Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What can you learn with Statistical language acquisition?
The role of statistical learning in language acquisition has been particularly well documented in the area of lexical acquisition. One important contribution to infants' understanding of segmenting words from a continuous stream of speech is their ability to recognize statistical regularities of the speech heard in their environments. Although many factors play an important role, this specific mechanism is powerful and can operate over a short time scale.
Communication interventions fall into two major categories. First, many autistic children do not speak, or have little speech, or have difficulties in effective use of language. Social skills have been shown to be effective in treating children with autism. Interventions that attempt to improve communication are commonly conducted by speech and language therapists, and work on joint attention, communicative intent, and alternative or augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) methods such as visual methods, for example visual schedules. AAC methods do not appear to impede speech and may result in modest gains. A 2006 study reported benefits both for joint attention intervention and for symbolic play intervention, and a 2007 study found that joint attention intervention is more likely than symbolic play intervention to cause children to engage later in shared interactions.
The Centre for Language Studies (CLS) is part of FASS. The centre currently offers thirteen languages for students. They are: Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Spanish, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese. Students who are interested in these languages and who have a prior knowledge of the language should sit for a placement test to ensure their enrolment into a class of appropriate level. Beginner (Level 1000) classes are offered for students who have no knowledge of the language. Upon enrolment into language programmes, students have the opportunity of partaking in overseas immersion programmes to further help them develop fluency and competence in the language. The Language Preparatory Programme (LPP) is hosted by the CLS for students who are preparing to go on student exchange to French-speaking or German-speaking countries or Korea. These students are admitted into the respective language programmes in their first year of study, and are given priority for language classes. Ideally, after two semesters of study, these students will go for a 3-week immersion programme to the respectively countries, and then after another two semesters of study, they will go for a semester-long (or 2 semesters for students on the Honours track) Student Exchange Programme (SEP) at a partner university.
He was one of the first to apply Labovian methods in Britain with his research in 1970-1 on the speech of Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield. He concluded that the speech detailed in most of dialectology (e.g. A. J. Ellis, the Survey of English Dialects) had virtually disappeared, having found only one speaker out of his sample of 106 speakers who regularly used dialect. However, he found that differences in speech persisted as an indicator of social class, age and gender. This PhD dissertation was later adapted into a book, "Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire". The work was criticised by Graham Shorrocks on the grounds that the sociolinguistic methods used were inappropriate for recording the traditional vernacular and that there was an inadequate basis for comparison with earlier dialect studies in West Yorkshire.
International Ecological Society: Distinguished Statistical Ecologist (1998)
There are several organic and psychological factors that can affect speech. Among these are:The classical or Wernicke-Geschwind model of the language system in the brain focuses on Broca's area in the inferior prefrontal cortex, and Wernicke's area in the posterior superior temporal gyrus on the dominant hemisphere of the brain (typically the left hemisphere for language). In this model, a linguistic auditory signal is first sent from the auditory cortex to Wernicke's area. The lexicon is accessed in Wernicke's area, and these words are sent via the arcuate fasciculus to Broca's area, where morphology, syntax, and instructions for articulation are generated. This is then sent from Broca's area to the motor cortex for articulation.
In linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. By extension, language extinction is when the language is no longer known, including by second-language speakers. Other similar terms include linguicide, the death of a language from natural or political causes, and rarely glottophagy, the absorption or replacement of a minor language by a major language.
Neuroplasticity is defined as the brain's ability to reorganize itself, lay new pathways, and rearrange existing ones, as a result of experience. Neuronal changes after damage to the brain such as collateral sprouting, increased activation of the homologous areas, and map extension demonstrate the brain's neuroplastic abilities. According to Thomson, "Portions of the right hemisphere, extended left brain sites, or both have been shown to be recruited to perform language functions after brain damage. All of the neuronal changes recruit areas not originally or directly responsible for large portions of linguistic processing. Principles of neuroplasticity have been proven effective in neurorehabilitation after damage to the brain. These principles include: incorporating multiple modalities into treatment to create stronger neural connections, using stimuli that evoke positive emotion, linking concepts with simultaneous and related presentations, and finding the appropriate intensity and duration of treatment for each individual patient.
