Vocabulary acquisition is one of the hottest research fields in English learning, which has aroused researchers’ great attention in recent years. However, their focus is on vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies and receptive lexical ability, seldom to productive lexical ability. Writing is an important productive ability for EFL learners, and a myriad of writing researches show that i...

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing ...

A commentary on Deaf children's non-verbal working memory is impacted by their language experience. The ability to keep information in mind for processing is known as working memory and is vital for learning. Children who have difficulty keeping up in school may have working memory limitations rather than limitations in the specific tasks they are assigned. In particular, children with function...

As far as incidental vocabulary learning is concerned, the basic contention of the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) is that retention of unfamiliar words is, generally, conditional upon the degree of involvement in processing them. This study examined input modality and incidental vocabulary uptake in a task-induced setting whereby three variously loaded task types (marginal glosses, fill-inta...

Recently, exemplar-based sparse representation phone identification features (Spif ) have shown promising results on large vocabulary speech recognition tasks. However, one problem with exemplar-based techniques is that they are computationally expensive. In this paper, we present two methods to speed up the creation of Spif features. First, we explore a technique to quickly select a subset of ...

Many content-based image mining systems extract local features from images to obtain an image description based on discrete feature occurrences. Such applications require a visual vocabulary also known as visual codebook or visual dictionary to discretize the extracted high-dimensional features to visual words in an efficient yet accurate way. Once such an application operates on images of a ve...

Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR), which is characterized by a high variability of the speech, is the most challenging task in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Believing that the evaluation of ASR systems on relevant and common speech corpora is one of the key factors that help accelerating research, we present, in this paper, a benchmark comparison of the performances o...

This work explores the use of unsupervised morph segmentation along with statistical language models for the task of vocabulary expansion. Unsupervised vocabulary expansion has large potential for improving vocabulary coverage and performance in different natural language processing tasks, especially in lessresourced settings on morphologically rich languages. We propose a combination of unsupe...