This paper investigates a recent change in the grammar of spoken Basque which results in the substitution of dative case and agreement for absolutive case and agreement in marking animate, specific direct objects. I argue that this pattern of use is due to convergence between the feature matrix of the functional category AGR in Spanish and Basque. In contrast to previous studies which point to ...

Gaining the ability to speak proficiently is an important goal in second language learning, and grammatical correctness is an important dimension of oral proficiency. To acquire the ability to produce grammatically correct speech in everyday conversational situations, learners must practice producing speech until they can do so with little to no concious effort. For maximum pedagogical effectiv...

Four papers were presented in the opening session of the conference. The papers were "Prosody and Parsing" by P. Pennsylvania). Price et al. reported on the use of prosodic information to resolve several types of syntactic ambiguities, the development of a prosodic information coding system suitable for a parser, and the development of automatic algorithms for extracting prosodic information. (...

We are developing a spoken language system which would more effectively merge natural language and speech recognition technology by using a more flexible parsing strategy and utilizing prosody, the suprasegmental information in speech such as stress, rhythm, and intonation. There is a considerable amount of evidence which indicates that prosodic information impacts human speech perception at ma...

Using our theoretical framework of multimodal processing, we developed and evaluated a computer-animated tutor, Baldi, to teach vocabulary and grammar for children with autism. Baldi was implemented in a Language Wizard/Player, which allows easy creation and presentation of a language lesson involving the association of pictures and spoken words. The lesson plan includes both the identification...

The paper describes comparative constructions in Zhoutun, a Chinese variety that was heavily influenced by Amdo Tibetan and spoken Guide County, Qinghai Province. There are five (Cxn), based on the type of marker, namely (1) xa-Cxn; (2) pi-Cxn; (3) ‘look’-Cxn; (4) ‘and’-Cxn; (5) hybrid Cxn. illustrate features from both Tibetan, their co-existence demonstrates mixed nature constructions, as wel...

Situations where a spoken dialogue system cannot interpret a user’s utterance are a major source of frustration in humancomputer spoken dialogue. Current spoken dialogue systems generally respond with an unhelpful “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand,” or something similarly uninformative. Recent work on Targeted Help has shown that giving users more appropriate feedback makes systems easier to lear...

Language disorders can be classified into the three linguistic levels of pronunciation, lexicon, and grammar. To identify the most important linguistic processes leading to disorders in the before-mentioned fields, both standardized test procedures and the analysis of freely spoken language are used in the everyday work of speech therapists. However, especially the analysis of freely spoken lan...

Abstract This article presents an analysis of the structure and use Finnish independent infinitives. Although typological studies have shown that syntactically non-finite constructions are widespread in many languages, understanding their semantic intersubjective motivation is still its early stages. The current paper aims to enrich by closely looking at free-standing infinitive spoken written ...

DURING the past thirty years great advances have been made towards making the study of language a science, but leading linguists have been mainly concerned with spoken language. There has been a certain tendency to suggest that the study of written documents should always be subsidiary to that of some spoken idiom, or even that it is bound to be less scientific than that of spoken idioms, and p...