本論文以語意學、認知語言學及心理語言學的觀點，探討中文名詞的多義現象。本篇論文討論詞彙多重意義的語言及心理語言表徵，並研究詞義如何在心理詞彙庫中被擷取。 文中藉由認知語言學者Tuggy（1993）所提出的認知語意架構，及詞彙語意學中「同形異義詞（homonymy）」、「一詞多義（polysemy）」及「模糊意義（vagueness）」等觀念之區辨，探索詞義之本質。本文所談之意義（sense）根據Ahrens（1999）之定義有以下三個特性：（1）意義非轉喻（metonymy）或部分/全體（meronymy）之延伸，但可以是隱喻性延伸；（2）意義之間的延伸關係無法由在同類名詞中直接以規律獲得；（3）除非特意，一詞的不同意義不會在同一語境中同時出現。 針對詞彙辨識歷程的語意效應，本論文有三大研究主題--意義數目效應、意義相關性效應及相對意義頻率效應。各效應之預測如下：「意義數目效應」認為意義數目較多的詞彙在詞彙判斷作業（lexical decision tasks）中比較容易辨識；「意義相關性效應」認為當一個詞的意義之間的相關性較高時，該詞的辨識時間亦會較快；「相對意義頻率效應」則認為一個詞意義之間頻率差異程度越小，該詞越有歧義之特質，也因此越容易辨識。 本研究旨在以實證方式探討這些語意向度在詞彙辨識歷程中所扮演的角色。由受試者提供200個中文名詞的意義並決定意義間的相關性；進行電腦詞彙判斷作業，得到辨識每個詞所需的反應時間；再由統計考驗反應時間來驗證各效應。 本研究結果發現只有「意義數目效應」達顯著水準，意義數目較多的詞彙在詞彙判斷作業中比較容易辨識。此一效應支持心理詞彙庫的隨機觸接模型（random access model）及平行觸接模型（parallel access model）並駁斥「序列搜尋模型（serial access model）」。 / This thesis studies the multiple senses of Chinese nominals from semantic, cognitive linguistic, and psycholinguistic viewpoints. It discusses the linguistic and psycholinguistic representations of a word's multiple senses, and the access of these senses in the mental lexicon. The nature of lexical meaning is examined by discussing lexical semantic notions such as homonymy, polysemy, and vagueness, and by introducing Tuggy's (1993) cognitive linguistic representation of a word's multiple lexical meanings. The "senses" of a word are defined according to the lexical semantic theory of Ahrens (1999) as having three properties: (1) A sense is not an instance of metonymic or meronymic extension, but may be an instance of metaphorical extension. (2) The extension links between two senses cannot be inherited by a class of nouns. (3) Senses cannot appear in the same context (unless the complexity is triggered). This thesis specifically looks into three semantic effects on word recognition, including the word's number-of-sense (NOS) effect, the effect of sense relatedness, and the effect of relative sense frequency. The predictions of these effects are as follows: The NOS effect predicts that words with more senses are recognized faster than those with fewer senses. The effect of sense relatedness predicts that words with more closely related senses are easier to recognize than those with distantly related senses. The effect of relative sense frequency predicts that words with equal sense frequencies are more easily recognized than words with unequal sense frequencies. This research aims at empirically verifying these three effects during the recognition of isolated lexical items. Subjects generate the senses of 200 Chinese nominals, and rate the relatedness among these senses. Lexical decision tasks are conducted to obtain the reaction times required to recognize each stimulus item. The semantic effects are verified by comparing the reaction times of different groups of experimental stimuli. The experimental results confirm only the NOS effect, giving support to the random and parallel access models of lexical access, and refuting the serial access model of the mental lexicon.

