Naturalizing the Unity of Consciousness: can neuroscience explain a fundamental feature of subjectivity? Martin Vraný Abstract The aim of the dissertation is to analyze the concept of the unity of conscious- ness as an explanandum for natural sciences and assess how good an explanation do leading neuroscientific theories of consciousness provide. The motivation be- hind this project is the idea that it is the unity which poses the greatest challenge for the scientific quest for consciousness. I argue in the Introduction that the reason why some theories of consciousness lead to what Dennett calls Cartesian materialism is precisely because they fail to address the problem of the unity of consciousness. If we had a good understanding of the unity of consciousness and its place in nature, we could more easily avoid the tendency to devise accounts of consciousness that are homuncular in disguise. In chapter 2 I analyze various aspects in which consciousness is thought be unified and conclude that two such aspects are particularly challenging for natu- ralizing the unity and that they cannot be treated separately. They are the unity of conscious contents at a time and the unity in the sense of a single subject having conscious contents and being able to reflect on them. Chapter 3 describes main conceptual and...

Unlike the English language, languages such as German, Dutch, the Skandinavian languages or Greek form compounds not as multi-word expressions, but by combining the parts of the compound into a new word without any orthographical separation. This poses problems for a variety of tasks, such as Statistical Machine Translation or Information Retrieval. Most previous work on the subject of splitting compounds into their parts, or ``decompounding'' has focused on German. In this work, we create a new, simple, unsupervised system for automatic decompounding for three representative compounding languages: German, Swedish, and Hungarian. A multi-lingual evaluation corpus in the medical domain is created from the EMEA corpus, and annotated with regards to compounding. Finally, several variants of our system are evaluated and compared to previous work. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The present thesis examines the influence of Czech nouns frequency features on their acquisition by non-native speakers. The first theoretical part summarizes the ongoing discussion regarding the importance of frequency for the entrenchment of grammatical categories in one's mind as outlined by cognitive and psycho-linguists abroad. The second introduces the research methodology, collection method and annotation of 20 lemmas obtained from non-native Czech speaker corpus CzeSL-SGT. Subsequently, an analysis of selected nouns is carried out with regard to their grammatical profiles (comprising two or three most frequent case forms as found in SYN2015). Based on its results, the production of non-native speakers shows a tendency to follow grammatical profiles as demonstrated by high correspondence of frequency features of nouns on the one hand and by low error rate in morphology of most frequent forms on the other. Additionally, cases where lower rate does not correspond to the above mentioned model can be explained using type frequency, i.e. the productivity of particular declension models having simultaneously more far-reaching effect, and higher relevance of nominative as the default form for non-native speakers.

This Master's thesis deals with the phenomenon of learning Dutch as a foreign language. The paper draws upon the fundamental theories and methods associated with applied linguistics on second language acquisition, in particular on the interlanguage hypothesis. The theoretical basis to this study comes from psycholinguistic processes that accompany the second language acquisition, such as language transfer, fossilization, overgeneralization and variability. This section is followed by a brief summary of the theory of the Dutch article, in contrast with an outline on how definiteness and indefiniteness are expressed in Czech. The paper also mentions some recent findings on article acquisition by second language learners. The practical part describes and analyses a small corpus of written utterances by Czech students who followed courses of Dutch language and literature at three Czech universities. The corpus consists of utterances made by speakers at two levels of language proficiency. The thesis seeks to observe the differences between lower intermediate and upper intermediate students. The research focuses mainly on general tendencies in article use. Various factors that influence the use of this grammatical category are discussed. Based on the collected data, a number of hypotheses are formulated,...

Mirror neurons are a specific kind of visuomotor neurons that are involved in action execution and also in action perception. The mirror mechanism is linked to a variety of complex psychological functions such as social-cognitive functions and language. People with schizophrenia have often difficulties both in mirror neuron system and in language skills. In the first part of our research we studied the connectivity of mirror neuron areas (such as IFG, STG, PMC, SMC and so on) by fMRI in resting state and the differences between a group of patients during first episode psychosis and a group of healthy controls. The second part of our research was dedicated to language: if there are specific activations in certain parts of the cortex (such as SMC, Broca's and Wernicke's areas) along with a specific meaning of the word stimuli and if these activations are disrupted in patients with schizophrenia. The first part of the research showed a significant difference in the mirror neuron system connectivity between these two groups. The patients had stronger connections between the thalamus (which mediates sensory information) and the cortical areas while the controls had the cortical areas more interconnected. The second part of our research, a language experiment, showed significant differences between the...

