... Commenting on the durability of this approach, Skehan (1998, p. 94) labels it the three Ps: p... more ... Commenting on the durability of this approach, Skehan (1998, p. 94) labels it the three Ps: presentation, practice, and production, where the first stage involves presentation of a single grammar point, the second requires learner practice within a controlled framework, and the ...
... Students of the violin typically master double-stopping or positional playing by working in t... more ... Students of the violin typically master double-stopping or positional playing by working in the context of a progressive syllabus, often in ways that ... false automatization' (R. Ellis 2003: 105), has led many scholars to dismiss its use as irrelevant to acquisition (eg J. Willis 1996: 135 ...
Connectionist language modelling typically has difficulty with syntactic systematicity, or the ab... more Connectionist language modelling typically has difficulty with syntactic systematicity, or the ability to generalise language learning to untrained sentences. This work develops an unsupervised connectionist model of infant grammar learning. Following the semantic boostrapping hypothesis, the network distils word category using a developmentally plausible infant-scale database of grounded sensorimotor conceptual representations, as well as a biologically plausible semantic co-occurrence activation function. The network then uses this knowledge to acquire an early benchmark clausal grammar using correlational learning, and further acquires separate conceptual and grammatical category representations. The network displays strongly systematic behaviour indicative of the general acquisition of the combinatorial systematicity present in the grounded infant-scale language stream, outperforms previous contemporary models that contain primarily noun and verb word categories, and successfully generalises broadly to novel untrained sensorimotor grounded sentences composed of unfamiliar nouns and verbs. Limitations as well as implications to later grammar learning are discussed.
… learner corpora, second language acquisition and …, 2002
... articles) Pronouns (reflexive and impersonal'you') ... more ... articles) Pronouns (reflexive and impersonal'you') Level 3: Nouns (collective and abstract) Figure 1. A traditional divide-up-the-grammar curriculum statement for an ESL com-position ... The most obvious development in the short term is probably the use of concordances in the ...
This paper reviews the developing commitment in UK educational policy-making to `evidence-based p... more This paper reviews the developing commitment in UK educational policy-making to `evidence-based practice', and its implications for applied linguistics research. Given the sceptical view which has predominated in UK applied linguistics towards `technical' solutions to ...
We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain ... more We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain activity while adults performed (1) a sequential learning task involving complex structured sequences and (2) a language processing task. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect, typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic processing, was found for structural incongruencies in both sequential learning as well as natural language and with similar topographical distributions. Additionally, a left anterior negativity (LAN) was observed for language but not for sequential learning. These results are interpreted as an indication that the P600 provides an index of violations and the cost of integration of expectations for upcoming material when processing complex sequential structure. We conclude that the same neural mechanisms may be recruited for both syntactic processing of linguistic stimuli and sequential learning of structured sequence patterns more generally.
This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of in... more This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of inflectional morphology. Ten participants were scanned at 4 Tesla as they covertly generated the past tenses of real and nonce (nonword) verbs presented auditorily. Regular past tenses (e.g., walked, wugged) and irregular past tenses (e.g., took, slept) produced similar patterns of activation in the posterior temporal lobe in both hemispheres. In contrast, there was greater activation in left and right inferior frontal gyrus for regular past tenses than for irregular past tenses. Similar previous results have been taken as evidence for the dual-mechanism theory of the past tense (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). However, additional analyses indicated that irregulars that were phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., slept, fled, sold) produced the same level of activation as did regulars, and significantly more activation than did irregulars that were not phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., took, gave). Thus, activation patterns were predicted by phonological characteristics of the past tense rather than by the rule-governed versus exception distinction that is central to the dual-mechanism framework. The results are consistent with a constraint satisfaction model in which phonological, semantic, and other probabilistic constraints jointly determine the past tense, with different degrees of involvement for different verbs.
This paper centres around the idea that an integration of cognitive grammar princi-ples into tens... more This paper centres around the idea that an integration of cognitive grammar princi-ples into tense-aspect teaching may help EFL learners to develop a more meaning-ful understanding of the concepts underlying these grammatical constructions. In the first part of the paper, a ...
