Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-22T17:26:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 maria luiza - mestrado.pdf: 1194865 bytes, checksum: 4131c150fdfa25c24fbfbf398843e624 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-04-25 / This research study aims not only to investigate the types of corrective feedback provided by Brazilian teachers of English, regarding the pronunciation mistakes found in the production of the -ed morpheme, but also to analyze the conceptions and practices of these professionals. The study is relevant given both the importance of L2 pronunciation intelligibility and its aim to contribute to an increase in the number of studies dealing with pronunciation teaching. In this study, we investigated the feedback strategies used by two different Brazilian teachers of English, one teaching at a private English course and the other at a University in the Southern city of Bagé/RS. The analysis was based on the data obtained from the audio recordings of two classes from each one of the teachers. Based on the class recordings, the investigator s notes and the answers provided by the participant teachers in an oral interview, we conclude that the feedback strategy most frequently used by the teachers was elicitation, since, according to the two participants, this is the feedback strategy that leads learners to reflect on the mistakes they have made / O presente estudo tem como propósito investigar os tipos de feedback corretivos fornecidos por professores brasileiros de inglês, no que tange aos erros de pronúncia do morfema -ed do passado regular, produzidos por seus alunos, e análise de suas concepções e práticas pedagógicas. O trabalho é realizado a partir de uma reflexão sobre a aprendizagem nas diversas teorias sobre o ensino de língua estrangeira, que se sucederam através dos tempos. Neste trabalho foi observado o comportamento corretivo de dois professores de inglês, no período de duas aulas de cada um, gravadas em áudio, sendo que um dos docentes é professor do Curso de Letras em uma universidade e o outro leciona em um Curso Livre, instituições localizadas na cidade de Bagé/RS. Justifica-se esse trabalho pela importância da inteligibilidade da pronúncia entre os falantes não nativos de inglês e a tentativa de colaborar com a expansão dos estudos da pronúncia desta língua, uma vez que, cada vez mais, se intensifica o uso do inglês como língua internacional. Com base nos dados coletados pelas gravações em áudio, anotações de pesquisa de campo e entrevistas com os professores, é efetuada uma pesquisa de caráter qualitativo sobre o tratamento da correção da pronúncia utilizado por esses profissionais, que é considerada uma área importante dentro da aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira (neste caso a língua inglesa). Destaca-se que fica constatado, nessa investigação, que o feedback corretivo que resultou em maior número de utilização foi o da elicitação

This study tested the unique checking constraint hypothesis and the usage-based account concerning why young children produced tense and agreement morphemes variably via three experiments. Experiment 1 investigated whether subject types influenced the production accuracy of auxiliary 'is' in three-year-olds through an elicited production task. The rate of use of auxiliary 'is' increased as children's tense productivity increased, but the pattern was different for each subject type. The rate of use increased more rapidly with tense productivity for lexical NP subjects than it did for pronominal subjects. Experiment 2 further examined the role of subject types, predicate types, and predicate word frequency on the use of copula 'is' in three-year-olds via an elicited production task. Overall, the production accuracy of copula 'is' was higher with nominal predicates than with permanent- or temporary-adjectival predicates, followed by locative predicates. Children also produced copula 'is' more accurately with low-frequency predicate words than with high-frequency predicate words. Moreover, the effect of subject types on the use of copula 'is' varied with children's tense productivity. For sentences with nominal, permanent-adjectival, or temporary-adjectival predicates, children with lower tense productivity used copula 'is' more accurately with lexical subjects than with pronominal subjects in. In contrast, children with higher tense productivity produced copula 'is' more accurately with pronominal subjects than with lexical subjects. Experiment 3 extended Experiment 1 by exploring the degree of abstractness of representations of auxiliary BE via a structural priming task. The production accuracy of auxiliary 'is' in three-year-olds increased above the baseline when the prime-target pair shared the same structure and subject + auxiliary 'is' combinations, but not when the prime-target pair only shared the same structure. However, the production accuracy of auxiliary 'are' did not change with prime types. These experiments suggest that young children have only lexically-specific representations of auxiliary BE. Frequency, rather than structural properties, of sentence elements influenced the production accuracy of auxiliary and copula 'is' in young children. These findings support the usage-based approach that young children use tense and agreement morphemes variably because they have not yet learned adult-like abstract representations and use highly frequent/ lexically-specific constructions for the production of these morphemes.