In the 19th century, Robert Latham suggested that the Siouan languages are related to the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages. In 1931, Louis Allen presented the first list of systematic correspondences between a set of 25 lexical items in Siouan and Iroquoian. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wallace Chafe further explored the link between Siouan and Caddoan languages. In the 1990s, Marianne Mithun compared the morphology and syntax of all the three families. At present, this Macro-Siouan hypothesis is not considered proved, and the similarities between the three families may instead be due to their protolanguages having been part of a sprachbund.
English has become the preeminent second language of Europe in the absence of any colonial history or diaspora, but rather as a concerted effort to increase fluency in English by Europeans since the Second World War. English has become the most useful language to connect different language groups in Europe. The impact of Brexit on EU language policy remains to be seen, but it is possible that the EU, in retaining English as a key working language without the dominant presence of British English speakers, would claim ownership over its own dialect of English and develop it for its own needs.
In the 19th century, Robert Latham suggested that the Siouan languages are related to the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages. In 1931, Louis Allen presented the first list of systematic correspondences between a set of 25 lexical items in Siouan and Iroquoian. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wallace Chafe further explored the link between Siouan and Caddoan languages. In the 1990s, Marianne Mithun compared the morphology and syntax of all the three families. At present, the Macro-Siouan hypothesis based on relations among Siouan, Caddoan, and Iroquoian is not universally accepted as proven.
The first comparative dialect study in Germany was "The Dialects of Bavaria" by Johann Andreas Schmeller, which included a linguistic atlas. In 1876, Georg Wenker sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These postal questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German. These sentences were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. Many studies proceeded from this, and over the next century dialect studies were carried out all over the world. Joseph Wright produced the six-volume "English Dialect Dictionary" in 1905.
Traditional studies in Dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. The move away from traditional methods of language study however caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists therefore began to study social, as well as regional variation. The "Linguistic Atlas of the United States" (1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.
Thai Sign Language (TSL) or Modern Standard Thai Sign Language (MSTSL), is the national sign language of Thailand's deaf community and is used in most parts of the country by the 20 percent of the estimated 56,000 pre-linguistically deaf people who go to school. Thai Sign Language was acknowledged as "the national language of deaf people in Thailand" in August 1999, in a resolution signed by the Minister of Education on behalf of the Royal Thai Government. As with many sign languages, the means of transmission to children occurs within families with signing deaf parents and in schools for the deaf. A robust process of language teaching and acculturation among deaf children has been documented and photographed in the Thai residential schools for the deaf.
The term "ethnography of communication" is meant to be descriptive of the characteristics that an approach towards language from an anthropological standpoint must take. Namely, according to Dell Hymes, it must 1) "investigate directly the use of language in contexts of situations so as to discern patterns proper to speech activity" and 2) "take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole." In other words, rather than divorcing linguistic form from its function, the analysis of a culture's or community's communication, linguistic and otherwise, must occur with respect to the sociocultural context of its use and the functions of the meanings conveyed. As Deborah Cameron puts it, "If you are mainly concerned with the way a certain speech event fits into a whole network of cultural beliefs and practices, you will spend more time describing things that are external to the talk itself: who the speakers are, where they are, what beliefs and customs are important in their lives."
Actuarial training in Sweden takes place at Stockholm University. The five-year master's program (for those with no previous university-level knowledge in mathematics, or without a bachelor's degree in mathematics) covers the subjects mathematics, mathematical statistics, insurance mathematics, financial mathematics, insurance law and insurance economics. The program operates under the Division of Mathematical Statistics . For those with a bachelor's degree in mathematics statistics or with a master's degree in mathematics, a two years full-time master's degree Aktuarieprogrammet has been created since 2002, at Stockholm University, which has a long history of research on insurance mathematics.
Linguists distinguish between language "death" and the process where a language becomes a "dead language" through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon analogous to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a "dead language" although it changed and developed into Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. Dialects of a language can also die, contributing to the overall language death. For example, the Ainu language is slowly dying - "The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger lists Hokkaido Ainu as critically endangered with 15 speakers ... and both Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu as extinct."
