1989 års ASLA symposium i Linköping valde ett tema som understryker utvecklingsaspekterna vid andra- eller främmandespråksinlärning. Nya rön om modersmålsutveckling är emellertid väsentliga eftersom många forskningsresultat pekar på stora likheter i språktillägnandeprocessen oavsett om det är fråga om ett första, andra eller främmande språk. Insikter från språkpsykologi, undervisningsteori och utvecklingsforskning har vidare stor betydelse för synen på hur undervisningsprocessen och klassrumsmetodiken skall förnyas.

Denna volym inleds liksom symposiet av Åke Vibergs fylliga översikt över den senaste tidens forskning om språkinlärningsprocessen och dess eventuella följder för språkundervisningen.

Olika aspekter av inlärarspråket kartläggs av Inge Bartning, som har undersökt svenska universitetsstuderandes utveckling i franska och av Björn Hammarberg, som har intresserat sig för inlärarens uttalslösningar inför ett delvis nytt ljudsystem. Suzanne Schlyters bidrag jämför de två språken hos naturligt tvåspråkiga barn för att försöka fastställa om det svagare språket mest liknar ett första språk (Ll) eller ett andra språk (L2).

De flesta bidragen är tillägnade olika aspekter av undervisningsprocessen. Denna sektion inleds av Gunnar Tingbjörns granskning och jämförelse av hur språkämnena behandlas i grundskolans läroplan.

Fyra bidrag presenterar delvis nya program för att uppfylla läroplanens krav. Elsie Wijk-Andersson har reviderat den vanliga sekvenseringen i metoder och material i svenskundervisning för gäststuderande, Eie Ericsson och Dieter Krohn lägger fram ett didaktiskt forskningsprojekt i skolans tyskundervisning, Lisa washburn beskriver ett försök till ’språkbadsprogram’ i engelska i ett svenskt gymnasium medan Rigmor Eriksson exemplifierar det växande intresset i Sverige för ’learner autonomy’, dvs elevstyrd undervisning.

Sektionen avslutas med två artiklar som behandlar enskilda aspekter av undervisningsprocessen. Karin Aijmer jämför naturlig, talad engelska med läroboksdialoger och konstaterar att talspråksforskningen än så länge har lämnat få spår i skolböckerna. Christian Hecht och Maria Kroes-Hecht lägger fram preliminära resultat av ett projekt som söker att utnyttja konsekventa likheter mellan tyska och svenska ord i ordförståelseträning.

Slutligen lyfter Jacob Mey fram en viktig aspekt av språkplaneringen, nämligen språket som maktmedel. Den kontroversiella frågan om vems språk vi egentligen lär ut borde stimulera till diskussion.

Redaktörerna vill uttrycka sin tacksamhet till bokens alla författare som har bidragit till att ett livligt och lyckat symposium även har resulterat i en värdefull samlingsvolym. Vi vill också tacka Stiftelsen Tornbylyckorna – Lektorshagen i Linköping för finansiellt stöd till tryckningen av denna symposierapport.

Writing is one of the four skills that students learning a foreign language are supposed to acquire, and writing often has an important role in the language classroom. Furthermore, in the field of cultural and arts education, a process-oriented approach is considered essential for learning. However, even though we see an increased interest in emphasizing the writing process, in reality, what is often commented, discussed and graded is the final outcome - the product. Consequently, features of the writing process, like fluency, revisions, and pauses, are not considered. This thesis explores what information about the writing process might add to the picture. In this manner, the current study investigates the writing process of advanced Swedish EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners through keystroke logging programme.

With the increased use of word processing tools, and not least with the development of keystroke logging tools, we now have the possibility to take also the details of the writing process into account. As Spelman Miller and Sullivan (2006:1) point out,

“[a]s an observational tool, keystroke logging offers the opportunity to capture details of the activity of writing, not only for the purposes of the linguistic, textual and cognitive study of writing, but also for the broader applications concerning the development of language learning, literacy, and language pedagogy”.

In the present study, a keystroke logging programme named Inputlog has been used, which allows researchers to get a better understanding of writing processes as well as cognitive processes during writing (Lindgren & Sullivan, 2002).

Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka hur stor kunskap pedagoger har om utlandsadopterade barn och deras eventuella språkproblem. De frågeställningar vi ämnade besvara var bland annat vad litteraturen skriver om utlandsadopterade barns språk. Vi ville också ta reda på vad föräldrarna till de utlandsadopterade barnen hade för åsikter om deras barns eventuella språkproblem och hur dessa barnen fått den hjälp de rimligtvis behöver. Vi arbetade enligt trianguleringsmetoden och arbetet inleds med en litteraturstudie, där vi redogör för den forskning vi tagit del av. Därefter följer en enkätundersökning där 15 föräldrar till utlandsadopterade barn deltog. Metoddelen avslutas med intervjuer av fem pedagoger. Resultatet visar att föräldrarna, efter hårt arbete, fick den hjälp som barnet behövde, exempelvis genom att få hjälp av en logoped eller talpedagog. Resultatet visar även att lärarna i vår undersökning inte hade någon större kunskap om utlandsadopterade barns språkproblem.

Kognitionsvetenskap är den första boken på svenska som beskriver kärnan i kognitionsvetenskap - att förstå hur människor tänker. Den spänner därmed över ett brett tvärvetenskapligt fält som inrymmer filosofi, lingvistik, psykologi, antropologi, datavetenskap och neuro­vetenskap. Författarna beskriver hur ämnet har vuxit fram och hur man kan studera kognition utifrån filosofiska, psykologiska och neurovetenskapliga aspekter. Även språkvetenskapliga och sociala aspekter på tänkande presenteras. Författarna tar dessutom upp relationen mellan mänskligt tänkande och djurs tänkande, samt utvecklingen av kognition från barndom till vuxen ålder. Avslutningsvis berörs flera aspekter av tänkande i förhållande till teknologi, både som stöd för tänkande och som simulering av tänkande.

Boken vänder sig till studenter som läser introduktionskurs eller grundkurs i kognitionsvetenskap, men är även lämplig för beteendevetenskapliga eller språkinriktade utbildningar. Den kan även vara av intresse för alla som vill förstå mer om mänskligt tänkande.

As for any categorial scheme used for annotation, UD abound with borderline cases. The main instruments to resolve them are the UD design principles and, of course, the linguistic facts of the matter. UD makes a fundamental distinction between content words and function words, and a, perhaps less fundamental, distinction between pure function words and the rest. It has been suggested that adpositions are to be included among the pure function words. In this paper I discuss the case of prepositions in Swedish and related languages in the light of these distinctions. It relates to a more general problem: How should we resolve cases where the linguistic intuitions and UD design principles are in conflict?

Recent improvements in neural machinetranslation calls for increased efforts onqualitative evaluations so as to get a betterunderstanding of differences in translationcompetence between human and machine.This paper reports the results of a studyof 1170 adjectives in translation from En-glish to Swedish, using the Parallel Uni-versal Dependencies Treebanks for theselanguages. The comparison covers two di-mensions: the types of solutions employedand the incidence of debatable or incorrecttranslations. It is found that the machinetranslation uses all of the solution typesthat the human translation does, but in dif-ferent proportions and less competently

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’ used live recording, transcription and public-led analysis to address the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives.

This article investigates how members of the public are guided or ‘signposted’ out of organisations that they have contacted to third-party agencies. Using conversation analysis, we examine the interactional practices professionals use to signpost callers to external organisations when their concerns do not fit within the remit of the present service. Drawing on a corpus of over 500 calls and meetings at five different institutions in the UK (including mediation services, local council organisations, a housing charity and a politician’s constituency office), we show how the practice of signposting is intertwined with the activities of rejecting the caller’s case for receiving service, while simultaneously offering a service – namely, a redirection to an ostensibly more appropriate service provider. We show how community problems can be treated as warranting assistance along a range of offer-ability (e.g. ‘I will do X for you’, ‘That’s the kind of thing we could do’, ‘Do you want their number?’), and how troubles-tellings without a specific request can be retroactively formulated into an actionable item for an institution. Our findings demonstrate practices for negotiating institutionality itself, through delimiting service remit, and through participants’ orientations to the relevance of service provision as an institutional goal.

This paper discusses correction sequences in classroom interaction when teachers correct students’ erroneous answers. The focus of this paper is the relevance between types and techniques of correction used by teachers to correct students’ answers and face-work. The study explains face-work necessity in classroom interaction since it increases students’ motivation to participate in classroom activities.  

The aim of the study was to analyze freely generated self-presentations through the natural language processing technique of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Four hundred fifty-one participants (F = 360; M = 143) recruited from LinkedIn (a professional social network) were randomly assigned to generate 10 words to describe themselves to either an employer (recruitment-condition) or a friend (friendship-condition). The words frequency-rate and their semantic representation were compared between conditions and to the natural language (Googles n-gram database). Self-presentations produced in the recruitment condition (vs. natural language) had significantly higher number of agentic words (e.g., problemsolver, responsible, able team-worker) and their contents were semantically closer to the concept of agency (i.e., competence, assertiveness, decisiveness) comparing to the friendship condition. Furthermore, the valence of the self-presentations words was higher (i.e., with a more positive meaning) in the recruitment condition. Altogether, these findings are consistent with the literature on the "Big Two," self-presentation, and impression management.

