Dissertations / Theses: 'Cross-language learning'

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Hjelm, Hans. "Cross-language Ontology Learning : Incorporating and Exploiting Cross-language Data in the Ontology Learning Process." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-8414.

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An ontology is a knowledge-representation structure, where words, terms or concepts are defined by their mutual hierarchical relations. Ontologies are becoming ever more prevalent in the world of natural language processing, where we currently see a tendency towards using semantics for solving a variety of tasks, particularly tasks related to information access. Ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri (all related notions) are also used in various variants by humans, to standardize business transactions or for finding conceptual relations between terms in, e.g., the medical domain. The acquisition of machine-readable, domain-specific semantic knowledge is time consuming and prone to inconsistencies. The field of ontology learning therefore provides tools for automating the construction of domain ontologies (ontologies describing the entities and relations within a particular field of interest), by analyzing large quantities of domain-specific texts. This thesis studies three main topics within the field of ontology learning. First, we examine which sources of information are useful within an ontology learning system and how the information sources can be combined effectively. Secondly, we do this with a special focus on cross-language text collections, to see if we can learn more from studying several languages at once, than we can from a single-language text collection. Finally, we investigate new approaches to formal and automatic evaluation of the quality of a learned ontology. We demonstrate how to combine information sources from different languages and use them to train automatic classifiers to recognize lexico-semantic relations. The cross-language data is shown to have a positive effect on the quality of the learned ontologies. We also give theoretical and experimental results, showing that our ontology evaluation method is a good complement to and in some aspects improves on the evaluation measures in use today.
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Woldemariam, Yonas Demeke. "Natural language processing in cross-media analysis." Licentiate thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-147640.

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A cross-media analysis framework is an integrated multi-modal platform where a media resource containing different types of data such as text, images, audio and video is analyzed with metadata extractors, working jointly to contextualize the media resource. It generally provides cross-media analysis and automatic annotation, metadata publication and storage, searches and recommendation services. For on-line content providers, such services allow them to semantically enhance a media resource with the extracted metadata representing the hidden meanings and make it more efficiently searchable. Within the architecture of such frameworks, Natural Language Processing (NLP) infrastructures cover a substantial part. The NLP infrastructures include text analysis components such as a parser, named entity extraction and linking, sentiment analysis and automatic speech recognition. Since NLP tools and techniques are originally designed to operate in isolation, integrating them in cross-media frameworks and analyzing textual data extracted from multimedia sources is very challenging. Especially, the text extracted from audio-visual content lack linguistic features that potentially provide important clues for text analysis components. Thus, there is a need to develop various techniques to meet the requirements and design principles of the frameworks. In our thesis, we explore developing various methods and models satisfying text and speech analysis requirements posed by cross-media analysis frameworks. The developed methods allow the frameworks to extract linguistic knowledge of various types and predict various information such as sentiment and competence. We also attempt to enhance the multilingualism of the frameworks by designing an analysis pipeline that includes speech recognition, transliteration and named entity recognition for Amharic, that also enables the accessibility of Amharic contents on the web more efficiently. The method can potentially be extended to support other under-resourced languages.

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Mau, Pui-sze Priscilla. "Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness in Chinese-English bilinguals." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2006. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36889301.

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Mau, Pui-sze Priscilla, and 繆佩詩. "Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness in Chinese-English bilinguals." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B36889301.

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Mogofe, Romulus Asaph. "Integrating language literacy skills in teaching physical sciences in Riba Cross District, South Africa." Thesis, University of Limpopo, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10386/1590.

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Thesis (M. A. (Education)) -- University of Limpopo, 2016
Poor performance, by English Language Learners (ELLs), in Science examinations remains a thorny issue in countries where English is not the home language. Research around the world and the Department of Basic Education in South Africa have long recommended the integration of Language Literacy skills in the teaching of Physical Sciences in order to solve this issue. Despite that, learners’ poor performance in Physical Sciences examinations has been found to be positively related to low language literacy skills. The questions are: Do Physical Sciences teachers integrate language literacy skills in teaching the subject?; If yes, to what extent is the integration of language literacy skills practiced in Physical Sciences classroom? In an attempt to answer the above questions, a quantitative survey was carried out in Riba Cross District of Sekhukhune Region of Limpopo Province in South Africa. 211 learners and five teachers from selected nine schools took part in the study and questionnaires were used to collect data. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22 was used. The results indicate that Language Literacy skills are integrated into the teaching of Physical Sciences in Riba Cross District, despite concerns raised by the teachers. The areas of concern include letting learners to argue using evidences and writing reports. Furthermore, schools with large classes have challenges in integrating Language Literacy Skills in the teaching of Physical Sciences. Therefore, further studies are recommended which should integrate both qualitative and quantitative approaches in school contexts.

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Lennane, B. Michael. "Cross-cultural influences on corrective feedback preferences in English language instruction." Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=112502.

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This cross-cultural study examined the preferences of 137 Taiwanese EFL students and 97 ESL Quebecois students for specific types of corrective feedback, as well as their attitudes and beliefs about error correction, and those of 12 Taiwanese English instructors and 12 native English teachers in Quebec. All participants completed two questionnaires, the first eliciting overall preferences and attitudes for corrective feedback, and the second eliciting preferences for specific types of feedback aurally modeled through a digital recording designed for the purpose of this study. In addition, a subsample of participants was selected for follow-up interviews. Descriptive analysis of the initial questionnaire coupled with trends found in interview data revealed cross-cultural differences in preferences for types of errors to correct, the use of correction, rates of correction and affective reactions to error correction. However, statistical analysis of the data yielded by the main elicitation instrument revealed similar preferences within both cultural groups, with explicit correction being ranked highest, followed by recasts and then prompts.

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Gupta, Parth Alokkumar. "Cross-view Embeddings for Information Retrieval." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de València, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/78457.

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In this dissertation, we deal with the cross-view tasks related to information retrieval using embedding methods. We study existing methodologies and propose new methods to overcome their limitations. We formally introduce the concept of mixed-script IR, which deals with the challenges faced by an IR system when a language is written in different scripts because of various technological and sociological factors. Mixed-script terms are represented by a small and finite feature space comprised of character n-grams. We propose the cross-view autoencoder (CAE) to model such terms in an abstract space and CAE provides the state-of-the-art performance. We study a wide variety of models for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and propose a model based on compositional neural networks (XCNN) which overcomes the limitations of the existing methods and achieves the best results for many CLIR tasks such as ad-hoc retrieval, parallel sentence retrieval and cross-language plagiarism detection. We empirically test the proposed models for these tasks on publicly available datasets and present the results with analyses. In this dissertation, we also explore an effective method to incorporate contextual similarity for lexical selection in machine translation. Concretely, we investigate a feature based on context available in source sentence calculated using deep autoencoders. The proposed feature exhibits statistically significant improvements over the strong baselines for English-to-Spanish and English-to-Hindi translation tasks. Finally, we explore the the methods to evaluate the quality of autoencoder generated representations of text data and analyse its architectural properties. For this, we propose two metrics based on reconstruction capabilities of the autoencoders: structure preservation index (SPI) and similarity accumulation index (SAI). We also introduce a concept of critical bottleneck dimensionality (CBD) below which the structural information is lost and present analyses linking CBD and language perplexity.
En esta disertación estudiamos problemas de vistas-múltiples relacionados con la recuperación de información utilizando técnicas de representación en espacios de baja dimensionalidad. Estudiamos las técnicas existentes y proponemos nuevas técnicas para solventar algunas de las limitaciones existentes. Presentamos formalmente el concepto de recuperación de información con escritura mixta, el cual trata las dificultades de los sistemas de recuperación de información cuando los textos contienen escrituras en distintos alfabetos debido a razones tecnológicas y socioculturales. Las palabras en escritura mixta son representadas en un espacio de características finito y reducido, compuesto por n-gramas de caracteres. Proponemos los auto-codificadores de vistas-múltiples (CAE, por sus siglas en inglés) para modelar dichas palabras en un espacio abstracto, y esta técnica produce resultados de vanguardia. En este sentido, estudiamos varios modelos para la recuperación de información entre lenguas diferentes (CLIR, por sus siglas en inglés) y proponemos un modelo basado en redes neuronales composicionales (XCNN, por sus siglas en inglés), el cual supera las limitaciones de los métodos existentes. El método de XCNN propuesto produce mejores resultados en diferentes tareas de CLIR tales como la recuperación de información ad-hoc, la identificación de oraciones equivalentes en lenguas distintas y la detección de plagio entre lenguas diferentes. Para tal efecto, realizamos pruebas experimentales para dichas tareas sobre conjuntos de datos disponibles públicamente, presentando los resultados y análisis correspondientes. En esta disertación, también exploramos un método eficiente para utilizar similitud semántica de contextos en el proceso de selección léxica en traducción automática. Específicamente, proponemos características extraídas de los contextos disponibles en las oraciones fuentes mediante el uso de auto-codificadores. El uso de las características propuestas demuestra mejoras estadísticamente significativas sobre sistemas de traducción robustos para las tareas de traducción entre inglés y español, e inglés e hindú. Finalmente, exploramos métodos para evaluar la calidad de las representaciones de datos de texto generadas por los auto-codificadores, a la vez que analizamos las propiedades de sus arquitecturas. Como resultado, proponemos dos nuevas métricas para cuantificar la calidad de las reconstrucciones generadas por los auto-codificadores: el índice de preservación de estructura (SPI, por sus siglas en inglés) y el índice de acumulación de similitud (SAI, por sus siglas en inglés). También presentamos el concepto de dimensión crítica de cuello de botella (CBD, por sus siglas en inglés), por debajo de la cual la información estructural se deteriora. Mostramos que, interesantemente, la CBD está relacionada con la perplejidad de la lengua.
En aquesta dissertació estudiem els problemes de vistes-múltiples relacionats amb la recuperació d'informació utilitzant tècniques de representació en espais de baixa dimensionalitat. Estudiem les tècniques existents i en proposem unes de noves per solucionar algunes de les limitacions existents. Presentem formalment el concepte de recuperació d'informació amb escriptura mixta, el qual tracta les dificultats dels sistemes de recuperació d'informació quan els textos contenen escriptures en diferents alfabets per motius tecnològics i socioculturals. Les paraules en escriptura mixta són representades en un espai de característiques finit i reduït, composat per n-grames de caràcters. Proposem els auto-codificadors de vistes-múltiples (CAE, per les seves sigles en anglès) per modelar aquestes paraules en un espai abstracte, i aquesta tècnica produeix resultats d'avantguarda. En aquest sentit, estudiem diversos models per a la recuperació d'informació entre llengües diferents (CLIR , per les sevas sigles en anglès) i proposem un model basat en xarxes neuronals composicionals (XCNN, per les sevas sigles en anglès), el qual supera les limitacions dels mètodes existents. El mètode de XCNN proposat produeix millors resultats en diferents tasques de CLIR com ara la recuperació d'informació ad-hoc, la identificació d'oracions equivalents en llengües diferents, i la detecció de plagi entre llengües diferents. Per a tal efecte, realitzem proves experimentals per aquestes tasques sobre conjunts de dades disponibles públicament, presentant els resultats i anàlisis corresponents. En aquesta dissertació, també explorem un mètode eficient per utilitzar similitud semàntica de contextos en el procés de selecció lèxica en traducció automàtica. Específicament, proposem característiques extretes dels contextos disponibles a les oracions fonts mitjançant l'ús d'auto-codificadors. L'ús de les característiques proposades demostra millores estadísticament significatives sobre sistemes de traducció robustos per a les tasques de traducció entre anglès i espanyol, i anglès i hindú. Finalment, explorem mètodes per avaluar la qualitat de les representacions de dades de text generades pels auto-codificadors, alhora que analitzem les propietats de les seves arquitectures. Com a resultat, proposem dues noves mètriques per quantificar la qualitat de les reconstruccions generades pels auto-codificadors: l'índex de preservació d'estructura (SCI, per les seves sigles en anglès) i l'índex d'acumulació de similitud (SAI, per les seves sigles en anglès). També presentem el concepte de dimensió crítica de coll d'ampolla (CBD, per les seves sigles en anglès), per sota de la qual la informació estructural es deteriora. Mostrem que, de manera interessant, la CBD està relacionada amb la perplexitat de la llengua.
Gupta, PA. (2017). Cross-view Embeddings for Information Retrieval [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/78457
TESIS