This study investigated the morpheme acquisition order of Swedish students in grades 6 and 7, utilizing corpus texts drawn from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). It is an extension of Khor (2012) that focused on students in grades 9 and 12. Previous studies on morpheme acquisition order suggested that there was a natural sequence in acquiring morphemes, regardless of first language (L1). First language influence was said to be minimal or non-existing. Recently, studies have found evidence that L1 transfer is greater than first thought. This study examined three morphemes; articles, the preposition in, and plural form. The results showed that the errors that both groups made were consistent with the errors that were found in Khor (2012). The errors were of the same nature in all age groups, mainly in differences in (1) generic and specific usage of articles in Swedish and English, (2) the generic sense of regular plural nouns, (3) plural form of irregular nouns and nouns of Latin or Greek origin, (4) plural forms of countable and misuse of uncountable nouns, and (5) the usage of prepositions in Swedish and English. Current studies have also generated these results, which points towards strong L1 influence. The different usage and the errors suggest that the first language influence is stronger than first described, and consequently, that it influences the acquisition of morphemes. Therefore, the L1 seems to shape the order in which grammatical morphemes are acquired. Learners in one language group seem to learn the morphemes in a specific order, rather than a fixed universal order.

Automatic morpheme segmentation as a field has been dominated by unsupervised methods since its inception. Partly due to theoretical motivations, but also due to resource constraints. Given the success neural network methods have shown on a wide variety of field in later years, it would seem compelling to apply these methods to the morpheme segmentation field. This study explores the efficacy of modern neural networks, specifically convolutional neural networks and Bi-directional LSTM networks, on the morpheme segmentation task in a resource low setting to determine their viability as contenders with previous unsupervised, minimally supervised, and semi-supervised systems in the field. One architecture of each type is implemented and trained on a new gold standard data set and the results are compared to previously established methods. A qualitative error analysis of the architectures’ segmentations is also performed. The study demonstrates that a BLSTM system can be trained with minimal effort to produce a proof of concept solution at low levels of training data and suggests that BLSTM methods may be a fruitful direction for further research in this field.

The development of standard models for describing general lexical resources has led to the emergence of numerous lexical datasets of various languages in the Semantic Web. However, there are no models that describe the domain of Morphology in a similar manner. As a result, there are hardly any language resources of morphemic data available in RDF to date. This paper presents the creation of the Hebrew Morpheme Inventory from a manually compiled tabular dataset comprising around 52.000 entries. It is an ongoing effort of representing the lexemes, word-forms and morphologigal patterns together with their underlying relations based on the newly created Multilingual Morpheme Ontology (MMoOn). It will be shown how segmented Hebrew language data can be granularly described in a Linked Data format, thus, serving as an exemplary case for creating morpheme inventories of any inflectional language with MMoOn. The resulting dataset is described a) according to the structure of the underlying data format, b) with respect to the Hebrew language characteristic of building word-forms directly from roots, c) by exemplifying how inflectional information is realized and d) with regard to its enrichment with external links to sense resources.

In this study an attempt is made to describe the morphological apects of Tshiguvhu. In chapter 1, it is indicated that historically, there was extensive early contact between Vhaguvhu and Balobedu and Tlokwa. In ,chapters 2 and 3, nouns and pronouns are analysed morphologically. Some similarities and differences between Tshiguvhu and Tshivenda are highlighted. These differences are ascribed to influences from Lobedu and Tlokwa. In chapters 4 and 5, the form of the verb and the use of verb forms in various tenses, where applicable, are described morphologically. Some verb roots and extensions have been influenced by Northern Sotho dialects whereas some have not. In chapter 6, the morphology of adverbs, interrogatives, conjunctions, ideophones and interjections are briefly described. In conclusion, it is indicated that Tshiguvhu is a dialect of Venda because of its cultural and historical bonds with Venda, although linguistically it shares some features with certain Northern Sotho dialects. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often rely on the simplistic assumption that words are opaque symbols. This assumption does not fit morphologically complex language well, where words can have rich internal structure and sub-word elements are shared across distinct word forms. Our approach is to encode basic notions of morphology into the assumptions of three different types of language models, with the intention that leveraging shared sub-word structure can improve model performance and help overcome data sparsity that arises from morphological processes. In the context of n-gram language modelling, we formulate a new Bayesian model that relies on the decomposition of compound words to attain better smoothing, and we develop a new distributed language model that learns vector representations of morphemes and leverages them to link together morphologically related words. In both cases, we show that accounting for word sub-structure improves the models' intrinsic performance and provides benefits when applied to other tasks, including machine translation. We then shift the focus beyond the modelling of word sequences and consider models that automatically learn what the sub-word elements of a given language are, given an unannotated list of words. We formulate a novel model that can learn discontiguous morphemes in addition to the more conventional contiguous morphemes that most previous models are limited to. This approach is demonstrated on Semitic languages, and we find that modelling discontiguous sub-word structures leads to improvements in the task of segmenting words into their contiguous morphemes.

