Search

The present article is a corpus-based descriptive/comparative study of lexical bundles (LBs) in two university genres: textbooks (TBs) and research articles (RAs) on applied linguistics. It aims to identify the LBs used in the two genres, compare them on the basis of their functional type and frequency and explore how they are related to genre. To this end, four-word LBs were identified in two corpora drawn from applied linguistics TBs and RAs. The comparative analysis revealed that there are interesting differences between the two genres in terms of discourse functions: the occurrence of LBs in the TBs was lower than in the RAs; attitudinal/modality LBs occurred more frequently in the TBs than in the RAs; epistemic LBs occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; discourse organizers occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; and time, place and text reference LBs occurred almost twice as frequently in the RAs. The findings build on research into the variations of genres in terms of the use and functions of LBs in discipline-specific corpora. Keywords: lexical bundle; comparative genre analysis; register analysis; register variation; applied linguistics discourse; corpus analysis Este articulo es un estudio descriptivo/comparativo de paquetes lexicos (LBs) en dos generos universitarios: libros de texto (TBs) y articulos de investigacion (RAs) en el campo de la linguistica aplicada. El objetivo es identificar los LBs utilizados en los dos generos, compararlos en base a su tipo funcional y frecuencia y explorar la relacion entre los LBs y el genero. A este fin, se identificaron LBs de cuatro palabras de dos corpus extraidos de TBs y RAs sobre linguistica aplicada. El analisis comparativo revelo diferencias interesantes entre los dos generos en cuanto a las funciones discursivas: aparece menor cantidad de LBs en los TBs que en los RAs; los LBs atitudinales y modales son mas frecuentes en los TBs que en los Ras; los LBs epistemicos ocurren con mas frecuencia en los RAs que en los TBs; los organizadores del discurso aparecen en mayor cantidad en los RAs que en los LBs; y por ultimo, los LBs de tiempo, espacio y referencia textual presentan casi el doble de frecuencia en los RAs. Los resultados se fundamentan en investigacion sobre variaciones genericas en el uso y las funciones de los LBs en corpus de disciplinas especificas. Palabras clave: paquete lexico; analisis generico comparativo; analisis de registro; variacion de registro; discurso en linguistica aplicada; analisis de corpus, I. INTRODUCTION Lexical bundles (LBs) are defined as 'statistically the most frequent recurring sequences of words' (Hyland 2012, 150), are 'highly sensitive to differences between text types' (Durrant 2015, 166) [...]

Developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment) is classically identified based on deficits in morphosyntax (Leonard, 2014; Rice et al., 1995), yet children with this disorder often [...], Purpose: When learning novel word forms, preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment) produce speech targets inaccurately and with a high degree of intraword variability. The aim of the current study is to specify whether and how layering lexical-semantic information onto novel phonological strings would induce increased organization of sound production patterns. Method: Twenty-one preschoolers with DLD and 21 peers with typical language (ranging in age from 4;1 to 5;11 [years; months]) imitated multiple renditions of novel words, half with (i.e., words) and half without (i.e., nonwords) a linked visual referent. Methods from network science were used to assess the stability and patterning of syllable sequences. Sound accuracy was also measured. Results: Children with DLD were less accurate and more variable than their typical peers. However, once word forms were associated with a visual referent, network stability, but not accuracy, improved for children with DLD. Conclusions: Children with DLD showed significant word form deficits as they acquired novel words and nonwords. The inclusion of a meaningful referent resulted in increased sound sequence stability, suggesting that lexical-semantic information provides a bootstrap for phonological organization in children with DLD.

In this study, we address two important and related theoretical issues dealing with the universality of the language acquisition process. The first issue is the degree to which children acquiring [...], Purpose: The Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) was used to compare Italian and English lexical development. The authors addressed the issue of universal versus language-specific aspects of lexical development by testing language, age, and gender effects on vocabulary scores and by comparing vocabulary composition across languages. They addressed the issue of delay versus deviance by comparing vocabulary composition in late talkers and younger vocabulary-size-matched children. Method: Participants were 398 Italian and 206 U.S. children ages 18-35 months. Results: Vocabulary size did not differ significantly by language, and age and gender effects on vocabulary size were not moderated by language. The Italian--English Q correlation for percentage word use scores was .55, lower than the within-language concordance of .90 and above. Cross-linguistic concordance declined as age and vocabulary size increased. Many cross-linguistic word matches (63 words) were found among the top 100 words. Italian late talkers were similar to younger vocabulary-size-matched Italian children in vocabulary composition, consistent with findings for English, Greek, and Korean. Conclusions: In both languages, the early lexicons of late talkers and typical talkers contained many of the same words, indicating considerable universality in young children's lexical development. These common words are therefore good targets for clinical intervention. Key Words: children, language, screening