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Conradie, Simone. "Verb movement parameters in Afrikaans : investigating the Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=85899.

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This thesis sets out to test the Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis (FTFA), which claims (i) that second language (L2) learners start out with the parameter settings instantiated in their first language (L1) grammars ('full transfer') and (ii) that they can subsequently reset parameters to the target L2 settings where these differ from the L1 settings, provided the required (triggering) positive evidence is available in the L2 input ('full access').
Three studies on the L2 acquisition of two verb movement parameters, the V2 parameter and the Split-IP parameter (SIP), are reported. The first study investigates 'full access', testing whether English-speaking learners of Afrikaans, who started acquiring the L2 in early childhood and are thus child L2 learners, can reset the two parameters. The second study investigates 'full transfer' and 'full access' by testing whether English-speaking and German-speaking learners start out with different settings of the two parameters and whether the English-speaking learners can reset the parameters. All participants in this study are adult L2 learners, which facilitates a comparison of child L2 acquisition (first study) with adult L2 acquisition. The third study investigates whether Afrikaans-speaking learners of French can acquire knowledge of the ungrammaticality of certain construction types that are allowed in their L1 but not in the L2 (although the languages share the same parameter setting), despite the fact that there seems to be no positive evidence to this effect in the L2 input. It is argued that, taken together, the studies provide evidence in support of the FTFA.
The original contribution of this thesis lies in (i) investigating both verb movement parameters (instead of only one), (ii) providing a thorough discussion of the relevant syntactic properties of Afrikaans, (iii) investigating the L2 acquisition of Afrikaans, and (iv) addressing the question of how learners go about acquiring a parameter setting ([+SIP]) in cases where both the L1 and the L2 share the parameter setting but the L1 exhibits a superset of the properties exhibited by the L2.

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Christodoulopoulos, Christos. "Iterated learning framework for unsupervised part-of-speech induction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/8880.

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Computational approaches to linguistic analysis have been used for more than half a century. The main tools come from the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and are based on rule-based or corpora-based (supervised) methods. Despite the undeniable success of supervised learning methods in NLP, they have two main drawbacks: on the practical side, it is expensive to produce the manual annotation (or the rules) required and it is not easy to find annotators for less common languages. A theoretical disadvantage is that the computational analysis produced is tied to a specific theory or annotation scheme. Unsupervised methods offer the possibility to expand our analyses into more resourcepoor languages, and to move beyond the conventional linguistic theories. They are a way of observing patterns and regularities emerging directly from the data and can provide new linguistic insights. In this thesis I explore unsupervised methods for inducing parts of speech across languages. I discuss the challenges in evaluation of unsupervised learning and at the same time, by looking at the historical evolution of part-of-speech systems, I make the case that the compartmentalised, traditional pipeline approach of NLP is not ideal for the task. I present a generative Bayesian system that makes it easy to incorporate multiple diverse features, spanning different levels of linguistic structure, like morphology, lexical distribution, syntactic dependencies and word alignment information that allow for the examination of cross-linguistic patterns. I test the system using features provided by unsupervised systems in a pipeline mode (where the output of one system is the input to another) and show that the performance of the baseline (distributional) model increases significantly, reaching and in some cases surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art part-of-speech induction systems. I then turn to the unsupervised systems that provided these sources of information (morphology, dependencies, word alignment) and examine the way that part-of-speech information influences their inference. Having established a bi-directional relationship between each system and my part-of-speech inducer, I describe an iterated learning method, where each component system is trained using the output of the other system in each iteration. The iterated learning method improves the performance of both component systems in each task. Finally, using this iterated learning framework, and by using parts of speech as the central component, I produce chains of linguistic structure induction that combine all the component systems to offer a more holistic view of NLP. To show the potential of this multi-level system, I demonstrate its use ‘in the wild’. I describe the creation of a vastly multilingual parallel corpus based on 100 translations of the Bible in a diverse set of languages. Using the multi-level induction system, I induce cross-lingual clusters, and provide some qualitative results of my approach. I show that it is possible to discover similarities between languages that correspond to ‘hidden’ morphological, syntactic or semantic elements.

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Gürel, Ayşe. "Linguistic characteristics of second language acquisition and first language attrition : Turkish overt versus null pronouns." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38201.

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This thesis investigates the binding of overt and null subject pronouns in second language (L2) acquisition and first language (L1) attrition of Turkish. The aim is to provide a comparative investigation of language transfer effects in the ultimate state of the L2 and L1 grammar. More specifically, it examines transfer effects from English L1 and English L2 into the grammars of Turkish L2 and Turkish L1, respectively.
In this thesis, I propose that the Subset Condition (Berwick, 1985; Manzini & Wexler, 1987) can account for transfer phenomena observed in both L2 acquisition and L1 attrition. I argue that the subset relation that holds between the L1 and the L2 can be a predictor for the extent and duration of cross-linguistic transfer in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition. In other words, whether or not a particular property will resist L2 acquisition and undergo L1 attrition can be determined by looking at the subset relationship between the L1 and the L2 with respect to that property.
The prediction is that in configurations where the 'influencing language' (L1 in L2 acquisition and L2 in L1 attrition) is the superset of the 'affected language' (L2 in L2 acquisition and L1 in L1 attrition), L1 transfer effect will persist in L2 acquisition and we will see more signs of L2 transfer into the L1 grammar, resulting in more attrition effects.
Pronominal binding is chosen to investigate such cross-linguistic transfer effects. English and Turkish differ with respect to governing domains and types of pronominals present in two languages. Turkish, being a pro-drop language, allows null subject pronouns in main and embedded clauses. It also has a special type of anaphoric pronominal, kendisi, for which English has no corresponding form.
Two experiments were conducted to test L2 acquisition and L1 attrition of binding properties of Turkish overt and null subject pronouns under the influence of English. Participants included native English-speakers living in Turkey (end-state L2 Turkish speakers) and native Turkish-speakers living in North America (end-state L2 English speakers). Overall, results obtained from the two studies reveal cross-linguistic transfer effects in the manner predicted. In particular, properties of English overt pronouns (e.g., him/her) are transferred onto the overt Turkish pronoun o in L2 acquisition and in attrition, whereas properties of the Turkish null pronoun and the anaphoric pronominal kendisi are unaffected by English.

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Kalenandi, Minerva E. Renee. "Language Learning Strategies of Russian-Speaking Adult ESL Learners." PDXScholar, 1994. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4766.

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In the ESL classroom, there are often cultural differences between learners and teachers. Sometimes these differences can lead to misunderstandings or even conflict. One area where differences between cultures can be seen is language learning strategies and styles. This study explores the possibility that awareness of differences, explicit teaching, and negotiation may help to resolve differences. This study looks at differences between Russian-speaking adult ESL learners and American ESL teachers, with respect to strategy use and preferences. Three aspects are investigated. The first is to see whether there are statistically significant differences ~tween these groups of learners and teachers. The second is to try to form a loose profile of the learners as a cultural group. The third is to see whether or not there is evidence to suggest the validity of explicit teaching of strategies in the ESL classroom. The Strategy Inventory for Language Learners (SIIL), developed by Rebecca Oxford, is one way to assess differences ~tween learners and teachers. A survey including the SIIL and a questionnaire was given to ninety-four subjects. Forty-seven are Russian-speaking adult ESL learners and forty-seven are American-English-speaking ESL teachers or potential ESL teachers taken from a TESOL program. The results of the survey show that, in this case, there are statistically significant differences in preferences for and use of several sets of strategies. A preliminary cultural profile is derived from the SILL results and from anecdotal evidence gathered from the questionnaire. There is some evidence that the explicit teaching of language learning strategies and their use may help resolve some of the classroom conflicts between the two groups studied.

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Child, Michael W. "Cross-Linguistic Influence in L3 Portuguese Acquisition: Language Learning Perceptions and the Knowledge and Transfer of Mood Distinctions by Three Groups of English-Spanish Bilinguals." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/333340.