This study investigates foreign language classroom talk and micro-level language policy-in-process from an ethnomethodological conversation analytic perspective. The study is based on 20 hours of video recordings from 20 lessons in an English as a Foreign Language classroom (EFL) in grades 8 and 9 of an international compulsory school in Sweden between the years 2007 and 2010. The main purpose of the study is to shed light on some of the distinguishing features of how a target-language-only policy is materialised in situ in a foreign language classroom. The study demonstrates the relative ease with which teachers and pupils uphold a strict language policy in the classroom, but also the considerable interactional work that is done, by both teachers and pupils, in cases where upholding the policy becomes problematic. An interactional phenomenon which arises in such cases is language policing, where the teacher or pupils restore the policy-prescribed linguistic order. Such sequences are analysed in detail. The study increases our understanding of how language policy is lived out in practice, through interaction in the classroom.

English is the official policy in the school (under observation) for English as a Second Language (ESL) Classroom. However, the participants here actually police each other’s and their own language choice to accomplish this language policy. Language policing here refers to the collaborative co-construction and orientation of the participants to the micro-level language policy in situ. The participants’ indigenous way of interpreting the official policy is negotiated, challenged and accomplished online. The official policy of the classroom is based on purist and monolinguist belief which entails that “English-only” is spoken in the classroom both by the teacher and the pupils. Swedish is deemed as a forbidden language. To keep “English-only” rule, however, alternate practices of policing emerge to avoid Swedish in the class. The study highlights the alternate practices displayed by the participants which emerge because of language policing.

The empirical data of the study comprises of over 20 hours of video recordings of ESL classrooms in an International Swedish school. The data was collected between the years 2008-2010 in the grades 8 and 9. There are 17 incidences of language policing in the data. The English language teachers of this particular school follow an “English-only” policy which is enforced through a point system.

The study aims to contribute to the research in the micro orientation of the second language (L2) classroom (Hellermann, 2008; Cekaite, 2006; Seedhouse, 2004). It is also an attempt to see how through talk and actions participants defy the policies in practice that are monolinguist and purist.

References

Cekaite, A. (2006) Getting started: Children’s participation and language learning in an L2 classroom. Tema Barn: Linköping Studies in Arts and Science.

Hellermann, J. (2008) Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Seedhouse, P. (2004) The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Perspective. Oxford. Blackwell.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the starting points of an experimental project to study dolphin communicative behaviour using distributional semantics, with methods implemented for the large scale study of human language.

This paper makes the first attempt to perform an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion of a lion (Panthera leo) roar. The main problems that one encounters in attempting this, is the fact that little is known about the dimensions of the vocal tract, other than a general range of vocal tract lengths. Precious little is also known about the articulation strategies that are adopted by the lion while roaring. The approach used here is to iterate between possible values of vocal tract lengths and vocal tract configurations. Since there seems to be a distinct articulatory changes during the process of a roar, we find a smooth path that minimizes the error function between a recorded roar and the simulated roar using a variable length articulatory model.

In this paper, we investigate strategies employed by students, lecturers and academic administrators to facilitate learning within a university in Rwanda. On a political level, the potential of linguistic diversity is a tool for nation building and, in times of globalization, access to information, communication, technology and business with international communities. However, on a societal and individual level, using foreign media of instruction may hamper the implementation of targeted goals.

The focus of this study is on how students handle the linguistic diversity they are exposed to. The research tools used to gather data are questionnaires, interviews and audio-recorded group work. The data were analysed drawing upon theories related to learning in multilingual settings. Findings show that language diversity has a great potential of facilitating learning, thus emphasizing the complementarities rather than the exclusion of languages used in Rwanda. However, what the participants described as “lack of background knowledge” might be a sign of an underlying language problem, where students memorise lecturers’ notes and reproduce them during any kind of evaluation, without questioning and reflecting on the material in order to convert information into knowledge.

Swedish children’s use of the headshake from 18 to 30 months shows a developmental progression from rote-learned and formulaic coordination with speech to increasingly more flexible and productive coordination with speech. To deal with these observations, I make use of the concept of multimodal constructions, to extend usage-based approaches to language learning and construction grammar by inclusion of the kinetic domain. These ideas have consequences for the (meta‑)theoretical question of whether gesture can be said to be part of language or not. I suggest that some speech-coordinated gestures, including the headshake, can be considered part of language, also in the traditional sense of language as a conventionalized system.