Auditory processing disorder (APD) is a diagnostic label that refers to listening difficulties that occur in the presence of normal hearing acuity (Dawes & Bishop, 2009; Moore, 2006). Such difficulties [...], Purpose: In the present study, the authors aimed to investigate the language confounds of filtered words tests by examining the repetition of real words versus nonsense words as a function of level of filtering. Method: Fifty-five young, native-English-speaking women with normal hearing were required to repeat 80 real-word and 80 nonsense-word monosyllables that were matched for phonemic content and low-pass filtered. Thirty participants were tested using a harsher filter range of 2000 to 500 Hz, and 25 participants were tested using a milder filter range of 3000 to 1500 Hz. Results: Paired-sample t tests compared accuracy (percentage of phonemes correct) for word and nonsense-word stimuli at each filter level. At filter levels between 3000 and 1750 Hz, performance for word stimuli was significantly better than for nonsense-word stimuli. Conversely, at filter levels between 500 and 1250 Hz, performance was significantly better for nonsense words. Conclusions: The linguistic content of real-word stimuli benefits performance on low-pass filtered speech tests at filter levels above 1500 Hz. Caution must be taken when using real-word stimuli in low-pass filtered speech tests as part of an auditory processing diagnostic test battery, because language ability will impact on performance. Key Words: auditory processing, filtered speech, top-down language processing, central auditory processing disorder, language impairment, speech perception

Many factors affect a listener's ability to understand spoken language. The most common method for evaluating speech understanding has been to measure the accuracy of word recognition, but accuracy measures [...], Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated how acoustic distortion affected younger and older adults' use of context in a lexical decision task. Method: The authors measured lexical decision reaction times (RTs) when intact target words followed acoustically distorted sentence contexts. Contexts were semantically congruent, neutral, or incongruent. Younger adults (n = 216) were tested on three distortion types: low-pass filtering, time compression, and masking by multitalker babble, using two amounts of distortion selected to control for word recognition accuracy. Older adults (n = 108) were tested on two amounts of time compression and one low-pass filtering condition. Results: For both age groups, there was robust facilitation by congruent contexts but minimal inhibition by incongruent contexts. Facilitation decreased as distortion increased. Older listeners had slower RTs than younger listeners, but this difference was smaller in congruent than in neutral or incongruent conditions. After controlling for word recognition accuracy, older listeners' RTs were slower in time-compressed than in low-pass filtering conditions, but younger listeners performed similarly in both conditions. Conclusions: These RT results highlight the interdependence between bottom-up sensory and top-down semantic processing. Consistent with previous findings based on accuracy measures, compared with younger adults, older adults were disproportionately slowed when speech was time compressed but more facilitated by congruent contexts. Key Words: lexical decision, context, facilitation, aging, low-pass filtering, time compression, multitalker babble

Aglcecwif and AElfscinu: Translation and Lexical Interpretation in the Reading of Two Idesa from Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Sarah Kelley Brish, Western Michigan University This paper will discuss the problems with [...]

The lexical and syntactic ambiguities of the word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Gen 49:10, the third verse of Jacob's blessing to Judah, have helped to make that verse [...]

This paper examines a set of structural parallels between Vaeakau-Taumako (Pileni), a Polynesian Outlier spoken in Temotu Province in the Solomon Islands, and the Vanuatu Outliers Emae, Ifira-Mele, and Futuna-Aniwa. It shows that these four languages share a set of structural features that is not, as a whole, shared by other known Polynesian languages; other languages may show one or two of the features under discussion, but not all four. It argues that the parallels are too detailed to be coincidental, and asks why it should be that just these four languages show such detailed similarities in structure. While it is not possible on the basis of the available data to decide whether the similarities should be assumed to result from shared origins or contact (or both), it is proposed that they may be seen as tentative support for the suggestion made by Bayard that the Vanuatu Outliers (and West Uvean) received their primary settlement from the Vaeakau-Taumako area, rather than directly from Triangle Polynesia., 1. INTRODUCTION. The precise origins and relationships of the Polynesian Outliers are subject to ongoing debate, restricted to no small extent by the lack of sufficient data or detailed descriptions [...]