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Interest in Portuguese has steadily increased over the last decade in universities across both North and South America (Carvalho 2002, 2011), principally among Spanish speakers. Generally speaking, Portuguese for Spanish-speakers courses have been designed around the theory that Spanish-speaking students will benefit from cross-linguistic influence (CLI, or transfer) due to the typological similarity that exists between Portuguese and Spanish (see Júdice, 2000). Related to this, the Typological Primacy Model, or TPM (Rothman, 2011), states that CLI in L3 acquisition principally comes from the language that is perceived to be typologically similar to the target language (psycho-typology, see Kellerman, 1983), resulting in both positive and negative transfer. Although there is a high degree of typological similarity between Spanish and Portuguese, it is unknown whether or not this linguistic proximity is equally salient to all learners and whether or not learners view this linguistic proximity as an advantage or a disadvantage when learning Portuguese. Furthermore, some studies have suggested that the context in which one's Spanish is acquired may play a role in the different types of CLI evident among different Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese (e.g., Carvalho & da Silva, 2006; Johnson, 2004; Koike & Gualda, 2008). Consequently, Carvalho (2002, 2011) has called for more empirical evidence to shed light on the nature of CLI between Spanish and Portuguese. This dissertation, consisting of three main studies, seeks to answer this call by examining the effects of language background on L3 Portuguese acquisition among three groups of Spanish-speaking bilinguals: L1 Spanish (L1S) bilinguals, L2 Spanish (L2S) bilinguals, and heritage speakers of Spanish (HS bilinguals). Results from both quantitative and qualitative analyses of questionnaire data from the first study suggest that although all participants view Spanish as the principal source of CLI in L3 Portuguese acquisition, L2S bilinguals and HS bilinguals perceive the role of Spanish as significantly more facilitative when learning Portuguese than do L1S bilinguals. The second and third studies used a sentence completion task and a preference/grammaticality judgment task (see Ayoun, 2000) to measure bilingual students' knowledge of mood distinctions in Spanish in obligatory and non-obligatory contexts, respectively, and how they transfer that knowledge to Portuguese. Results indicate that the L2S group scored significantly lower on both measures of mood distinctions in obligatory contexts in Spanish, but transferred over more of their knowledge to Portuguese than either the L1S or HS groups. Similarly, results suggest that L2S bilinguals do not understand the variable nature of mood distinctions in non-obligatory environments, but show almost identical strategies of mood selection in both Spanish and Portuguese. In contrast, L1S and HS bilinguals display knowledge of the variable nature of mood distinctions in Spanish in these contexts but show marked differences in mood selection between the Spanish and Portuguese tasks. The results of these studies contribute to L3 acquisition literature by emphasizing the complexity involved in determining the role of the background languages in CLI and by highlighting the importance of the context of acquisition in CLI. In addition, the results provide more empirical evidence regarding the differences between how different groups of Spanish-speaking bilinguals transfer their knowledge when acquiring L3 Portuguese.

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Pak, Samuel Sungchoon. "Incorporating crosscultural learning strategies to reduce English language learning stresses on Hong Kong's secondary students." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1999. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1523.

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Sun-Alperin, Marlene Kendra. "Cross-language transfer of phonological and orthographic processing skills in Spanish-speaking children learning to read and spell in English." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/7684.

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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.
Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Human Development/Institute for Child Study. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

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Wei-Tzou, Hsiou-Chi. "An investigation into mainland Chinese students' experience of a cross-cutural e-mail exchange project." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/87848.

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The effectiveness of e-mail writing has been exhaustively studied and reported on, especially in Taiwan. However, there has not been any research carried out on the topics that mainland Chinese university students enjoy writing about when corresponding with their Western epals, nor does the literature report research on writing e-mails to two groups of epals simultaneously. This study explores what issues concerned the participants when they exchanged e-mails with their Western epals and how they viewed their cross-cultural learning experience. The participants were 28 mainland Chinese second-year English majors who voluntarily corresponded with 28 American high school pupils and 28 Western adult epals for about two months in Autumn 2006. The data of this exploratory interpretative research was mainly collected from their e-mails, ‘final reports’, the mid-project questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The study found that the topics the participants enjoyed writing about actually depended on with whom they were corresponding. With the younger school pupils, they tended to look for friendship by talking about pastimes, their own high school experience, etc. To the more sophisticated adult epals though, they wrote largely about personal matters, on which they seemed to be covertly seeking advice. However, some topics were common to both groups and were equally popular – for example, school and daily life. The data also reveals that the majority of the participants enjoyed the experience and overall had positive views about it. These fall into three broad categories of learning: language, cultural, and communication. However, some experienced minor difficulties and problems in these areas, particularly regarding the communication aspect. Meanwhile, in the process of the participants multiediting their ‘final reports’, learning seems to have occurred between their first and final drafts – perhaps as a result of responding to the researcher’s written feedback, which seemed to make a significant difference. The implications arising from the study suggest that the students’ interest in it stimulated their engagement with learning - though the findings are tentative. Some recommendations for further research are also given.

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Inagaki, Shunji. "Transfer and learnability in second language argument structure : motion verbs with locationaldirectional PPs in L2 English and Japanese." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38492.

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This thesis investigates how the outcomes of the acquisition of second language (L2) argument structure will vary depending on the nature of the learner's first language (L1). The focus is on motion verbs appearing with a prepositional/postpositional phrase that expresses the final endpoint of the motion (goal PP). In English, manner-of-motion verbs (e.g., walk ) and directed motion verbs (e.g., go) can appear with a goal PP as in John walked (went ) to school. In contrast, Japanese allows only directed motion verbs to occur with a goal PP. Thus, Japanese motion verbs with goal PPs form a subset of their English counterparts. I propose an analysis of these crosslinguistic differences in terms of different incorporation patterns in lexical-syntax (Hale & Keyser, 1993). L1 transfer and learnability considerations (White, 1991b), then, lead me to hypothesize that Japanese-speaking learners of English will be able to acquire the L2 representation on the basis of positive evidence, but that English-speaking learners of Japanese will have difficulty acquiring the L2 representation due to the lack of positive data motivating the restructuring of the L1 representation to the L2. A series of experiments tested these hypotheses using grammaticality judgment and picture-matching tasks. Results in general supported this prediction, suggesting that whether the L1 constitutes a subset of the L2 or vice versa indeed affects the outcomes of L2 argument structure. The results indicate full involvement of L1 and UG in L2 acquisition, thus supporting the Full-Transfer/Full-Access model of L2 acquisition (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994).

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Goksun-Yoruk, Tilbe. "The 'Who' and 'Where' of Events: Infants' Processing of Figures and Grounds in Events." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2010. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/100828.

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Psychology
Ph.D.
Learning relational terms such as verbs and prepositions is fundamental to language development. To learn relational words, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components, and then uncover how the particular language they are learning encodes these constructs. Building on a new area of research, this dissertation investigated two event components, figure (i.e., the moving entity) and ground (i.e., the stationary setting) that are central to learning relational words. In particular, we examine how English- and Japanese-reared infants process figures and grounds in nonlinguistic events and how language learning interacts with their conceptualization of these constructs. Four studies were designed to probe our questions. Study 1 examined English-reared infants' ability to form nonnative ground categories encoded only in Japanese. For example, "crossing a road," which extends in a line and is bounded, is expressed differently than "crossing a field" that extends in a plane and is unbounded. We found that infants can detect the geometry of the ground and form a nonnative ground category. Study 2 indicated that the path of an action plays a role in construing these categorical ground distinctions such that without the bounded paths infants do not differentiate between grounds. Study 3 demonstrated that even though infants notice figures and grounds in static representations of the dynamic events (even earlier for the ground discrimination), the Japanese categorical ground differentiation no longer emerged. In the last set of studies, we showed that despite the sensitivity to the event structure and categorical ground distinctions in dynamic events by both English- and Japanese-reared infants (Study 4a), only Japanese toddlers retained these categorical distinctions (Study 4b). Overall, these results suggest that 1) infants distinguish between figures and grounds in events with differential attention to static and dynamic displays; 2) before learning much about their native language infants form nonnative event categories; and 3) the process of learning language appears to shift earlier formed categorical boundaries.
Temple University--Theses

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18

Chuang, Min-Tun. "Cross-language transfer the strategic reading processes of eighth-grade Taiwanese readers in Chinese and english within a self-regulated learning framework /." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/7820.

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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.
Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

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Park, In-Ryang. "Encouraging motivation using songs and cooperative learning to improve intercultural understanding." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1754.

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The purpose of this study is to explore the students' motivation using songs and cooperative learning to improve intercultural understanding and to achieve communicative competence. The target level is the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) intermediate level students in South Korea.

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20

Hung, Hui-Lin. "Linking the domains of cross-culture, cognition, and language to an understanding of Asian international students' academic challenges." [Kent, Ohio] : Kent State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=kent1226779218.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2008.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 25, 2010). Advisor: Eunsook Hyun. Keywords: International/multicultural education; cross-cultural cognition/metacognition; English for academic purposes; inclusive curriculum and pedagogy. Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-301).

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21

Mora, Harder Maribel G. "English Reading/Language Arts Instruction in First-Grade Classrooms Serving English Language Learners: A Cross-Analysis of Instructional Practices and Student Engagement." Scholarly Repository, 2009. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/242.

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This study was designed to provide information on the reading instructional practices of 36 first grade teachers in nine schools that serve predominantly Spanish-speaking and ELL students in a southeastern U.S. school district. The purpose of this investigation was to describe teaching practices employed during English language arts instruction and to examine their use in relation to instructional grouping strategies, teacher language use, and student engagement. Participating classrooms were observed three times throughout the 2006-07 school year. Data were collected via the Timed Observations of Student Engagement/Language (TO/SEL) classroom observation instrument (Foorman & Schatchneider, 2003). Paired sample t-tests, multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA), and multiple regression analyses were employed to investigate the relationship among the following observed variables: allocation of reading instructional time, grouping strategies, teacher language use and student engagement. Several key findings emerged. Participating teachers spent a greater amount of time on meaning-focused reading instruction (i.e., writing, reading texts, reading comprehension) than on code-focused reading instruction (i.e., word work, spelling, reading fluency, phonemic awareness), both during all four observed grouping strategies and after controlling for individual student seat work. In addition, of five key collapsed instructional variables (word work/spelling, oral language, writing, reading texts, and reading comprehension), teachers spent most time on word work/spelling (19%) and writing (18%). Reading texts and reading comprehension instruction together comprised 26% of total instructional time. Whole class instruction was the grouping strategy of choice among teachers (65% of total observed time); in sharp contrast, teachers spent 11% of observed time engaged in small group instruction, despite research findings supporting the effectiveness of sound grouping instruction. In addition, as little as 1% of teachers' total instructional time was spent in oral language/discussion, and 6% of total instructional time was spent in vocabulary instruction. The results also demonstrated little variation in teacher language use. Thus, evidence of "codeswitching" was not significant. Student engagement was high- 91% of total time students were observed; and was highest during writing and word work/spelling instruction. More longitudinal research is warranted that further explores precisely documented teacher reading instructional practices in relation to student outcomes with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Implications for practice include teacher training and professional development on managing small group instruction, and incorporating additional oral language/discussion, vocabulary and meaningful tasks into daily classroom activities.

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22

Lin, Fangyi. "Faculty perceptions and experiences with Taiwanese graduate students at a university in the United States implication for cross cultural teaching and learning /." [Kent, Ohio] : Kent State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=kent1225416318.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2008.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 22, 2010). Advisor: Kenneth Cushner. Keywords: language; communication; cross cultural; teaching and learning; international students. Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-216).