The present study investigates the use of gestures by 18-, 24- and 30-month-old Swedish children, as well as their practical actions in coordination with verbs. Previous research on connections between children’s verbs and gestures has mainly focused only on iconic gestures and action verbs. We expand the research foci in two ways: we look both at gestures and at practical actions, examining how the two are coordinated with static verbs (e.g. sleep) and dynamic verbs (e.g. fall). Thanks to these additional distinctions, we have found that iconic gestures and iconic actions (the latter in particular) most commonly occurred with dynamic verbs. Static verbs were most commonly accompanied by deictic actions and deictic gestures (the latter in particular). At 30 months, deictic bodily expressions, including both gestures and actions, increased, whereas iconic expressions decreased. We suggest that this may reflect a transition to less redundant ways of using bodily expressions at 30 months, where bodily movement increasingly takes on the role of specifying verb arguments rather than expressing the semantics of the verb itself.

It is argued that a language, a langue in a modified Saussurean sense, is a regular outcome of conversation. Based on an analysis of a series of five Swedish telephone conversations, it is demonstrated through a turn-by-turn analysis of the first of these phone calls that an embedded and dynamic system of linguistic resources emerges in conversation and is stabilized in a tradition of conversations, and that the very methods which participants use to structure conversation - turn-taking, sequence organization, and repair - also structure conversation like a language.

In this article, I observe how a construction emerges, through a method of turn construction whichI call recycling with différance, in an informal conversation between four peers. Basing myself on a detailed analysis of the social impact of the turns at talk through which the construction emerges, I argue that a construction never substitutes for or absorbs a series of individual turns, but is a socially negotiated interim structuring of these turns. As such, it is potentially open to new modifications and new uses, which, however, also have to be socially negotiated.

Language is not inside speaking but comes forth as a consequence of dialogue and tradition.

Man får anta att språkbrukaren har till sitt förfogande ett lexikon innehållande lexikaliska enheter (byggstenar) och en grammatik innehållande regler för hur meningar (el. andra större enheter) konstrueras med de lexikaliska enheterna som byggstenar. De lexikaliska enheterna är inte enstaka morfem; snarare är de stammar eller 'ord', där de senare kan vara grundord, avledningar, sammansättningar etc. (se t.ex. Linell, 1976). Många lexikaliska enheter är emellertid av fraskaraktär. I den här uppsatsen skall vi behandla vissa av dessa s.k. lexikaliserade fraser, varvid vi skall belysa en rad skillnader mellan, på den ena sidan, sådana lexikonlagrade 'fasta förbindelser' och, på den andra sidan, syntaktiska nykonstruktioner (jfr Jespersens (1924: 18 ff.) termer 'formulas' resp. 'free expressions').

In Swedish newspapers and journals an interview with or a feature article

about a person is normally accompanied by an infobox, where, among other items, there

is a headline named familj (family). Under this headline are mentioned not only partners,

children, and other relatives, but also pets, notably dogs and cats. Our contribution poses

the question to what extent this verbal (written) presentation of pets serves to construct

them as ‘family members’. Based on our findings – the fact that pets are frequently mentioned

in connection with family members, overlap between names of pets and names of

human family members, and close textual alignment of humans and pets, among other

things – we discuss whether these findings should be interpreted as a tendency towards

anthropomorphism with regard to pets, or, somewhat more radically, whether we are witnessing

a linguistic practice where cultural species boundaries are blurred.

Aphasiologists developing treatments for anomia should closely align therapy methods with the typological and morphological characteristics of the language in question. The lead author initiated this study to develop more defensible interventions for speakers of Sesotho, a South African language. Prefix-based cueing (our alternative name for initial phoneme cueing that describes these cues in Sesotho-oriented terms) was compared to a novel technique, root-based cueing (RBC). While prefix-based cues are described in the literature, we hypothesized root-based cues would be more appropriate in this context since they were thought to be more consonant with the linguistic parameters of Sesotho. Two speakers with aphasia, who demonstrated significant anomic symptoms, served as participants. We used a multiple-baseline, single case study design. Two 144-item word lists were developed with every item represented by a photograph. Each of the two word lists was associated with one of the two cueing techniques investigated. After baseline measurements were obtained, each participant attended eight facilitation sessions for each cueing condition, resulting in eight data points per condition and participant. For both participants, RBC resulted in greater naming performance than cueing by means of initial phonemes. Our explanation of these results is based on the Interactive Lexical Network model of lexical access; root-based cues may be more effective because they more efficiently constrain the number of lemmas activated after a cue is provided. We argue that a confluence of factors (word-retrieval processes and the character of Sesotho morphosyntax) gave rise to the noted differences in naming facilitation.

