This study examined the effects of linguistic task demands on the neuroanatomical localization of the neural response related to automatic semantic processing of concrete German nouns combining the associative priming paradigm with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To clarify the functional role of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for semantic processing with respect to semantic decision making compared to semantic processing per se, we used a linguistic task that involved either a binary decision process (i.e., semantic categorization; Experiment 1) or not (i.e., silently thinking about a word's meaning; Experiment 2). We observed associative priming effects indicated as neural suppression in bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), occipito-temporal brain areas, and in medial frontal brain areas independently of the linguistic task. Inferior parietal brain areas were more active for silently thinking about a word's meaning compared to semantic categorization. A conjunction analysis of linguistic task revealed that both tasks activated the same left-lateralized occipito-temporo-frontal network including the IFG. Contrasting neural associative priming effects across linguistic task demands, we found a significant interaction in the right IFG. The present fMRI data give rise to the assumption that activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) in the semantic domain might be important for semantic processing in general and not only for semantic decision making. These findings contrast with a recent study regarding the role of the LIFG for binary decision making in the lexical domain (Wright et al. 2011).

The present dissertation investigates the development in the production and perception of inflectional morphology in second-language learners of English and the role of their mother tongue during this development. The data analysed in this thesis stem from three psycholinguistic experiments that examine the production and comprehension of English novel words (thus investigating the sublexicon without the activation of word meaning). The first experiment focuses on the perception of inflectional morphemes in English novel words in L2 students at the A0 to C1 proficiency levels. Reaction-times analysis has shown that L2 learners seem to be (similarly to native speakers (e.g., Post et al., 2008)) sensitive to the presence of morphosyntactic information at the sublexical level, and they appear to decompose inflected forms into stems and affixes during perception and conduct an implicit phonetic analysis of the stem. The presence of these patterns across all levels suggests that L2 performance might be influenced by L1: Czech is morphologically much richer than English, and Czech speakers might thus be in general sensitive to morphological analysis of words. The second experiment investigates the production of inflected forms, more specifically those of past tense, in L2 learners of English at the A1 to...

La présente étude a examiné si les équivalents traductionnels en français ou en anglais des constituants des mots composés chinois peuvent influencer la reconnaissance des composés chinois et, si oui, s’ils affectent ce processus de la même manière. Nous avons mené une expérience d’amorçage par répétition du constituant, où les cibles étaient des mots composés chinois bimorphémiques, précédés d’un de leurs constituants ou d’un stimulus non relié. Des bilingues chinois-français et chinois-anglais ont été assignés à trois conditions d’amorçage, où les amorces étaient traduites dans leur L2 (français ou anglais) ou répétées en L1 (chinois, transcrit en pinyin). Les résultats des conditions d’amorçage en L2 révèlent que les participants reconnaissaient les mots composés chinois comme de vrais mots significativement plus rapidement lorsqu’ils étaient précédés d’un de leurs constituants, en français ou en anglais, que lorsqu’ils étaient précédés d’un stimulus non relié. Cet effet n’est pas limité à une L2 spécifique, puisque les effets d’amorçage des constituants provoqués par les amorces en français et en anglais ont partagé le même patron. Nous n’avons pas trouvé d’effet d’amorçage par répétition d’un constituant en chinois, ce qui pourrait être dû à la difficulté à traiter le pinyin. Nous proposons que l’effet d’amorçage par répétition du constituant en L2 sur le traitement des mots composés chinois appuie l’hypothèse d’un lexique mental bilingue intégré caractérisé par une connectivité au niveau non seulement lexicale, mais aussi infralexicale. / The present study investigated whether the French or English translation equivalents of Chinese compound constituents affect Chinese compound recognition and, if so, whether they affect processing in a comparable manner. We conducted a constituent priming experiment, where targets were bimorphemic Chinese compounds, preceded by one of their constituents or an unrelated item. Chinese-French and Chinese-English bilinguals were assigned to three priming conditions, where primes were translated into their L2 French or L2 English or repeated in their L1 Chinese (transcribed as Pinyin syllables). Results from the L2 priming conditions indicated that participants recognized Chinese compounds as real words significantly faster when they were preceded by one of their constituents, in either French or English, than they were when preceded by an unrelated stimulus. This effect was not restricted to a particular L2, as constituent priming effects produced by French primes patterned with English primes. We failed to find a significant constituent priming effect in the L1 priming condition, possibly due to difficulty in processing Pinyin. We argue that the L2 constituent priming effects on Chinese compound processing provide evidence in favour of an integrated bilingual mental lexicon characterized by lexical as well as sublexical connectivity.