The Central Luzon microgroup of Philippine languages is composed of Kapampangan, Sinauna, the three major dialects of Sambal, and the Ayta languages spoken in and around the Zambales Mountains in Zambales, Pampanga, and Bataan provinces. A defining phonological feature of this group is the regular /y/ reflex of Proto-Malayo-Polynesian * R. The languages and dialects in question also share similar pronoun sets and a number of lexical and other innovations. The Northern Mangyan and Bashiic languages also reflect * R as /y/. The former group probably clusters with Central Luzon, but the Bashiic languages lack substantial sharing of innovative items with Central Luzon., 1. THE CENTRAL LUZON LANGUAGES. (1) The Central Luzon (LUZC) group of languages includes Kapampangan (or Pampango), Sinauna (or Sinauna Tagalog), three dialects of Sambal (Bolinao, Tina, and Botolan), and [...]

7.1.2 Nukuoro and Sikaiana as possibly originally EPN. Nukuoro is quite similar to Kapingamarangi in its core linguistic identity, generally exhibiting all the Kapingamarangi retentions from PNPN not found in [...]

A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ('emphatic stress'). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances [...]

Este articulo trata el estudio de los procesos de integracion lexico-construccional o subsuncion de los verbos ingleses phone y email (representativos de la subclase de verbos de instrumento de comunicacion) en las construcciones dativa y ditransitiva. El analisis de las irregularidades halladas en dichos procesos nos lleva a postular la existencia y explorar la actividad de dos construcciones, a saber, las construcciones frasales X About Y y X With Y. Estas construcciones frasales pueden combinarse sobre la base de procesos de amalgamacion construccional con la construccion transitiva en aquellos casos en que la naturaleza semantica del objeto directo lo requiera, dando lugar a una nueva construccion en la que ambos verbos pueden subsumirse. El Modelo Lexico Constructional (mlc) nos proporciona las herramientas analiticas que necesitamos para el desarrollo de este estudio, especialmente las restricciones internas y externas que regulan los procesos de subsuncion y amalgama. Palabras clave: amalgama; dativa; ditransitiva; subsuncion; verbos de instrumento de comunicacion This article deals with the study of the processes of lexical-constructional integration, or subsumption, of the verbs phone and email (as representatives of the subclass of verbs of instrument of communication) into the English dative and ditransitive argument-structure constructions. The exploration of the irregularities in such processes has led us to postulate the existence and explore the activity of two phrasal constructions, namely the X About Y and the X With Y constructions. These phrasal constructions may combine, on the basis of level-internal constructional amalgamation with the transitive construction as required by the semantic nature of the direct object, thus giving rise to a combined construction into which both verbs may subsume. The Lexical Constructional Model (LCM) provides the necessary analytical tools for the development of this study, especially the set of internal and external constraints that regulate subsumption and amalgamation. Keywords: amalgam; dative; ditransitive; instrument of communication verbs; subsumption, Constraints on Subsumption and Amalgamation Processes in the Lexical Constructional Model: the Case of phone and email I. INTRODUCTION The English dative and the ditransitive constructions have received a great [...]

This research explores the cross-linguistic validity of a recent claim made in the field of child language development. The claim explored here is that the words learned by children with [...], Purpose: This research explored the impact of neighborhood density (ND), word frequency (WF), and word length (WL) on the vocabulary size of Danish-speaking children. Given the particular phonological properties of Danish, the impact was expected to differ from that reported in studies on English and French. Method: The monosyllabic words in the expressive lexicons of 894 Danish-speaking 2-year-old children were coded for ND, WF, and WL. Lexicons were extracted from parent checklists of the words spoken by their children. Results: Regression revealed that ND, WF, WL, and age together predicted 47% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND, WF, WL, and age uniquely accounting for 39%, 3.2%, 2.2%, and 2.8% of that variance, respectively. Children with small vocabularies had learned words that were denser and more frequent in the ambient language, and those words were shorter than the words of children with larger vocabularies. Conclusion: The 2 main findings were unexpected. The impact of ND for Danish-speaking children was not expected given the phonological properties of the language. The WF results differed from those of English because of the distribution of word classes on the language-relevant parent checklists. The strong role for ND in emerging languages found in other languages was replicated for Danish. Key Words: statistical learning, late talkers, phonological neighborhood density, Danish, vocabulary development

A lexical decision task was used with a masked priming procedure to investigate whether and to what extent neighborhood distribution influences the effect of prime duration in masked orthographic priming. [...]

