人教版高中英语新课程教材中,语言运用（Using Language）是每个单元必不可少的部分,提供了围绕单元中心话题的听、说、读、写的综合性练习,是单元中心话题的延续和升华.如何设计Using Language部分的教学,使自己的教学模式既不落俗套,又能真正体现新课程标准所倡导的教学理念,正是广大一线英语教师一直努力探索的问题.

打磨Using Language,倡导新理念

Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated with smaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out more effectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes.

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Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task.

How the mind works

Inferior temporal (IT) cortex in human and nonhuman primates serves visual object recognition. Computational object-vision models, although continually improving, do not yet reach human performance. It is unclear to what extent the internal representations of computational models can explain the IT representation. Here we investigate a wide range of computational model representations (37 in total), testing their categorization performance and their ability to account for the IT representational geometry. The models include well-known neuroscientific object-recognition models (e.g. HMAX, VisNet) along with several models from computer vision (e.g. SIFT, GIST, self-similarity features, and a deep convolutional neural network). We compared the representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the model representations with the RDMs obtained from human IT (measured with fMRI) and monkey IT (measured with cell recording) for the same set of stimuli (not used in training the models). Better performing models were more similar to IT in that they showed greater clustering of representational patterns by category. In addition, better performing models also more strongly resembled IT in terms of their within-category representational dissimilarities. Representational geometries were significantly correlated between IT and many of the models. However, the categorical clustering observed in IT was largely unexplained by the unsupervised models. The deep convolutional network, which was trained by supervision with over a million category-labeled images, reached the highest categorization performance and also best explained IT, although it did not fully explain the IT data. Combining the features of this model with appropriate weights and adding linear combinations that maximize the margin between animate and inanimate objects and between faces and other objects yielded a representation that fully explained our IT data. Overall, our results suggest that explaining IT requires computational features trained through supervised learning to emphasize the behaviorally important categorical divisions prominently reflected in IT.

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003915&type=printable

Deep supervised, but not unsupervised, models may explain IT cortical representation.

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation (such as semantics, syntax, and phonology). We show (a) how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, (b) how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and (c) how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal.

/pdf/an-integrated-theory-of-language-production-and-5g9jv1yavn.pdf

An integrated theory of language production and comprehension

This study examined the relation between musical ability and second-language (L2) proficiency in adult learners. L2 ability was assessed in four domains: receptive phonology, productive phonology, syntax, and lexical knowledge. Also assessed were various other factors that might explain individual differences in L2 ability, including age of L2 immersion, patterns of language use and exposure, and phonological short-term memory. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine if musical ability explained any unique variance in each domain of L2 ability after controlling for other relevant factors. Musical ability predicted L2 phonological ability (both receptive and productive) even when controlling for other factors, but did not explain unique variance in L2 syntax or lexical knowledge. These results suggest that musical skills may facilitate the acquisition of L2 sound structure and add to a growing body of evidence linking language and music.

/pdf/individual-differences-in-second-language-proficiency-does-qbjrjk0gon.pdf

Individual Differences in Second-Language Proficiency Does Musical Ability Matter?

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

/pdf/making-psycholinguistics-musical-self-paced-reading-time-4ifw06cg4t.pdf

Making Psycholinguistics Musical: Self-Paced Reading Time Evidence for Shared Processing of Linguistic and Musical Syntax

Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence. Music, while recognized as a human universal, is often treated as an ancillary ability—one dependent on or derivative of language. In contrast, we argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, the authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the authors present evidence that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition. We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

/pdf/music-and-early-language-acquisition-3nyvhjh2xb.pdf

Music and Early Language Acquisition

http://lmcl.umd.edu/pubs/Ferreira_etal_05.pdf

How do speakers avoid ambiguous linguistic expressions

In the ventral visual pathway, early visual areas encode light patterns on the retina in terms of image properties, for example, edges and color, whereas higher areas encode visual information in terms of objects and categories. At what point does semantic knowledge, as instantiated in human language, emerge? We examined this question by studying whether semantic similarity in language relates to the brain's organization of object representations in inferior temporal cortex ITC, an area of the brain at the crux of several proposals describing how the brain might represent conceptual knowledge. Semantic relationships among words can be viewed as a geometrical structure with some pairs of words close in their meaning e.g., man and boy and other pairs more distant e.g., man and tomato. ITC's representation of objects similarly can be viewed as a complex structure with some pairs of stimuli evoking similar patterns of activation e.g., man and boy and other pairs evoking very different patterns e.g., man and tomato. In this study, we examined whether the geometry of visual object representations in ITC bears a correspondence to the geometry of semantic relationships between word labels used to describe the objects. We compared ITC's representation to semantic structure, evaluated by explicit ratings of semantic similarity and by five computational measures of semantic similarity. We show that the representational geometry of ITC-but not of earlier visual areas V1-is reflected both in explicit behavioral ratings of semantic similarity and also in measures of semantic similarity derived from word usage patterns in natural language. Our findings show that patterns of brain activity in ITC not only reflect the organization of visual information into objects but also represent objects in a format compatible with conceptual thought and language.

/pdf/the-emergence-of-semantic-meaning-in-the-ventral-temporal-2tum76ooyb.pdf

L. Robert Slevc

Papers

Individual Differences in Second-Language Proficiency Does Musical Ability Matter?

Making Psycholinguistics Musical: Self-Paced Reading Time Evidence for Shared Processing of Linguistic and Musical Syntax

Music and Early Language Acquisition

How do speakers avoid ambiguous linguistic expressions

The emergence of semantic meaning in the ventral temporal pathway