Features of the development of the semantic side of speech in junior schoolchildren with mental retardation

The article discusses the problem of education of children with disabilities, which is relevant today due to the objective difficulties of social functioning and the child's entry into society. It is known that the basis of a person's speech organization is vocabulary, the shortcomings of which significantly complicate the process of social adaptation. The features of the intellectual and speech development of students with mental retardation limit the ability of these children to understand the speech of others, to adequately express their own thoughts and lead to an inferiority of social and everyday orientation. Consequently, one of the urgent areas of work with children with mental retardation should be the formation and development of vocabulary, characterized by sufficiency and usefulness, in terms of the volume of vocabulary, semantics and syntagmatic characteristics. The solution of this practical problem will allow primary schoolchildren with intellectual disabilities to expand their vocabulary, to form their basic cognitive processes, in the structure of which speech occupies one of the basic positions. To study the level of formation of the semantic side of speech of children with intellectual underdevelopment at the present stage, we conducted a psychological and pedagogical study, in which 1376 schoolchildren from Kaluga and Obninsk, Kaluga region, took part. The diagnostic results made it possible to reveal the fact that with mental retardation, operations and levels of speech utterance generation (semantic, linguistic, sensorimotor levels) are impaired to varying degrees. The most underdeveloped are highly organized, complex levels (semantic, linguistic), requiring a high degree of formation of the operations of analysis, synthesis, generalization, the sensorimotor level of speech in these children suffers in different ways. The study showed that the symptomatology and mechanism of speech disorders in these children are determined not only by the presence of a general underdevelopment of the cerebral systems, which causes systemic speech impairment, but also local pathology on the part of systems directly related to speech, which further complicates the picture of speech impairments in mentally retarded children.

API2CAN: a dataset & service for canonical utterance generation for REST APIs

Objectives Recently natural language interfaces (e.g., chatbots) have gained enormous attention. Such interfaces execute underlying application programming interfaces (APIs) based on the user's utterances to perform tasks (e.g., reporting weather). Supervised approaches for building such interfaces rely upon a large set of user utterances paired with APIs. Collecting such pairs is typically starts with obtaining initial utterances for a given API method. Generating initial utterances can be considered as a machine translation task in which an API method is translated into an utterance. However, the key challenge is the lack of training samples for training domain-independent translation models. In this paper, we propose a dataset for training supervised models to generate initial utterances for APIs. Data description The dataset contains 14,370 pairs of API methods and utterances. It is built automatically by converting method descriptions of a large number of APIs to user utterances; and it is cleaned manually to ensure quality. The dataset is also accompanied with a set of microservices (e.g., translating API methods to utterances) which can facilitate the process of collecting training samples for building natural language interfaces.

DECODING THE AUTHOR'S IDEA OF A SPEECH UTTERANCE USING THE METHOD OF DENOTATIVE TEXT ANALYSIS

Данная статья посвящена описанию проведенного исследования, целью которого является изучение замысла или предмета речевой деятельности путем последовательного анализа каждого этапа порождения речевого высказывания от внешней формы текста до замысла автора по модели А.А. Леонтьева. Для проведения данного исследования были поставлены и решены задачи визуализации операции определения основных смысловых единиц предметного содержания речевого высказывания, визуализации операции определения «иерархии» смысловых единиц в «контексте» речевого сообщения и визуализации операции определения последовательности отображения смысловых элементов в речевом высказывании. Для анализа результатов, полученных на каждом этапе исследования, используются различные средства, такие как существующие программы семантического анализа текста и методика построения денотатного графа А.И. Новикова. Данная работа проведена для определения замысла автора на материале текстов англоязычных блогов, так как данные тексты могут быть рассмотрены как речевое высказывание, представленное в письменной форме, имеющее свою интенцию и направленное на адресата. The present paper is devoted to the investigation of the intention of a speaker or decoding the author's idea of a speech utterance. The purpose of this research is to study the idea or subject of speech activity by analyzing each stage of speech utterance generation from the external form of the text to the author's idea according to the model of A.A. Leontiev. To conduct this study some tasks were set and solved such as the task of visualizing of the operation of determining the basic semantic units of the subject content of speech, rendering of the operation of the definition of "hierarchy" semantic units in the "context" of a voice message, and visualizing of the operation of determining the display order of semantic elements in speech utterance. To analyze the results obtained at each stage of the study, various tools are used, such as existing programs for semantic text analysis and the method of constructing a denotative graph by A.I. Novikov. This work is carried out to determine the author's intention based on the material of texts of English-language blogs, since these texts can be considered as speech utterances presented in writing, having its own intention and directed at the addressee.