Dardano asserts that 'a communicative and cultural situation which is so different causes adaptation phenomena to be accentuated; folk etymology and hybrid forms are developed to a greater extent. The [...]

Time-binding: the characteristic human ability to transmit information, using language and other symbols, across time; the potential for individuals to learn from their own and other people's experiences; the potential [...]

Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical- stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be [...]

Byline: Nana Aba Appiah Amfo Abstract Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo) has a rich inventory of lexical items for the purposes of signaling information structure. This article examines the communicative role of a number of these markers. The focus marker na singles out the constituent within its scope as the only new information in the utterance in which it is contained. Two inclusive markers are identified; they are (n)so and mpo. (N)so is an additive focus marker which indicates that the utterance to which it is attached has to be interpreted in a context parallel to that of the immediately preceding utterance. Mpo is a scalar marker; the entity within its scope is considered quite low on a pragmatically given scale. Exclusive markers in the language include the restrictive nko and the multifunctional ara. The latter combines with features of the context to communicate restriction, simultaneity, continuity, or it may cause the accompanying utterance to receive a scalar reading. Finally, the traditional analysis associated with the information structural marker de is shown to be untenable. Thus, an alternative analysis is proffered, based on critical examination of its discourse function, using attested data.

Byline: Rena Torres Cacoullos; James A. Walker Abstract This article provides evidence that, just as lexical meaning is retained in grammaticization, grammatical conditioning persists in fixed discourse formulas. Despite their high frequency and formulaic status, such formulas are not completely autonomous from the productive constructions from which they emerge. This evidence comes from a variationist analysis of that and zero complementizer in a corpus of spoken Canadian English. Testing syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors proposed to account for the variation, we focus on claims that frequent collocations have developed as discourse formulas. Multivariate analysis shows that, although the variation is largely lexically constrained, that serves to demarcate the boundaries of two clauses with lexical content, while zero tends to occur when the clauses function like a single unit. Moreover, the linguistic conditioning of that in frequent collocations that behave like discourse formulas parallels its conditioning in the general construction. These findings suggest that the principle of semantic retention or persistence should be extended to grammar. Article History: Date received: March 29, 2005 Date revision received: January 11, 2006

Byline: Seizi Iwata Abstract This article advances a lexical-constructional analysis of sentences like The door swung open and The trap door fell shut (henceforth open/shut expressions). These open/shut expressions involve both motion and change of state, as described by the verb and the AP, respectively. Two important characteristics of open/shut expressions are: (1) that they involve internal motion, as distinct from translational motion (e.g., The ball bounced down the hall) or self-contained motion (e.g., The ball bounced up and down on the same floor tile) in the sense of Talmy (2000), and (2) that the change of state is concurrent with the internal motion. Since open/shut expressions involve both motion and change of state, they are different from simple change-of-state expressions like He fell silent, which involve a change of state alone. They cannot be identified with spatial resultatives like Bill rolled out of the room, either, for the postverbal AP denotes a state. Remarkably, open/shut expressions should also be discriminated from intransitive resultatives like The kettle boiled dry, in that the AP open or shut simply indicates that the state of being open or shut results, without specifying the entity that state is predicated of. This analysis allows us to account for why open/shut expressions behave differently from ordinary resultatives, which are to be accounted for by means of argument structure constructions, as Goldberg (1995) argues. Open/shut expressions with verbs of sound emission (e.g., The door creaked open) can be similarly handled. What makes these open/shut expressions distinct from open/shut expressions like The door swung open is that, generally, the verb metonymically stands for the internal motion, rather than describing the manner/path of the internal motion. Article History: Date received: November 04, 2004 Date revision received: March 07, 2006

Byline: Claire Lefebvre; Virginie Loranger Abstract This article bears on the properties and on the historical derivation of the multifunctional lexical item taa in Saramaccan, an English and Portuguese based Creole of Surinam. Taa fulfills several functions: it may be used as a verb, a complementizer, a quotative marker, and as a marker conveying similarity or manner. Taa is thus a multifunctional lexical item. Its functions parallel in a remarkable way those of the semantically closest substrate languages lexical entries. Furthermore, a review of the early sources reveals that taa was already a multifunctional item in early SA. This constitutes a major drawback for a grammaticalization account of the relationship between taki and taa. The properties of taa are argued to have been derived through the process of relexification. This process consists in assigning a new label to an existing lexical entry; relexification thus reduces to relabeling. Finally, the parameters of relexification/relabeling are shown to be compatible with a monosemic account of multifunctionality, and to not be compatible with a polysemic account of the phenomenon. Article History: Date received: September 06, 2004 Date revision received: April 05, 2006

