Dyslexia and dying languages? There's an app for that
What do dyslexia in children and endangered languages have in common? Concordia graduate Gina Cook combines her expertise in linguistics and computer programming to tackle both challenges — and more. Her company, iLanguage Lab LTD, develops Android-tablet apps with varied language-related functions to help the community.
This August, Cook heads to Patzun, Guatemala, to launch iField, a cloud-based app for field linguists. It records and codes primary language data both on and offline.
Empowering minority language speakers
“We’re using technology to empower minority language speakers. iField provides a bridge that enables software to work with their language,” says Cook.
There are clear benefits when it comes to performing effective computer-based searches. Because many native languages in the Americas use a single word to convey what is expressed in an entire English sentence, searching using a native word brings up very limited results, since it’s so specific. Knowing this, native language speakers naturally switch to English or Spanish search terms to get more results.
Better search capabilities help protect minority languages
Unlike software designed to work with English, iField extracts meaningful sequences of letters – called morphemes.
“With iField, you can cut up the words into morphemes and use those to create a search index instead of full words. Indexing morphemes means you get more and better search results while exponentially reducing search time,” says Cook.
“Adaptive software might make an important difference to maintaining minority languages in the next 10 years.”
Facilitating the use of native languages not only helps to preserve cultural communities, but also promotes bilingualism.
“Bilingualism creates healthy brains and communities. Alzheimer’s disease has been shown to start five years later in bilinguals,” says Cook, who speaks five languages fluently.
The initiative is part of a collaborative project with researchers at McGill University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The larger project aims to preserve minority Mayan languages by empowering community members to speak and document their native language.
Diagnosing dyslexia while kids have fun
Closer to home, iLanguage Lab was selected to develop an app for dyslexia diagnosis among pre-literate children for Quebec’s education ministry. The dyslexia test comprises four interactive, touch-tablet games for kids and is part of a larger project McGill University and Université de Montréal researchers have been working on for five years. The app launches in September.
“Kids think it’s a game, but in reality, it’s a test that can help determine whether they might have dyslexia,” Cook says. “We’ll be working with school boards to get it into schools. It’s a great app for us because it demonstrates how research in theoretical linguistics can help the community.”
Cook launched iLanguage Lab in April 2011 to build software to automate data entry. “It’s a very basic concept, but makes a world of difference in linguistics, a field of study which can require navigating huge amounts of data,” Cook says.
Hiring fellow Concordians
Recognizing talent at Concordia, Cook has hired several students and recent graduates. They include interns with linguistics and software engineering backgrounds. With their help, iLanguage launched an Android-based bilingual aphasia test. “We automated an existing test for the language disorder to collect data for researchers and clinicians.”
Cook thrives on solving problems using technology. Her skills were recognized at last December’s Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathon, where her team won the best use of technology award for building an Android app to determine the safety of drinking water.
The 32-year-old is a two-time Concordia graduate and holds a BA in linguistics and a graduate diploma in computer science with a specialization in computational linguistics. Cook was president of Concordia’s Linguistics Student Association for two years.
The Concordia difference
“I’m a very proud Concordia graduate,” Cook says. “The university has been very important in my life. Since Concordia does not offer a graduate program in linguistics, undergraduate students are treated with the attention usually invested in grad students.”
Her outstanding work at Concordia won her a full graduate scholarship at the University of Delaware, where she met Emmy Cathcart, iLanguage Lab’s field linguist, who attests to the difference Concordia makes.
“Gina is more proactive, takes greater initiative. Not only does she have linguistics and programming skills, she has this gung ho attitude to start her own company. She inspires me,” Cathcart says.
Cook went from learning fieldwork as an undergraduate to doing fieldwork in half a dozen countries to establishing what she calls the world’s first open-source field linguistics company, here in Montreal.
The Vermont native is at home in Quebec, having learned French watching the popular Radio Canada sitcom Les Bougon and arguing with a francophone boyfriend. “That’s the best way to learn language, not from a textbook, but straight from the data source.”
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