Unfamiliar Language Research Articles

Effects of Illustration Types on the English Reading Performance of Senior High School Students with Different Cognitive Styles

Illustration is always used as an example to make the written text or the utterance more clear in general. In Winarski’s opinion (1997), one picture equals thousands of words. That is to say, illustrations are capable to express the meaning of unfamiliar language or a great deal of information in the reading material by vivid pictures, tables, drawings, paintings and so on. As a result, illustrations are applied to many different fields including English language teaching. Based upon Song’s 3 types of illustration classification (2005), decorational illustrations, explainable illustrations and promotive illustrations, this paper tries to investigate the effects of illustrations on the reading performance of senior high school students with different cognitive styles (field-dependence, field-mix and field-independence) in the process of English reading. The result shows that: 1). There is a significant correlation between illustration types and reading performance in terms of field-dependent students. The coefficient of explainable illustration to reading peformance is the highest, while the lowest coefficient is decorational illustration. 2). As for field-mixed participants, their reading performance is also closely associated with illustrations. However, the coefficients are lower than that of field-dependent participants. Decorational illustration has no obviously relation to reading performance. Explainable illustration also reaches the highest coefficient, and it can better improve student’ reading score than promotive illustration. 3). Speaking of field-independent students, no correlation has been found between decorational, promotive illustration and reading performance. However, there exists a significant correlation between explainable illustration and reading performance for field-independent participants.

Abstraction and the (Misnamed) Language Familiarity Effect.

Talkers are recognized more accurately if they are speaking the listeners' native language rather than an unfamiliar language. This "language familiarity effect" has been shown not to depend upon comprehension and must instead involve language sound patterns. We further examine the level of sound-pattern processing involved, by comparing talker recognition in foreign languages versus two varieties of English, by (a) English speakers of one variety, (b) English speakers of the other variety, and (c) non-native listeners (more familiar with one of the varieties). All listener groups performed better with native than foreign speech, but no effect of language variety appeared: Native listeners discriminated talkers equally well in each, with the native variety never outdoing the other variety, and non-native listeners discriminated talkers equally poorly in each, irrespective of the variety's familiarity. The results suggest that this talker recognition effect rests not on simple familiarity, but on an abstract level of phonological processing.

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations.

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced-choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower-level explanations (Experiments 3-6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.

Foreign Languages Sound Fast: Evidence from Implicit Rate Normalization.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that unfamiliar languages sound faster than one’s native language. Empirical evidence for this impression has, so far, come from explicit rate judgments. The aim of the present study was to test whether such perceived rate differences between native and foreign languages (FLs) have effects on implicit speech processing. Our measure of implicit rate perception was “normalization for speech rate”: an ambiguous vowel between short /a/ and long /a:/ is interpreted as /a:/ following a fast but as /a/ following a slow carrier sentence. That is, listeners did not judge speech rate itself; instead, they categorized ambiguous vowels whose perception was implicitly affected by the rate of the context. We asked whether a bias towards long /a:/ might be observed when the context is not actually faster but simply spoken in a FL. A fully symmetrical experimental design was used: Dutch and German participants listened to rate matched (fast and slow) sentences in both languages spoken by the same bilingual speaker. Sentences were followed by non-words that contained vowels from an /a-a:/ duration continuum. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed a consistent effect of rate normalization for both listener groups. Moreover, for German listeners, across the two experiments, foreign sentences triggered more /a:/ responses than (rate matched) native sentences, suggesting that foreign sentences were indeed perceived as faster. Moreover, this FL effect was modulated by participants’ ability to understand the FL: those participants that scored higher on a FL translation task showed less of a FL effect. However, opposite effects were found for the Dutch listeners. For them, their native rather than the FL induced more /a:/ responses. Nevertheless, this reversed effect could be reduced when additional spectral properties of the context were controlled for. Experiment 3, using explicit rate judgments, replicated the effect for German but not Dutch listeners. We therefore conclude that the subjective impression that FLs sound fast may have an effect on implicit speech processing, with implications for how language learners perceive spoken segments in a FL.

Another bilingual advantage? Perception of talker-voice information.