Background: Written language impairments are common in Alzheimers disease and reduced syntactic complexity in written discourse has been observed decades before the onset of dementia. The validity of average dependency distance (ADD), a measure of syntactic complexity, in cognitive decline needs to be studied further to evaluate its clinical relevance. Aims: The aim of the study was to determine whether ADD is associated with levels of cognitive impairment in memory clinic patients. Methods & procedures: We analyzed written texts collected in clinical practice from 114 participants with subjective cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimers disease during routine assessment at a memory clinic. ADD was measured using automated analysis methods consisting of a syntactic parser and a part-of-speech tagger. Outcomes & results: Our results show a significant association between ADD and levels of cognitive impairment, using ordinal logistic regression models. Conclusion: These results suggest that ADD is clinically relevant with regard to levels of cognitive impairment and indicate a diagnostic potential for ADD in cognitive assessment.

This article concerns generation and food morality, drawing on video recordings of dinners in Swedish middle-class families. A detailed analysis of affect displays during one family dinner extends prior work on food morality (Ochs, Pontecorvo, & Fasulo 1996; Grieshaber 1997; Bourdieu 2003; Wiggins 2004), documenting ways in which participants may shift between distinct GENERATIONAL POSITIONS with respect to affects and food morality (from “irresponsiblechild” to caretaker positions). In our recordings, an elder sibling is shifting between a series of contrasting affective stances (Ochs & Schieffelin 1989; M. Goodwin 2006; Stivers 2008), linked to generational positions along an implicit age continuum: positioning himself, at one end of the continuum, as his young brother’s accomplice, and at the other as an adult, aserious guardian of food morality. This study shows that generational positionsare not fixed, but are positions adopted as parts of language socializationand interactional events.

Acquired neurogenic communication disorders can affect language, speech, or both. Although neurogenic speech disorders have been researched for a considerable time, much of this work has been restricted to a few languages (mainly English, with German, French, Japanese and Chinese also represented). Further, the work has concentrated on monolingual speakers. In this account, I aim to outline the main acquired speech disorders, and give examples of research into multilingual aspects of this topic. The various types of acquired neurogenic speech disorders support a tripartite analysis of normal speech production. Dysarthria (of varying sub - types) is a disorder of the neural pathways and muscle activity: the implementation of the motor plans for speech. Apraxia of speech on the other hand is a disorder of compilation of those motor plans (seen through the fact that novel utterances are disordered, while often formulaic utterances are not). Aphasia (at least when it affects speech rather than just language) manifests as a disorder at the phonological level; for example, paraphasias disrupt the normal ordering of segments, and jargon aphasias affect both speech sound inventories and the link between sound and meaning. I will illustrate examples of various acquired neurogenic speech dis orders in multilingual speakers drawn from recent literature. We will conclude by considering an example of jargon aphasia produced by a previously bilingual speaker (that is, bilingual before the acquired neurological damage). This example consists of non - perseverative non - word jargon, produced by a Louisiana French - English bilingual woman with aphasia. The client’s jargon has internal systematicity and these systematic properties show overlaps with both the French and English phonological system and structure. Therefore, while she does not have access to the lexicon of either language, it would seem that she accesses both the French and English phonological systems.

The voice quality symbols (VoQS) transcription system for voice quality was introduced some 20 years ago, and no major revision has been undertaken since then. In this account we describe the first major revision of the VoQS chart, these changes being mostly in the form of additions to the section on phonation types, but include also changes to the layout of the supralaryngeal settings section. These reflect recent developments in the understanding of the physiological underpinnings of sounds produced in the larynx including certain phonation types.

This paper describes changes to the extIPA (Extensions to the IPA) symbol set, the motivation for these changes, and areas where future changes by the IPA might be helpful to clinical transcribers. The extIPA symbol set was introduced some twenty-five years ago. Since that time, some minor changes have been introduced to the extIPA chart but no major rearrangement has been attempted. The 2010 Oslo meeting of ICPLA (International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association) started a revision of the extIPA chart, and this process was recently completed. A revised extIPA chart was approved at the 2016 ICPLA meeting. The revision involved the addition, modification and removal of categories and symbols. All changes derive from the need to denote sounds encountered in disordered speech that were not covered by the original chart.