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23

Pergolini, Diego. "Differentiable Neural Computing: Studio e Sperimentazione nella Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification." Bachelor's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2017. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/14266/.

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La straordinaria diffusione di piattaforme online attraverso le quali le persone possono esprimere opinioni,come blog, social network,forum, e la conseguente enormità di testo non strutturato generato, ha fatto emergere sempre più interesse verso la Sentiment Classification. Essa, proponendosi di carpire la connotazione, positiva o negativa, di un testo, può assumere un'evidente rilevanza commerciale. Il problema delle soluzioni che sono state proposte in questo ambito è che molto spesso si tratta di tecniche che agiscono con efficacia solo in-domain , cioè addestrando e testando un modello di classificazione sullo stesso dominio. I casi reali,però, sono costituiti da scenari cross-domain, proprio perché spesso non sono disponibili dati categorizzati per eseguire un addestramento sul dominio target. Questo lavoro si propone di utilizzare un approccio moderno come quello rappresentato dalle DNC, un nuovo tipo di reti neurali dotate di una memoria esterna, unito ad una codifica semantica del testo come i word embeddings, allo scopo di svolgere al meglio classificazioni cross-domain, sia a 2 che a 5 classi. I risultati ottenuti dimostrano la bontà di questo approccio, visto il raggiungimento di ottime accuratezze nell'ambito cross-domain e il superamento di alcuni dei risultati ottenuti in letteratura rappresentanti lo stato dell'arte. Le DNC hanno mostrato di essere in grado capaci di generalizzare, dimostrandosi un modello di classificazione efficace anche se testato su domini diversi da quello di addestramento e facendo segnare un ottimo grado di accuratezza sia applicando tecniche di transfer learning esplicite che non.

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Nam, Jue Yeun. "Achieving English competence in Korea through computer-assisted language learning and crosscultural understanding." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2001. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1865.

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The purpose of this project is to address the problems and improve English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning for the students of Korea by contrasting cultural similarities and differences and the same time utilizing computer-based instruction learning.

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Feldman, Anna. "Portable language technology a resource-light approach to morpho-syntactic tagging /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1153344391.

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26

Ou, Chun-Ming. "The Dynamics Among Non-English Speaking Online Learners' Language Proficiency, Coping Mechanisms,and Cultural Intelligence: Implications for Effective Practice for Online Cross-cultural Collaboration." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1338383346.

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27

Mozafari, Marzieh. "Hate speech and offensive language detection using transfer learning approaches." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Institut polytechnique de Paris, 2021. http://www.theses.fr/2021IPPAS007.

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Une des promesses des plateformes de réseaux sociaux (comme Twitter et Facebook) est de fournir un endroit sûr pour que les utilisateurs puissent partager leurs opinions et des informations. Cependant, l’augmentation des comportements abusifs, comme le harcèlement en ligne ou la présence de discours de haine, est bien réelle. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur le discours de haine, l'un des phénomènes les plus préoccupants concernant les réseaux sociaux.Compte tenu de sa forte progression et de ses graves effets négatifs, les institutions, les plateformes de réseaux sociaux et les chercheurs ont tenté de réagir le plus rapidement possible. Les progrès récents des algorithmes de traitement automatique du langage naturel (NLP) et d'apprentissage automatique (ML) peuvent être adaptés pour développer des méthodes automatiques de détection des discours de haine dans ce domaine.Le but de cette thèse est d'étudier le problème du discours de haine et de la détection des propos injurieux dans les réseaux sociaux. Nous proposons différentes approches dans lesquelles nous adaptons des modèles avancés d'apprentissage par transfert (TL) et des techniques de NLP pour détecter automatiquement les discours de haine et les contenus injurieux, de manière monolingue et multilingue.La première contribution concerne uniquement la langue anglaise. Tout d'abord, nous analysons le contenu textuel généré par les utilisateurs en introduisant un nouveau cadre capable de catégoriser le contenu en termes de similarité basée sur différentes caractéristiques. En outre, en utilisant l'API Perspective de Google, nous mesurons et analysons la « toxicité » du contenu. Ensuite, nous proposons une approche TL pour l'identification des discours de haine en utilisant une combinaison du modèle non supervisé pré-entraîné BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) et de nouvelles stratégies supervisées de réglage fin. Enfin, nous étudions l'effet du biais involontaire dans notre modèle pré-entraîné BERT et proposons un nouveau mécanisme de généralisation dans les données d'entraînement en repondérant les échantillons puis en changeant les stratégies de réglage fin en termes de fonction de perte pour atténuer le biais racial propagé par le modèle. Pour évaluer les modèles proposés, nous utilisons deux datasets publics provenant de Twitter.Dans la deuxième contribution, nous considérons un cadre multilingue où nous nous concentrons sur les langues à faibles ressources dans lesquelles il n'y a pas ou peu de données annotées disponibles. Tout d'abord, nous présentons le premier corpus de langage injurieux en persan, composé de 6 000 messages de micro-blogs provenant de Twitter, afin d'étudier la détection du langage injurieux. Après avoir annoté le corpus, nous réalisons étudions les performances des modèles de langages pré-entraînés monolingues et multilingues basés sur des transformeurs (par exemple, ParsBERT, mBERT, XLM-R) dans la tâche en aval. De plus, nous proposons un modèle d'ensemble pour améliorer la performance de notre modèle. Enfin, nous étendons notre étude à un problème d'apprentissage multilingue de type " few-shot ", où nous disposons de quelques données annotées dans la langue cible, et nous adaptons une approche basée sur le méta-apprentissage pour traiter l'identification des discours de haine et du langage injurieux dans les langues à faibles ressources
The great promise of social media platforms (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) is to provide a safe place for users to communicate their opinions and share information. However, concerns are growing that they enable abusive behaviors, e.g., threatening or harassing other users, cyberbullying, hate speech, racial and sexual discrimination, as well. In this thesis, we focus on hate speech as one of the most concerning phenomenon in online social media.Given the high progression of online hate speech and its severe negative effects, institutions, social media platforms, and researchers have been trying to react as quickly as possible. The recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms can be adapted to develop automatic methods for hate speech detection in this area.The aim of this thesis is to investigate the problem of hate speech and offensive language detection in social media, where we define hate speech as any communication criticizing a person or a group based on some characteristics, e.g., gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, race. We propose different approaches in which we adapt advanced Transfer Learning (TL) models and NLP techniques to detect hate speech and offensive content automatically, in a monolingual and multilingual fashion.In the first contribution, we only focus on English language. Firstly, we analyze user-generated textual content to gain a brief insight into the type of content by introducing a new framework being able to categorize contents in terms of topical similarity based on different features. Furthermore, using the Perspective API from Google, we measure and analyze the toxicity of the content. Secondly, we propose a TL approach for identification of hate speech by employing a combination of the unsupervised pre-trained model BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and new supervised fine-tuning strategies. Finally, we investigate the effect of unintended bias in our pre-trained BERT based model and propose a new generalization mechanism in training data by reweighting samples and then changing the fine-tuning strategies in terms of the loss function to mitigate the racial bias propagated through the model. To evaluate the proposed models, we use two publicly available datasets from Twitter.In the second contribution, we consider a multilingual setting where we focus on low-resource languages in which there is no or few labeled data available. First, we present the first corpus of Persian offensive language consisting of 6k micro blog posts from Twitter to deal with offensive language detection in Persian as a low-resource language in this domain. After annotating the corpus, we perform extensive experiments to investigate the performance of transformer-based monolingual and multilingual pre-trained language models (e.g., ParsBERT, mBERT, XLM-R) in the downstream task. Furthermore, we propose an ensemble model to boost the performance of our model. Then, we expand our study into a cross-lingual few-shot learning problem, where we have a few labeled data in target language, and adapt a meta-learning based approach to address identification of hate speech and offensive language in low-resource languages

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28

Henderson, Petra. ""Shaking Shakespeare": A case study of a cross-curricular project in year 9 which integrated content and English." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Lärarutbildningen (LUT), 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-28455.

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An increasing number of schools across Europe offer education which integrates the teaching of content with that of language, sometimes known as CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), or the Swedish equivalent SPRINT (språk- och innehållsintegrerad inlärning och undervisning). In Sweden this type of learning often goes under the name of cross-curricular or interdisciplinary work. This dissertation is a case study of one such project that integrated content and English and that took place in year 9 at a secondary school in southern Sweden. The purpose of the investigation was to find out what the teachers' and pupils' perceptions were of the use and role of English in this particular cross-curricular project. Applying case study methodology, data was collected using triangulation through observations, a focus group interview with the teachers and a pupil questionnaire. The results show that all the involved teachers and a majority of the pupils were positive towards the integration of content and language, but not on a permanent basis. The teachers felt that the project gave the pupils the opportunity to work with the language and develop communication skills. The pupils said that they had learned more speaking skills compared to being taught English as a separate subject, closely followed by writing and reading skills. However, some felt that they had not learned any grammar, which showed a view of English as a skills subject. The study shows that project-based cross-curricular work could be a successful way to integrate content and language, provided projects are well-planned and clearly structured.

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29

Sagen, Markus. "Large-Context Question Answering with Cross-Lingual Transfer." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informationsteknologi, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-440704.

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Models based around the transformer architecture have become one of the most prominent for solving a multitude of natural language processing (NLP)tasks since its introduction in 2017. However, much research related to the transformer model has focused primarily on achieving high performance and many problems remain unsolved. Two of the most prominent currently are the lack of high performing non-English pre-trained models, and the limited number of words most trained models can incorporate for their context. Solving these problems would make NLP models more suitable for real-world applications, improving information retrieval, reading comprehension, and more. All previous research has focused on incorporating long-context for English language models. This thesis investigates the cross-lingual transferability between languages when only training for long-context in English. Training long-context models in English only could make long-context in low-resource languages, such as Swedish, more accessible since it is hard to find such data in most languages and costly to train for each language. This could become an efficient method for creating long-context models in other languages without the need for such data in all languages or pre-training from scratch. We extend the models’ context using the training scheme of the Longformer architecture and fine-tune on a question-answering task in several languages. Our evaluation could not satisfactorily confirm nor deny if transferring long-term context is possible for low-resource languages. We believe that using datasets that require long-context reasoning, such as a multilingual TriviaQAdataset, could demonstrate our hypothesis’s validity.

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30

Samuelfolk, Hugues. "Swedish L2 Learners’ acquisition of grammatical morphemes : A cross-sectional study on how well Swedish Learners of English as a second language at upper secondary school use morphemes in their writing." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-67959.