L’objectif de cette recherche est d’étudier le développement du vocabulaire en production et en compréhension orales en turc (L1) et en français (L2) des enfants bilingues franco-turcs âgés de 6 à 10 ans en France en comparaison aux enfants monolingues français et turcs. Le test allemand « Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige » (Glück, 2011) a été utilisé. Celui-ci a permis d’analyser les stratégies de réponses en fonction de six types de questions posées, les différentes catégories lexicales (1 : vie quotidienne / famille ; 2 : non spécifique et 3 : école), les phénomènes sémantiques, les items connus et non connus des enfants ainsi que leur répertoire linguistique. Le corpus est constitué de 180 enfants dont 60 bilingues, 60 monolingues français et 60 turcs fréquentant le CP, le CE2 et le CM2. Les résultats révèlent un meilleur niveau en L1 en CP puis une amélioration en L2 en CE2 et un écart rapproché en CM2. Les questions difficiles sont les Types 1, 2, 4 et 5 dans les deux langues pour les CP ; 1, 4 et 6 pour les CE2 en L2 et 1, 2, 4 et 5 en L1 alors que pour les CM2, il s’agit du Type 1. Les catégories sémantiques les mieux réussies en L2 sont les 1 et 3 alors qu’en L1, il s’agit de la 2. Les sous-extensions sont nombreuses en CE2 et CM2 dans la L2 alors que les CP ont tendance à sur-extendre. Les bilingues font davantage appel à des stratégies de compensation comme la catégorisation, l’approximation ou la traduction. Le retard constaté pour le vocabulaire total chez les CP est vite rattrapé en CE2. De fortes et positives corrélations (Pearson et al., 1993) ont été constatées entre les langues : plus la L1 est maîtrisée, plus la L2 l’est aussi. / This research examine lexical development in receptive and expressive skills in Turkish (L1) and French (L2) of French-Turkish bilingual children aged between 6 and 10 years in France compared to French and Turkish monolinguals. The German test scale “Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige” (Glück, 2011) allowed to analyze spoken vocabulary, production and comprehension strategies according to 6 question types, different categories (1: everyday life/family; 2: general; 3: school), semantic phenomena, known and unknown items and their linguistic repertoire. The sample consists of 180 children, including 60 bilinguals, 60 French and 60 Turkish monolinguals composed of first, third and fifth grade pupils. Results show that bilingual have better vocabulary level in their L1 in the first grade and they made good progress in L2 in the third grade and the lexical gaps are significantly reduced in the fifth grade. The most problematic clauses are Types 1, 2, 4 and 5 in the first class; 1, 4 and 6 in L2 and 1, 2, 4, 5 in L1 in the third class whereas they are Type 1 in the fifth class. The most successful semantical category in L2 are the 1 and 3 whereas they are the 2 in L1. The under-extension is more in L2 in the third and fifth classes while the over-extension is more for the first class. Bilinguals make more use of compensation such as categorization, approximation and translation. Bilinguals’ total vocabulary is lower than monolinguals’ however the delay is regain in the third grade. According to the correlation (Pearson et al., 1993), there is a strong and positive correlation between two languages: the more we promote L1 development, the more we promote L2. / Bu çalışma Türkiye ve Fransa’daki 6 ile 10 yaş arası çift dilli çocukların tek dilli çocuklara kıyasla anadilleri olan Türkçe ve ikinci dilleri olan Fransızcada anlama ve kullanma becerilerindeki kelime gelişimini araştırmaktır. Kullanılan Alman testi « Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige » (Glück, 2011), 6 soru türüne göre sözcük stratejilerinin, 3 farklı kategorinin (1: günlük yaşam/aile; 2: genel; 3: okul), çocukların anlamsal olgularının, bilinen ve bilinmeyen öğelerinin ve dil repertuvarlarının analizlerini yapmamızı sağlamıştır. Derlemimiz 180 çocuktan oluşup 60’ı çift dilli, 60’ı tek dilli Fransız ve diğer 60’ı ise tek dilli Türk birinci, üçüncü ve beşinci sınıf öğrencileridir. Çift dillilerin ilkokul birde ana dillerinde iyi bir sözcük seviyesine sahip olduklarını, üçte ise ikinci dillerinde ilerleme kaydettiklerini ve beşinci sınıfa gelince ise sözcük yetisi farkının azaldığını ortaya koymaktadır. En zor soru türleri birler için 1., 2., 4. ve 5. olurken, üçler için Fransızcada 1., 4. ve 6. Türkçede ise 1., 2., 4. ve 5. olmaktadır. Beşler için her iki dilde 1. soru türüdür. Fransızcadaki en iyi bilinen tümceler 1. ve 3. kategorilerine aittir, oysaki anadilde 2. kategoridir. Anlam daralması üçüncü ve beşinci sınıfta daha fazladır. Birinci sınıfta anlam genişlemesi daha çoktur. Çift dilliler kategorilere ayırma, tahmin etme, çeviri gibi telafi stratejilerine başvurmaktadırlar. Kelime hazinesi daha zayıf öngörülen birinci sınıf çift dilliler, bu farkı üçüncü sınıfta telafi etmekte. Her iki dil arasında müspet ve güçlü bir bağlantı (Pearson et al., 1993) olduğu tespit edilmiştir: anadile ne kadar hakim olunursa ikinci dile de o kadar hakim olunur.