As theories on the process of reading have advanced so definitional changes have resulted. This in turn has impacted on the teaching of reading. Comprehension is not the result of successful word recognition, rather, meaning is constructed by the reader using various sources as a frame of reference. Reading requires an interaction between the reader, the text read and the context in vvhich it is read. Reader factors involve language competencies, prior knowledge, vocabulary, the use of strategies and attitudes and motivation. The text may be narrative or expository and encompasses instructional materials. The tvvo broad categories in the context are the classroom setting and the instructional context. An 'interactive' or 'organisational' paradigm underlying inclusion recognises individual differences as being a probable cause of failure but postulates that the school and all that it encompasses, can be a barrier to learning and development. As such it is not deficit driven, attributing failure to learners alone. In the case of reading, this means not attributing reading failure to the reader alone but acknowledging the role of the text and the context. This point of departure is confirmed by an interactive model of disability, which, while still explaining reading deficits, advances that alternative areas also be investigated. Focusing on abilities is conducive to proactivity in the prevention of barriers to learning and development. To be inclusive therefore, mainstream schools generally and classrooms specifically, will need to be reformed and restructured to be more responsive to learners experiencing barriers to learning and development. This will require enhanced teaching methods and flexible support systems. Accommodating diversity presupposes the acknowledgement of each learner's uniqueness in order to meet individual needs. This will be facilitated when in the compilation of a reading programme to meet individual needs, the reader, the text and context are matched through assessment and instruction . A reading programme to enhance the teaching of reading and thereby meet individual needs has been compiled and implemented in a mainstream, intermediate phase class. From this practical experience and the literature studied, guidelines for the teaching of reading have been formulated for teachers in the intermediate phase to use within the context of inclusion. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Orthopedagogics)

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My doctoral research addressed two questions regarding the influence of orthographic knowledge on speech processing. First, I attempted to identify the locus of the orthographic effects observed in spoken word recognition tasks in which the orthographic consistency and the congruency between the phonological and orthographic representations of the stimuli were manipulated. Several studies provided converging results suggesting that only phonological representations activated at lexical or postlexical processing levels are affected by orthographic knowledge, while those activated at prelexical levels are not. However, the lexical processing level is not the only factor that determines the occurrence and/or the size of the orthographic effects. Regardless of the processing level tapped by the task, the characteristics of the material and the way in which participants perform the tasks also play an important role. Second, I examined the generality of the orthographic effects both in the suprasegmental domain and in the operation of working memory. Overall, the results showed orthographic effects in both situations./La question de l’influence des connaissances orthographiques sur le traitement de la parole a été abordée sous différents angles à travers les études menées dans le cadre de ma thèse de doctorat. Plus précisément, le locus des effets orthographiques a été examiné dans des tâches de reconnaissance de la parole grâce à une manipulation de la consistance orthographique et de la congruence entre les représentations phonologique et orthographique des stimuli. Les résultats obtenus convergent pour indiquer que seules les représentations phonologiques activées dans les situations qui exigent un traitement lexical et/ou post-lexical sont affectées par les représentations orthographiques. Cependant, l’occurrence et/ou la magnitude des effets orthographiques obtenus semblent dépendre également des caractéristiques du matériel et de la manière dont les participants effectuent la tâche. La question de la généralité des effets orthographiques a aussi été abordée :les effets orthographiques ont été démontrés d’une part dans le domaine suprasegmental (sur le ton lexical) et, d’autre part, dans le fonctionnement de la mémoire de travail. / Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Recognition of text from camera-captured scene/born-digital images help in the development of aids for the blind, unmanned navigation systems and spam filters. However, text in such images is not confined to any page layout, and its location within in the image is random in nature. In addition, motion blur, non-uniform illumination, skew, occlusion and scale-based degradations increase the complexity in locating and recognizing the text in a scene/born-digital image. Text localization and segmentation techniques are proposed for the born-digital image data set. The proposed OTCYMIST technique won the first place and placed in the third position for its performance on the text segmentation task in ICDAR 2011 and ICDAR 2013 robust reading competitions for born-digital image data set, respectively. Here, Otsu’s binarization and Canny edge detection are separately carried out on the three colour planes of the image. Connected components (CC’s) obtained from the segmented image are pruned based on thresholds applied on their area and aspect ratio. CC’s with sufficient edge pixels are retained. The centroids of the individual CC’s are used as nodes of a graph. A minimum spanning tree is built using these nodes of the graph. Long edges are broken from the minimum spanning