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The main aim of this paper has been to examine if Swedish students at upper secondary school were able to use the morphemes The progressive –ing, The irregular past and The irregular third person. In addition, it has also addressed if the students examined in this essay were able to use some morphemes better than others. In addition, it concluded if the results found in this paper were in accordance with what other researchers have concluded. The paper is based on essays written by students at upper secondary school that can be found in The Uppsala Learner English Corpus, as well as essays written for the national test by students studying English 6. In the course of the study, it was vital to explain what the natural order actually is as well as what researchers who believe in it claim and what researchers who do not believe in it claim. Consequently, it becomes important to clarify the differences between a cross-sectional study and a longitudinal study. When analysing the essays the program Antconc was used. It is a free corpus analysis program that allows researchers to study several texts at once. Next, to determine if the students had acquired the morphemes, all obligatory contexts where the morphemes should be used were analysed manually. What can be concluded from this paper is that the three morphemes have not been acquired by the students who were examined in this paper. Students could use some forms of the morphemes; however, even in those cases the correct usage in percentage of the morpheme were often not above 85%. These results were quite like the ones found in studies conducted on students at secondary school; this indicates that students at both secondary and upper secondary school do not actually acquire these morphemes fully. What they do acquire are different forms of a specific morpheme that they probably use quite a lot in their writing.
Syftet med denna uppsats har varit att undersöka om svenska elever som studerar på gymnasieskolan kunde aktivt använda de engelska morfemen The progressive –ing, The irregular past och The irregular third person. Dessutom har uppsatsen också behandlat om det fanns morfemen som eleverna kunde använda sig bättre av. Den har även jämfört sitt resultat med vad andra forskare har hittat. Uppsatsen är bygd på essäer skrivna av elever på gymnasieskolan som finns att hämta i The Uppsala Learner English Corpus. Dessutom använder den sig av essäer skrivna av elever för det nationella provet i engelska 6. Under studiens gång var det viktigt att förklara vad The natural order är liksom vad forskare säger gällande denna teori. Följaktligen blir det viktigt att klargöra skillnaden mellan en tvärsnittsstudie och en longitudinell studie. Vid analysen av essäerna användes programmet Antconc. Det är ett gratis korpusanalysprogram som tillåter forskare att studera flera texter samtidigt. För att klargöra om eleverna hade förvärvat morfemen var det därefter viktigt att studera alla obligatoriska sammanhang där morfemen måste användas, vilket gjordes manuellt. Det som framgår är att eleverna som granskades i studien inte har förvärvat de tre morfemen. Eleverna kunde använda sig av vissa former av varje morfem, men även i dessa fall var den korrekta användningen i procent oftast inte mer än 85%. Detta resultat var ganska likt de studier som har granskat elever i högstadiet, vilket tyder på att elever i både högstadiet och gymnasiet inte förvärvar dessa morfem fullt ut. I de flesta fall kunde eleverna enbart använda olika former av morfemen.

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Salii, Helena. "Teaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day : A Theoretical Essay Towards Cross-Curricular, DualCoded Historical Knowledge." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-40764.

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In a suggestion to build upon students’ historical knowledge through reading The Remains of the Day, this essay delves into cross-curricular teaching, dual-coded theory aspects and revision of suggested plans to improve learner’s understanding of historical novels, characters, events, and descriptions to grasp and reflect upon such historical knowledge. Several methods for enhancing students’ knowledge and to improve vocabulary knowledge are provided. The essay is theoretically based and presents different aspects of how students’ knowledge of English and history as separate subjects in school, could be combined to address the learning abilities of all students. Reading comprehension is mainly based upon students’ prior knowledge. Therefore, this essay delves into various parts of learners’ abilities to reflect upon the written word and its significance to reality. Furthermore, suggestions to how teachers can collaborate to achieve an improved understanding of the novel and its time period through history and vocabulary is presented.

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Brock, Melanie. "Re-conceptualizing Secondary Literacy: Impacts of 21st-Century Literacy Interventions on STEM High School Student Achievement." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1619628937875231.

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Barbir, Monica. "The way we learn." Thesis, Paris Sciences et Lettres (ComUE), 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019PSLEE019.

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Apprendre, c’est extraire et condenser de l’information pertinente à partir d’un certain nombre d’indices concordants. Pourtant, les indices auxquels un apprenant a, ou pourrait avoir, accès, peuvent sembler insuffisants pour ce à quoi il veut parvenir. Le caractère partiel ou insuffisant des indices disponibles est souvent évoqué dans le contexte de l’acquisition du langage : le sens des mots et la grammaire que les individus maîtrisent semblent nécessiter davantage d’information que celle présente dans leur environnement. Si une grande partie de la recherche se focalise sur l’identification de sources d’information négligées ou sous-estimées jusqu’alors, ici nous déplaçons le point de vue pour explorer plutôt les connaissances que ces sources d’information doivent permettre de construire. Nous proposons dans ce travail que les informations disponibles restent souvent insuffisantes pour atteindre le niveau de connaissance qu'un locuteur compétent pense avoir; toutefois, la même information peut être suffisante pour qu’un apprenant extraie l’information nécessaire au traitement cognitif du langage. Plus généralement, il pourrait y avoir un décalage entre ce que l’on pense apprendre et ce que l’on apprend véritablement. Dans l’introduction de ce travail, nous commençons par une présentation des études qui suggèrent l’existence d’un décalage entre notre intuition de ce qu’est le sens des mots, et la manière dont le sens des mots est effectivement traité par le cerveau. Nous explorons ce décalage dans le contexte plus général de la manière dont les individus, qui ne disposent que d’informations limitées, tentent de comprendre le monde. Ensuite, dans le premier chapitre, nous examinons comment une faible quantité d’information peut malgré tout favoriser l’acquisition de la grammaire, en utilisant un paradigme écologique. Nos résultats démontrent que la connaissance d’une petite poignée de mots peut générer un cercle vertueux dans l’acquisition de la grammaire et du vocabulaire chez le bébé. Puis, dans le deuxième chapitre, nous tâchons de découvrir si cet ensemble réduit d’informations peut suffire à amorcer l’acquisition d’un savoir productif qui permettra ensuite de généraliser cette connaissance à des situations nouvelles, à travers les âges : du bébé à l’adulte en passant par l’enfant d'âge scolaire. Nos données suggèrent que les bébés et les adultes généralisent les caractéristiques d’un nouvel élément grammatical afin de comprendre de nouveaux mots, mais que les enfants d’âge scolaire ne généralisent pas. Nous expliquons nos résultats dans le contexte de la recherche existante sur la généralisation, en soulignant la possibilité que ce qui est considéré comme savoir est peut-être défini par rapport à un seuil, plutôt que par rapport à une définition idéale objective. Finalement, dans le troisième chapitre, nous étudions si l’information qui donne l’impression de refléter directement l’état des connaissances de quelqu’un d’autre (i.e., entendre une traduction directe : ‘Bamoule’, ça veut dire ‘chat’) est véritablement plus utile, ou seulement plus attractive. Nos résultats suggèrent que ce type d’information ‘clé-en-main’ augmente systématiquement la confiance de l’apprenant, mais a des effets variables sur la performance objective. A travers trois chapitres et dix expériences, nous proposons une série de principes qui définissent la connaissance : (1) une petite quantité d’information peut mener loin, (2) combien d’information suffit semble dépendre d'un seuil adaptable, et (3) le cerveau paraît être avide de certitude. Nous suggérerons que l’ensemble des informations à la disposition d’un individu peut être suffisant pour générer des connaissances, mais pas forcément le type de connaissances que l’on a l’intuition d’avoir. Ainsi, pour mieux comprendre comment on apprend, nous devons étudier ce que signifie vraiment ‘savoir’ pour l'apprenant
To learn is to extract and distill pertinent information from a set of evidence. Yet, the evidence a learner has, or could have, at hand may seem insufficient for what she is aiming to acquire. The insufficiency of the evidence is often evoked in respect to language acquisition: the word meanings and grammar that individuals know appear to require more evidence than that to which they have access in their environments. While the brunt of research has focused on identifying overlooked sources of evidence and widening the evidence set, here we switch gears and probe what exactly it is that the evidence set needs to support. We propose that the evidence a learner has may be insufficient to provide her with the knowledge competent language users think they have; however, the very same evidence may be sufficient to provide a learner with the information needed for cognitive processing of language. Very broadly, there may be a gap between what we think we acquire and what we really acquire. In the introductory section of this dissertation, we begin by presenting evidence of a gap between what we feel words mean and how meanings are processed in the mind. We frame this gap in the broader context of how minds, with finite access to evidence, make sense the external world. Then, in the first chapter, we investigate how comparably little evidence can fuel acquisition of grammar in an ecologically valid setting. Our results reveal that just a handful of words can spur a virtuous cycle of grammar and vocabulary acquisition in infants. Next, in the second chapter, we examine whether the same set of evidence gives rise to productive knowledge or generalization (i.e., the capacity to use prior knowledge to interpret novel situations) across development, from infancy into childhood and through to adulthood. Our data show that infants and adults generalize a novel grammatical context to new words, but pre-school children do not. We interpret our results within the extant literature, pointing to the live possibility that what counts as knowledge may depend on where an individual places her ‘knowledge threshold’ rather than an immutable ideal. Finally, in the third chapter, we probe whether evidence that reflects a knowledge state (e.g., explicitly hearing a direct translation: ‘Bamoule’ means ‘cat’) is inherently more informative, or merely more appealing, for a learner. Our results demonstrate that pre-packaged knowledge-state evidence boosts confidence, but has variable effects on performance. Across three chapters and ten experiments, we build up a set of fundamental features about what it is ‘to know’: (1) a little evidence can go a long way, (2) how much evidence is considered to be enough may depend on a modifiable threshold, and (3) the mind may crave certainty. We advance the conclusion that the set of evidence available to an individual can be sufficient to foster knowledge. It may just not be sufficient to foster the kind of knowledge we think we have. Therefore, to better understand the way we learn, we need to investigate what is ‘to know’ from the point of view of the learner

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Tse, Siu-ching, and 謝兆政. "Cross linguistic influence in polyglots: encoding of the future by L3 learners of Swedish." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2012. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B4842187X.

