting of a variety of activities and games designed for the task of raising awareness of the child to the linguistic and cultural diversity, applicable to a class of children in the fourth year of primary school. The observation of the interactions arising from the session, as well as the analysis of a questionnaire, allowed us to collect, analyze and systematize the ideas of these children about unfamiliar cultures and languages.

Verbal Redundancy Aids Memory for Filmed Entertainment Dialogue

ABSTRACT Three studies investigated the effects of presentation modality and redundancy of verbal content on recognition memory for entertainment film dialogue. U.S. participants watched two brief movie clips and afterward answered multiple-choice questions about information from the dialogue. Experiment 1 compared recognition memory for spoken dialogue in the native language (English) with subtitles in English, French, or no subtitles. Experiment 2 compared memory for material in English subtitles with spoken dialogue in English, French, or no sound. Experiment 3 examined three control conditions with no spoken or captioned material in the native language. All participants watched the same video clips and answered the same questions. Performance was consistently good whenever English dialogue appeared in either the subtitles or sound, and best of all when it appeared in both, supporting the facilitation of verbal redundancy. Performance was also better when English was only in the subtitles than when it was only spoken. Unexpectedly, sound or subtitles in an unfamiliar language (French) modestly improved performance, as long as there was also a familiar channel. Results extend multimedia research on verbal redundancy for expository material to verbal information in entertainment media.

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning

Traditional conceptions of spoken language assume that speech recognition and talker identification are computed separately. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies imply some separation between the two faculties, but recent perceptual studies suggest better talker recognition in familiar languages than unfamiliar languages. A familiar-language benefit in talker recognition potentially implies strong ties between the two domains. However, little is known about the nature of this language familiarity effect. The current study investigated the relationship between speech and talker processing by assessing bilingual and monolingual listeners’ ability to learn voices as a function of language familiarity and age of acquisition. Two effects emerged. First, bilinguals learned to recognize talkers in their first language (Korean) more rapidly than they learned to recognize talkers in their second language (English), while English-speaking participants showed the opposite pattern (learning English talkers faster than Korean talkers). Second, bilinguals’ learning rate for talkers in their second language (English) correlated with age of English acquisition. Taken together, these results suggest that language background materially affects talker encoding, implying a tight relationship between speech and talker representations.

Transition Probabilities and Different Levels of Prominence in Segmentation

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of the relative importance of lexical stress, phrasal prominence, and transitional probabilities (TP) between adjacent syllables for the segmentation of an artificial language. We explored how duration increase, pitch rise, and the combination of duration and pitch on the antepenultimate, the penultimate, and the final syllable of a three‐syllabic word affect segmentation by native speakers of Italian. Our results indicate that, if the most frequent location of stress in the participants’ native language and a lengthened syllable in the artificial language do not coincide, segmentation is disrupted. If there is no conflict between the location of stress in the native language of the participant and the lengthened syllable in the artificial language, segmentation is neither impeded nor facilitated. Pitch marked the edges of the TP‐defined words in a continuous speech stream. When TPs and pitch cues are in conflict, segmentation fails; if pitch rise coincides with the edges of TP words, segmentation succeeds, but is not facilitated. Phrasal prominence comprising both pitch and duration facilitates segmentation when aligned with the word edges. Our findings show that language‐specific peculiarities of how nuclear pitch accents are realized in the native language of the listener might interact with statistical cues in the segmentation of an unfamiliar language.

Literacy Worlds of Children of Migrant Farmworker Communities Participating in a Migrant Head Start Program

Within this ethnographic case study, I examine the ways that a Migrant Head Start program failed to build on the funds of language and literacy knowledge of a group of socioculturally and linguistically marginalized preschool children. Using a literacy-as-social-practice lens, I explore the children’s early literacy knowledge by focusing on the ways that reading and writing mediate the lives of the migrant farmworker community—their parents’ and community members’ lives. Observational and interview data analysis revealed literacy practices in the migrant camps that reflected their lives of bureaucratic regulation, family and community relationships, and spirituality in the migrant camps. Participant observation in the Migrant Head Start program revealed a school-based focus on only surface features of early literacy, delivered in an unfamiliar language and reflecting culturally specific beliefs and values about literacy practice that did not match those of most of the children. Analysis also revealed the ways that literacy practice among the migrant farmworkers moved and changed as the individual life experiences of the families changed, particularly in relation to increased geographic permanence over time.

