From Intricacy to Conciseness: A Progressive Transfer Strategy for EEG-Based Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition

Emotion plays a significant role in human daily activities, and it can be effectively recognized from EEG signals. However, individual variability limits the generalization of emotion classifiers across subjects. Domain adaptation (DA) is a reliable method to solve the issue. Due to the nonstationarity of EEG, the inferior-quality source domain data bring negative transfer in DA procedures. To solve this problem, an auto-augmentation joint distribution adaptation (AA-JDA) method and a burden-lightened and source-preferred JDA (BLSP-JDA) approach are proposed in this paper. The methods are based on a novel transfer idea, learning the specific knowledge of the target domain from the samples that are appropriate for transfer, which reduces the difficulty of transfer between two domains. On multiple emotion databases, our model shows state-of-the-art performance.

Positive and Negative Lexical Transfer in English Vocabulary Acquisition

The aim of the paper is to explore the appearance of positive and negative lexical transfer of plurilingual learners in English vocabulary acquisition. Cross-linguistic influences in the study are examined by word translation tasks from Croatian into English, including true, partial, and deceptive cognates or false friends in English, German, and Italian. The results have revealed different language dominances and positive or negative transfer manifestation. Lexical transfer from L4 German is manifested positively, but the Italian language seems to play a dominant role in the acquisition of English vocabulary. The effect of Croatian is manifested both positively and negatively. The study has confirmed previous psycholinguistic studies on the complexity of lexical connections in plurilingual learners and the dynamic interaction of various learning-based factors, such as language recency, proficiency, exposure to languages, the order in which languages are learned, and the formal context in language learning.

Influence of Negative Transfer of Dialects on English Pronunciation and Teaching Strategies

In the process of students’ learning English pronunciation, some pronunciation errors caused by the negative transfer of Chinese are caused. If these negative transfer effects of Chinese cannot be overcome, it will hinder the improvement of students’ listening and speaking skills. This article analyzes the impact of negative dialect transfer on English phonetics learning from three aspects: phoneme, coherent pronunciation and intonation, and proposes some coping strategies, hoping to instruct teachers to help students overcome the impact of negative dialect transfer and improve their English pronunciation level during the listening and speaking teaching process.

On the Role of Distinctive Features of British English Sounds in the Cartoon Peppa Pig for Chinese Learners to Conquer Mother Tongue’s Negative Transfer

With the process of globalization and integration, more and more people tend to be bilingual. Undoubtedly, mastering a second language is significant. This thesis aims to explore how to conquer the difficulties in learning British English sounds through analyzing a British cartoon Peppa Pig.Chapter one begins with the research background, significance and purpose of research. The thesis takes the cartoon Peppa Pig as the starting point to demonstrate the role of distinctive features for Chinese learners to conquer negative transfer. The empirical research could be found in Chapter two, because of requiring to know the concrete circumstance of Chinese learners.Through the collection and analysis of data, we can know these problems which Chinese learners exist in the process of learning British English.Based on the comparison of Chinese and British English, Chapter three clarifies the difficulties in learning British English. As for Chinese learners, mastering distinctive features can promote learners to master British English sounds better than stress and rhythm. Chapter four states the role of the distinctive features in helping conquer Chinese negative transfer in the cartoon Peppa Pig. The final chapter is the conclusion of this thesis and involves a new study for Chinese learners to learn British English sounds under the distinctive features.

The Impact of Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue On College ESL Learners: Zhejiang Yuexiu University as a Case Study

Negative transfer of mother tongue is a major difficulty that every second language learner has to overcome, especially for those students whose target language is quite different from their mother tongue. With the in-depth development of pluralism in the world, people pay more and more attention to the learning of various languages, especially English. In this situation, the concerns of language researchers on the negative transfer of mother tongue are inevitably boosting. Given this, based on the pertinent theories of the negative language transfer, this study aims to explore the impact of negative language transfer on Chinese college students’ English learning through a questionnaire poll with some students of Zhejiang Yuexiu University as the research objects. The results of the study are mainly shown in two aspects: the impact of the negative transfer of mother tongue on college students’ oral learning and college students’ writing learning. At the end of the article, the author puts forward the cultural differences between China and the Western countries that lead to the negative transfer of mother tongue, and some effective methods to help Chinese college English learners reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue in their process of English learning.

The Influence of Pontianak Melayu Dialect Towards the Students’ Pronunciation of English Speech Sounds

This qualitative research attempted to review the influence of the Pontianak Melayu dialect on students’ English pronunciation of English speech sounds. The objectives of the study were to explain the influence of Pontianak Melayu dialect on students’ English pronunciation of vowels, consonants, diphthongs, and consonant clusters and to explain the way teachers play their roles to improve students’ pronunciation. This study used a qualitative case study design. The subjects of this study were 17 students from seventh-grade of Junior High School who are originally from the Pontianak. The data were collected by using questionnaires, students’ recordings, observation checklists, and interviews. The results of this study show that the Pontianak Melayu dialect contributed insignificant positive transfer on English vowel sounds [ɔ:], [ʊ], and [ɒ]. It gave significant negative transfer on English consonant sounds [f, v, k, s]. It also gave insignificant negative transfer on English diphthong sound [aɪ]. It gave significant negative transfer on English consonant cluster sounds [fr] and [kl], and significant negative transfer on three consonant clusters. Meanwhile, the teacher did play her role in improving students’ pronunciation. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the Pontianak Melayu dialect did not strongly give positive and negative transfer to the students’ English pronunciation. The easiness might be caused by the similarities between the Pontianak Melayu language and English. The difficulties might be caused by the lack of students’ knowledge about correct pronunciation, lack of pronunciation practice, students’ inability to recognize the words, and spelling interference. In teaching pronunciation processes, the teachers and the students should be supported each other to reach the best achievement. The teachers taught by supporting media such as English songs, western movies or English short stories, etc. Meanwhile, the students practice more and more.