The focus of the thesis is on the Language Policy in the English education system for bilinguals by looking at texts such as official documents (Languages for All: Languages for Life A Strategy for England and Every Language Matters) and the inspection reports of several schools and identifying discourses and then considering the consequences of these discourses (what are these discourses reveal) for education.

Spoken Language Translator (SLT) is a project whose long-term goal is the construction of practically useful systems capable of translating human speech from one language into another. The current SLT prototype, described in detail in this report, is capable of speech-to-speech translation between English and Swedish in either direction within the domain of airline flight inquiries, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words. Translation from English and Swedish into French is also possible, with slightly poorer performance.

A good English-language speech recognizer existed before the start of the project, and has since been improved in several ways. During the project, we have constructed a Swedish-language recognizer, arguably the best system of its kind so far built. This has involved among other things collection of a large amount of Swedish training data. The recognizer is essentially domain-independent, but has been tuned to give high performance in the air travel inquiry domain.

The main version of the Swedish recognizer is trained on the Stockholm dialect of Swedish, and achieves near-real-time performance with a word error rate of about 7%. Techniques developed partly under this project make it possible to port the recognizer to other Swedish dialects using only modest quantities of training data.

On the language-processing side, we had at the start of the project a substantial domain-independent language-processing system for English, a preliminary Swedish version, and a sketchy set of rules to permit English to Swedish translation. We now have good versions of the language-processing system for English, Swedish and French, and fair to good support for translation in five of the six possible language- pairs. Translation is carried out using a novel robust architecture developed under the project. In essence, this translates as much of the input utterance as possible using a sophisticated grammar-based method, and then employs a much simpler set of word- to-word translation rules to fill in the gaps.

The language-processing modules are all generic in nature, are based on large, linguistically motivated grammars, and can fairly easily be tuned to give good performance in new domains. Much of the work involved in the domain adaptation process can be carried out by non-experts using tools developed under the project.

Formal comparisons are problematic, in view of the different domains and languages used and the lack of accepted evaluation criteria. None the less, the evidence at our disposal suggests that the current SLT prototype is no worse than the German Verbmobil demonstrator, in spite of a difference in project budget of more than an order of magnitude.

In this paper, we compare the distribution of disfluencies intwo human–computer dialogue corpora. One corpus consistsof unimodal travel booking dialogues, which were recorded over the telephone. In this unimodal system, all components except the speech recognition were authentic. The other corpus was collected using a semi-simulated multi-modal dialogue system with an animated talking agent and a clickable map. The aim of this paper is to analyze and discuss the effects of modality, task and interface design on the distribution and frequency of disfluencies in these twocorpora.

This chapter presents the collaborative research project ‘From monologues to dialogues’. The project included several small-scale classroom studies conducted by a research team of teachers and researchers. The collaboration encompassed all stages of the project (design, implementation and analysis), which combined theory and practice to produce findings relevant for the teaching profession. The project was grounded in a practice-based problem: How do we get the pupils to talk to each other in the target language in the classroom? The research team hypothesized that the issue might lie with oral classroom activities and that the problem could be solved by designing meaningful tasks aimed at promoting co-constructed interaction. Our findings related to task design indicate that problem-based tasks with brief instructions and artefacts can elicit ‘good interaction’, which–with the analytical affordances of conversation analysis–we empirically defined as co-constructed interaction where pupils attend to each other’s turns-at-talk and formulate fitting turns that foster the progressivity of the activity. Challenges in our collaboration included negotiating different expectations and perspectives; we argue, however, that the benefits outweigh the challenges. Most importantly, by working side by side in the research process our research team has produced findings that are both actionable and sustainable for the teaching profession.

There are several studies about non-fluency inpeople who stutter, but comparatively few regardingchildren with language impairment. The currentresearch body regarding disfluencies in childrenwith language impairment has been using differentstudy-designs and definitions, making some resultsrather contradictory.

The purpose of the present study is to expand theknowledge about disfluencies in children withlanguage impairment and compare the occurrenceof disfluencies between children with languageimpairment and children with typical languagedevelopment in the same age group.

A total of ten children with language impairmentand six children with typical language developmentparticipated in this study. The subjects wererecorded when talking freely about a thematicpicture or toys and then analysed by calculatingdisfluencies per 50 words including frequency ofdifferent kinds of disfluencies according to Johnsonand Associates’ (1959) classic taxonomy.

Our results show that children with languageimpairment do produce statistically significant moredisfluency in general, notably sound and syllablerepetition, broken words and prolongations.