Characteristics of Language Behavior and Speech Activity in Children with Autistic Disorders: Theoretical Aspect

Speech development of a child with autism does not always take place at the appropriate age and does not always obey the laws of development of speech functions. According to the analysis of literature sources, the direct study of speech activity of children with autistic disorders requires a more detailed study. According to our predictions, a child with autistic disorders of older preschool age due to the peculiarities of communicative and behavioral spheres will show a low level of speech activity, which can be explained directly by the specificity of speech development along with limited language experience and insufficient knowledge of language and its use in communication. Language behavior consists of two complementary and interrelated processes: psychological formation (generation) of speech utterance and perception of the expanded speech of the interlocutor. The model of speech utterance generation includes five consecutive, interconnected stages (phases) identified by O.O. Leontiev (1967): the motive of utterance; the idea of expression; internal programming; lexical and grammatical development of the utterance; implementation of speech expression in external speech. Speech activity is one of the many forms of general activity, a reflection of the needs that arise in accordance with specific communication situations, a prerequisite and an important component of language behavior. The term "speech activity" is considered by us in the sense of the presence of a motive for speech utterance and direct speech utterance, which may occur as a reaction-response to the interlocutor's remark or as a desire to inform the interlocutor of their own thoughts, experiences, emotions, needs.

The core vocabulary of South African Afrikaans-speaking Grade R learners without disabilities

Background: Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can enable individuals with little or no functional speech to communicate functionally in a variety of communication contexts. AAC systems for individuals who are not (yet) fully literate often require that the vocabulary for the system be preselected. By including the most commonly- and most frequently-used words (core vocabulary) in an AAC system, access to novel utterance generation can arguably be facilitated. At present, no Afrikaans core vocabulary list based on children’s speech samples exists.Objectives: This study aimed to identify the most frequently- and commonly-used words of South African Afrikaans-speaking Grade R learners without disabilities.Method: Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 12 Afrikaans-speaking Grade R learners during regular preschool activities. Samples were transcribed and analysed to determine the number of different words used, the frequency with which each word was used, as well as the commonality of word use across the 12 participants.Results: A total of 239 words met the criteria for inclusion in the core vocabulary (words used with a frequency of more than 0.05% in the sample, and used by at least half of the participants). These words accounted for 79.4% of words used in the entire speech sample.Conclusion: The established core vocabulary consists of a relatively small set of words that was found to represent a large proportion of speech. AAC team members may consider including these words on Afrikaans AAC systems that are intended to give access to a measure of novel utterance generation.

Automated Utterance Generation

Conversational AI assistants are becoming popular and question-answering is an important part of any conversational assistant. Using relevant utterances as features in question-answering has shown to improve both the precision and recall for retrieving the right answer by a conversational assistant. Hence, utterance generation has become an important problem with the goal of generating relevant utterances (sentences or phrases) from a knowledge base article that consists of a title and a description. However, generating good utterances usually requires a lot of manual effort, creating the need for an automated utterance generation. In this paper, we propose an utterance generation system which 1) uses extractive summarization to extract important sentences from the description, 2) uses multiple paraphrasing techniques to generate a diverse set of paraphrases of the title and summary sentences, and 3) selects good candidate paraphrases with the help of a novel candidate selection algorithm.

COGNITIVE BASES OF CONVERTIBILITY IN VERBS OF THE "FLIESEN" TYPE AND SUCH CONSTRUCTIONS AS «VERSEHEN MIT FLIESEN» IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

The article features the role of predication in the process of actual utterance generation. Predication forms the logical structure of an abstract model situation, whose components are connected by logical valency. Reflection of reality in the mind of the speaker occurs in the form of logical-grammatical predicates. A predicative sign of the logical-grammatical category of predicativity constitutes a sentence. It implies various logical and grammatical predicates. They are immanently inherent in thematic groups of verbs, with the help of which they are actualized in the utterance. The material of the study is represented by such constructions as "versehen mit Fliesen" and similar verbs, e.g. "fliesen". The prepositional / unrepresentative group of the noun acts as a semantic marker in the thematic group of verbs. The research employs H. Glintz’s test elimination and proves that the semantic marker is a part of the actual predicate. Convertibility of constructions with a prepositional / non-prepositional noun and the corresponding verb allows us to conclude that they have a common logical-semantic predicate in the "deep" plane. The results of the research can be successfully used in courses of theoretical and systematizing grammar, stylistics and text interpretation.