| Japanese ...... Aphasic Exs on Moodle .....A Comparison of Com. Aids ...... Exercises...... TOP |
Let's Communicate in Images:
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I experimentally made rehabilitation exercises for Japanese and English adults with aphasia, using the free authoring software Hot Potatoes (plus TexToys) and they are publicized on my moodle site called pictoreole.net. You can make your own account via email and work on the exercises at pictoreole.net freely. Hot Potatoes has enjoyed a high reputation in the field of foreign language education. To the best of my knowledge, however, it has not been used to create exercises for people with aphasia (except at the list of resources for aphasic therapy) despite a number of difficulties they share with adult learners of foreign languages (especially, college students in Japan struggling to master English after 6 years of education in high school!!). One important ingredient in creating exercises for aphasic rehabilitation is a collection of images corresponding to words in natural languages. A lot of images for nouns have already been made by volunteers and available through the Internet, but images for other categories like verbs and adjectives (and those for functional categories) do not seem to be sufficient. It is mainly because they are hard to express as images. Even images for nouns are hard to make because words in natural languages are neutral, without specific properties like color, shape, and size. Some of the nice attempts to work out this problem are to be listed and compared from various points of view at Image-based dictionary.Another project I have in mind is to offer a grammar engine that could check "free utterances' made by people with aphasia using an imaged-based dictionary. They are not sure if their utterances are correct or not according to the grammar of the language they are tryin to recover. As for syntactic representations, I believe dependency graphs used in a bunch of fields including Word Grammar, Dependency Grammar and Link Grammar are more suitable for aphasic rehabilitation than more familiar phrase structures consisting of non-terminal nodes like S and VP. A very nice communication aid for people with aphasia has already been developed by Lingraphicare and been used for more than a decade. Their system called Lingraphica contains an image-based dictionary which appears to me to roughly approximate our knowledge of words, and they've reported a number of encouraging results of their system in rehabilitation. I would like to construct an image-based dictionary like the one in Lingraphica and offer it for FREE! Since images are basically understandable for people speaking any language, they can be used by aphasics of any language if appropriate pronunciations and spellings are added. So, the image-based dictionary is virtually universal; So could the grammar engine be if my theory using dependency graph is on the right track. In this site, I will take up five existing systems for aphasic rehab, compare them from a viewpoint mentined above, and thereby propose a better system. |
| Japanese ........ Aphasic Exs on Moodle .....A Comparison of Com. Aids ....... Exercises...... TOP |