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Brian MacWhinney
Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) and TalkBank corpora. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope, an experimental control system for the Macintosh; E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform; and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research. Biography MacWhinney earned a B.A. in rhetoric an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. As a consequence, the term ''conversation analysis'' has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as ''EMCA''. History Conversation analysis was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transana
Transana is a software package used to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana used to be a GPL licensed software, but has become proprietary software in recent releases. Features Transana lets the user analyze and manage your data, transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelecris en français fdp ated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The goal is to find a new way to focus on the data, and manage large collections of video and audio files and clips. History Transana is a product of the Digital Insight Project, and it is being developed with funding from the National Science Foundation through the National Partnership for Computational Infrastructure at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the TalkBank Project at Carnegie Mellon University. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CHILDES
The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a corpus established in 1984 by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first language acquisition. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and it now has contents (transcripts, audio, and video) in 26 languages from 130 different corpora, all of which are publicly available worldwide. Recently, CHILDES has been made into a component of the larger corpus TalkBank, which also includes language data from aphasics, second language acquisition, conversation analysis, and classroom language learning. CHILDES is mainly used for analyzing the language of young children and directed to the child speech of adults. During the early 1990s, as computational resources capable of easily manipulating the data volumes found in CHILDES became commonly available, there was a significant increase in the number of studies of child language acquisition that made use of it. CHILDES is currently direct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech Corpus
A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions. In speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models (which can then be used with a speech recognition or speaker identification engine). In linguistics, spoken corpora are used to do research into phonetic, conversation analysis, dialectology and other fields. A corpus is one such database. Corpora is the plural of corpus (i.e. it is many such databases). There are two types of Speech Corpora: # Read Speech – which includes: #* Book excerpts #* Broadcast news #* Lists of words #* Sequences of numbers # Spontaneous Speech – which includes: #* Dialogs – between two or more people (includes meetings; one such corpus is the KEC); #* Narratives – a person telling a story (one such corpus is the Buckeye Corpus); #* Map-tasks – one person explains a route on a map to another; #* Appointment-tasks – two people try to find a common meeti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communication
Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquiry studying them. There are many disagreements about its precise definition. John Peters argues that the difficulty of defining communication emerges from the fact that communication is both a Universality (philosophy), universal phenomenon and a Communication studies, specific discipline of institutional academic study. One definitional strategy involves limiting what can be included in the category of communication (for example, requiring a "conscious intent" to persuade). By this logic, one possible definition of communication is the act of developing Semantics, meaning among Subject (philosophy), entities or Organization, groups through the use of sufficiently mutually understood signs, symbols, and Semiosis, semiotic conventions. An im ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules and representation. The capacity to use language successfully requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign. Human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: ''relativization'', ''complementation'' and ''coordination''. There are two ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Second Language Acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education. A central theme in SLA research is that of ''interlanguage:'' the idea that the language that learners use is not simply the result of differences between the languages that they already know and the language that they are learning, but a complete language system in its own right, with its own systematic rules. This interlanguage gradually develops as learners are exposed to the targeted language. The order in which learners acquire features of their new language stays rem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context. Social theory In the humanities and social sciences, discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourse is a soci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aphasia
Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in the Global North. Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases (such as dementias). To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's speech or language must be significantly impaired in one (or more) of the four aspects of communication following acquired brain injury. Alternatively, in the case of progressive aphasia, it must have significantly declined over a short period of time. The four aspects of communication are auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading and writing, and functional communication. The difficulties of people with aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words, to losing the ability to speak, read, or write; intelligence, however, is unaffected. Expressive lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