We investigate segment prolongation as a means of disfluent hesitation in spontaneous German speech. We describe phonetic and structural features of disfluent prolongation and compare it to data of other languages and to non-disfluent prolongations.

This paper examines the coordination of vision when formulating place in driver training. Specifically, the study examines the visual practices involved when jointly establishing where to change direction. First, it shows how visual availabilities are exploited in establishing the place for the instructed driving action, and second, how verbal and embodied instructions may be adjusted to new visualities as movement in space ongoingly change the visual landscape. In conclusion, place formulations are questions that seek to establish a mutual reference point. By showing how the parties secure joint visual access to a landmark and how instructions are reflexively related to a changing visual environment, the study highlights the role of shared perception for giving and making sense of directions.

This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains.  Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.

The Spoken Language Translator (SLT) is a multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation prototype supporting English, Swedish and French within the air traffic information system (ATIS) domain. The design of SLT is characterized by a strongly corpus-driven approach, which accentuates the need for cost-efficient collection procedures to obtain training data. This paper discusses various approaches to the data collection issue pursued within a speech translation framework. Original American English speech and language data have been collected using traditional Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) techniques, a relatively costly procedure yielding high-quality results. The resulting corpus has been translated textually into Swedish by a large number of native speakers (427) and used as prompts for training the target language speech model. This ￜbudgetￜ collection method is compared to the accepted method, i.e., gathering data by means of a full-blown WOZ simulation. The results indicate that although translation in this case proved economical and produced considerable data, the method is not sensitive to certain features typical of spoken language, for which WOZ is superior

Human language acquisition, and in particular the acquisition of grammar, is a partially-canalized, strongly-biased but robust and efficient procedure. For example, children prefer to induce compositional rules (e.g. Wanner and Gleitman, 1982) despite peripheral use of non-compositional constructions, such as idioms, in every attested human language. And, most parameters of grammatical variation set during language acquisition appear to have default values retained in the absence of robust counter-evidence (e.g.Bickerton, 1984; Lightfoot, 1989). A variety of explanations have been offered for the emergence of a partially-innate language acquisition device (LAD) with such properties, such as exaption of a spandrel (Gould, 1987), biological saltation (Chomsky, 1972) or genetic assimilation (Pinker and Bloom, 1990). But none provide a coherent account of both the emergence and maintenance of a LAD in an evolving population.

The account offered here is that an embryonic LAD emerged via exaption of general-purpose (Bayesian) learning mechanisms (e.g. Staddon, 1983) to a specifically-linguistic mental representation capable of expressing mappings from the `language of thought' to `realizable' encodings of propositions expressed in the language of thought. However, the selective pressure favouring such an exaption, and its subsequent maintenance and refinement, is only coherent given a coevolutionary scenario in which a (proto)language supporting successful communication within a population had already itself evolved on a historical timescale (e.g. Hurford, 1987; Kirby, 1998; Steels, 1997) and continued to coevolve with the LAD (e.g. Briscoe, 1997, in press). This account is supported by the results of a number of computational simulations of evolving populations of software agents acquiring and communicating with coevolving structured languages. The model behind the simulations suggests a new dynamic framework forthe study of communication systems in general, and human language in particular, which both incorporates the insights gained from formalizing a language as static well-formed stringset (Chomsky, 1957) and extends them by embedding this model in an evolving population of distributed language agents. The practical implication of this framework for natural language processing is that development of static hand-coded systems should be replaced by development of autonomous software agents capable of adapting to their linguistic environment.

This study aims to answer the questions of when and why foreign language teachers use their learners’ first language (L1) in the foreign language classroom. Additionally, the study also explores learner attitudes toward teachers’ use of the L1, and compares these attitudes with the teacher practices. In order to answer the research questions, international peer-reviewed studies have been used and analysed. The findings include L1 use in a number of different situations, for example during grammatical and lexical explanations, when giving instructions on classroom activities, and in informal interactions with the learners. Teachers may use the L1 in order to facilitate learners’ understanding, to save time, and to create a positive and welcoming classroom environment. The investigation of the learner attitudes shows that they are not always aligned with the teachers’ beliefs and practices. The learner attitudes are also ambiguous, displaying a variety of opinions for or against the teachers’ use of the L1. One possible explanation for the wide range of opinions could be the different levels of target language proficiency among the learners, with advanced learners leaning more toward less L1 use by the teacher, while beginners lean more toward the use of the L1. However, this could not be shown to always be the case, suggesting that other factors might also influence the attitudes toward the use of the L1. In the light of the results of this study, the discussion mainly revolves around the possible benefits and disadvantages of L1 use in the foreign language classroom, and what implications this might have for foreign language teachers. For example, more L1 use could result in less meaningful communication in the target language, which might pose a lost opportunity for language acquisition. On the other hand, the L1 could also lead to learners feeling more comfortable in class, lowering their affective filter and thus result in improved language acquisition.

