Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the phonological shape of the surface word and its primary syntactic function, which has no surface phonetic content (McCarthy, J. J. (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenative morphology, Linguistic Inquiry, (...) 12 373-418). The other two morphemes are proposed to be the vocalic melody, which conveys additional syntactic information, and the root, which defines meaning. In three experiments using masked, cross-modal, and auditory-auditory priming we examined the role of the vocalic melody and the CV-Skeleton as potential morphemic units in the processing and representation of Arabic words. Prime/target pairs sharing the vocalic melody but not the CV-Skeleton consistently failed to prime. In contrast, word pairs sharing only the CV-Skeleton primed reliably throughout, with the amount of priming being as large as that observed between word pattern pairs sharing both vocalic melody and CV-Skeleton. Priming between morphologically related words can be observed when there is no overlap either in meaning or in surface phonetic form. (shrink)

When a toddler knows a word, what does she actually know? Many categories have multiple relevant properties; for example, shape and color are relevant to membership in the category banana. How do toddlers prioritize these properties when recognizing familiar words, and are there systematic differences among children? In this study, toddlers viewed pairs of objects associated with prototypical colors. On some trials, objects were typically colored ; on other trials, colors were switched. On each trial, toddlers were directed to find (...) a target object. Overall, recognition was disrupted when colors were switched, as measured by eye movements. Moreover, individual differences in vocabularies predicted recognition differences: Toddlers who say fewer shape-based words were more disrupted by color switches. “Knowing” a word may not mean the same thing for all toddlers; different toddlers prioritize different facets of familiar objects in their lexical representations. (shrink)

This study considers one of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of second language vocabulary in children: The differentiation and sharpening of lexical representations. We propose that sharpening is triggered by an implicit comparison of similar representations, a process we call contrasting. We investigate whether integrating contrasting in a learning method in which children contrast orthographically and semantically similar L2 words facilitates learning of those words by sharpening their new lexical representations. In our study, 48 Dutch-speaking children learned (...) unfamiliar orthographically and semantically similar English words in a multiple-choice learning task. One half of the group learned the similar words by contrasting them, while the other half did not contrast them. Their word knowledge was measured immediately after learning as well as 1 week later. Contrasting was found to facilitate learning by leading to more precise lexical representations. However, only highly skilled readers benefitted from contrasting. Our findings offer novel insights into the development of L2 lexical representations from fuzzy to more precise, and have potential implications for education. (shrink)

In this commentary I discuss the role of types of knowledge and conceptual structures in lexical representation, revealing the explanatory potential of frame-based knowledge. Although frame-based lexical semantics is not alien to the theoretical model outlined in Jackendoff's conceptual semantics, testing its relevance to the analysis of the lexical evidence presented in his book has been left out of consideration.

The study explores the degree to which readers can use their previous linguistic knowledge, which goes beyond the immediate evidence in the input, to create mental representations of new words and how the employment of this knowledge may reduce the fuzziness of the new representations. Using self-paced reading, initial representations of novel identical forms with different grammatical functions were compared in native German speakers and advanced L2 German learners with L1 Czech. The results reveal that although both groups can employ (...) general knowledge about German grammar when establishing new representations, the L1 native speakers outperform the L2 learners: Their new representations have more precise structure and are better differentiated from related representations with respect to their grammatical information. Modeling consequences of these findings are discussed in the context of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation and the Fuzzy Lexical Representation Hypothesis. (shrink)

This study aims to resolve contradictory conclusions on the relative importance of lexical and syntactic knowledge in second language (L2) listening with evidence from academic English. It was hypothesized that when lexical and syntactic knowledge is measured in auditory receptive tasks contextualized in natural discourse, the measures will be more relevant to L2 listening, so that both lexical and syntactic knowledge will have unique contributions to L2 listening. To test this hypothesis, a quantitative study was designed, in (...) which lexical and syntactic knowledge was measured via partial dictation, an auditory receptive task contextualized in a discourse context. Academic English listening was measured via a retired IELTS listening test. A group of 258 college-level native Chinese learners of English completed these tasks. Pearson correlations showed that both lexical and syntactic measures correlated strongly with English listening (r =.77 and r =.67 respectively). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that both measures jointly explained 62% of the variance in the listening score and that each measure had its unique contribution. These results demonstrated the importance of considering construct representation substantially and using measures that well reflect constructs in practical research. (shrink)

The thesis concerns itself with the selection constraints governing the basic distributional patterns of five complement constructions in English--the bare clause, the that-clause, the interrogative, the concealed question construction and the exclamative complement--across a wide array of knowledge, belief and communication predicates. The relevant distributional phenomena--which predicates are capable of embedding which complement types--have traditionally been captured by stipulative grammatical markings such as subcategorization frames, semantic selection frames and case-theoretic lexical markings. These theoretical tools, even to the extent that (...) they successfully reduplicate the observed phenomena, are of no explanatory value, as they do not derive the different behavioral patterns from some independently established properties of the embedding predicates or their complements. In the thesis, I present an epistemically-based theory, which attempts to derive the relevant distributional phenomena, including those traditionally assumed to reflect hard-core syntactic idiosyncrasies, from a linguistic-epistemic theory of knowledge, belief and communication. ;The theory is based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the embedding predicates, according to which they denote ternary relations between agents, objects of attitude and objects of representation. Thus, to give an example, the predicate think denotes a ternary relation between a thinker, a thought mentally represented by the thinker, and a proposition expressed by the thought and believed by the thinker to be true. This analysis, developed on linguistic grounds for linguistic purposes, echoes some of the recent insights in the philosophy of mind, especially Crimmins . Coupled with a theory of the meanings of the different complement types--partially based on the formal semantic insights of Karttunen , Groenedijk and Stokhof and Ginzburg --this account derives the distributional patterns from simple considerations of semantic compatibility: those predicates which are capable of embedding a certain complement type are exactly those whose lexical semantics is compatible with the semantics of the complement. ;Some of the distributional patterns discussed in the thesis, especially the one involving concealed questions, have traditionally been taken to provide empirical support for the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntactic representations . The analysis presented in this thesis reveals the dramatic extent to which the semantics and the syntax of lexical selection are transparent to each other, and thus implies, at least with respect to the core domain of lexical selection, that the autonomy hypothesis is empirically unjustified. (shrink)

These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive ...