Les méthodes à l’état de l’art de la reconnaissance de l’écriture sont fondées sur des réseaux de neurones récurrents (RNN) à cellules LSTM ayant des performances remarquables. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons deux nouveaux principes la vérification lexicale et la génération de cohorte afin d’attaquer les problèmes de la reconnaissance de l’écriture : i) le problème des grands lexiques et des décodages dirigés par le lexique ii) la problématique de combinaison de modèles optiques pour une meilleure reconnaissance iii) la nécessité de constituer de très grands ensembles de données étiquetées dans un contexte d’apprentissage profond. La vérification lexicale est une alternative aux décodages dirigés par le lexique peu étudiée à cause des faibles performances des modèles optiques historiques (HMM). Nous montrons dans cette thèse qu’elle constitue une alternative intéressante aux approches dirigées par le lexique lorsqu’elles s’appuient sur des modèles optiques très performants comme les RNN LSTM. La génération de cohorte permet de générer facilement et rapidement un grand nombre de réseaux récurrents complémentaires en un seul apprentissage. De ces deux techniques nous construisons et proposons un nouveau schéma de cascade pour la reconnaissance de mots isolés, une nouvelle combinaison au niveau ligne LV-ROVER et une nouvelle stratégie d’auto-apprentissage de RNN LSTM pour la reconnaissance de mots isolés. La cascade proposée permet de combiner avec la vérification lexicale des milliers de réseaux et atteint des résultats à l’état de l’art pour les bases Rimes et IAM. LV-ROVER a une complexité réduite par rapport à l’algorithme original ROVER et permet de combiner des centaines de réseaux sans modèle de langage tout en dépassant l’état de l’art pour la reconnaissance de lignes sur le jeu de donnéesRimes. Notre stratégie d’auto-apprentissage permet d’apprendre à partir d’un seul réseau BLSTM et sans paramètres grâce à la cohorte et la vérification lexicale, elle montre d’excellents résultats sur les bases Rimes et IAM. / State-of-the-art methods for handwriting recognition are based on LSTM recurrent neural networks (RNN) which achieve high performance recognition. In this thesis, we propose the lexicon verification and the cohort generation as two new building blocs to tackle the problem of handwriting recognition which are : i) the large vocabulary problem and the use of lexicon driven methods ii) the combination of multiple optical models iii) the need for large labeled dataset for training RNN. The lexicon verification is an alternative to the lexicon driven decoding process and can deal with lexicons of 3 millions words. The cohort generation is a method to get easily and quickly a large number of complementary recurrent neural networks extracted from a single training. From these two new techniques we build and propose a new cascade scheme for isolated word recognition, a new line level combination LV-ROVER and a new self-training strategy to train LSTM RNN for isolated handwritten words recognition. The proposed cascade combines thousands of LSTM RNN with lexicon verification and achieves state-of-the art word recognition performance on the Rimes and IAM datasets. The Lexicon Verified ROVER : LV-ROVER, has a reduce complexity compare to the original ROVER algorithm and combine hundreds of recognizers without language models while achieving state of the art for handwritten line text on the RIMES dataset. Our self-training strategy use both labeled and unlabeled data with the unlabeled data being self-labeled by its own lexicon verified predictions. The strategy enables self-training with a single BLSTM and show excellent results on the Rimes and Iam datasets.