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The current study aims to investigate the source(s)of cross linguistic influence(CLI)on the production of future encoding strategies by L1 Cantonese learners of L3 Swedish who speak L2 English. In the literature of third language acquisition (TLA) research, the language status of native and non-native languages as well as genetic and (psycho)typological language distance are identified to be important to TLA processes but the current knowledge is insufficient to inform which factor(s) is/are more influential. Given the close genetic distance between English and Swedish and the status of English as a second language, it is hypothesized that CLI on L3 Swedish comes from L2 English rather than L1 Cantonese. Any confirmation or rejection to this hypothesis serves to inform the relationship of language status and language distance to TLA. To test this hypothesis, linguistic background questionnaire and a picture elicitation task are designed to record the production of future ideas in the three languages. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, mixed sources of CLI from Cantonese and English are identified. An equidistance representation of non-native languages is also identified in which non-native English and Swedish respectively show similar degree of cross linguistic matching in relation to native Cantonese regardless which of them is the principal source of CLI. The hypothesis of differentiation of linguistic representation in the minds of polyglots is therefore proposed and further verification and investigation is required.
published_or_final_version
Linguistics
Master
Master of Arts

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Wei, Peipei. "Cross-Linguistic Perception and Learning of Mandarin Chinese Sounds by Japanese Adult Learners." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22279.

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This dissertation presents a cross-linguistic investigation of how nonnative sounds are perceived by second language (L2) learners in terms of their first language (L1) categories for an understudies language pair---Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Category mapping experiment empirically measured the perceived phonetic distances between Chinese sounds and their most resembling Japanese categories, which generated testable predictions on discriminability of Chinese sound contrasts according to Perception Assimilation Model (PAM). Category discrimination experiment obtained data concerning L2 learners' actual performance on discrimination Chinese sounds. The discrepancy between PAM's predictions and actual performances revealed that PAM cannot be applied to L2 perceptual learning. It was suggested that the discriminability of L2 sound contrasts was not only determined by perceived phonetic distances but probably involved other factors, such as the distinctiveness of certain phonetic features, e.g. aspiration and retroflexion. The training experiment assessed the improvement of L2 learners' performance in identifying Chinese sound contrasts with exposure to high variability stimuli and feedback. The results not only proved the effectiveness of training in shaping L2 learners' perception but showed that the training effects were generalizable to new tokens spoken by unfamiliar talkers. In addition to perception, the production of Chinese sounds by Japanese learners was also examined from the phonetic perspective in terms of perceived foreign accentedness. Regression of L2 learners' and native speakers foreign accentedness ratings against acoustic measurements of their speech production revealed that although both segmental and suprasegmental variables contributed to the perception of foreign accent, suprasegmental variables such as total and intonation patterns were the most influential factor in predicting perceived foreign accent. To conclude, PAM failed to accurately predict learning difficulties of nonnative sounds faced by L2 learners solely based on perceived phonetic distances. As Speech Learning Model (SLM) hypothesizes, production was found to be driven by perception, since equivalence classification of L2 sounds to L1 categories prevented the establishment of a new phonological category, thus further resulted in divergence in L2 production. Although production was hypothesized to eventually resemble perception, asynchrony between production and perception was observed due to different mechanisms involved.

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Ballinger, Susan Gail. "Towards a cross-linguistic pedagogy: biliteracy and reciprocal learning strategies in French immersion." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114147.

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This dissertation is based on a 7-week classroom intervention in two French immersion classes (Grades 3and 3/4) in two schools that enroll both English- and French-dominant students near Montreal, Quebec. The intervention aimed to bridge the students' first and second languages (L2) through a 'biliteracy' project that linked English and French language arts content and through the instruction of reciprocal language learning strategies designed to help students make language-learning connections with other students.For the biliteracy project, students' English and French teachers read to them from the English and French versions of three picture books. Following each reading, student pairs consisting of one English- and one French-dominant partner engaged in collaborative literacy tasks. In addition, students received eight strategy lessons with the goals of raising their awareness of their L2 production and enhancing its accuracy, while increasing their awareness of themselves and their peers as language-learning resources.Data collection consisted of student and teacher interviews as well as audiotaped interactions of 8 focal pairs (n = 16) as they worked on all collaborative tasks. The study's mixed-methods data analysis was as follows: Transcripts of the interaction data were first analyzed quantitatively in terms of students' (a) focus on language (operationalized as language-related episodes) and (b) use of reciprocal strategies (operationalized as 'asking questions' and 'giving corrective feedback'). The quantitative analysis offered an overall portrait of students' interaction and allowed for a comparison of pair behaviors as well as of individual partners' behaviors. The patterns that emerged in the quantitative data helped guide the subsequent qualitative analysis of the data. The analyses revealed that all recorded pairs engaged in reciprocal strategy use and extensive on-task collaboration. Language dominance and task type both influenced students' interactional behavior to some degree, but the effectiveness of their task and language problem solving was tempered by the extent to which they engaged in additional interactional moves that sought and supported contributions from their partners. Thus, future instruction that teaches students how to collaborate constructively is highlighted as a key element in promoting the success of similar cross-linguistic approaches.
Cette dissertation s'appuie sur une intervention d'une durée de 7 semaines dans deux cours d'immersion en français (classes de 3e et 3e/ 4e années) au sein de deux écoles, situées près de Montréal, fréquentées par des élèves ayant comme langue dominante soit le français, soit l'anglais. L'intervention visait à créer une passerelle entre la langue maternelle et la langue seconde (L2) des élèves par le truchement d'un projet de « bilitéracie » liant la matière des cours de langue française et anglaise et de la mise en œuvre de stratégies d'apprentissage réciproque des langues conçues pour aider les élèves à établir des liens d'apprentissage linguistique avec d'autres élèves. Dans le cadre du projet de bilitéracie, les enseignants des cours de français et d'anglais lisaient aux élèves des extraits tirés des versions anglaise et française de trois livres d'images. Après chaque lecture, des paires d'élèves, composées d'un élève dont la langue dominante était l'anglais et un autre dont c'était le français, étaient appelées à réaliser des tâches de litéracie coopératives. De plus, les élèves suivaient huit cours de stratégie visant une meilleure sensibilisation à leur production en L2 et une plus grande exactitude linguistique, tout en rehaussant leur prise de conscience de leur rôle et de celui de leurs pairs en tant que ressources dans l'apprentissage des langues.La collecte de données s'est effectuée à partir d'entrevues d'enseignant et d'élèves et d'interactions filmées de 8 paires témoins (n = 16) alors qu'elles s'adonnaient à de tâches coopératives. Les transcriptions des données sur l'interaction ont d'abord fait l'objet d'une analyse quantitative en termes de (a) l'attention portée à la langue (opérationnalisées en tant qu'épisodes liés à la langue et de (b) l'utilisation des stratégies (opérationnalisées sous les rubriques « poser des questions » et « fournir de la rétroaction corrective ») par les élèves. Les schèmes mis au jour par l'analyse quantitatives ont contribué à orienter l'analyse qualitative subséquente. Les analyses ont révélé que toutes les paires d'élèves filmées ont eu recours à des stratégies de réciprocité et ont manifesté une collaboration poussée dans la réalisation des tâches. La dominance linguistique et le type de tâche ont tous deux influé, dans une certaine mesure, sur le comportement interactionnel des élèves, mais leur efficacité sur les plans de la réalisation des tâches et de la résolution des problèmes linguistiques était d'autant plus grande qu'ils recouraient à des initiatives interactionnelles additionnelles sollicitant et soutenant les contributions de leurs pairs. Par conséquent, une pédagogie qui montrera aux élèves comment collaborer de manière constructive s'avérera un élément clé pour contribuer au succès d'approches interlinguales similaires.

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Shammas, Nafez Antonius. "Cross-cultural pragmatic failure : misunderstanding in verbal communication between speakers of Arabic & English." Thesis, Loughborough University, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.338756.

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Shport, Irina A. 1975. "Cross-Linguistic Perception and Learning of Japanese Lexical Prosody by English Listeners." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12087.

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xviii, 216 p. : ill. (some col.)
The focus of this dissertation is on how language experience shapes perception of a non-native prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) peak and fall are acoustic cues to lexically contrastive pitch patterns, in which a word may be accented on a particular syllable or unaccented (e.g., tsúru 'a crane', tsurú 'a vine', tsuru 'to fish'). In English, lexical stress is obligatory, and it may be reinforced by F0 in higher-level prosodic groupings. Here I investigate whether English listeners can attend to F0 peaks as well as falls in contrastive pitch patterns and whether training can facilitate the learning of prosodic categories. In a series of categorization and discrimination experiments, where F0 peak and fall were manipulated in one-word utterances, the judgments of prominence by naïve English listeners and native Japanese listeners were compared. The results indicated that while English listeners had phonetic sensitivity to F0 fall in a same-different discrimination task, they could not consistently use the F0 fall to categorize F0 patterns. The effects of F0 peak location and F0 fall on prominence judgments were always larger for Japanese listeners than for English listeners. Furthermore, the interaction between these acoustic cues affected perception of the contrast by Japanese, but not English, listeners. This result suggests that native, but not non-native, listeners have complex and integrated processing of these cues. The training experiment assessed improvement in categorization of Japanese pitch patterns with exposure and feedback. The results suggested that training improved identification of the accented patterns, which also generalized to new words and new contexts. Identification of the unaccented pattern, on the other hand, showed no improvement. Error analysis indicated that native English listeners did not learn to attend specifically to the lack of the F0 fall. To conclude, language experience influences perception of prosodic categories. Although there is some sensitivity to F0 fall in non-native listeners, they rely mostly on F0 peak location in language-like tasks such as categorization of pitch patterns. Learning of new prosodic categories is possible. However, not all categories are learned equally well, which suggests that first language attentional biases affect second language acquisition in the prosodic domain.
Committee in charge: Susan Guion Anderson, Chairperson; Melissa A. Redford, Member; Vsevolod Kapatsinki, Member; Kaori Idemaru, Outside Member

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Awad, Ghada M. "MOTIVATION, PERSISTENCE, AND CROSS-CULTURAL AWARENESS: A STUDY OF COLLEGE STUDENTS LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1542036826465842.

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Nyberg, Selma. "Video Recommendation Based on Object Detection." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Avdelningen för systemteknik, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-351122.

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In this thesis, various machine learning domains have been combined in order to build a video recommender system that is based on object detection. The work combines two extensively studied research fields, recommender systems and computer vision, that also are rapidly growing and popular techniques on commercial markets. To investigate the performance of the approach, three different content-based recommender systems have been implemented at Spotify, which are based on the following video features: object detections, titles and descriptions, and user preferences. These systems have then been evaluated and compared against each other together with their hybridized result. Two algorithms have been implemented, the prediction and the top-N algorithm, where the former is the more reliable source for evaluating the system's performance. The evaluation of the system shows that the overall performance scores for predicting values of the users' liked and disliked videos are in the range from about 40 % to 70 % for the prediction algorithm and from about 15 % to 70 % for the top-N algorithm. The approach based on object detection performs worse in comparison to the other approaches. Hence, there seems to be is a low correlation between the user preferences and the video contents in terms of object detection data. Therefore, this data is not very suitable for describing the content of videos and using it in the recommender system. However, the results of this study cannot be generalized to apply for other systems before the approach has been evaluated in other environments and for various data sets. Moreover, there are plenty of room for refinements and improvements to the system, as well as there are many interesting research areas for future work.