tree of the graph. Pairwise height ratio is used to remove likely non-text components. CC’s are grouped based on their proximity in the horizontal direction to generate bounding boxes (BB’s) of text strings. Overlapping BB’s are removed using an overlap area threshold. Non-overlapping and minimally overlapping BB’s are used for text segmentation. These BB’s are split vertically to localize text at the word level. A word cropped from a document image can easily be recognized using a traditional optical character recognition (OCR) engine. However, recognizing a word, obtained by manually cropping a scene/born-digital image, is not trivial. Existing OCR engines do not handle these kinds of scene word images effectively. Our intention is to first segment the word image and then pass it to the existing OCR engines for recognition. In two aspects, it is advantageous: it avoids building a character classifier from scratch and reduces the word recognition task to a word segmentation task. Here, we propose two bottom-up approaches for the task of word segmentation. These approaches choose different features at the initial stage of segmentation. Power-law transform (PLT) was applied to the pixels of the gray scale born-digital images to non-linearly modify the histogram. The recognition rate achieved on born-digital word images is 82.9%, which is 20% more than the top performing entry (61.5%) in ICDAR 2011 robust reading competition. In addition, we explored applying PLT to the colour planes such as red, green, blue, intensity and lightness plane by varying the gamma value. We call this technique as Nonlinear enhancement and selection of plane (NESP) for optimal segmentation, which is an improvement over PLT. NESP chooses a particular plane with a proper gamma value based on Fisher discrimination factor. The recognition rate is 72.8% for scene images of ICDAR 2011 robust reading competition, which is 30% higher than the best entry (41.2%). The recognition rate is 81.7% and 65.9% for born-digital and scene images of ICDAR 2013 robust reading competition, respectively, using NESP. Another technique, midline analysis and propagation of segmentation (MAPS), has also been proposed. Here, the middle row pixels of the gray scale image are first segmented and the statistics of the segmented pixels are used to assign text and non-text labels to the rest of the image pixels using min-cut method. Gaussian model is fitted on the middle row segmented pixels before the assignment of other pixels. In MAPS, we assume the middle row pixels are least affected by any of the degradations. This assumption is validated by the good word recognition rate of 71.7% on ICDAR 2011 robust reading competition for scene images. The recognition rate is 83.8% and 66.0% for born-digital and scene images of ICDAR 2013 robust reading competition, respectively, using MAPS. The best reported results for ICDAR 2003 word images is 61.1% using custom lexicons containing the list of test words. On the other hand, NESP and MAPS achieve 66.2% and 64.5% for ICDAR 2003 word images without using any lexicon. By using similar custom lexicon, the recognition rates for ICDAR 2003 word images go up to 74.9% and 74.2% for NESP and MAPS methods, respectively. In place of passing an image segmented by a method, manually segmented word image is submitted to an OCR engine for benchmarking maximum possible recognition rate for each database. The recognition rates of the proposed methods and the benchmark results are reported on the seven publicly available word image data sets and compared with these of reported results in the literature. Since no good Kannada OCR is available, a classifier is designed to recognize Kannada characters and words from Chars74k data set and our own image collection, respectively. Discrete cosine transform (DCT) and block DCT are used as features to train separate classifiers. Kannada words are segmented using the same techniques (MAPS and NESP) and further segmented into groups of components, since a Kannada character may be represented by a single component or a group of components in an image. The recognition rate on Kannada words is reported for different features with and without the use of a lexicon. The obtained recognition performance for Kannada character recognition (11.4%) is three times the best performance (3.5%) reported in the literature.

<p>The present study investigates lexical similarity perceptions by students of Swedish as a foreign language (L3) with a good yet non-native proficiency in English (L2). The general theoretical framework is provided by studies in transfer of learning and its specific instance, transfer in language acquisition.</p><p>It is accepted as true that all previous linguistic knowledge is facilitative in developing proficiency in a new language. However, a frequently reported phenomenon is that students see similarities between two systems in a different way than linguists and theoreticians of education do. As a consequence, the full facilitative potential of transfer remains unused.</p><p>The present research seeks to shed light on the similarity perceptions with the focus on the comprehension of a written text. In order to elucidate students’ views, a form involving similarity judgements and multiple choice questions for formally similar items has been designed, drawing on real language use as provided by corpora. 123 forms have been distributed in 6 groups of international students, 4 of them studying Swedish at Level I and 2 studying at Level II. </p><p>The test items in the form vary in the degree of formal, semantic and functional similarity from very close cognates, to similar words belonging to different word classes, to items exhibiting category membership and/or being in subordinate/superordinate relation to each other, to deceptive cognates. The author proposes expected similarity ratings and compares them to the results obtained. The objective measure of formal similarity is provided by a string matching algorithm, Levenshtein distance.</p><p>The similarity judgements point at the fact that intermediate similarity values can be considered problematic. Similarity ratings between somewhat similar items are usually lower than could be expected. Besides, difference in grammatical meaning lowers similarity values significantly even if lexical meaning nearly coincides. Thus, the obtained results indicate that in order to utilize similarities to facilitate language learning, more attention should be paid to underlying similarities.</p>