<p><b>Purpose:</b> Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech perception deficits in SSD. The primary aim of the current study was to compare the neural activity underlying speech perception in young children with SSD and typical development (TD).</p><p><b>Method</b>: Twenty-eight children ages 4;1-6;0 participated in the current study. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while children completed a speech perception task which included phonetic (speech sound) and lexical (meaning) matches and mismatches. Groups were compared on their judgment accuracy for matches and mismatches as well as the mean amplitude of the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) and N400 ERP components.</p><p><b>Results</b>: Children with SSD demonstrated lower judgment accuracy across the phonetic and lexical conditions compared to peers with TD. The ERPs elicited by lexical matches and mismatches did not distinguish the groups. However, in the phonetic condition, the SSD group exhibited a more consistent left lateralized PMN effect and a delayed N400 effect over frontal sites compared to the TD group.</p><p><b>Conclusions</b>: These findings provide some of the first evidence of a delay in the neurophysiological processing of phonological information for young children with SSD compared to their peers with TD. This delay was not present for the processing of lexical information, indicating a unique difference between children with SSD and TD related to speech perception of phonetic errors.</p>

Radka Těšínská Lomičková: Cistercian and Benedictine Sign Language in the Middle Age Sign language is an important communication phenomenon that has existed for a thousand years. In medieval monasteries signs were used to enable simple communication of messages when rules of silence forbade monks from speaking. This thesis concentrates on a study of sign language communication in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries during the Middle Ages. In doing so it describes the history of sign language in Europe between the 10th and 15th centuries. Furthermore it shows that sign language was not only used in the center of the order but in the Czech Republic as well. This thesis provides a detailed discussion of sign lexicons which are similar to a monolingual dictionary and are the basic and central source of information about each language. Lexicons contain words and short descriptions of how to make each hand sign. A careful analysis of one particular sign lexicon, called Siquis (which was used in Central Europe in the 15th century), reveals new information about daily life in medieval monasteries. The primary focus of the Siquis lexicon was liturgy, food and drink, utensils, persons, and activities. This thesis concentrates on both singular words and on the description of the signs in the lexicons....

<p>Previous research has shown that the type of ditransitive sentence preferred by English speakers in a particular linguistic context is significantly influenced by the relative ‘givenness’ of the post verbal arguments (i.e. the assumption that the referent of a linguistic expression is known to the speaker/hearer). This ‘givenness constraint’ has also been shown to play a role in the ditransitive sentence preferences of bilingual English speakers. Some have claimed that the realization of the givenness constraint in the ditransitive sentence preferences of bilingual English speakers is significantly influenced by the characteristics of their dominant language; however, no studies that I am aware of have explicitly compared the preferences of speakers whose dominant languages feature different sets of ditransitive sentence types, making this claim difficult to evaluate. Additionally, the effects of task type (i.e. the experimental task(s) employed by a particular study), and variables related to speakers’ experience with English and English proficiency, relative to language background are unclear. This study attempts to clarify the role of language background in the realization of the givenness constraint by recruiting three groups of English speakers: German-English bilingual speakers living in Germany, Spanish-English bilingual speakers living in Mexico, and monolingual English speakers living in the United States. The three groups completed three tasks, all of which were administered over the internet: a scalar acceptability judgement task, a forced choice task, and a self-paced reading task. The results from the two bilingual groups showed significant effects of language background, even after factors related to English proficiency and English experience were taken into account. The results support an interpretation where language background plays a significant role in the realization of the givenness constraint on bilingual speakers’ ditransitive sentence preferences. </p>

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英語の冠詞システムは、冠詞システムを持たない日本語を母語とする日本人学習者にとって、習得の難しい文法項目であるとされている。その原因の1つとして、冠詞使用に影響する英語名詞の可算性について正しく理解できていない、という理由が考えられる。本研究では、2つの実験研究を行い、日本人学習者が名詞の可算性を学習することで、英語冠詞を適切に使用できるようになるのかを調査した。 / The acquisition of the English article system is difficult for learners of English, especially when these learners do not have any article systems in their first language. One reason for their difficulty with English article usage is considered to stem from their inadequate understanding about noun countability. The present study examined the extent to which learning noun countability prompts Japanese learners' appropriate usage of English articles. / 博士(英語学) / Doctor of Philosophy in English Linguistics / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University