Jones recognizes the existence of “primitives of conceptual structures,” out of which “local representations of kinship are constructed.” NSM semantics has identified these primitives through a cross-linguistic search for lexical universals (“NSM” stands for Natural Semantic Metalanguage and also for the corresponding linguistic theory). These empirical universals provide, I argue, a better bridge between cognitive anthropology and evolutionary psychology than the abstract constructs of OT, with dubious claim to conceptual reality.

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of (...) words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine‐grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure. (shrink)

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word‐segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two (...) computational models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser’s predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part‐words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes. (shrink)

This paper argues for a largely unnoted distinction between relational and modal components in the lexical semantics of verbs. Wehypothesize that many verbs encode two kinds of semantic information:a relationship among participants in a situation and a subset ofcircumstances or time indices at which this relationship isevaluated. The latter we term sublexical modality.We show that linking regularities between semantic arguments andsyntactic functions provide corroborating evidence in favor of thissemantic distinction, noting cases in which the semantic groundingof linking through participant-role (...) properties apparently fails. Thissemantic grounding can be preserved, however, once we abstractaway from sublexical modality in lexical semantic representations.Semantically-based linking constraints are insensitive to the sublexicalmodality component of lexical entries and depend only on informationin a predicator's situational core. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the (...) dynamical approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation (...) of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon. (shrink)

Following much work in linguistic theory, it is hypothesized that the language faculty has a modular structure and consists of two basic components, a lexicon of (structured) entries and a computational system of combinatorial operations to form larger linguistic expressions from lexical entries. This target article provides evidence for the dual nature of the language faculty by describing recent results of a multidisciplinary investigation of German inflection. We have examined: (1) its linguistic representation, focussing on noun plurals and (...) verb inflection (participles), (2) processes involved in the way adults produce and comprehend inflected words, (3) brain potentials generated during the processing of inflected words, and (4) the way children acquire and use inflection. It will be shown that the evidence from all these sources converges and supports the distinction between lexical entries and combinatorial operations. (shrink)

Establishing phonologically robust lexical representations in a second language is challenging, and even more so for words containing phones in phonological contrasts that are not part of the native language. This study presents a series of additional analyses of lexical decision data assessing the phonolexical encoding of English /ε/ and /æ/ by German learners of English in order to examine the influence of lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density and the acoustics of the particular vowels on learners’ ability (...) to reject nonwords differing from real words in the confusable L2 phones only. Results showed that both the lexical properties of the target items and the acoustics of the critical vowels affected nonword rejection, albeit differently for items with /æ/ → [ε] and /ε/ → [æ] mispronunciations: For the former, lower lexical frequencies and higher neighborhood densities led to more accurate performance. For the latter, it was only the acoustics of the vowel that had a significant impact on learners’ accuracy. This suggests that the encoding of /ε/ and /æ/ may not only be asymmetric in that /ε/ is generally more robustly represented in the lexicon than /æ/, as previously reported, but also in the way in which this encoding takes place. Mainly, the encoding of /æ/ appears to be more dependent on the characteristics of the L2 vocabulary and on one’s experience with the L2 than that of its more dominant counterpart. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and the nature of the representations of an ambiguous word's multiple meanings is yet to be fully understood. With a special focus on Chinese characters, the present study first established that native speaker's perception about a character's number of meanings was heavily influenced by the availability of its distinct word formations, while whether these meanings would be perceived to be closely related was driven by further conceptual analysis. These notions were operationalized as two (...) computed metrics, which assessed the degree of dispersion across individual word formations and the degree of propinquity across clusters of word formations, respectively, in a distributional semantic space. The observed correlations between the computed and the perceived metrics indicated that the utility of word formations to tap into meaning representations of Chinese characters was indeed cognitively plausible. The results have demonstrated the extent to which distributional semantics could inform about meaning representations of Chinese characters, which has theoretical implications for the representation of ambiguous words more generally. (shrink)

According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game‐theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces and (...) their interaction: (i) pressure toward communicative efficiency and (ii) transmission perturbations during the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures, which suggests that the relationship between underspecified semantics and pragmatic inference is one of coevolution. (shrink)

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored.Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of (...) computerised lexicons for the automatic treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects. (shrink)

The question of when and how bottom‐up input is integrated with top‐down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken‐word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post‐perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the (...) following phoneme, supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt & McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original lexical feedback explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases. (shrink)

This edited collection presents the state of the art in research related to lexical combinations and their restrictions in Spanish from a variety of theoretical approaches, ranging from Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology to Distributed Morphology and Generative Lexicon Theory. Section 1 offers a presentation of the main theoretical and descriptive approaches to collocation. Section 2 explores collocation from the point of view of its lexicographical representation, while Section 3 offers a pedagogical perspective. Section 4 surveys current research on collocation (...) in Catalan, Galician and Basque. Collocations and other lexical combinations in Spanish will be of interest to students of Hispanic linguistics. ". (shrink)