本研究旨在探究以可解碼英文故事書(decodable storybook)為主的英語教學，對低年級英語低成就學童的影響，特別是在此補救教學方案下，學童早期英語閱讀能力及學習態度之改變及表現，並探討造成其改變的可能原因。本研究分兩階段進行，第一階段先進行小規模的預試研究作為正式研究之準備，目的在測試選用的英語可解碼故事書做為教材是否適切、教學活動是否可行，並根據初探結果規劃正式研究。第二階段的正式研究，根據第一階段的結果改良部分測驗、增加閱讀讀本、以及增加教師訪談等質性資料，以期進一步探討此補救教學方案對於學童早期閱讀能力及學習態度的影響。 在正式研究中，研究對象為台北市某國小英語攜手班(補救教學班)之五名二年級學習低成就學童（學業表現為後15%至20%）。研究者選擇Scholastic Company所出版的某系列分級可解碼英語故事書之第一套部分冊數作為讀本，搭配由整體到細部的架構理念設計課程，發展出適合本校學童的補救教學方案，將字母拼讀技巧訓練融入自然有趣的閱讀情境中。 本研究為行動研究，透過以質性為主的資料蒐集法，包含課室錄影錄音觀察、訪談、多方文件彙集及前後測評量，來進行研究結果之分析詮釋。學童每週均接受一次教學(每次三節課，共120分鐘)，共持續十六週。經過一學期補救教學後，對照學童前後測評量及各種質性資料分析，發現學童在字母認讀、單字辨識、單字拼讀及學習態度上均有正向改變。本研究也發現，使用可解碼故事書的內容來設計閱讀及自然發音教學活動，的確有助於低成就學童早期閱讀能力及內在動機之提升。本研究之結果及教學建議可供未來國小補救教學之參考。 / The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of decodable storybook instruction on the early reading performances and learning attitudes of Taiwanese EFL lower-grade underachievers in an elementary school in Taipei. An attempt is also made to explore the possible reasons for any improvement among the underachievers’ with respect to this remedial program. The present study was conducted in two stages. A small-scale pilot study was implemented as a preparation for the formal study in advance. The purpose of the pilot study was to investigate if the reading text of the selected storybook series is appropriate for underachievers, the feasibility of the decodable storybook instruction and the effects of the instruction on learners’ early reading ability and learning attitudes. Afterwards, the formal study was revised in modifying some test words as well as the scoring procedure on the early reading assessments, adding more reading materials and qualitative data sources such as teacher interviews. In the formal study, the participants are one remedial English class of five second graders (whose academic performances were at the bottom 15% to 20% of the grade). The curriculum was based on the contents of a commercial series of decodable story books—Clifford Phonics Fun Reading Program—pack one. The researcher adopted the framework of whole-to-parts phonics instruction to integrate reading activities and phonics training in an interesting and meaningful reading context. A variety of reading activities integrating four skills were designed and based on the content and topic of the storybooks to rouse learners’ interest. Decodable CVC words embedded in the story series were then explicitly taught to learners to apply letter-sound knowledge in their reading process. This study triangulates action research with qualitative data using classroom observations (video or taping), interviews, assessment records, and document analysis. Data analysis interprets the study results. After the sixteen weeks of remedial instruction, a comparison between the results of pre-tests and post-tests showed some changes in learners’ early reading ability, including letter-sound recognition, word recognition and visual blending, as well as a positive change in learning attitudes. The other findings were as follows. (1) Multiple teaching activities generated from the decodable story book can be beneficial to learners’ early reading ability and learning motivation. (2) The decodable story book is an effective language learning medium for learners to apply their decoding skills as well as to provide them with an interesting reading context to lower their anxiety in learning English. Based on the findings, a number of suggestions and pedagogical implications are provided for EFL elementary school teachers and further studies in the remedial instruction field alike.

The present study investigates lexical similarity perceptions by students of Swedish as a foreign language (L3) with a good yet non-native proficiency in English (L2). The general theoretical framework is provided by studies in transfer of learning and its specific instance, transfer in language acquisition. It is accepted as true that all previous linguistic knowledge is facilitative in developing proficiency in a new language. However, a frequently reported phenomenon is that students see similarities between two systems in a different way than linguists and theoreticians of education do. As a consequence, the full facilitative potential of transfer remains unused. The present research seeks to shed light on the similarity perceptions with the focus on the comprehension of a written text. In order to elucidate students’ views, a form involving similarity judgements and multiple choice questions for formally similar items has been designed, drawing on real language use as provided by corpora. 123 forms have been distributed in 6 groups of international students, 4 of them studying Swedish at Level I and 2 studying at Level II.  The test items in the form vary in the degree of formal, semantic and functional similarity from very close cognates, to similar words belonging to different word classes, to items exhibiting category membership and/or being in subordinate/superordinate relation to each other, to deceptive cognates. The author proposes expected similarity ratings and compares them to the results obtained. The objective measure of formal similarity is provided by a string matching algorithm, Levenshtein distance. The similarity judgements point at the fact that intermediate similarity values can be considered problematic. Similarity ratings between somewhat similar items are usually lower than could be expected. Besides, difference in grammatical meaning lowers similarity values significantly even if lexical meaning nearly coincides. Thus, the obtained results indicate that in order to utilize similarities to facilitate language learning, more attention should be paid to underlying similarities.