Eye fixations during encoding of familiar and unfamiliar language

Eye fixations during encoding of familiar and unfamiliar language

Singing can facilitate foreign language learning

This study presents the first experimental evidence that singing can facilitate short-term paired-associate phrase learning in an unfamiliar language (Hungarian). Sixty adult participants were randomly assigned to one of three "listen-and-repeat" learning conditions: speaking, rhythmic speaking, or singing. Participants in the singing condition showed superior overall performance on a collection of Hungarian language tests after a 15-min learning period, as compared with participants in the speaking and rhythmic speaking conditions. This superior performance was statistically significant (p < .05) for the two tests that required participants to recall and produce spoken Hungarian phrases. The differences in performance were not explained by potentially influencing factors such as age, gender, mood, phonological working memory ability, or musical ability and training. These results suggest that a "listen-and-sing" learning method can facilitate verbatim memory for spoken foreign language phrases.

Medical health care tourism: Why patients go overseas and what nurse practitioners need to know

Over the past two decades the number of individuals traveling abroad for the purpose of obtaining health care has increased. There are multiple reasons why they decide to travel far distances. The most common reasons are lack of health insurance, not enough health insurance, high costs, inaccessibility, and unfamiliar language and culture. The purpose of this paper was to discuss the reasons why people would seek health care overseas and the issues that nurse practitioners need to be aware of when dealing with patients who are considering medical tourism or have traveled abroad for medical treatment and surgical procedures. These individuals have diverse backgrounds; the common denominator is their belief that they can obtain health care in another country that is more affordable, more accessible, and/or comparable or better quality. Nurse practitioners are responsible for patients' overall well-being. They are obligated to educate their patients about the risks and benefits of medical tourism and assist them in making a decision that best suits their health care goals. Some concerns that nurse practitioners may have when treating a patient who has traveled overseas for healthcare are postoperative complications, polypharmacy, drug–drug interactions, drug resistance, and malpractice liability. Although there are several resources practitioners can refer their patients to in order to learn more about medical tourism, practitioners are encouraged to work closely with their patients to maintain the health and safety of patients as well as protecting themselves from liability.

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

Navigating a car in an unfamiliar country using an internet map: effects of street language formats, map orientation consistency, and gender on driver performance, workload and multitasking strategy

Navigating a car in an unfamiliar country becomes one of the major concerns with driving safety. Existing studies mainly used survey, focus group and statistical analysis to study this problem. Although the navigation system (e.g. GPS) gains an advantage in providing navigation assistances, paper maps and particularly internet maps are one of major ways for navigating in an unfamiliar area. This study is one of a few experimental studies which addressed a typical multitasking driving behaviour (driving and navigation task) in a cross-culture context. Twenty-four native American-English speakers navigated a driving simulator in urban environments which involved three formats of language settings of the street signs (English, Chinese or no street signs) and two types of map orientation consistency (driving from south to north vs. driving from north to south with a north-up map). It was found that female drivers made more wrong turns only with Chinese street signs but not in the other two conditions compared to male drivers. This indicated that female drivers actually behaved differently from male drivers in an unfamiliar driving environment with unfamiliar street names language. Both male and female drivers benefited from English street signs and reported higher driver workload with Chinese street signs. Interestingly, the average glance duration of maps with Chinese street signs was significantly less than that with English street signs, indicating that even though Chinese language belongs to ideograph with graphical information, its graphical information was not that helpful in assisting navigation task. In addition, female drivers had more instances of collisions with other vehicles, a longer distance of deviation from central line position, higher driver workload and a longer time period of map glance duration. For the main effect of map consistency, drivers made more wrong turns and perceived higher driving workload when they drove with inconsistent maps. Further implications of the current study in transportation safety of globalisation were also discussed, including improvement of street sign infrastructures and optimal ways of using and designing internet maps for drivers navigating in an unfamiliar country.

Cross-modal prediction in speech depends on prior linguistic experience

The sight of a speaker's facial movements during the perception of a spoken message can benefit speech processing through online predictive mechanisms. Recent evidence suggests that these predictive mechanisms can operate across sensory modalities, that is, vision and audition. However, to date, behavioral and electrophysiological demonstrations of cross-modal prediction in speech have considered only the speaker's native language. Here, we address a question of current debate, namely whether the level of representation involved in cross-modal prediction is phonological or pre-phonological. We do this by testing participants in an unfamiliar language. If cross-modal prediction is predominantly based on phonological representations tuned to the phonemic categories of the native language of the listener, then it should be more effective in the listener's native language than in an unfamiliar one. We tested Spanish and English native speakers in an audiovisual matching paradigm that allowed us to evaluate visual-to-auditory prediction, using sentences in the participant's native language and in an unfamiliar language. The benefits of cross-modal prediction were only seen in the native language, regardless of the particular language or participant's linguistic background. This pattern of results implies that cross-modal visual-to-auditory prediction during speech processing makes strong use of phonological representations, rather than low-level spatiotemporal correlations across facial movements and sounds.