A bilingual advantage has been found in both cognitive and social tasks. In the current study, we examine whether there is a bilingual advantage in how children process information about who is talking (talker-voice information). Younger and older groups of monolingual and bilingual children completed the following talker-voice tasks with bilingual speakers: a discrimination task in English and German (an unfamiliar language), and a talker-voice learning task in which they learned to identify the voices of three unfamiliar speakers in English. Results revealed effects of age and bilingual status. Across the tasks, older children performed better than younger children and bilingual children performed better than monolingual children. Improved talker-voice processing by the bilingual children suggests that a bilingual advantage exists in a social aspect of speech perception, where the focus is not on processing the linguistic information in the signal, but instead on processing information about who is talking.

The specificity of the neural response to speech at birth.

In this work we ask whether at birth, the human brain responds uniquely to speech, or if similar activation also occurs to a non-speech surrogate 'language'. We compare neural activation in newborn infants to the language heard in utero (English), to an unfamiliar language (Spanish), and to a whistled surrogate language (Silbo Gomero) that, while used by humans to communicate, is not speech. Anterior temporal areas of the neonate cortex are activated in response to both familiar and unfamiliar spoken language, but these classic language areas are not activated to the whistled surrogate form. These results suggest that at the time human infants emerge from the womb, the neural preparation for language is specialized to speech.

Rapid Statistical Learning Supporting Word Extraction From Continuous Speech

The identification of words in continuous speech, known as speech segmentation, is a critical early step in language acquisition. This process is partially supported by statistical learning, the ability to extract patterns from the environment. Given that speech segmentation represents a potential bottleneck for language acquisition, patterns in speech may be extracted very rapidly, without extensive exposure. This hypothesis was examined by exposing participants to continuous speech streams composed of novel repeating nonsense words. Learning was measured on-line using a reaction time task. After merely one exposure to an embedded novel word, learners demonstrated significant learning effects, as revealed by faster responses to predictable than to unpredictable syllables. These results demonstrate that learners gained sensitivity to the statistical structure of unfamiliar speech on a very rapid timescale. This ability may play an essential role in early stages of language acquisition, allowing learners to rapidly identify word candidates and “break in” to an unfamiliar language.

Contextual factors in knowledge reuse

PurposeThis paper aims to answer calls for more research on how contextual factors influence the effectiveness of knowledge reuse.Design/methodology/approachThe findings are based on an in-depth case study conducted in the sales department of a large white goods company in Australia.FindingsSix contextual factors identified include purpose, time pressure, language, accessibility, author and date. A mismatch in purpose between knowledge creation and reuse is most likely to reduce knowledge reuse effectiveness. Time pressures may lead to an increase in errors associated with search question definition as well as knowledge search and selection, while unfamiliar language is likely to lead to misinterpretations of content. Knowledge accessibility issues are of particular concern in time-sensitive situations. Authorship and creation date information may facilitate knowledge reuse by allowing consumers to filter unwanted knowledge.Originality/valueThis study contributes to knowledge management theory by providing an exploration of the ways in which contextual factors influence knowledge and reuse effectiveness, and of the possible relationships between those factors. The paper also provides knowledge management practitioners with tangible guidelines on how to increase the effectiveness of organizational knowledge reuse.

Tracking the parallelism of difference with ostension schemes

In this paper I develop an instrument for monolingual elicitation through ostension. I call the instrument an ostension scheme. Ostension schemes are matrices with rows to introduce pictures and columns to represent sentences. Ostension schemes have utility for monolingual elicitation of an unfamiliar language and they allow for the collection and storage of certain kinds of linguistic data in a particularly transparent fashion that does not primarily utilize translation. This transparency is due to design features which help distinguish between a sentence and its entailments or between a sentence and precizations of that sentence. The data stored on an ostension scheme allows access to the linguistic hierarchy at the level of the basic sentence. Comparison of minimal sentence pairs allows for movement within the linguistic hierarchy, from the level of the basic sentence to the level of the morpheme or the phoneme. Ostension schemes utilize a principle I call the parallelism of difference. By this principle, minimal differences in the forms of basic sentences tend to correspond to minimal differences in situations described by these sentences. I take up the problem of how to determine these minimal differences. I demonstrate how ostension schemes have been used to elicit a number of sentences from the Sakha language (Yakut) and to identify morphemes in the language, and I also provide a brief discussion of overcoming first language bias of the designer of the scheme. Finally, I consider how the rows and columns of ostension schemes interact and how this interaction facilitates elicitation. The instrument as developed here promises to be highly practical, but at the same time it is limited in the kind of language it can be used to elicit. The theoretical investigation should be useful not only by engaging in fundamental issues of language study but also by paving the way for possibly broader applications of these ostension schemes.