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Gieser, Julianna Hawkins. "Academic stress and the transition from a national school to an English-speaking school." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), access this title online Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN) Access this title online, 2005. http://www.tren.com.

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Zhang, Zheng. "Explorations in Word Embeddings : graph-based word embedding learning and cross-lingual contextual word embedding learning." Thesis, Université Paris-Saclay (ComUE), 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019SACLS369/document.

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Les plongements lexicaux sont un composant standard des architectures modernes de traitement automatique des langues (TAL). Chaque fois qu'une avancée est obtenue dans l'apprentissage de plongements lexicaux, la grande majorité des tâches de traitement automatique des langues, telles que l'étiquetage morphosyntaxique, la reconnaissance d'entités nommées, la recherche de réponses à des questions, ou l'inférence textuelle, peuvent en bénéficier. Ce travail explore la question de l'amélioration de la qualité de plongements lexicaux monolingues appris par des modèles prédictifs et celle de la mise en correspondance entre langues de plongements lexicaux contextuels créés par des modèles préentraînés de représentation de la langue comme ELMo ou BERT.Pour l'apprentissage de plongements lexicaux monolingues, je prends en compte des informations globales au corpus et génère une distribution de bruit différente pour l'échantillonnage d'exemples négatifs dans word2vec. Dans ce but, je précalcule des statistiques de cooccurrence entre mots avec corpus2graph, un paquet Python en source ouverte orienté vers les applications en TAL : il génère efficacement un graphe de cooccurrence à partir d'un grand corpus, et lui applique des algorithmes de graphes tels que les marches aléatoires. Pour la mise en correspondance translingue de plongements lexicaux, je relie les plongements lexicaux contextuels à des plongements de sens de mots. L'algorithme amélioré de création d'ancres que je propose étend également la portée des algorithmes de mise en correspondance de plongements lexicaux du cas non-contextuel au cas des plongements contextuels
Word embeddings are a standard component of modern natural language processing architectures. Every time there is a breakthrough in word embedding learning, the vast majority of natural language processing tasks, such as POS-tagging, named entity recognition (NER), question answering, natural language inference, can benefit from it. This work addresses the question of how to improve the quality of monolingual word embeddings learned by prediction-based models and how to map contextual word embeddings generated by pretrained language representation models like ELMo or BERT across different languages.For monolingual word embedding learning, I take into account global, corpus-level information and generate a different noise distribution for negative sampling in word2vec. In this purpose I pre-compute word co-occurrence statistics with corpus2graph, an open-source NLP-application-oriented Python package that I developed: it efficiently generates a word co-occurrence network from a large corpus, and applies to it network algorithms such as random walks. For cross-lingual contextual word embedding mapping, I link contextual word embeddings to word sense embeddings. The improved anchor generation algorithm that I propose also expands the scope of word embedding mapping algorithms from context independent to contextual word embeddings

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Chan, Carol Suk Oi. "A cross-sectional study of syntactic errors in English composition by ESL students in Hong Kong : aspects of negative transfer." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2002. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/501.

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Lu, Yan. "Etude contrastive de la prosodie audio-visuelle des affects sociaux en chinois mandarin vs.français : vers une application pour l'apprentissage de la langue étrangère ou seconde." Thesis, Université Grenoble Alpes (ComUE), 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015GREAL001/document.

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Se distinguant des expressions émotionnelles qui sont innées et déclenchées par un contrôle involontaire du locuteur au sein d'une communication face-à-face, les affects sociaux émergent plutôt de manière volontaire et intentionnelle, et sont largement véhiculés par la prosodie audio-visuelle. Ils mettent en circulation, entre les interactants, des informations sur la dynamique du dialogue, la situation d'énonciation et leur relation sociale. Ces spécificités culturelles et linguistiques de la prosodie socio-affective dans la communication orale constituent une difficulté, même un risque de malentendu, pour les apprenants en langue étrangère (LE) et en langue seconde (L2). La présente thèse se consacre à des études intra- et interculturelles sur la perception de la prosodie de 19 affects sociaux en chinois mandarin et en français, ainsi que sur leurs représentations cognitives. Son but applicatif vise l'apprentissage de la prosodie des affects sociaux en chinois mandarin et en français LE ou L2. Le premier travail de la thèse consiste en la construction d'un large corpus audio-visuel des affects sociaux chinois. 152 énoncés variés dans leur longueur, leur morpho-syntaxe et leur représentation tonale sont respectivement produits dans les 19 affects sociaux. Sur la base de ce corpus, sont examinées l'identification et les confusions perceptives de ces affects sociaux chinois par des natifs, des français et des vietnamiens (comme groupe de référence), ainsi que l'effet du ton lexical sur l'identification auditive des sujets non natifs. Les résultats montrent que la majorité des affects sociaux chinois est perçue de manière similaire par les sujets natifs et les sujets non natifs, cependant certains décalages perceptifs sont également observés. Les tons chinois engendrent des problèmes perceptifs des affects sociaux autant pour les vietnamiens (d'une langue tonale) que pour les français (d'une langue non tonale). En parallèle, une analyse acoustique permet de mettre en évidence les caractéristiques principales de la prosodie socio-affective en chinois et d'étayer les résultats perceptifs. Ensuite, une étude sur les distances conceptuelles d'une part, et psycho-acoustiques d'autre part, entre les affects sociaux est menée auprès de sujets chinois et de sujets français. Les résultats montrent que la plupart des connaissances sur les affects sociaux sont partagées par les sujets, quels que soient leur langue maternelle, leur genre ou la manière de présenter les affects sociaux (concepts ou entrées acoustiques). Enfin, le dernier chapitre de la thèse est consacré à une étude contrastive sur la perception multimodale des affects sociaux en chinois et en français LE ou L2. Il est constaté que la reconnaissance des affects sociaux est étroitement liée aux expressions elles-mêmes et à la modalité de présentation de ces expressions. Le degré d'acquisition de la langue cible du sujet (débutant ou intermédiaire) n'a pas d'impact significatif à la reconnaissance, dans le cadre restreint des niveaux étudiés
In human face-to-face interaction, social affects should be distinguished from emotional expressions, triggered by innate and involuntary controls of the speaker, by their nature of voluntary controls expressed within the audiovisual prosody and by their important role in the realization of speech acts. They also put into circulation between the interlocutors the social context and social relationship information. The prosody is a main vector of social affects and its cross-language variability is a challenge for language description as well as for foreign language teaching. Thus, cultural and linguistic specificities of the socio-affective prosody in oral communication could be a difficulty, even a risk of misunderstanding, for foreign language and second language learners. This thesis is dedicated to intra- and intercultural studies on perception of the prosody of 19 social affects in Mandarin Chinese and in French, on their cognitive representations, as well as on Chinese and French socio-affective prosody learning for foreign and second language learners. The first task of this thesis concerns the construction of a large audio-visual corpus of Chinese social affects. 152 sentences with the variation of length, tone location and syntactic structures of utterances, have been incorporated with 19 social affects. This corpus is served to examine the identification and perceptual confusion of these Chinese social affects by native and non-native listeners, as well as the tonal effect on non-native subjects' identification. Experimental results reveal that the majority of social affects are similarly perceived by native and non-native subjects, otherwise, some differences are also observed. Lexical tones lead to certain perceptual problems also for Vietnamese listeners (of a tonal language) and for French listeners (of a non-tonal language). In parallel, an acoustic analysis investigates the production side of prosodic socio-affects in Mandarin Chinese, and allows highlighting the more prominent patterns of acoustical variations as well as supporting the perceptual resultants obtained on the same expressions. Then, a study on conceptual and psycho-acoustic distances between social affects is carried out with Chinese and French subjects. The main results indicate that all subjects share to a very large extent the knowledge about these 19 social affects, regardless of their mother language, gender or how to present social affects (concept or acoustic realization). Finally, the last chapter of thesis is dedicated to the differences in the perception of 11 Chinese social affects expressed in different modalities (audio only, video only and audio-visual) for French learners and native subjects, as well as in the perception of the same French socio-affects for Chinese learners and native subjects. According to the results, the identification of affective expressions depends more on their affective values and on their presentation modality. Subject's learning level (beginner or intermediate) does not have a significant effect on their identification

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Boonkwan, Prachya. "Scalable semi-supervised grammar induction using cross-linguistically parameterized syntactic prototypes." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/9808.

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This thesis is about the task of unsupervised parser induction: automatically learning grammars and parsing models from raw text. We endeavor to induce such parsers by observing sequences of terminal symbols. We focus on overcoming the problem of frequent collocation that is a major source of error in grammar induction. For example, since a verb and a determiner tend to co-occur in a verb phrase, the probability of attaching the determiner to the verb is sometimes higher than that of attaching the core noun to the verb, resulting in erroneous attachment *((Verb Det) Noun) instead of (Verb (Det Noun)). Although frequent collocation is the heart of grammar induction, it is precariously capable of distorting the grammar distribution. Natural language grammars follow a Zipfian (power law) distribution, where the frequency of any grammar rule is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. We believe that covering the most frequent grammar rules in grammar induction will have a strong impact on accuracy. We propose an efficient approach to grammar induction guided by cross-linguistic language parameters. Our language parameters consist of 33 parameters of frequent basic word orders, which are easy to be elicited from grammar compendiums or short interviews with naïve language informants. These parameters are designed to capture frequent word orders in the Zipfian distribution of natural language grammars, while the rest of the grammar including exceptions can be automatically induced from unlabeled data. The language parameters shrink the search space of the grammar induction problem by exploiting both word order information and predefined attachment directions. The contribution of this thesis is three-fold. (1) We show that the language parameters are adequately generalizable cross-linguistically, as our grammar induction experiments will be carried out on 14 languages on top of a simple unsupervised grammar induction system. (2) Our specification of language parameters improves the accuracy of unsupervised parsing even when the parser is exposed to much less frequent linguistic phenomena in longer sentences when the accuracy decreases within 10%. (3) We investigate the prevalent factors of errors in grammar induction which will provide room for accuracy improvement. The proposed language parameters efficiently cope with the most frequent grammar rules in natural languages. With only 10 man-hours for preparing syntactic prototypes, it improves the accuracy of directed dependency recovery over the state-ofthe- art Gillenwater et al.’s (2010) completely unsupervised parser in: (1) Chinese by 30.32% (2) Swedish by 28.96% (3) Portuguese by 37.64% (4) Dutch by 15.17% (5) German by 14.21% (6) Spanish by 13.53% (7) Japanese by 13.13% (8) English by 12.41% (9) Czech by 9.16% (10) Slovene by 7.24% (11) Turkish by 6.72% and (12) Bulgarian by 5.96%. It is noted that although the directed dependency accuracies of some languages are below 60%, their TEDEVAL scores are still satisfactory (approximately 80%). This suggests us that our parsed trees are, in fact, closely related to the gold-standard trees despite the discrepancy of annotation schemes. We perform an error analysis of over- and under-generation analysis. We found three prevalent problems that cause errors in the experiments: (1) PP attachment (2) discrepancies of dependency annotation schemes and (3) rich morphology. The methods presented in this thesis were originally presented in Boonkwan and Steedman (2011). The thesis presents a great deal more detail in the design of crosslinguistic language parameters, the algorithm of lexicon inventory construction, experiment results, and error analysis.