Three eye movement studies with novel lexicons investigated the role of semantic context in spoken word recognition, contrasting 3 models: restrictive access, access-selection, and continuous integration. Actions directed at novel shapes caused changes in motion (e.g., looming, spinning) or state (e.g., color, texture). Across the experiments, novel names for the actions and the shapes varied in frequency, cohort density, and whether the cohorts referred to actions (Experiment 1) or shapes with action-congruent or action-incongruent affordances (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 1 demonstrated effects of frequency and cohort competition from both displayed and non-displayed competitors. In Experiment 2, a biasing context induced an increase in anticipatory eye movements to congruent referents and reduced the probability of looks to incongruent cohorts, without the delay predicted by access-selection models. In Experiment 3, context did not reduce competition from non-displayed incompatible neighbors as predicted by restrictive access models. The authors conclude that the results are most consistent with continuous integration models. Keywords: spoken word recognition, artificial lexicons, context integration

Five experiments were conducted to investigate how subsyllabic, syllabic and prosodic information is processed in Cantonese monosyllabic word production. A picture-word interference task was used in which a target picture and a distractor word were presented simultaneously or sequentially. In the fast 3 experiments with visually presented distractors, null effects on naming latencies were found when the distractor and the picture name shared the onset, the rhyme, the tone, or both the onset and tone. However, significant facilitation effects were obtained when the target and the distractor shared the rhyme + tone (Experiment 2), the segmental syllable (Experiment 3), or the syllable + tone (Experiment 3). Similar results were found in Experiments 4 and 5 with spoken rather than visual distractors. Moreover, a significant facilitation effect was observed in the rhyme-related condition in Experiment 5, and this effect was not affected by the degree of phonological overlap between the target and the distractor. These results are interpreted in an interactive model, which allows feedback sending from the subsyllabic to the lexical level during the phonological encoding stage in Cantonese word production. Keywords: Cantonese word production, phonological encoding, lexical tone, segmental processing

Recent research has shown that letter identity and letter position are not integral perceptual dimensions (e.g., jugde primes judge in word-recognition experiments). Most comprehensive computational models of visual word recognition (e.g., the interactive activation model, J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981, and its successors) assume that the position of each letter within a word is perfectly encoded. Thus, these models are unable to explain the presence of effects of letter transposition (trial-trail), letter migration (beard-bread), repeated letters (moose-mouse), or subset/superset effects (faulty-faculty). The authors extend R. Ratcliff's (1981) theory of order relations for encoding of letter positions and show that the model can successfully deal with these effects. The basic assumption is that letters in the visual stimulus have distributions over positions so that the representation of one letter will extend into adjacent letter positions. To test the model, the authors conducted a series of forced-choice perceptual identification experiments. The overlap model produced very good fits to the empirical data, and even a simplified 2-parameter model was capable of producing fits for 104 observed data points with a correlation coefficient of .91. Keywords: lexical process, letter position coding, word recognition, modeling, perceptual matching

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed the sequence encoder is used to learn nearly 75,000 wordform representations through exposure to strings of stress-marked phonemes or letters. First, the mechanisms and efficacy of the sequence encoder are demonstrated and shown to overcome problems with traditional slot-based codes. Then, two large-scale simulations are reported that learned to represent lexicons of either phonological or orthographic wordforms. In doing so, the models learned the statistics of their lexicons as shown by better processing of well-formed pseudowords as opposed to ill-formed (scrambled) pseudowords, and by accounting for variance in well-formedness ratings. It is discussed how the sequence encoder may be integrated into broader models of lexical processing. Keywords: Large-scale connectionist modeling; Sequence encoder; Simple recurrent network; Lexical processing; Orthography; Phonology; Wordforms

The study aims to examine whether length and transposed-letter effects reflect developmental changes in reading in a transparent orthography. The results confirm empirical evidence of the effects of length and transposed-letter similarity in Spanish language across beginning, intermediate and adult readers.

