Learning the mother tongue

How is the Mother Tongue Acquired

Implementing Mother-tongue

Hong Kong is a homogeneous community both in terms of race (98% Chinese) and language (over 80% speak Cantonese as their mother tongue). However, the historical and sociolinguistic dynamics there are such that English is the dominant medium of instruction at secondary level and above, while Modern Mandarin, a non-indigenous Chinese (standard) dialect, provides the norms for both the use of Chin...

Relational Algebra: Mother Tongue - XQuery: Fluent

This work may be seen as a further proof of the versatility of the relational database model. Here, we add XQuery to the catalog of languages which RDBMSs are able to “speak” fluently. Given suitable relational encodings of sequences and ordered, unranked trees—the two data structures that form the backbone of the XML and XQuery data models—we describe a compiler that translates XQuery expressi...

The Acquisition of Clicks by Non-mother-tongue Speakers

It is generally accepted that non-mother-tongue speakers acquiring Xhosa often encounter difficulties with the acquisition of clicks. This paper addresses this issue by focussing on some of the results obtained from 18 Englishand Afrikaans-speaking children aged between 10;0 and 13;0, acquiring Xhosa as a third language in the primary school. The results firstly indicate that non-mother-tongue ...

Intelligent Agent for Acquisition of the Mother Tongue Vocabulary

This paper describes the following: firstly, the basic ideas of a system that simulate how we consider that a child acquires the mother tongue vocabulary and makes the correspondences between objects, words and senses; secondly: the mechanism for a system that can learn the mother tongue vocabulary using observations and, thirdly, how to make an intelligent agent that can behave like a little c...