... Commenting on the durability of this approach, Skehan (1998, p. 94) labels it the three Ps: p... more ... Commenting on the durability of this approach, Skehan (1998, p. 94) labels it the three Ps: presentation, practice, and production, where the first stage involves presentation of a single grammar point, the second requires learner practice within a controlled framework, and the ...
... Students of the violin typically master double-stopping or positional playing by working in t... more ... Students of the violin typically master double-stopping or positional playing by working in the context of a progressive syllabus, often in ways that ... false automatization' (R. Ellis 2003: 105), has led many scholars to dismiss its use as irrelevant to acquisition (eg J. Willis 1996: 135 ...
Connectionist language modelling typically has difficulty with syntactic systematicity, or the ab... more Connectionist language modelling typically has difficulty with syntactic systematicity, or the ability to generalise language learning to untrained sentences. This work develops an unsupervised connectionist model of infant grammar learning. Following the semantic boostrapping hypothesis, the network distils word category using a developmentally plausible infant-scale database of grounded sensorimotor conceptual representations, as well as a biologically plausible semantic co-occurrence activation function. The network then uses this knowledge to acquire an early benchmark clausal grammar using correlational learning, and further acquires separate conceptual and grammatical category representations. The network displays strongly systematic behaviour indicative of the general acquisition of the combinatorial systematicity present in the grounded infant-scale language stream, outperforms previous contemporary models that contain primarily noun and verb word categories, and successfully generalises broadly to novel untrained sensorimotor grounded sentences composed of unfamiliar nouns and verbs. Limitations as well as implications to later grammar learning are discussed.
… learner corpora, second language acquisition and …, 2002
... articles) Pronouns (reflexive and impersonal'you') ... more ... articles) Pronouns (reflexive and impersonal'you') Level 3: Nouns (collective and abstract) Figure 1. A traditional divide-up-the-grammar curriculum statement for an ESL com-position ... The most obvious development in the short term is probably the use of concordances in the ...
This paper reviews the developing commitment in UK educational policy-making to `evidence-based p... more This paper reviews the developing commitment in UK educational policy-making to `evidence-based practice', and its implications for applied linguistics research. Given the sceptical view which has predominated in UK applied linguistics towards `technical' solutions to ...
We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain ... more We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain activity while adults performed (1) a sequential learning task involving complex structured sequences and (2) a language processing task. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect, typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic processing, was found for structural incongruencies in both sequential learning as well as natural language and with similar topographical distributions. Additionally, a left anterior negativity (LAN) was observed for language but not for sequential learning. These results are interpreted as an indication that the P600 provides an index of violations and the cost of integration of expectations for upcoming material when processing complex sequential structure. We conclude that the same neural mechanisms may be recruited for both syntactic processing of linguistic stimuli and sequential learning of structured sequence patterns more generally.
This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of in... more This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of inflectional morphology. Ten participants were scanned at 4 Tesla as they covertly generated the past tenses of real and nonce (nonword) verbs presented auditorily. Regular past tenses (e.g., walked, wugged) and irregular past tenses (e.g., took, slept) produced similar patterns of activation in the posterior temporal lobe in both hemispheres. In contrast, there was greater activation in left and right inferior frontal gyrus for regular past tenses than for irregular past tenses. Similar previous results have been taken as evidence for the dual-mechanism theory of the past tense (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). However, additional analyses indicated that irregulars that were phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., slept, fled, sold) produced the same level of activation as did regulars, and significantly more activation than did irregulars that were not phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., took, gave). Thus, activation patterns were predicted by phonological characteristics of the past tense rather than by the rule-governed versus exception distinction that is central to the dual-mechanism framework. The results are consistent with a constraint satisfaction model in which phonological, semantic, and other probabilistic constraints jointly determine the past tense, with different degrees of involvement for different verbs.
This paper centres around the idea that an integration of cognitive grammar princi-ples into tens... more This paper centres around the idea that an integration of cognitive grammar princi-ples into tense-aspect teaching may help EFL learners to develop a more meaning-ful understanding of the concepts underlying these grammatical constructions. In the first part of the paper, a ...
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