The effects of lexical context on phonological processing are pervasive and there have been indications that such effects may be modulated by attention. However, attentional modulation in speech processing is neither well documented nor well understood. Experiment 1 demonstrated attentional modulation of lexical facilitation of speech sound recognition when task and critical stimuli were identical across attention conditions. We propose modulation of lexical activation as a neurophysiologically plausible computational mechanism that can account for this type of modulation. Contrary to the claims of critics, this mechanism can account for attentional modulation without violating the principle of interactive processing. Simulations of the interactive TRACE model extended to include two different ways of modulating lexical activation showed that each can account for attentional modulation of lexical feedback effects. Experiment 2 tested conflicting predictions from the two implementations and provided evidence that is consistent with bias input as the mechanism of attentional control of lexical activation. Keywords: Speech perception; Attention; Lexical feedback; Neural networks; Interactive processing; Phoneme recognition; Human experimentation

We present evidence that (a) at least some components of the reading process are serial and (b) pseudoword reading is affected by lexical knowledge, even in a transparent orthographic system like Italian. Pseudowords deriving from five-letter words by changing either the first or the fourth letter were presented for reading aloud. Results showed an effect of the position of the diverging letter: Early diverging pseudowords were read more slowly than late diverging pseudowords. The dual-route cascaded (DRC) model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) successfully simulated the behavioural data.

Abstract: This paper addresses a new finding regarding the specific form taken by certain lexical borrowings in the Spanish spoken in New York City, using as data 30 sociolinguistic interviews [...]

The role of orthographically similar words (i.e., neighbours) in the word recognition process has been studied extensively using short-term priming paradigms (e.g., Colombo, 1986). Here we demonstrate that long-term effects of neighbour priming can also be obtained. Experiment 1 showed that prior study of a neighbour (e.g., TANGO) increased later lexical decision performance for similar words (e.g., MANGO), but decreased performance for similar pseudowords (e.g., LANGO). Experiment 2 replicated this bias effect and showed that the increase in lexical decision performance due to neighbour priming is selectively due to words from a relatively sparse neighbourhood. Explanations of the bias effect in terms of lexical activation and episodic memory retrieval are discussed. Resume Le role de mots semblables d'un point de vue orthographique (c.-a-d. des mots voisins) dans le processus de reconnaissance du mot a ete etudie de facon exhaustive a l'aide de paradigmes d'amorcage a court terme (par ex., Colombo, 1986). Ici nous demontrons que des effets a long terme a la l'amorcage du mot voisin peuvent egalement etre obtenus. L'experience 1 montre que l'etude prealable d'un mot voisin (par ex., TANGO) ameliorait plus tard le rendement de decision lexicale pour des mots semblables (MANGO), mais diminuait le rendement pour des pseudomots semblables (LANGO). L'experience 2 a repete cet effet de biais et montre que l'amelioration du rendement a la decision lexicale a cause de l'amorcage du mot voisin est selectivement attribuable aux mots d'un voisinage relativement epars. Les explications de cet effet de biais en termes d'activation lexicale et de recuperation en memoire episodique font l'objet de discussions.

Abstract A lexicological study of the set of Afrikaans adjectives containing 'ene' The tiny lexicological set accounted for in the present article comprises 'ene' 'loutere', 'pure ', 'skone', 'suiwere', 'volle', [...]

Although subjects have little or no awareness of masked primes, Bodner and Masson (2001) found that priming of lexical decisions is often enhanced when masked repetition primes occur on a high proportion of trials. We used baseline prime conditions to specify the locus of this repetition proportion (RP) effect. In Experiments 1A and IB, a .8-RP group showed more priming than did a .2-RP group, and this RP effect was due to both (1) increased facilitation from repetition primes and (2) increased interference from unrelated primes. In Experiment 2, we used the baseline condition to show that subjects are sensitive to RP rather than to the proportion of unrelated primes. Direct comparisons of a given prime condition (repetition, unrelated) across RP conditions were more stable than were comparisons relative to the baseline condition. The increased costs and benefits of repetition priming when RP is higher implicate a context-sensitive mechanism that constrains accounts of masked priming.