The organization and reorganization of audiovisual speech perception in the first year of life

The period between six and 12 months is a sensitive period for language learning during which infants undergo auditory perceptual attunement, and recent results indicate that this sensitive period may exist across sensory modalities. We tested infants at three stages of perceptual attunement (six, nine, and 11 months) to determine (1) whether they were sensitive to the congruence between heard and seen speech stimuli in an unfamiliar language, and (2) whether familiarization with congruent audiovisual speech could boost subsequent non-native auditory discrimination. Infants at six- and nine-, but not 11- months, detected audiovisual congruence of non-native syllables. Familiarization to incongruent, but not congruent, audiovisual speech changed auditory discrimination at test for six-month-olds but not nine- or 11-month-olds. These results advance the proposal that speech perception is audiovisual from early in ontogeny, and that the sensitive period for audiovisual speech perception may last somewhat longer than that for auditory perception alone.

Visual methodologies for research with refugee youth

In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individual needs and experiences of displaced learners. Given that students’ journeys are shaped by movements across physical, cultural and linguistic spaces, we suggest that related scholarship might benefit from Third Space theory. Within this theoretical framework, neither language nor culture is static. Rather, both are continuously shaped through interactions – including those that are non-verbal. For students who may be learning in an unfamiliar language, visual methodologies offer a means and venue for communication. To explore how refugee youth might benefit from Third Space theory and visual methodologies, we first review scholarship that examines how children and schools negotiate educational space. We then describe a series of methodologies that scholars might consider when conducting research with refugee youth, including photovoice, fotonovela, digital storytelling and quilting. Significantly, pairing a Third Space theoretical framework with visual and participatory methodologies may address issues of language, power, vulnerability and ethics.

Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 262 pp. £67 hardcover.

Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism, in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings by Pooja Parmar. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 262 pp. £67 hardcover.Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings sets out with the twin objective of understanding both and indigeneity through the Plachimada struggle of India's indigenous people, the Adivasi, against the Coca Cola bottling facility in Kerala. These objectives, however, also unpack the meta narrative of what it means to be the most dispossessed. As Parmar describes at the very outset, it means more than losing one's land and water-it is also to experience an injustice that often goes unrecognized. The book, as she states, is an attempt to understand the violence of such injustice.Indeed, the violence of that injustice is carefully spread out in the seven chapters of the book where multiple accounts of the Plachimada are carefully woven together to primarily ask two questions; what has the dispute meant to its actors and how can we indeed understand the multiple advanced by the different actors in that struggle? Parmar shows how the meanings that emerge in their day to day lives are considerably different from the ones which are placed on the Samara Pandal (protest hut) by their and supporters, and again, when they are placed before the formal legal system. In both cases, new meanings of claims emerge and crystallize, whereas some old meanings are lost, either in the impossibility of or in the rigidity of formal legal institutions. The constitutiveness of law or legal consciousness acknowledges that law's power is discursive and productive as well as coercive where law helps shape the meaning that people make of their day to day lives (Merry 1990; Sarat and Kearns 1993), and that law is culture (Ewick and Silbey 1998); therefore, what and claims mean to the actors of the Plachimada struggle are essential to understand that constitutiveness of law. More importantly, what indeed frames the legal consciousness of injustice, that constantly shape the meanings of claims and resistance of the community that eventually are transformed (or left ««.transformed)?The first chapter introduces the project and Parmar's central questions, assumptions and challenges. As a project it sets out to not only scrutinize but to understand-the clashes between different normative worlds and their different narratives, migration, and destruction of meanings of the indigenous narrative upon by their representatives and the role of itself in an unequal world as an experience of loss; she complicates the role of further by turning the anthropological gaze inwards in a lesson in ethical research by acknowledging her linguistic limitations in the translation of unfamiliar stories narrated in unfamiliar languages into a familiar language and how she overcame them. The second chapter locates the by situating the Plachimada struggle in the complex matrix of history of the region and people, including indigenous people as well as settlers in the region, the setting up of the Coca Cola factory and depletion of groundwater, the meaning and importance of water itself in the community and the subsequent dispute. The struggle to protect water does not become an event in itself; rather it becomes the process through which past struggles and events are connected. This chapter also provides an account of the protest by the community and the subsequent litigation, though both are dealt with later in greater detail in other chapters. The third chapter outlines the transformation of Plachimada from a local struggle to a global event, identified as a people's resistance movement. In this politics of transformation, the chapter indicates how the strategies of Plachimada's various supporters and outsiders in varying categories of social activists, human rights activists, anti-globalization activists, environmental rights activists, etc. …