The United States has forty-one million people aged five or older that speak Spanish at home, making Spanish the second most spoken language of the United States by far. Spanish is the most studied foreign language in United States, with about six million students. With over 50 million native speakers, heritage language speakers and second language speakers, the United States now has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico, although it is not an official language of the country. About half of all American Spanish speakers also assessed themselves as speaking English "very well" in the 2000 U.S. Census. This percentage increased to 57% in the 2013-2017 American Community Survey. The United States is among the Spanish-speaking countries that has its own Academy of the Spanish Language.
Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly, from 470 million to more than 1 billion. David Crystal calculates that, as of 2003, non-native speakers outnumbered native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1. When combining native and non-native speakers, English is the most widely spoken language worldwide.
Language processing has been linked to Broca's area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior inferior frontal gyrus (pars triangularis) (BA45) of the brain. Since then, the approximate region he identified has become known as Broca's area, and the deficit in language production as Broca's aphasia, also called expressive aphasia. Broca's area is now typically defined in terms of the pars opercularis and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, represented in Brodmann's cytoarchitectonic map as Brodmann area 44 and Brodmann area 45 of the dominant hemisphere.
An endangered language, or moribund language, is a language that is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead language". If no one can speak the language at all, it becomes an "extinct language". A dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings, but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. Although languages have always become extinct throughout human history, they are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization, neocolonialism and linguicide (language killing).
Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners. Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries, and they may have grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.
The statistical abilities are effective, but also limited by what qualifies as input, what is done with that input, and by the structure of the resulting output. One should also note that statistical learning (and more broadly, distributional learning) can be accepted as a component of language acquisition by researchers on either side of the "nature and nurture" debate. From the perspective of that debate, an important question is whether statistical learning can, by itself, serve as an alternative to nativist explanations for the grammatical constraints of human language.
It is possible that the kinds of language experience and knowledge gained through the statistical learning of the first language influences one's acquisition of a second language. Some research points to the possibility that the difficulty of learning a second language may be derived from the structural patterns and language cues that one has already picked up from his or her acquisition of first language. In that sense, the knowledge of and skills to process the first language from statistical acquisition may act as a complicating factor when one tries to learn a new language with different sentence structures, grammatical rules, and speech patterns.
Although the phenomenon of statistical learning was first discovered in the context of language acquisition and there is much evidence of its role in that purpose, work since the original discovery has suggested that statistical learning may be a domain general skill and is likely not unique to humans. For example, Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, and Newport found that both adults and infants were able to learn statistical probabilities of “words” created by playing different musical tones (i.e., participants heard the musical notes D, E, and F presented together during training and were able to recognize those notes as a unit at test as compared to three notes that had not been presented together). In non-auditory domains, there is evidence that humans are able to learn statistical visual information whether that information is presented across space, e.g., or time, e.g.. Evidence of statistical learning has also been found in other primates, e.g., and some limited statistical learning abilities have been found even in non-primates like rats. Together these findings suggest that statistical learning may be a generalized learning mechanism that happens to be utilized in language acquisition, rather than a mechanism that is unique to the human infant’s ability to learn his or her language(s).
Much of the early work using statistical learning paradigms focused on the ability for children or adults to learn a single language, consistent with the process of language acquisition for monolingual speakers or learners. However, it is estimated that approximately 60-75% of people in the world are bilingual. More recently, researchers have begun looking at the role of statistical learning for those who speak more than one language. Although there are no reviews on this topic yet, Weiss, Gerfen, and Mitchel examined how hearing input from multiple artificial languages simultaneously can affect the ability to learn either or both languages. Over four experiments, Weiss et al. found that, after exposure to two artificial languages, adult learners are capable of determining word boundaries in both languages when each language is spoken by a different speaker. However, when the two languages were spoken by the same speaker, participants were able learn both languages only when they were “congruent”—when the word boundaries of one language matched the word boundaries of the other. When the languages were incongruent—a syllable that appeared in the middle of a word in one language appeared at the end of the word in the other language—and spoken by a single speaker, participants were able to learn, at best, one of the two languages. A final experiment showed that the inability to learn incongruent languages spoken in the same voice was not due to syllable overlap between the languages but due to differing word boundaries.