The 'hard problem' in bilingual lexical access arises when translation-equivalent lexical representations are activated to roughly equal levels and, thus, compete equally for lexical selection. The language suppression hypothesis (D. W. Green, 1998) solves this hard problem through the suppression of lexical representations in the nontarget language. Following from this proposal is the prediction that lexical selection should take longer on a language switch trial because the to-be-selected representation was just suppressed on the previous trial. Inconsistent with this prediction, participants took no longer to name pictures in their dominant language on language switch trials than they did on nonswitch trials. These findings indicate that nontarget lexical representations are not suppressed. The authors suggest that these results undermine the viability of the language suppression hypothesis as a possible solution to the hard problem in bilingual lexical access. Keywords: bilingual, lexical selection, lexical access, language switching, speech production

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the performance of highly proficient bilinguals in language-switching contexts involving (a) the 2nd language (L2) and the L3 of the bilinguals, (b) the L3 and the L4, and (c) the L1 and a recently learned new language. Highly proficient bilinguals showed symmetrical switching costs regardless of the age at which the L2 was learned and of the similarities of the 2 languages and asymmetrical switching costs when 1 of the languages involved in the switching task was very weak (an L4 or a recently learned language). The theoretical implications of these results for the attentional mechanisms used by highly proficient bilinguals to control their lexicalization process are discussed. Keywords: bilingualism, language production, lexical access, language switching

The main determinants of lexical access in speech are considered to be a word's age of acquisition (AoA) and its frequency of occurrence in a speaker's experience. It is unclear whether and how these variables interact, although they are commonly observed to be correlated, for the few studies that address the issue have reported inconsistent findings. An influential view of AoA in lexical processing (Ellis & Lambon Ralph, 2000) predicts stronger frequency effects for items acquired later in life than for those acquired at an early age. Five experiments were designed to investigate the possible interaction of AoA and frequency effects in speech. We found that the interaction between word frequency and AoA was not robust and that, contrary to expectation, the effect of word frequency was greater for words acquired earlier in life than for those acquired later. The implications of our findings are discussed.

In a lexical decision task (LDT) in which list composition is manipulated, a typical finding to date has been a slowdown for easy items (e.g., high-frequency words) but little speedup for hard items (e.g., low-frequency words) when they are mixed together. This asymmetric frequency-blocking effect contrasts with the symmetric pattern (both a speedup for hard items and a slowdown for easy items when they are mixed together) observed with the naming task. In the present study, we investigated the mechanism responsible for the asymmetric blocking effect in the LDT within a model of blocking effect proposed by Mozer, Kinoshita, and Davis (2003), termed the adaptation-to-the-statistics-of-the-environment (ASE) model. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that when the same high- and low-frequency words were used, consistent with the existing literature, an asymmetric blocking effect was found in the LDT and a symmetric blocking effect was found in the naming task. Within the ASE model, a symmetric versus asymmetric blocking effect can be explained in terms of different asymptotic rates in subjective estimates of error probability. Experiments 2 and 3 tested and confirmed a prediction of the model based on this assumption that a speedup of hard items would be observed in an LDT with hard items whose subjective error probability asymptotes near zero (low-frequency words with high familiarity ratings that subjects could be certain were words). Implications of the model for task differences in reaction times are discussed.

Reduplication patterns in Itelmen (Chukotko-Kamchatkan) present a prima facie challenge to the view that association in partial reduplication is always Edge-In (Yip t988, McCarthy & Prince 1996). Closer investigation suggests that Itelmen reduplication may in fact be total copying, masked by an apocope rule. This solution is not obvious, however, as the apocope rule must be limited to 'core' or' native' vocabulary. While Russian loans are reasonably transparent, the analysis requires making a distinction between cognates and loans from related Koryak, a distinction speakers are not consciously aware of. Positing that this distinction is part of the synchronic phonology provides a solution to other apparently unrelated phonological puzzles in the language. In addition to removing an apparent counter-example to universal Edge-In association, the proposals made here may also provide a small argument for the lexical stratification model of loanword phonology over a purely representational alternative.

For the analysis of the noun phrase, the treatment which currently prevails in generative grammar is the one in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the determiner, rather than with the noun. This D(et)P treatment has the advantage of providing a uniform account of all syntactic categories, both the substantive and the functional ones, and it provides a natural way to capture the co-occurrence restrictions between nouns and determiners, but it also faces a number of empirical problems. To solve them I propose an analysis in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the noun, but in which the advantages of the DP treatment are incorporated as much as possible. This is done in two steps. First, I argue that the requirement (or the desirability) of a uniform treatment of all syntactic categories does not by itself favour the DP treatment, since there is no empirical evidence for the postulation of a separate syntactic category for the determiners. The argumentation is mainly based on an analysis of NP-internal agreement data and leads to the conclusion that the class of determiners is syntactically heterogeneous: there are the adjectival determiners, which are subject to morpho-syntactic agreement, and (pro)nominal ones, which are exempt from this agreement. Second, I dissociate the roles of head and selector. All prenominals, both the specifying and the modifying ones, are treated as functors which select a nominal head, rather than as heads which select a nominal complement. This functor treatment accounts in a natural and straightforward way for both morpho-syntactic agreement and semantic types of agreement. The language which is used for exemplification is Dutch, but at various points comparisons are made with German and English.

