I denna studie undersöks ett brädspel under utveckling. Innehållsmässigt bygger spelet på folklore och folkminne förlagt till delregionen Skaraborg. Med stöd av karta och resurskort berättar spelarna sagor. Utveckling och formgivning av spelet baseras i bland annat chunking-teori, effekter av kooperativt lärande och flytande roller bland spelare och spelledare. Svar eftersöks i frågan om spelare i sagoberättandet föredrar att samspela eller om de hellre tävlar mot varandra. För att utröna detta har spelet utvecklats med stöd av fokusgrupp och därefter testats med tre grupper av spelare i varierande ålder under spelsessioner som observerats. Efter spelsessioner har intervjuer hållits med spelledarna, vilka i spelet kallas Sagomästare. Svaren har analyserats för att bedöma vilka justeringar som går att göra i spelets fortsatta utformning, dels för dess potentiella underhållningsvärde och dels för dess möjliga funktion som pedagogiskt verktyg.

Chunking is a cognitive process that re-organizes information into groupings, promoting efficient memory storage and recall. Due to the complexity of music scores, music reading requires both knowledge of the individual notes and recognition of musical chunks for rapid and accurate reading. For young piano students, it is especially important to systematically introduce and develop connections between individual notes and chunks. However, despite the importance of chunking, few studies have examined the development of chunking techniques in music reading for younger students. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how beginner piano method book and sight-reading book series for young students address chunking and provide a guide to develop chunking techniques that influence both reading and playing the piano. This study analyzes the contents of ten method book series and seven sight reading book series, examining the types and sizes of patterns introduced within the series, and the frequency of reinforcement. The study also examines pattern-related instructions, concepts and visual cues included in the series. The results reveal a lack of systemic chunking technique development, the importance of pattern recognition and the need for incorporating written instructions and visual cues to encourage chunking. Although the present study affirms the lack of development on chunking techniques in the evaluated teaching materials, the findings demonstrate the areas that could be developed to form chunking processes. Based on this research, suggestions are made to improve teaching materials to include chunking techniques and processes.

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Because many individuals with developmental disabilities prefer to be as independent as possible, strategies need to be developed to teach them functional skills. Video prompting is a fairly new technology, in which a person learns to engage in a complex behavior by viewing steps of a task analysis on video. The steps are broken down so that the task is more manageable for the individual. The present study evaluated how many steps needed to be presented in the video model for the learner to acquire a functional skill. Three individuals between the ages of 17 and 29 and diagnosed with mental retardation were selected as participants. The target behaviors were to complete a 10 component laundry skill in a group home setting. Starting with viewing the entire task on video, the task was broken down into halves, then thirds, and so on until the individual performed all steps to criterion. A multiple baseline design was used to show the results of the video prompting procedure. The results showed that one individual learned the task with 5 steps in each video segment, another learned the task with the video broken into 4, 3, and 3 segments, and the final participant did not learn from video. For this participant, a least to most prompting procedure was effective.