När en infödd talare av spanska med hög behärskningsnivå i svenska samtalar med en annan individ med liknande språkbakgrund är det inte sällan fraser som ”¿me pasarías la blåbärssylt?” (”kan du skicka blåbärssylten, tack?”) uppstår. Lexikaliskt inskott (eng. noun insertion), d.v.s. att skjuta in substantiv från andraspråket i för övrigt förstaspråksdominerat tal, är ett vanligt förekommande fenomen hos tvåspråkiga. Men vad händer när de två samspelande språken har asymmetriska genussystem som spanskans och svenskans? Vilket spanskt grammatiskt genus ska man då tillskriva de inskjutna svenska enheterna som ”blåbärssylt” i rubriken? Och vad är det som styr dessa val? Två hypoteser ställs upp för att försöka få svar på dessa frågor: genusvalet styrs i större utsträckning av det inskjutna substantivets ändelsemorfem, eller så styrs det i större utsträckning av dess översättningsmotsvarighet. För att testa dessa två hypoteser genomfördes ett experiment med 30 infödda spansktalare med svenska som andraspråk där de ombads attribuera ett spanskt grammatiskt genus, maskulinum eller femininum, till en del svenska substantiv i två olika uppgifter, en lucktext och en ordlista. Resultaten visade att både de olika stimuliordens ändelsemorfem och översättningsmotsvarighet spelade en signifikativ roll för val av grammatiskt genus, och att översättningsmotsvarighet hade en relativt större påverkan på genusvalet jämfört med ändelsemorfem. Detta kan eventuellt peka på att genus hos infödda spansktalare upplevs som en inherent egenskap hos själva referenten, med påtagliga konsekvenser för hur de ser på och tänker kring omvärlden.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T19:34:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Maria Ribeiro Dantas.pdf: 10620631 bytes, checksum: 35d42faeef12d4fe76dab2d5be4a0150 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-10-16 / Secretaria da Educação do Estado de São Paulo / This study is situated on the grammar of the Portuguese language with discursive-functional approach and is focused on the diversity of uses grammar morphemes, called our traditional grammarian "possessive pronouns adjectives." The study is justified because it had been found in the teaching of Portuguese language and Portuguese foreign language, a lack of studies that focus on description of rules underlying the semantic values in the different dimensions textual and discursive. Such studies are needed to solve problems presented by foreigners, and also Brazilian, in understanding the operation of "possessive pronouns adjectives" as arising from enunciate intentions. It is, moreover, because they have verified that there is no treatment discursive-functional language for "possessive" by traditional grammars, that situate the morphemes in the dimension of the sentence, from systemic rules in order not to consider the language in effective use. Thus, the general aim of this study is contributing to the studies that inter-related grammar and grammaticalization for the treatment of enunciativos phenomena of language. They are specific objectives: 1. to seek, in the history of the portuguese language, evidence of systemic grammar and grammaticalization of morphemes "possessive" from the semantic value of ownership and its modifications, 2. to examine in effective use of brazilian portuguese, relations between subject and progression semantics of text to the use of morphemes possessive in the text-product, 3. to deal the lexical choices and its relations with grammar morfossintaxe. The theoretical aspects are considered in the search for the Pragmática, the Critical Analysis of Discourse, the Traditional Grammar, the Functional Grammar to deal the dimensions textual communicative, textual discourse and processes of grammaticalization. The results indicate that: 1.em relation to morpheme possessive, synchronic at the same time, use forms together in the past with the present forms, 2. there are systemic grammatical rules that are applied in the construction textual-discursive, namely: Rule 1 - the nominalisation of the predicate and use of the possessive morpheme by subject; Rule 2 - the correlation of morpheme possessive noun by inflections of gender and number; Rule 3 to Serve as the morpheme possessive adjective, before the noun; Rule 4 - the morpheme possessive with function of the pronoun in order to replace the lexical sintagms. These rules allow understand the cause of tradicional brazilian grammar, post NGB, classify the possessive pronouns in adjectives / Esta dissertação está situada na área da gramática da Língua Portuguesa com abordagem discursivo-funcional e tem por tema a diversidade de usos dos morfemas gramaticais, designados por nossos gramáticos tradicionais pronomes adjetivos possessivos . O estudo se justifica em razão de se ter verificado, no ensino de português língua materna e português língua estrangeira, uma carência de estudos que privilegiam a descrição de regras subjacentes aos valores semânticos, nas diferentes dimensões textuais e discursivas. Tais estudos são necessários para resolver dificuldades apresentadas por estrangeiros, e também brasileiros, na compreensão do funcionamento dos pronomes adjetivos possessivos como decorrentes de intenções enunciativas. Justifica-se, ainda, por se ter verificado não haver um tratamento lingüístico discursivo-funcional para os possessivos pelas gramáticas tradicionais, que os situam na dimensão da frase, a partir de regras sistêmicas, de forma a não se considerar a língua em uso efetivo. Assim, o objetivo geral desta dissertação é contribuir com os estudos que inter-relacionam gramática e gramaticalização para o tratamento de fenômenos enunciativos da língua. São objetivos específicos: 1. buscar, na história da língua portuguesa, os indícios da gramática sistêmica e da gramaticalização dos morfemas possessivos , a partir do valor semântico da posse e suas modificações; 2. examinar, no uso efetivo do português brasileiro, as relações entre tema e progressão semântica do texto para o uso dos morfemas possessivos no texto-produto; 3. tratar das escolhas lexicais e suas relações com a morfossintaxe gramatical. Os aspectos teóricos considerados para a pesquisa são relativos à Pragmática, à Análise Crítica do Discurso, à Gramática Tradicional, à Gramática Funcional para tratar das dimensões textual-comunicativa e textual-discursiva e dos processos de gramaticalização. Os resultados obtidos indicam que: 1. em relação ao morfema possessivo, no mesmo momento sincrônico, convivem em uso formas do passado com formas do presente; 2. há regras gramaticais sistêmicas que são aplicadas na construção textual-discursiva, a saber: Regra 1 - a nominalização do predicado e o uso do morfema possessivo pelo sujeito; Regra 2 - a concordância do morfema possessivo como substantivo por flexões de gênero e número; Regra 3 - o morfema possessivo funciona como adjetivo, antecedendo o substantivo; Regra 4 - o morfema possessivo com a função de pronome de forma a substituir o sintagma nominal lexical. Tais regras permitem entender a causa dos gramáticos tradicionais brasileiros, pós NGB, classificarem os possessivos em pronomes adjetivos

