Gestural reorganization under rate pressure interacts with learned language-specific phonotactics

The Gestural Abilities of Children with Specific Language Impairment

Gestural abilities of children with specific language impairment.

BACKGROUND Specific language impairment (SLI) is diagnosed when language is significantly below chronological age expectations in the absence of other developmental disorders, sensory impairments or global developmental delays. It has been suggested that gesture may enhance communication in children with SLI by providing an alternative means to convey words or extend utterances. However, gestur...

First-language phonotactics in second-language listening.

Highly proficient German users of English as a second language, and native speakers of American English, listened to nonsense sequences and responded whenever they detected an embedded English word. The responses of both groups were equivalently facilitated by preceding context that both by English and by German phonotactic constraints forced a boundary at word onset (e.g., lecture was easier t...

Phonetic knowledge, phonotactics an automatic language id

This study explores a multilingual phonotactic approach to automatic language identification using Broadcast News data. The definition of a multilingual phoneset is discussed and an upper limit on the performance of the phonotactic approach is estimated by eliminating any degradation due to recognition errors. This upper bound is compared to automatic language identification based on a phonotac...

The gestural origins of language.

The idea that language evolved from manual gestures rather than primate calls dates back at least to the 18th century, and was revived in modern form by the anthropologist, Gordon W. Hewes, in 1973. The main sources of current evidence are: (1) Signed languages invented by deaf communities share with speech the essential characteristics of language, including such properties as reference, gener...