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Harumi, Seiko. "The use of silence by Japanese learners of English in cross-cultural communication and its pedagogical implications." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1999. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10006613/.

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This thesis examinest he use of silence by Japanese learners of English in cross-cultural communication. It also considers how cross-cultural misunderstandings can be avoided in a pedagogic context. To this end, an analysis is made of a contrastive study of the use of silence by Japanese students learning English, and by Western students learning Japanese. The study draws on insights from the ethnographic approach. The study consists of three parts. The first part, Chapters 1-4, investigates the theoretical background to the study. Chapter 1 examines various definitions of the word 'culture' and investigates the role of Pragmatics in cross-cultural communication. Chapter 2 surveys studies of silence in various socio-cultural contexts. Chapter 3 more specifically explores the use of silence in the Japanese context and its relation to Japanese cultural values and sociocultural norms. Then, Chapter 4 shifts attention to examine differences of communicative styles between Japanese and Westerners, and several important features in interaction. In part two, Chapters 5-8, the ethnographic approach takes the lead in the interpretation of the interview and observational material. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the study and carefully considers the principles of ethnography guiding this investigation. Chapter 6 considers the research design in relation to the context and purposes of the investigation. The data is analysed in Chapters 7 and 8 interpreting the use of silence from a socio-cultural perspective. Chapter 7 discusses the results of the questionnaires. Chapter 8 concentrates on the analysis of the video-recorded data. The last Chapter, Chapter 9, concludes with suggestions of possible pedagogic approaches tackling cross-cultural misunderstanding in foreign language learning.

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Tilley-Lubbs, Gresilda A. "Crossing the Border Through Service-Learning: The Power of Cross-Cultural Relationships." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2003. http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07272003-010818.

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Carbutt, Ren S. "The Experiences of Hispanic International Students as Interviewees in a Cross-Cultural Interview Project." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3403.

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In the field of world language education, it has long been affirmed that language and culture are inseparable. It has also often been asked how teaching language and culture in an inseparable way is to be accomplished. One solution that has been proposed is ethnographic interviews. Other studies have demonstrated that interviewing native cultural informants is beneficial for language students. This study examined whether such interviews are also beneficial to the native informants. The participants in this project, sixteen native speakers of Spanish, were each interviewed three times by a pair of Spanish students who employed ethnographic techniques as a part of the interview process. The native speakers answered two brief questionnaires, one before and one after the interviews, and many of them participated in one-on-one interviews with me, the primary researcher, to follow-up on their answers to those questionnaires and their experiences with the interviews. I found that the participants perceived the project as beneficial in multiple areas including, but not limited to, the chance it gave them to talk about their culture, the interest they perceived in their culture and their viewpoints, and the opportunity it gave them to confirm, modify, or strengthen conclusions they had made from previous cultural experience. A small percentage of the native speakers either did not understand or appreciate the ethnographic techniques that were employed. However, after initial interviews, I gave the students of Spanish feedback on how to better make use of those techniques in order to improve the students' and native speakers' experiences with the interviews and a large majority of the native speakers observed how the subsequent interviews improved. Therefore, similar projects might benefit from making use of this information. Specifically, it might be useful to explain ethnographic techniques not just to interviewers, but also to interviewees, so that both groups might better understand and appreciate the purpose of those techniques. It might also be useful to give feedback to those who use ethnographic techniques to interview native culture informants.

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Vraciu, Eleonora Alexandra. "Tense-Aspect Morphology in the Advanced English L2 Variety: Exploring Semantic, Discourse and Cross-linguistic Factors." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/96894.

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La tesi pertany a una línia d’estudis recentment iniciada amb l’objectiu de descriure la varietat de l’anglès avançat. Proposem una anàlisi integral d’una sèrie de factors semàntics, discursius i interlingüístics que conformen l’ús de la morfologia verbal que empren aprenents avançats catalans i francesos d’anglès idioma estranger; específicament dues poblacions d’especialistes de l’anglès (estudiants de Filologia Anglesa i professors d’anglès a la universitat). A partir d’un corpus de narracions orals d’un llibre en imatges, explorem la distribució de la morfologia temporo-aspectual en relació amb les característiques semàntiques dels predicats (la hipòtesi de l’aspecte) i els moviments narratius que els predicats expressen en la narració (la hipòtesi del discurs). Les formes verbales són analitzades també des de la perspectiva de l’anomenat estíl retòric d’aprenent, és a dir la tria sistemàtica de recursos lingüístics que els aprenents fan en tasques comunicatives complexes en base a un repertori après de formes però també à una determinada manera de seleccionar i organitzar la informació pròpia del seu idioma matern. El fet que els aprenents disposin d’aspecte gramatical en català i en francès no garanteix, d’entrada, el mateix ús d’aquesta morfologia verbal en anglès. Les diferències resideixen tant en la utilització del progressiu amb els predicats de tipus duratiu atèlic, com en el ventall de funcions que les formes verbals en general tenen en el discurs dels aprenents. La coalició prototípica dels predicats duratius atèlics amb el progressiu continua sent forta, particularment en les produccions dels estudiants francòfons, i dona peu a un ús generalitzat d’aquesta forma, molt sovint en tensió amb la funció de fer avançar la narració que té el predicat. El grau de gramaticalització de l’aspecte progressiu en el idioma matern dels aprenents sembla interferir amb les hipòtesis d’ús del progressiu en anglès idioma estranger. Els grups de professors són els que més s’alliberen de les congruències semàntiques amb els predicats en el seu ús de les formes verbals, de manera semblant als locutors nadius. Amb aquests aprenents, el progressiu té una funció discursiva específica i esdevé opcional quan la informació temporal pròpia de la forma verbal es pot recuperar d’altres elements en context. L’estudi estableix que el ventall de funcions que les formes verbals tenen en anglès avançat és més limitat i que no sempre es correspon a les funcions emprades pels locutors nadius. Un exemple és la forma no progressiva de present i de passat, que s’utilitza sobretot per expressar relacions de moviment endavant de la narració en les produccions dels estudiants, mentres que els professors i els anglesos utilitzen la forma no progressiva com a forma per defecte i en contextos narratius més variats. L’anàlisi interlingüístic de dos episodis estructurats per la relació de simultaneïtat revela que hi ha una influència subtil de l’idioma matern en la manera de construir una perspectiva temporal en l’expressió de la simultaneïtat en anglès idioma estranger. Aquesta influència es manifesta fins i tot amb els aprenents més avançats (els professors). Totes aquestes observacions conviden a una reflexió sobre la rigidesa dels contrastos gramaticals, les coalicions atípiques predicat/forma o forma/funció que poden sorgir en el discurs, i la manera que tenen els aprenents d’arribar a detectar i produir aquestes coalicions en un idioma estranger com l’anglès. Les observacions també indiquen que les produccions orals en un idioma estranger es fan a través del filtre lingüístic i conceptual de l’idioma matern fins a estadis molt avançats d’aprenentatge.
Our dissertation belongs to a recently initiated line of studies seeking to characterise the advanced English L2 variety. We present an integrated analysis of a series of semantic, discourse and cross-linguistic factors underlying the use of verb forms by advanced French and Catalan learners of English as a foreign language. On the basis of a corpus of oral picture book narratives produced by two populations of language specialists (i.e., English Studies graduates and professors at several French and Catalan universities), we explore the distribution of tense-aspect morphology in relation to the aspectual class of predicates (the Aspect Hypothesis) and the temporal information predicates encode in narrative discourse (the Discourse Hypothesis). Tense-aspect forms are also considered from the perspective of the so-called L2 rhetorical style, the systematic linguistic choices learners make in a given communicative task drawing both on their learnt repertoire of L2 devices and on information selection and organisation patterns unconsciously transferred from their L1. The availability of grammaticalised aspectual distinctions in the learners’ mother tongues does not ensure a nativelike use of aspectual marking in advanced English L2. Differences reside in the use of tense-aspect morphology with durative atelic predicates and in the functional-semantic scope verb forms have in discourse. Prototypical predicate/form coalitions in learner production were found to remain strong in the use of the progressive with durative atelic predicates and to lead to an across-the-board reliance on the progressive, often in tension with the plot-advancing role of the predicate. The degree of grammaticalisation of the progressive aspect in the learners’ L1 seems to interfere with the hypotheses of use concerning the progressive form in English L2, particularly in the case of the French L1 student group. Only the professor groups employ tense-aspect forms in a way which is genuinely liberated from the semantic congruence with the predicate, similar to what was observed in English L1. With these very advanced learners, the progressive has a discourse-specific function and becomes optional when viewpoint information can be retrieved from other elements in the context. English L2 form-function mappings in the domain of tense-aspect morphology were also found to be more limited or not to match the ones observed in English L1. A case in point is the non-progressive present or past form, strongly associated with plot-advancing contexts in the production of the student groups, whereas the non-progressive is a default form, encoding a variety of narrative material, in the production of the professor groups and the English native speakers. The cross-linguistic analysis of a specific type of narrative contexts, namely two episodes where the expression of simultaneity plays a central role, revealed the existence of a subtle L1 influence on the construction of a temporal perspective in English L2, even with the most proficient learners. These findings invite to a reflection on the margins of grammaticalised contrasts, where atypical coalitions arise, and how learners can grasp such peripheral uses in an instructional setting. They also indicate that L2 oral production at the advanced stages is bound to a linguistic and conceptualisation filter which is the legacy of learners’ L1.

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Sajiki, Atsuko. "Intellectual empathy as a tool of cross-cultural learning United States students in study abroad program in Japan /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3215207.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Language Education, School of Education, 2006.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1258. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 18, 2007)."

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Cross-language learning'

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