The author went to the United States to study applied linguistics. Although he was there for nine months, his English proficiency did not improve as much as he had hoped, considering that he was using English almost exclusively every day. After his time in the United States, he spent 10 months in Australia working and traveling on a working…

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

This paper presents a new version of Robo-Sensei's NLP (Natural Language Processing) system which updates the version currently available as the software package "ROBO-SENSEI: Personal Japanese Tutor" (Nagata, 2004). Robo-Sensei's NLP system includes a lexicon, a morphological generator, a word segmentor, a morphological parser, a syntactic…

This paper discusses several design issues in the development of a new online Japanese textbook, called "Robo-Sensei: Japanese Curriculum with Automated Feedback". When it is completed, the new online textbook will present a full Japanese curriculum. It extends a previously published online software program, "Robo-Sensei: Personal Japanese Tutor"…

For the whole of the last half-century, most theoretical syntacticians have assumed that knowledge of language is different from the tasks of speaking and understanding. There have been some dissenters, but, by and large, this view still holds sway. This book takes a different view: it continues the task set in hand by Kempson et al (2001) of…

This paper describes four writing systems and discusses research on phonetic coding, eye movements, and cortical processing in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. Research on word recognition in English, Japanese Kanji and Kana, and Korean Hangul are presented. (Author/MT)

Experiences in teaching French verb tenses to Japanese students are used to illustrate teaching techniques that not only help students acquire verb forms but also present them as a coherent linguistic unity tied to fundamental communicative needs. A variety of exercises are included. (MSE)

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…

In this brief report, we summarize the results of an experiment on the interpretation of English word order patterns by adult Korean- and Japanese-speaking second language learners. Our results suggest that a direct relationship between a construction's word order and the structure of the corresponding event has a greater facilitative effect on…

ALICE, a multimedia framework for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI) at Carnegie Mellon University (PA), consists of a set of tools for building a number of different types of ICALI programs in any language. Its Natural Language Processing tools for syntactic error detection, morphological analysis, and generation of…

Describes development and evaluation of an error analysis procedure for a computer-assisted language learning program using natural language processing techniques. The program can be used for learning passive voice in Japanese on any World Wide Web browser. The program enables learners to type sentences freely, detects errors, and displays…