1,721,094 research outputs found
L'inglese medico: guida al self-study
No full textIl volume promuove lo studio autonomo della lingua inglese come principio fondamentale dell'apprendimento che va verificato "dal vivo" e in una prospettiva internazionale. I percorsi e i consigli pratici che il libro propone aiutano il medico e lo studente di Medicina a migliorare le proprie capacità linguistiche (leggere, scriver, parlare, ascoltare) e a formulare un programma di apprendimento adeguato alle proprie esigenze
Dickens and the stenographic mind
No full textThe topic of this book is stenography and how it relates to Dickens’s life and work. The book covers the period from Dickens’s learning of Gurney’s Brachygraphy in 1827/28 to his teaching of shorthand to Arthur Stone in 1859 – almost his entire working life. It examines all existing shorthand sources in detail, particularly the shorthand notebooks Dickens compiled with Arthur Stone and the shorthand letters he wrote from Gads Hill Place and Tavistock House. The first half of the book (chapters 1-4) explores Dickens’s shorthand as a 19th century textual practice, arguing that the manual’s alphabetical characteristics were the defining elements of the mindset that Dickens acquired through learning and practising shorthand. Drawing on evidence from cognitive psychology, these chapters argue that Dickens acquired a specific cognitive disposition towards the processing and manipulation of language, defined in chapter 4 as the stenographic mind. The second half of the book (chapters 5-8) examines Dickens’s stenography in relation to his literary and non-literary production. It explores the impact of shorthand on Dickens’s law and parliamentary reporting (chapter 5) and how it is expressed through the phonetic speech of Pickwick (chapter 6) and stenographic representations in his literary work (chapter 7). Chapter 8 draws together the different threads of the book, arguing that the Gurney system, with its emphasis on the creative manipulation of vowels, constituted a pedagogy for reading spoken words and hearing written ones, which Dickens passed on to his readers as a new kind of stenographic literacy
The use of authentic discourse for listening comprehension in language teaching materials
No full textApplied psycholinguistic models of English phonaesthetic effects in L1 and L2: a theoretical and experimental study
No full textThe area of sound symbolism has been the subject of linguistic investigation throughout the twentieth century. These linguistic studies, which have generally involved detailed analyses of the meanings connoted by individual phonemes both within and across languages and of their morphological status, have tended to present sound symbolism as an area which is prone to subjectivity (see Allan 1986, 250 for a summary). As a result it is an area which is regarded with suspicion in applied fields.
The article is in 2 parts. The first (1.0 ff.) seeks to revive the interest of psycholinguists in the phenomenon fo sound symbolism by using a limited theoretical definition – the concept of phoaesthesia developed by Firth (1930). A “spreading activation” model (par.2 ff.) is suggested to account for the recognition of phonaesthetic effects in L1. The second part (par.3), an experimental study based on the theoretical and working definition of phonaesthesia set out in 1.0. examines Italian students’ judgements of the connotations of objectively tested English “phonaesthemes”. The results show that L2 students are generally sensitive to phonaesthetic effects even at an elementary level. They initially adopt a contrastive strategy using phonological cues only and work towards a progressively more semantic strategy in the course of language learning
Acquiring regular and irregular inflection in a language with verb classes
No full textThe dual mechanism model claims that only rule-generated inflections are productive; that is, can be applied to words borrowed from other languages or derived from other grammatical categories (e.g. verbs derived from nouns or adjectives). Productivity, high generalisability and insensitivity to type or token frequency effects are intertwined properties of rule-generated inflections across languages (Pinker, 1991). We tested this cross-linguistic prediction in two experiments investigating Italian children’s spontaneous performance with the past definite (Experiment 1) and their elicited performance with the past definite and the past participle (Experiment 2). Our findings show that performance profiles with productive and unproductive inflection cannot be “categorically distinguished”. The phonologically transparent morphological patterns exhibited by an unproductive verb class are high in generalisabilty when children make errors with root change verbs. The morphological patterns exhibited by a semi-productive class, which in Italian is consistently used with verbs derived from adjectives, are more correctly applied when forms are high in token frequency
Cognitive approaches to sound symbolism: a reinterpretation of JR Firth's theory of phonaesthesia
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