Les tâches d’empan simples sont classiquement utilisées pour évaluer la mémoire à court terme, tandis que les tâches d’empan complexes sont généralement considérées comme spécifiques de la mémoire de travail. Par construction, les tâches d’empan complexes étant plus difficiles,en raison de l’utilisation d’une tâche concurrente, l’empan moyen est généralement plus faible (4 ± 1 items) que dans les tâches d’empan simples (7 ± 2 items). Une raison possible de cet écart est que sans tâche concurrente, les participants peuvent tirer profit du temps libre entre les stimuli pour détecter et recoder des régularités présentes dans la série de stimuli afin de regrouper les stimuli en 4 ± 1 chunks. Notre hypothèse principale est que la compression de l’information en mémoire immédiate est un indicateur pertinent pour étudier la relation entre la capacité de mémoire immédiate et l’intelligence fluide. L’idée est que les deux dépendent de la qualité du traitement de l’information, autrement dit, selon nos hypothèses, d’une interaction entre traitement et stockage. Nous avons développé plusieurs tâches de mesure d’empan de chunks dans lesquelles la compressibilité de l’information a été estimée en utilisant différentes mesures de complexité algorithmique. Les résultats ont montré que la compressibilité peut être utilisée pour prédire la performance en mémoire de travail, et que la capacité à compresser l’information est un bon prédicteur de l’intelligence fluide. Nous concluons que la capacité à compresser l’information en mémoire de travail est la raison pour laquelle à la fois traitement et stockage de l’information sont liés à l’intelligence. / Simple span tasks are tasks commonly used to measure short-term memory, while complex span tasks are usually considered typical measures of working memory. Because complex span tasks were designed to create a concurrent task, the average span is usually lower (4 ± 1items) than in simple span tasks (7±2 items). One possible reason for measuring higher spansduring simple span tasks is that participants can take profit of the spare time between the stimuli to detect, and recode regularities in the stimulus series (in the absence of a concurrent task), and such regularities can be used to pack a few stimuli into 4 ± 1 chunks. Our main hypothesis was that information compression in immediate memory is an excellent indicator for studying the relationship between immediate-memory capacity and fluid intelligence. The idea is that both depend on the efficiency of information processing, and more precisely, on the interaction between storage and processing. We developed various span tasks measuringa chunking capacity, in which compressibility of memoranda was estimated using different algorithmic complexity metrics. The results showed that compressibility can be used to predictworking-memory performance, and that fluid intelligence is well predicted by the ability to compress information.We conclude that the ability to compress information in working memoryis the reason why both manipulation and retention of information are linked to intelligence.

This study is part of the IN.MIGRA-2 CM project, which studies the sociolinguistic integration of the immigrant population of Madrid. The present study focuses on the language attitudes of 16 residents of Alcalá de Henares, a community of Madrid. The participants were asked to rate their level of agreement with the following affirmations: (1) The Spanish of Madrid is more correct than the forms of speech of Latin American immigrants; (2) Mastery of the Spanish language is the principal demonstration of the integration of immigrants; (3) Immigrants of Latin American origin are integrated because they speak the same language. The study finds a connection between higher levels of contact with immigrants and lower ratings of agreement with the affirmations. This investigation supports others that show connections between social networks and language attitudes, and it adds to the sparse research on language attitudes in Madrid. Adverbial adjectives modify both a verb and the subject of that verb. Their purpose is to describe a quality that pertains to both the subject and the way the subject is performing the verb. Because they modify both the verb and the noun, adverbial adjectives agree with the noun in number and gender. The generativist approaches to this linguistic phenomenon do not provide a sufficient explanation of verb + adverbial adjective constructions nor do they predict which subjects and predicates that can be used in these constructions. This paper takes a usage-based approach to adverbial adjectives. It explores the token frequencies of use of different verb + adverbial adjective phrases and attempts to categorize the components of these phrases based on these frequencies.

Le but de cette thèse est d'étudier de façon détaillée l'impact des disfluences en français parlé (répétitions, auto-corrections, amorces, etc.) sur l'analyse syntaxique automatique de l'oral et de propose un modèle théorique permettant de les intégrer dans cette analyse. Notre axe de recherche se fonde sur l'hypothèse selon laquelle une analyse détaillée des énoncés oraux (principalement en termes morphosyntaxiques) peut permettre un traitement efficace pour ce type de données, et s'avère incontournable dans une optique de développement d'applications génériques dans le domaine des technologies de la parole. Dans le cadre de ce travail, nous proposons à la fois une étude linguistique détaillée et une stratégie d'analyse syntaxique automatique partielle des disfluences (en syntagmes minimaux non récursifs ou "chunks"). Le corpus final obtenu est ainsi segmenté en chunks non-disfluents d'une part, à côté des chunks disfluents d'autre part après prise en compte des régularités observées dans notre corpus. Les résultats de l'analyse automatique sont finalement évalués de façon quantitative sur le corpus permettant ainsi de valider le modèle théorique de façon empirique.