Principled Eclecticism: Approach and Application in Teaching Writing to ESL/EFL Students

The principal purpose of this paper is to critically examine and evaluate the efficacy of the principled eclectic approach to teaching English as second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) writing to undergraduate students. The paper illustrates that this new method adapts mainstream writing pedagogies to individual needs of learners of ESL/EFL in order to address students’ difficulties arising from their contact with an unfamiliar language. Such a claim is based on the researcher’s review of relevant research, the analysis and evaluation of scholarly studies on the subject by leading academics and authorities in the area, and the researcher’s practical experiences as a writing teacher in the Department of English Language and Translation (DELT), College of Languages and Translation (COLT), King Saud University (KSU). It has been generally observed that the common, time-honored, language-based, process-based, and genre-based approaches to teaching writing tend to troubleshoot only certain specific problems related to the teaching of ESL/EFL writing. This paper highlights the importance of student-centered approaches to teaching in order to achieve the goal of coherent, pluralistic language teaching. To achieve this, the discussion recommends classifying, selecting, and sequencing the activities related to teaching writing. Indeed, this is what eclecticism means. The term principled signifies coherence that consistently focuses upon the same formal or functional units and sequencing them at the end to help learners interact and participate in writing activities that need contextualized attention. The paper concludes that the gap between eclecticism and principled eclecticism in teaching English writing must be bridged to improve ESL/EFL learners’ writing skills.

Students’ underachievement in English-medium subjects: The case of secondary school in Zanzibar

Kiswahili was used as a language of instruction in primary schools in Zanzibar for more than four decades and English as a language of instruction in secondary schools. The increasing hegemony of English has led to the introduction, from 2014, of the use of English as medium of instruction from Grade 5 onwards in primary schools. This article critically analyses Form 2 (Grade 9) students’ performance in one secondary school in Zanzibar when a subject was taught and assessed in Kiswahili, and in the same subject when it was taught and assessed in English with the same students. Compelling evidence from the analysis indicates that students performed far better when the subject was taught and assessed in Kiswahili compared to when the same subject was taught and assessed in English. These findings therefore provide impetus for policymakers and other education stakeholders in many countries in Africa to rethink the use of an unfamiliar language as a language of instruction. Zanzibar in particular has moved backwards by replacing Kiswahili with English as a language of leaning and teaching from Grade 5 onwards.

An fMRI study of implicit language learning in developmental language impairment.

Individuals with developmental language impairment can show deficits into adulthood. This suggests that neural networks related to their language do not normalize with time. We examined the ability of 16 adults with and without impaired language to learn individual words in an unfamiliar language. Adults with impaired language were able to segment individual words from running speech, but needed more time to do so than their normal-language peers. ICA analysis of fMRI data indicated that adults with language impairment activate a neural network that is comparable to that of adults with normal language. However, a regional analysis indicated relative hyperactivation of a collection of regions associated with language processing. These results are discussed with reference to the Statistical Learning Framework and the sub-skills thought to relate to word segmentation.

