It is common practice in computational linguistics to attempt to use selectional constraints and semantic type hierarchies as primary knowledge resources to perform word sense disambiguation (cf. Jurafsky and Martin 2000). The most widely adopted methodology is to start from a given ontology of types (e.g. Wordnet, cf. Miller and Fellbaum 2007) and try to use its implied conceptual categories t...

Because most common words have multiple meanings, children are often learning new senses of existing words, rather than entirely new words. Here, we explore whether children can use their knowledge of an existing word sense to constrain their interpretation of a new word meaning. Across two studies, we teach 3and 4-year-olds and adults novel words for materials, and manipulate whether those wor...

Linguistic categories have been shown to influence perceptual discrimination, to do so preferentially in the right visual field, to fail to do so when competing demands are made on verbal memory, and to vary with the color-term boundaries of different languages. However, because there are strong commonalities across languages in the placement of color-term boundaries, the question remains open ...

Text examples must be exploited in the acquisition of lexical structures. However, neither syntactic nor semantic features are provided by the text itself, and so acquisition must be aided by additional resources. We investigate the application of an existing resource, a set of lexical categories, as a prediction method. We present an algorithm that applies (a) top-down prediction based on lexi...

root INDICATE is taken to be present in the syntax of all the examples in (3):in (3b), it is the complement of an n head; in (3c), it is the complement of an a head; in (3a) it is the complement of a v head. The driving force behind positing these extra heads does not come so much from the theory of lexical categories per se, but from the morphological goal of providing a syntactic position fo...

Learning the meaning of words from ambiguous and noisy context is a challenging task for language learners. It has been suggested that children draw on syntactic cues such as lexical categories of words to constrain potential referents of words in a complex scene. Although the acquisition of lexical categories should be interleaved with learning word meanings, it has not previously been modeled...

Previous studies suggest that musicians show an advantage in processing and encoding foreign-language lexical tones. The current experiments examined whether musical experience influences the perceptual learning of lexical tone categories. Experiment I examined whether musicians with no prior experience of tonal languages differed from nonmusicians in the perception of a lexical tone continuum....

The notion of part of speech dates back at least to 5th century BC Sanskrit grammar (Matilal, 1990, ch.3) and is adopted in one form or another by most current linguistic theories. In spite of this, no objective definition for part of speech labels has ever been put forth (Croft, 1984, 2001; Langacker, 1987; Aarts, 2007). The present work explores the idea that parts of speech and their syntact...