Assessment  of  grammatical  knowledge  is  a  rather  neglected  area  of  research  in  the  field with  many  open  questions  (Purpura,  2004).  The  present  research  incorporates  recent proposals  about  the  nature  of  grammatical  development  to  create  a  framework  consisting of dimensions of complexity, range and strength, and studies which dimension(s) can best predict the stat...

This thesis presents an initial investigation of the semantic-syntactic interface in a sub-group of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): the Grammatical (G)-SLI group. Previous research of this group has largely focused on their morphosyntactic abilities and more recently on the morpho-phonological interface. In contrast, the semantic ability of children with SLI in general is an a...

This study aimed at investigating the effects of grammatical error correction on EFL learners’ accuracy. Twenty-two male and female senior students were chosen randomly to respond to a questionnaire investigating their beliefs about immediate grammatical error correction.  Actually, the study was conducted in order to answer this question: what is the effect of grammatical error feedback on stu...

1 Background The alternation of two languages inside and outside of sentences –codeswitching (CS hereafter) has been studied mainly from two perspectives, i.e. grammatical/syntactic and pragmatic/discourse (Romaine, 1995). Although these two aspects are related and a knowledge of one helps understand the other (Myers-Scotton, 2002:Chapter 2), because of a limit in space, I will focus on the str...

Pinyin-to-character conversion is an important task for Chinese natural language processing tasks. Previous work mainly focused on n-gram language models and machine learning approaches, or with additional hand-crafted or automatic rule-based post-processing. There are two problems unable to solve for word n-gram language model: out-of-vocabulary word recognition and long-distance grammatical c...

A totally ordered tree is a tree equipped with an additional total order on its nodes. It provides a formal model for data that comes with both a hierarchical and a sequential structure; one example for such data are natural language sentences, where a sequential structure is given by word order, and a hierarchical structure is given by grammatical relations between words. In this paper, we stu...

This paper presents a pioneer study on acoustic modeling for continuous Cantonese speech recognition. It starts from the context-independent modeling of sub-syllabic units, namely INITIALs and FINALs, and then moves on to examine a number of context-dependent models that characterize intra-syllable co-articulation. The acoustic models are trained with a large database of Cantonese polysyllabic ...

Several studies have shown that the task of reordering source sentences to match the target order is crucial to improve the performance of Statistical Machine Translation, especially when the source and target languages have significantly divergent grammatical structures. In fact, it is now become a standard practice to include reordering as a pre-processing step or as an integrated module (wit...