This work is focused on cooperative learning in foreign language teaching. It brings knowledge about cooperative learning, about methods of didactics in foreign language and their suitability for using cooperative learning. It deals with the news that appeared in cooperative learning in a foreign language teaching. The research that is part of this work was qualitative and it was completed by quantitative research, too. The aim of the research was to understand the teachers' point of view and their opinion on cooperative learning in foreign language teaching. The outcome is finding teachers' attitude to cooperative learning in foreign language teaching and their attitude to including this kind of teaching in real teaching. Key words: cooperative learning, foreign language teaching, advantages of cooperative learning in foreign language teaching, disadvantages of cooperative learning in foreign language teaching

Unlike the English language, languages such as German, Dutch, the Skandinavian languages or Greek form compounds not as multi-word expressions, but by combining the parts of the compound into a new word without any orthographical separation. This poses problems for a variety of tasks, such as Statistical Machine Translation or Information Retrieval. Most previous work on the subject of splitting compounds into their parts, or ``decompounding'' has focused on German. In this work, we create a new, simple, unsupervised system for automatic decompounding for three representative compounding languages: German, Swedish, and Hungarian. A multi-lingual evaluation corpus in the medical domain is created from the EMEA corpus, and annotated with regards to compounding. Finally, several variants of our system are evaluated and compared to previous work. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This diploma thesis deals with communication in kindergarten in selected communicative situations. The first part defines basic theoretical terms and, based on previous research, summarizes findings about pre-school education and mental and language development in pre- school children. The thesis also explains factors that influence language acquisition, child directed speech and pedagogical communication. The second part's main focus lies in describing communicative situations and in qualitative analysis of the acquired data - video recordings of selected communicative situation. The pocess of recording took place after previous agreement with two kindergartens. The recordings were transcribed according to the modified manual for the DIALOG database. The analysis is focused on the nature of the pedagogical communication in kindergarten. Our findings were compared to previous research results. Keywords communication, pedagogical communication, language acquisition, child directed speech, kindergarten

The knowledge of foreign languages has always been inseparable part of education and a part of spiritual wealth of every human being. At present, it also becomes one of the conditions for employment and success of university graduates on labour market, the precondition of which is a correctly assembled curriculum of a foreign specialized language both in its cultivation and qualification part. The goal of this dissertation is to on the one hand examine significant features of our presence which have influence on cultivation component of curriculum in particular, and examining the requirements of practice which determine its qualification component. From the synthesis of conclusions of both parts, we formulate recommendations for assembling specialized foreign language curriculum for universities of economic focus on a specific case of the curriculum of specialized German at University of Economics, Prague. We define the notion curriculum in theoretical part and we deal with curriculum from synchronic and diachronic aspect. Hermeneutical approach examines its social determinants. Furthermore we deal with current problem of special methodologies, which touch upon the addressed problem: methodology of tertiary education, methodology of foreign languages, methodology of German and methodology of specialized German. In conclusion of the theoretical part, space is devoted to language policy in Czech and European context and we summarize current state of solution of our research problem. In the research part, we deal with the qualification part of curriculum by means of empirical research of University of Economics, Prague graduates focused on the analysis of current demands of labour market on the knowledge of and the comparison of these requirements with the existing curriculum of German at University of Economics, Prague. It has been verified in the research whether the level of graduates´ knowledge for practice is sufficient and gives them competitive value on the labour market, what activities they do in German, how they reflect their studies of German at University of Economics, Prague and what their suggestions to curriculum, which would better respect their educational needs, are. Conclusions of the research are compared with the existing curriculum as it is depicted in graduate´s profile, as well as syllabuses of individual subjects and textbooks which are used in tuition at present. We derive from both of the steps that the nature of changes in curriculum is legitimate. Concrete suggestions for the innovation of curriculum where we take the findings of theoretical and research part into account follow the research part.

Cieľom tejto práce je preskúmať dostupné systémy pre extrakciu informácií a možnosti ich použitia v projekte MedIEQ. Teoretickú časť obsahuje úvod do oblasti extrakcie informácií. Popisujem účel, potreby a použitie a vzťah k iným úlohám spracovania prirodzeného jazyka. Prechádzam históriou, nedávnym vývojom, meraním výkonnosti a jeho kritikou. Taktiež popisujem všeobecnú architektúru IE systému a základné úlohy, ktoré má riešiť, s dôrazom na extrakciu entít. V praktickej časti sa nacházda prehľad algoritmov používaných v systémoch pre extrakciu informácií. Opisujem oba typy algoritmov ? pravidlové aj štatistické. V ďalšej kapitole je zoznam a krátky popis existujúcich voľných systémov. Nakoniec robím vlastný experiment s dvomi systémami ? LingPipe a GATE na vybraných korpusoch. Meriam rôzne výkonnostné štatistiky. Taktiež som vytvoril malý slovník a regulárny výraz pre email aby som demonštroval taktiež pravidlá pre extrahovanie určitých špecifických informácií.