This article examines ascriptions of mental states to other road users in live traffic driver training. Through this practice, instructors formulate how others make sense of the trainee drivers car. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we demonstrate how others side formulations support trainee drivers communicative handling of the car during ongoing coordination events. In contrast, formulations occurring after coordination events serve educational ends, yielding the generic inferential practices by which competent drivers make contextual sense of others actions. Therefore, others side formulations comprise an important instructional resource for introducing neophyte drivers into the real-world theorizing, rendering traffic its orderly social character. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Studies of sign languages have been used to test traditional cognitive models of working memory (WM) that distinguish between verbal and visuospatial WM (e.g. Baddeley, 2003), without considering that sign languages operate in the visuospatial domain. Previous studies have shown that WM mental representations and processes are largely similar for signed and spoken languages (e.g. Rönnberg et al., 2004). However, it is not clear to what extent visual WM processes aid and support sign language WM.

Here we characterise the neural substrates supporting sign language and visual WM, and the mechanisms that subserve differential processing for signers and for deaf individuals. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment with three groups of participants: deaf native signers, hearing native signers and hearing non-signers. Participants performed a 2-back WM task and a control task on two sets of stimuli: signs from British Sign Language or non-sense objects. Stimuli were composed of point-lights to control for differences in visual features.

Our results show activation in a fronto-parietal network for WM processing in all groups, independently of stimulus type, in agreement with previous literature. We also replicate previous findings in deaf signers showing a stronger right posterior superior temporal cortex (STC) activation for visuospatial processing, and stronger bilateral STC activation for sign language stimuli.

Group comparisons further reveal stronger activations in STC for WM in deaf signers, but not for the groups of hearing individuals. This activation is independent of the linguistic content of the stimuli, being observed in both WM conditions: signs and objects. These results suggest a cognitive role for STC in deaf signers, beyond sign language processing.

Purpose This study reports on the development of an auditory passage comprehension task for Swedish primary school children of cultural and linguistic diversity. It also reports on their performance on the task in quiet and in noise. Method Eighty-eight children aged 7-9 years and showing normal hearing participated. The children were divided into three groups based on presumed language exposure: 13 children were categorized as Swedish-speaking monolinguals, 19 children were categorized as simultaneous bilinguals, and 56 children were categorized as sequential bilinguals. No significant difference in working memory capacity was seen between the three language groups. Two passages and associated multiple-choice questions were developed. During development of the passage comprehension task, steps were taken to reduce the impact of culture-specific prior experience and knowledge on performance. This was achieved by using the story grammar principles, universal topics and plots, and simple language that avoided complex or unusual grammatical structures and words. Results The findings indicate no significant difference between the two passages and similar response distributions. Passage comprehension performance was significantly better in quiet than in noise, regardless of language exposure group. The monolinguals outperformed both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals in both listening conditions. Conclusions Because the task was designed to minimize the effect of cultural knowledge on auditory passage comprehension, this suggests that compared with monolinguals, both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals have a disadvantage in auditory passage comprehension. As expected, the findings demonstrate that noise has a negative effect on auditory passage comprehension. The magnitude of this effect does not relate to language exposure. The developed auditory passage comprehension task seems suitable for assessing auditory passage comprehension in primary school children of linguistic and cultural diversity.

In this paper we describe how the translation methodology adopted fro the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) addresses the characteristics of the speech translation task in a context where it is essential to achieve easy customization to new languages and new domains. We then discuss the issues that arise in any attempt to evaluate a speech translator, and present results of such an evaluation carried out on SLT for several language pairs.

This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains.  Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.

This book presents a detailed description of Spoken Language Translator (SLT), one of the first major projects in the area of automatic speech translation. The SLT system can translate between English, French, and Swedish in the domain of air travel planning, using a vocabulary of about 1500 words, and with an accuracy of about 75%. The greater part of the book describes the language processing components, which are largely built on top of the SRI Core Language Engine, using a combination of general grammars and techniques that allow them to be rapidly customized to specific domains.  Speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Mode technology, and uses versions of the SRI DECIPHER system. This account of the Spoken Language Translator should be an essential resource both for those who wish to know what is achievable in spoken-language translation today, and for those who wish to understand how to achieve it.