The present research sought to investigate the correspondence between auditory and visual feature dimensions and to utilise this knowledge in order to inform the design of audio-visual mappings for visual control of sound synthesis. The first stage of the research involved the design and implementation of Morpheme, a novel interface for interaction with corpus-based concatenative synthesis. Morpheme uses sketching as a model for interaction between the user and the computer. The purpose of the system is to facilitate the expression of sound design ideas by describing the qualities of the sound to be synthesised in visual terms, using a set of perceptually meaningful audio-visual feature associations. The second stage of the research involved the preparation of two multidimensional mappings for the association between auditory and visual dimensions. The third stage of this research involved the evaluation of the Audio-Visual (A/V) mappings and of Morpheme's user interface. The evaluation comprised two controlled experiments, an online study and a user study. Our findings suggest that the strength of the perceived correspondence between the A/V associations prevails over the timbre characteristics of the sounds used to render the complementary polar features. Hence, the empirical evidence gathered by previous research is generalizable/ applicable to different contexts and the overall dimensionality of the sound used to render should not have a very significant effect on the comprehensibility and usability of an A/V mapping. However, the findings of the present research also show that there is a non-linear interaction between the harmonicity of the corpus and the perceived correspondence of the audio-visual associations. For example, strongly correlated cross-modal cues such as size-loudness or vertical position-pitch are affected less by the harmonicity of the audio corpus in comparison to weaker correlated dimensions (e.g. texture granularity-sound dissonance). No significant differences were revealed as a result of musical/audio training. The third study consisted of an evaluation of Morpheme's user interface were participants were asked to use the system to design a sound for a given video footage. The usability of the system was found to be satisfactory. An interface for drawing visual queries was developed for high level control of the retrieval and signal processing algorithms of concatenative sound synthesis. This thesis elaborates on previous research findings and proposes two methods for empirically driven validation of audio-visual mappings for sound synthesis. These methods could be applied to a wide range of contexts in order to inform the design of cognitively useful multi-modal interfaces and representation and rendering of multimodal data. Moreover this research contributes to the broader understanding of multimodal perception by gathering empirical evidence about the correspondence between auditory and visual feature dimensions and by investigating which factors affect the perceived congruency between aural and visual structures.