Entre je, jeu et jeux : écoute polysensorielle des langues pour une pédagogie énactive

All Ears : Listening from Within and Without. A Polysensory Ëxperience of Language Perception for an Enactive Pedagogy. This article presents the design and analysis of a polysensory listening experience of different languages. Combining sensory design, phenomenology and language education, this research draws on the enaction paradigm. The objective of the authors is twofold : to understand the nature and structures of transmodal perception of unknown languages and to prepare a novel educational approach to sensory awareness to foreign languages. The article will explain the origin of the project as well as its theoretical framework and the foundations that dictated the aesthetic and didactic choices for the video used as a primer within the experiment. Finally, the authors share findings that suggest that inhabitual ways of listening to familiar and unfamiliar languages result in emotional filters as well as cognitive and attentional oscillations.

The Galactic Dependencies Treebanks: Getting More Data by Synthesizing New Languages

We release Galactic Dependencies 1.0—a large set of synthetic languages not found on Earth, but annotated in Universal Dependencies format. This new resource aims to provide training and development data for NLP methods that aim to adapt to unfamiliar languages. Each synthetic treebank is produced from a real treebank by stochastically permuting the dependents of nouns and/or verbs to match the word order of other real languages. We discuss the usefulness, realism, parsability, perplexity, and diversity of the synthetic languages. As a simple demonstration of the use of Galactic Dependencies, we consider single-source transfer, which attempts to parse a real target language using a parser trained on a “nearby” source language. We find that including synthetic source languages somewhat increases the diversity of the source pool, which significantly improves results for most target languages.

Perception of speech rate in speech rate perception

This study investigates what influences a listener’s perception of speech rate. Three factors were investigated: pause type, actual speech rate, and utterance type (native, accented, and unfamiliar). Using manually accelerated vs. decelerated but structurally-identical sentences with three-type pauses (long, short, and filled) in accented, native, and unfamiliar language (Spanish) utterances, a group of Arabic speakers judged whether the sentences they heard were slow or fast, and rated the speed on a 1-7 scale (1 = slow, 7 = fast). The findings show that long pauses triggered lower ratings, while filled pauses achieved ratings higher than both long and short pauses. Unfamiliar language received the highest ratings while the accented speech received the lowest. This suggests that, regardless of actual speech rate, silent pauses affect our perception of speech rate, and that when the duration of silence differs, our perception of speech rate will differ accordingly. The results also show that we tend to th...

Language familiarity mediates identification of bilingual talkers across languages

Many studies show that listeners are more accurate at identifying talkers in their native language than in an unfamiliar language; yet, little is known about the nature of this language familiarity effect in bilingual speech. Here, we investigate the links between language and talker processing further by assessing listeners’ ability to identify bilingual talkers across languages. Two groups were recruited: English monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Participants learned to identify bilinguals speaking in only one language (English); they were then tested on their ability to identify the same talkers speaking in the trained language (same language context: English) and in their other language (different language context: French). Both monolinguals and bilinguals showed above chance performance in identifying talkers in both language contexts at test, confirming that there is sufficient information in bilingual speech to generalize across languages. Moreover, the results showed a language context e...

Music Listening modulates Functional Connectivity and Information Flow in the Human Brain.

Listening to familiar music has recently been reported to be beneficial during recovery from stroke. A better understanding of changes in functional connectivity and information flow is warranted in order to further optimize and target this approach through music therapy. Twelve healthy volunteers listened to seven different auditory samples during an fMRI scanning session: a musical piece chosen by the volunteer that evokes a strong emotional response (referred to as: "self-selected emotional"), two unfamiliar music pieces (Invention #1 by J. S. Bach* and Gagaku - Japanese classical opera, referred to as "unfamiliar"), the Bach piece repeated with visual guidance (DML: Directed Music Listening) and three spoken language pieces (unfamiliar African click language, an excerpt of emotionally charged language, and an unemotional reading of a news bulletin). Functional connectivity and betweenness (BTW) maps, a measure for information flow, were created with a graph-theoretical approach. Distinct variation in functional connectivity was found for different music pieces consistently for all subjects. Largest brain areas were recruited for processing self-selected music with emotional attachment or culturally unfamiliar music. Maps of information flow correlated significantly with fMRI BOLD activation maps (p<0.05). Observed differences in BOLD activation and functional connectivity may help explain previously observed beneficial effects in stroke recovery, as increased blood flow to damaged brain areas stimulated by active engagement through music listening may have supported a state more conducive to therapy.