1,721,005 research outputs found
Speech Errors as a Window on Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Perspective
Full text linkWe are so used to speaking in our native language that we take this ability for granted. We think that speaking is easy and thinking is hard. From the perspective of cognitive science, this view is wrong. Utterances are complex things, and generating them is an act of linguistic creativity, in the face of the computational complexity of the task. On occasion, utterance generation goes awry and the speaker’s output is different from the planned utterance, such as a speaker who says “Fancy getting your model renosed!” when “fancy getting your nose remodeled” was intended. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Fromkin 1971) linguists have not taken speech error data to be informative about speakers’ linguistic knowledge or mental grammars. The paper strives to put language production errors back onto the linguistic data map. If errors involve units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes and phrases, which may be exchanged, moved around or stranded during spoken production, this shows that they are both representational and processing units. If similar units are converged upon via multiple methods (e.g. native speaker judgments, language corpora, speech error corpora, psycholinguistic experiments) those units have stronger empirical support. All other things being equal, theories of language that can account for both representation and processing are to be preferred
Universal Design and Communication Rights: Meeting the Challenge of Linguistic and Communicative Diversity
Full text linkThis essay discusses Universal Design (UD) with respect to language and communication rights. Because Universal Design approaches aim at meeting human variability from the get-go, they must be able to address linguistic and communicative variability. Variability must individual variation in language functions and communication activities in the absence of disability and variability when speech, language or communicative disorders are present. Current conceptualizations of speech, language and communication disabilities take a person-centered approach and a bio-psycho-social framework of health and disease (WHO-ICF) that encompass three ontological domains: body functions and structures, activities, and participation. The framework crucially lists environmental factors that interact with each domain. I illustrate how UD can successfully be integrated with an ICF framework in the domain of speech, language and communication impairments; I then propose that the ICF model can be extended beyond disability to non-clinical populations and settings, to meet the communication rights for all
Design for Inclusion. Dialogues on Universal Design: Theory, Ethics and Practice
No full textCurrent ideas about human diversity often highlight the importance of the relational and dynamic nature of interactions across different domains of human function, activities and participation. Universal Design (UD) is defined as design that is usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible and without the need for adaptation or specialization. The term 'universal is intended to embrace human diversity, making it the opposite of the one-size-fits-all approach. This book will be of interest to all those working in the field of universal design and inclusivity
Transforming our World through Universal Design for Human Development
Full text linkAn environment, or any building product or service in it, should ideally be designed to meet the needs of all those who wish to use it. Universal Design is the design and composition of environments, products, and services so that they can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people, regardless of their age, size, ability or disability. It creates products, services and environments that meet people’s needs. In short, Universal Design is good design.
This book presents the proceedings of UD2022, the 6th International Conference on Universal Design, held from 7 - 9 September 2022 in Brescia, Italy.The conference is targeted at professionals and academics interested in the theme of universal design as related to the built environment and the wellbeing of users, but also covers mobility and urban environments, knowledge, and information transfer, bringing together research knowledge and best practice from all over the world. The book contains 72 papers from 13 countries, grouped into 8 sections and covering topics including the design of inclusive natural environments and urban spaces, communities, neighborhoods and cities; housing; healthcare; mobility and transport systems; and universally- designed learning environments, work places, cultural and recreational spaces. One section is devoted to universal design and cultural heritage, which had a particular focus at this edition of the conference.
The book reflects the professional and disciplinary diversity represented in the UD movement, and will be of interest to all those whose work involves inclusive design
Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension
Full text linkWe use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12 children who received no priming (0). Priming was comparable to that reported for older children and adults. Comprehension of reversible passives with animate participants before and after priming was above chance but did not improve as a result of priming. Young 3-year-olds represent sentences abstractly, have syntactic representations for noun, verb, "surface subject", and "surface object", have semantic representations for "agent" and "patient", and flexibly map the relation between syntax and semantics. Taken together with research on syntactic categories in 2-year-olds, our results provide empirical support for continuity in language acquisition
The Contribution of Argument Structure Constructions to Sentence Meaning
Full text linkWhat types of linguistic information do people use to construct the meaning of a sentence? Most linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension assume that the main determinant of sentence meaning is the verb. This idea was argued explicitly in Healy and Miller (1970). When asked to sort sentences according to their meaning, Healy and Miller found that
participants were more likely to sort sentences according to the main verb in the sentence than according to the subject argument. On the basis of these results, the authors concluded that the verb was the main determinant of sentence meaning. In this study we used the same sorting paradigm to
explore the possibility that there is another strong influence on sentence interpretation: the configuration of complements (the argument structure construction). Our results showed that participants did produce sorts by construction, despite a well-documented tendency for subjects to sort on the basis of a single dimension, which would favor sorts by verb
The act of giving – Sur. A service for sharing and co-producing gifts
No full textSur is the prototype of a relational service for gift production. Sur is aimed at articulating, nourishing and strengthening relationships between the giver and the receiver of the gift. The co-production of personalised gifts is supervised and guided by a designer and supported by a network of crafts(wo)men-makers. Sur provides the opportunity not only to reflect upon the issue “sharing and collaborating”, but also, more in general, upon the role of gifts within services and especially within relational services
Impaired Number Word Production: A Bilingual Chinese-English Case Study
No full textWe report the performance of a bilingual Chinese-English speaker (RC) who makes selective errors on number words in both languages only when the task involved processing the number word phonologically, either in the input modality or in the output modality. RC sustained a mid-cerebral artery occlusion resulting in non-fluent aphasia. Several experimental tasks were used to tap RC’s ability to access numbers in both languages under different contexts. The purpose of these tasks was to examine the patterns of number word production problems in this patient and to functionally locate the deficit within current models of language production
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