This study investigates how the parser employs thematic and contextual information in resolving temporary ambiguities during sentence processing. We report results from a sentence-completion task and from a self-paced reading experiment with native speakers of Greek examining two constructions under different referential context conditions: relative clauses (RCs) preceded by complex noun phrases with genitives, [NP1 + [NP2.sub.Gen]], and RCs preceded by complex noun phrases containing prepositional phrases, [NP1 + pp[P NP2]]. We found different attachment preferences for these two constructions, a high (NP1) preference for RCs with genitive antecedents and a low (NP2) preference for RCs with PP antecedents. Moreover, referential context information was found to modulate RC attachment differently in the two experimental tasks. We interpret these findings from the perspective of modular theories of sentence processing and argue that on-line ambiguity resolution relies primarily on grammatical and lexical-thematic information, and makes use of referential context information only as a secondary resource.

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms 'marked' and 'unmarked' have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term 'markedness' is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of 'markedness'.

An event-related brain potential experiment was carried out to investigate the temporal relationship between lexical selection and the semantic integration in auditory sentence processing. Participants were presented with spoken sentences that ended with a word that was either semantically congruent or anomalous. Information about the moment in which a sentence-final word could uniquely be identified, its isolation point (IP), was compared with the onset of the elicited N400 congruity effect, reflecting semantic integration processing. The results revealed that the onset of the N400 effect occurred prior to the IP of the sentence-final words. Moreover, the factor early or late IP did not affect the onset of the N400. These findings indicate that lexical selection and semantic integration are cascading processes, in that semantic integration processing can start before the acoustic information allows the selection of a unique candidate and seems to be attempted in parallel for multiple candidates that are still compatible with the bottom-up acoustic input. Keywords: event-related potentials, N400, auditory sentence processing, semantics, lexical selection

A sound change may propagate through a language in different ways. Different studies attest sound changes spreading at different rates through different phonological and/or phonotactic environments, diffusing through the speaker [...]

Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2,428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood size, and length), and semantic variables (e.g., imageability and semantic connectivity). The influence of most variables was highly task dependent, with the results shedding light on recent empirical controversies in the available word recognition literature. Semantic-level variables accounted for unique variance in both speeded naming and lexical decision performance, with the latter task producing the largest semantic-level effects. Discussion focuses on the utility of large-scale regression studies in providing a complementary approach to the standard factorial designs to investigate visual word recognition.

This article examines the usefulness of vocabulary richness for authorship attribution and tests the assumption that appropriate measures of vocabulary richness can capture an author's distinctive style or identity. After briefly discussing perceived and actual vocabulary richness, I show that doubling and combining texts affects some measures in computationally predictable but conceptually surprising ways. I discuss some theoretical and empirical problems with some measures and develop simple methods to test how well vocabulary richness distinguishes texts by different authors. These methods show that vocabulary richness is ineffective for large groups of texts because of the extreme variability within and among them. I conclude that vocabulary richness is of marginal value in stylistic and authorship studies because the basic assumption that it constitutes a wordprint for authors is false. Key words: authorship attribution, lexical statistics, stylistics, vocabulary richness

In the past 20 years, a great deal of research has examined how morphologically complex words are represented in the mental lexicon. One central question in this field has been [...], The use of lexemes during the recognition of spatially unified familiar English compounds was examined in naming, lexical decision and sentence-reading tasks by manipulating beginning and ending lexeme frequencies while controlling overall compound frequencies. All tasks revealed robust ending lexeme frequency effects, with compound processing being more effective when the ending lexeme was a high-frequency word. Beginning lexeme frequency effects were more elusive and dependent on task demands. Eye movements, recorded during sentence reading, also indicated that the effects of ending lexemes occurred after the first fixation during compound viewing. Together, the results suggest either that the ending lexeme is used as an access code to locate the meaning of the full compound word or that its meaning is coactive with the meaning of the full compound.

Abstract The common formulation which proposes that bilingual children enter into language production with either a single or a dual phonological system is questioned. Instead, it is suggested that implicit [...]