The current research presents a system that learns to understand object names, spatial relation terms and event descriptions from observing narrated action sequences. The system extracts meaning from observed visual scenes by exploiting perceptual primitives related to motion and contact in order to represent events and spatial relations as predicate-argument structures. Learning the mapping be...

PURPOSE The purpose of this article is to describe the nature of informational (expository) language in terms of unique grammatical characteristics and discuss applications for assessment and intervention for older school-age children and adolescents with language impairments. METHODS Information presented is based on a selected literature review of topics including the nature of academic tex...

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples of six ASL syntactic structures: simple, negati...

This paper is concerned with the lexical knowledge retrieval system created at the Linguistic Modelling Laboratory. The main goal of the system is to provide a powerful and comfortable interface for lexical knowledge retrieval from large morphological dictionary. To achieve this a constraint based approach is applied that leads to a very eeective algorithm. The algorithm for query building, whi...

Large-scale natural language generation requires the integration of vast amounts of knowledge: lexical, grammatical, and conceptual. A robust generator must be able to operate well even when pieces of knowledge are missing. It must also be robust against incomplete or inaccurate inputs. To attack these problems, we have built a hybrid generator , in which gaps in symbolic knowledge are lled by ...

This study aimed at investigating the effects of grammatical error correction on EFL learners’ accuracy. Twenty-two male and female senior students were chosen randomly to respond to a questionnaire investigating their beliefs about immediate grammatical error correction.  Actually, the study was conducted in order to answer this question: what is the effect of grammatical error feedback on stu...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to natural language understanding that utilizes context-free grammars (CFGs) in conjunction with sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) deep learning. Specifically, we take a CFG authored to generate dialogue for our target application for NLU, a videogame, and train a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) to map the surface utterances t...

An important concern in language acquisition research is that behavior on a given task can be indicative both of children’s underlying knowledge and of their ability to deploy that knowledge. Therefore, to accurately uncover the nature of children’s grammatical knowledge, it is necessary to take into account variability in deployment processes. In this study, we will use children’s acquisition ...

Pragmatic competence includes illocutionary competence, and sociolinguistic competence. Illocutionary competence indicates a speaker's ability to combine grammatical interpretation of an utterance with its speech act, and the sociolinguistic competence indicates a speaker's ability to perform language functions in appropriate ways according to context. One must gain pragmatic knowledge before b...