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[pt] O Processamento de Linguagem natural é uma área de pesquisa que explora como computadores podem entender e manipular textos em linguagem natural. Dentre as tarefas mais conhecidas em PLN está a de rotular sequências de texto. O problema de segmentação de texto em sintagmas é um dos problemas que pode ser abordado como rotulagem de sequências. Para isto, classificamos quais palavras pertencem a um sintagma, onde cada sintagma representa um grupo disjunto de palavras sintaticamente correlacionadas. Este tipo de segmentação possui importantes aplicações em tarefas mais complexas de processamento de linguagem natural, como análise de dependências, tradução automática, anotação de papéis semânticos, identificação de orações e outras. O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar uma arquitetura de rede neural profunda para o problema de segmentação textual em sintagmas para a língua portuguesa. O corpus usado nos experimentos é o Bosque, do projeto Floresta Sintá(c)tica. Baseado em trabalhos recentes na área, nossa abordagem supera o estado-da-arte para o português ao alcançar um F(beta)=1 de 90,51, que corresponde a um aumento de 2,56 em comparação com o trabalho anterior. Além disso, como forma de comprovar a qualidade do segmentador, usamos os rótulos obtidos pelo nosso sistema como um dos atributos de entrada para a tarefa de análise de dependências. Esses atributos melhoraram a acurácia do analisador em 0,87. / [en] Natural Language Processing is a research field that explores how computers can understand and manipulate natural language texts. Sequence tagging is amongst the most well-known tasks in NLP. Text Chunking is one of the problems that can be approached as a sequence tagging problem. Thus, we classify which words belong to a chunk, where each chunk represents a disjoint group of syntactically correlated words. This type of chunking has important applications in more complex tasks of natural language processing, such as dependency parsing, machine translation, semantic role labeling, clause identification and much more. The goal of this work is to present a deep neural network archtecture for the Portuguese text chunking problem. The corpus used in the experiments is the Bosque, from the Floresta Sintá(c)tica project. Based on recent work in the field, our approach surpass the state-of-the-art for Portuguese by achieving a F(beta)=1 of 90.51, which corresponds to an increase of 2.56 in comparison with the previous work. In addition, in order to attest the chunker effectiveness we use the tags obtained by our system as feature for the depedency parsing task. These features improved the accuracy of the parser by 0.87.

