Via Great Minds Working and Slashdot: neurobiologists at MIT are studying the role of the basal ganglia in bird songs, in an effort to learn more of the BG‘s role in human L1A (first language acquisition) & language processing. Here’s MIT’s press release I think the fact that this comparison between birds and humans is […]
Category Archives: research
As of last night I finished up a submission to Eurospeech 2005 with Abhinav Sethy. I’ve posted it here: Modeling and Automating Detection of Errors in Arabic Language Learner Speech. In a nutshell: Understanding bad-accent/bad-grammar learner speech is hard for humans. And what’s hard for humans is even harder for machines. Compound a relative lack […]
Last week marked the end of my Second Language Acquisition class with Dr. John Schumann over at UCLA. The class was amazingly good. Dr. Schumann is an old-school applied linguist who, halfway through his career, decided that studying applied linguistics from a cognitive psychology background was futile without more practical grounding in how the brain […]
The Burnt Out Ends of Smoky Weeks
25-Feb-05Late yesterday afternoon was an anti-climactic end to a weeklong binge of paper-writing, as my advisor and I sat down to examine our ICALT paper and realized that–because of lack of performance data on the ASR system that my work receives as input, and because of lack of overall pedagogical effectiveness of our project–the paper […]
TactLang on Slashdot
04-Jan-05Neat: our Tactical Language project was featured on slashdot this morning. The main link in the article pointed to a journal paper written by Ravi Purushotma, documenting his vision of customizing The Sims to teach German. From reading his paper (and his updates to the paper), it is unclear if this Sims system is more […]
Home English Home
12-Dec-04A wonderful bit of web-based English pedagogy. Perhaps I can use this as inspiration for my work in our Tactical Langauge Training System.