Dictionaries and Orthography in Modern Africa

This paper considers the issues and options in creating orthographies for languages without alphabetic traditions. In particular, it looks at issues that face linguists and anthropologists in creating such orthographies for preliminary descriptive work on a language. It is often the case that these orthographies by linguistic outsiders later serve as the bases for literacy-aimed orthographies. Thus, the lexicographer is constrained not only to present the language accurately, but to not undermine indigenous literacy projects for that language. This paper looks at the particular case of devising an orthography for Beng, a Southern Mande language of Cote d'Ivoire, in order to illustrate the problems inherent in alphabetising an unfamiliar language.

Language experienced in utero affects vowel perception after birth: a two‐country study

To test the hypothesis that exposure to ambient language in the womb alters phonetic perception shortly after birth. This two-country study aimed to see whether neonates demonstrated prenatal learning by how they responded to vowels in a category from their native language and another non-native language, regardless of how much postnatal experience the infants had. A counterbalanced experiment was conducted in Sweden (n = 40) and the USA (n = 40) using Swedish and English vowel sounds. The neonates (mean postnatal age = 33 h) controlled audio presentation of either native or non-native vowels by sucking on a pacifier, with the number of times they sucked their pacifier being used to demonstrate what vowel sounds attracted their attention. The vowels were either the English/i/or Swedish/y/in the form of a prototype plus 16 variants of the prototype. The infants in the native and non-native groups responded differently. As predicted, the infants responded to the unfamiliar non-native language with higher mean sucks. They also sucked more to the non-native prototype. Time since birth (range: 7-75 h) did not affect the outcome. The ambient language to which foetuses are exposed in the womb starts to affect their perception of their native language at a phonetic level. This can be measured shortly after birth by differences in responding to familiar vs. unfamiliar vowels.

Song and speech: examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability

In previous research on speech imitation, musicality, and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Forty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64% of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66% of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi) could be explained by working memory together with a singer's sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and auditory memory with singing fitting better into the category of “speech” on the productive level and “music” on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways. (1) Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. (2) Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. (3) The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory working memory.

The development of language-specific and language-independent talker processing.

In this study, the authors aimed to investigate how differences in language ability relate to differences in processing talker information in the native language and an unfamiliar language by comparing performance for different ages and for groups with impaired language. Three groups of native English listeners with typical language development (TLD; ages 7-9, ages 10-12, adults) and 2 groups with specific language impairment (SLI; ages 7-9, ages 10-12) participated in the study. Listeners heard pairs of words in both English and German (unfamiliar language) and were asked to determine whether the words were produced by the same or different talkers. In English, talker discrimination improved with age. In German, performance improved with age for the school-age children but was worse for adult listeners. No differences were found between TLD and SLI children. These results show that as listeners' language skills develop, there is a trade-off between more general perceptual abilities useful for processing talker information in any language and those that are relevant to their everyday language experiences and, thus, tied to the phonology. The lack of differences between the children with and without language impairments suggests that general auditory processing may be intact in at least some children with SLI.

Frances

Students in all areas of computing require knowledge of the computing device including software implementation at the machine level. Several courses in computer science curricula address these low-level details such as computer architecture and assembly languages. For such courses, there are advantages to studying real architectures instead of simplified examples. However, real architectures and instruction sets introduce complexity that makes them difficult to grasp in a single semester course. Visualization techniques can help ease this burden, unfortunately existing tools are often difficult to use and consequently difficult to adopt in a course where time is already limited. To solve this problem, we present Frances. Frances graphically illustrates key differences between familiar high-level languages and unfamiliar low-level languages and also illustrates how familiar high-level programs behave on real architectures. Key to this tool is that we use a simple Web interface that requires no setup, easing course adoption hurdles. We also include several features that further enhance its usefulness in a classroom setting. These features include graphical relationships between high-level code and machine code, clearly illustrated step-by-step machine state transitions, color coding to make instruction behavior clear, and illustration of pointers. We have used Frances in courses and performed experimental evaluation. Our experiences with Frances in the classroom demonstrate its usability. Most notably, in our experimental setting, students with no computer architecture course experience were able to complete lessons using Frances with no guidance.