Dans de nombreux comportements qui reposent sur le rappel et la production de séquences, des groupements temporels émergent spontanément, créés par des délais ou des allongements. Ce « chunking » a été observé tant chez les humains que chez certains animaux et plusieurs auteurs l’attribuent à un processus général de chunking perceptif qui est conforme à la capacité de la mémoire à court terme. Cependant, aucune étude n’a établi comment ce chunking perceptif s’applique à la parole. Nous présentons une recension de la littérature qui fait ressortir certains problèmes critiques qui ont nui à la recherche sur cette question. C’est en revoyant ces problèmes qu’on propose une démonstration spécifique du chunking perceptif de la parole et de l’effet de ce processus sur la mémoire immédiate (ou mémoire de travail). Ces deux thèmes de notre thèse sont présentés séparément dans deux articles. Article 1 : The perceptual chunking of speech: a demonstration using ERPs Afin d’observer le chunking de la parole en temps réel, nous avons utilisé un paradigme de potentiels évoqués (PÉ) propice à susciter la Closure Positive Shift (CPS), une composante associée, entre autres, au traitement de marques de groupes prosodiques. Nos stimuli consistaient en des énoncés et des séries de syllabes sans sens comprenant des groupes intonatifs et des marques de groupements temporels qui pouvaient concorder, ou non, avec les marques de groupes intonatifs. Les analyses démontrent que la CPS est suscitée spécifiquement par les allongements marquant la fin des groupes temporels, indépendamment des autres variables. Notons que ces marques d’allongement, qui apparaissent universellement dans la langue parlée, créent le même type de chunking que celui qui émerge lors de l’apprentissage de séquences par des humains et des animaux. Nos résultats appuient donc l’idée que l’auditeur chunk la parole en groupes temporels et que ce chunking perceptif opère de façon similaire avec des comportements verbaux et non verbaux. Par ailleurs, les observations de l’Article 1 remettent en question des études où on associe la CPS au traitement de syntagmes intonatifs sans considérer les effets de marques temporels. Article 2 : Perceptual chunking and its effect on memory in speech processing:ERP and behavioral evidence Nous avons aussi observé comment le chunking perceptif d’énoncés en groupes temporels de différentes tailles influence la mémoire immédiate d’éléments entendus. Afin d’observer ces effets, nous avons utilisé des mesures comportementales et des PÉ, dont la composante N400 qui permettait d’évaluer la qualité de la trace mnésique d’éléments cibles étendus dans des groupes temporels. La modulation de l’amplitude relative de la N400 montre que les cibles présentées dans des groupes de 3 syllabes ont bénéficié d’une meilleure mise en mémoire immédiate que celles présentées dans des groupes plus longs. D’autres mesures comportementales et une analyse de la composante P300 ont aussi permis d’isoler l’effet de la position du groupe temporel (dans l’énoncé) sur les processus de mise en mémoire. Les études ci-dessus sont les premières à démontrer le chunking perceptif de la parole en temps réel et ses effets sur la mémoire immédiate d’éléments entendus. Dans l’ensemble, nos résultats suggèrent qu’un processus général de chunking perceptif favorise la mise en mémoire d’information séquentielle et une interprétation de la parole « chunk par chunk ». / In numerous behaviors involving the learning and production of sequences, temporal groups emerge spontaneously, created by delays or a lengthening of elements. This chunking has been observed across behaviors of both humans and animals and is taken to reflect a general process of perceptual chunking that conforms to capacity limits of short-term memory. Yet, no research has determined how perceptual chunking applies to speech. We provide a literature review that bears out critical problems, which have hampered research on this question. Consideration of these problems motivates a principled demonstration that aims to show how perceptual chunking applies to speech and the effect of this process on immediate memory (or “working memory”). These two themes are presented in separate papers in the format of journal articles. Paper 1: The perceptual chunking of speech: a demonstration using ERPs To observe perceptual chunking on line, we use event-related potentials (ERPs) and refer to the neural component of Closure Positive Shift (CPS), which is known to capture listeners’ responses to marks of prosodic groups. The speech stimuli were utterances and sequences of nonsense syllables, which contained intonation phrases marked by pitch, and both phrase-internal and phrase-final temporal groups marked by lengthening. Analyses of CPSs show that, across conditions, listeners specifically perceive speech in terms of chunks marked by lengthening. These lengthening marks, which appear universally in languages, create the same type of chunking as that which emerges in sequence learning by humans and animals. This finding supports the view that listeners chunk speech in temporal groups and that this perceptual chunking operates similarly for speech and non-verbal behaviors. Moreover, the results question reports that relate CPS to intonation phrasing without considering the effects of temporal marks. Paper 2: Perceptual chunking and its effect on memory in speech processing: ERP and behavioral evidence We examined how the perceptual chunking of utterances in terms of temporal groups of differing size influences immediate memory of heard speech. To weigh these effects, we used behavioural measures and ERPs, especially the N400 component, which served to evaluate the quality of the memory trace for target lexemes heard in the temporal groups. Variations in the amplitude of the N400 showed a better memory trace for lexemes presented in groups of 3 syllables compared to those in groups of 4 syllables. Response times along with P300 components revealed effects of position of the chunk in the utterance. This is the first study to demonstrate the perceptual chunking of speech on-line and its effects on immediate memory of heard elements. Taken together the results suggest that a general perceptual chunking enhances a buffering of sequential information and a processing of speech on a chunk-by-chunk basis.