DATA ANALYSIS: LINGUISTICS ➤


‘Sing a song of statistics’) be used to examine the testimony of law enforcers as readily as that of law breakers. The educational, psychomedical and


social interests are not discrete, with large areas of overlap between them. Development of language in early years is a strong marker of likely future patterns in achievement and behaviour, with economic and policy implications. There is consequent interest in understanding the mechanisms involved: if factors can be identifi ed which either affect or predict development, the possibility arises of potential intervention. That these areas are, from a researcher’s viewpoint, particularly accessible to machine analysis makes them even more attractive sociopolitical investment targets. There is, as a result, a plethora of recent analytic studies targeting this triple point in numerous languages and contexts. Contexts, these days, include ICT mediating technologies and their rapidly shifting al hierarchies. Within the life of Scientifi c Computing World, email has moved from being something unavailable to young learners through a phase when they colonised it and made it their own to a current state where they regard it with disdain. That rapid shift of status between ‘new literacies’ is refl ected in the infl uence


production and monitoring’. South African researcher Adrienne Watson observes[7]


that


‘from a linguistic perspective, the “in group” variations in multisemiotic expression’ within SMS communication are ‘creative and indicative of group belonging’. Language can be lost as well as gained. There


Variation of historical spellings from modern standardised equivalents, per text corpus by decade, over time. From Baron et al (2009)[11]


which a technology has on linguistic and learning development, and the mismatch between educator and educatee in favoured communication modes. Studies suggest that the most stable and


widely infl uential forces on written and read language development are now not the book, the web page or the email, but the condensed coding of cellular short message systems (SMS ‘texts’) or online ‘chat’ channels. One analysis of ‘syntactic complexity, productive use of grammatical gender, and lexical diversity’ in dyadic chat interactions within one German learner group[6]


suggests that second language


learners ‘appear to use the increased online (i.e. moment-by-moment) planning time afforded by chat to engage in careful


Locating the building blocks


From the abstract to Structure of sounds (2009), by Silke Telkemeyer et al: ‘Understanding the rapidly developing building blocks of speech perception in infancy requires a close look at the auditory prerequisites for speech sound processing. Pioneering studies have demonstrated that hemispheric specialisations for language processing are already present in early infancy. However, whether these computational asymmetries can be considered a function of linguistic attributes or a consequence of basic temporal signal properties is under debate.


‘Several studies in adults link hemispheric specialisation for certain aspects of speech perception to an asymmetry in cortical tuning and reveal that the auditory cortices are differentially sensitive to spectrotemporal features of speech. Applying concurrent electrophysiological (EEG) and haemodynamic (near-infrared spectroscopy) recording to newborn infants listening to temporally


10


structured non-speech signals, we provide evidence that newborns process non-linguistic acoustic stimuli that share critical temporal features with language in a differential manner. The newborn brain preferentially processes temporal modulations especially relevant for phoneme perception. In line with multi-time-resolution conceptions, modulations on the time scale of phonemes elicit strong bilateral cortical responses. ‘Our data furthermore suggests that responses to slow acoustic modulations are lateralised to the right hemisphere. That is, the newborn auditory cortex is sensitive to the temporal structure of the auditory input and shows an emerging tendency for functional asymmetry. Hence, our fi ndings support the hypothesis that development of speech perception is linked to basic capacities in auditory processing. From birth, the brain is tuned to critical temporal properties of linguistic signals to facilitate one of the major needs of humans: to communicate.’


SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD DECEMBER 2010/JANUARY 2011


are numerous accounts of this happening in migrants, but it can also arise from isolation (physical or social), injury, traumatic stress and any number of other causes. Language also changes radically over time, both globally and in individuals. We live in a time when shifts from one language to another, or the combined problems and rewards of maintained parallel multilingualism[8]


, are an


increasingly common phenomenon. I have several students who completed


most of their primary education in Somali, secondary in German or Swedish, and now tackle tertiary learning in English speaking societies. All three processes (acquisition, change, loss) ‘take place in, and are determined by, a complex and multifactorial web of language internal and language external infl uences’ and, like the signs of which language is constructed, ‘the impact of each individual factor can only be determined on the basis of a careful consideration of its interplay with all other factors’[9]


. Such a large and complex web


of interrelated infl uences would have been impossible to tackle meaningfully before the advent of powerful scientifi c computing hardware software. Another result of computer mediated two-way communications is the rise of non- geographic communities. The net result, in the long-term and global perspective, is a widening and accelerating stability of linguistic norms, but often increasingly rapid local segmentation. More than any other area of research


activity, computing is an actively participant observer whose continually developing analytic muscle is all that keeps it abreast of its own fractally expanding infl uence on change. It’s all a very long way from manual excavation of Hamlet, parts of speech, and Marlowe, but is even more exciting.


References and sources


For a full list of the sources and references cited in this article, please visit www.scientifi c-computing.com/features/ referencesdec10.php


www.scientifi c-computing.com


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