We study the problem of predicting tense in Chinese conversations. The unique challenges include: (1) Chinese verbs do not have explicit lexical or grammatical forms to indicate tense; (2) Tense information is often implicitly hidden outside of the target sentence. To tackle these challenges, we first propose a set of novel sentence-level (local) features using rich linguistic resources and the...

The double dissociation between the regular and irregular past tense in English has been explained in terms of dual and single mechanism accounts. In previous research we have argued that problems with the regular past tense in patients with left inferior frontal damage arise from morpho-phonological parsing difficulties [Trends in Cognitive Science 2 (1998) 428]. This claim has recently been c...

Contemporary studies of the semantics of tense and aspect tend to rely on syntactic hypotheses that are at odds with those of a phrase-structure based and lexicalist approach to syntax, such as that embodied in HPSG. For instance, de Swart (1998) explicitly assumes that tense relations originate in a syntactic position distinct from that of the head verb of the clause; and the approach to aspec...

Neuropsychological impairments of English past tense processing inform a key debate in cognitive neuroscience concerning the nature of mental mechanisms. Dual-route accounts claim that regular past tense comprehension deficits reflect a specific impairment of morphological decomposition (e.g., jump + ed), disrupting the automatic comprehension of word meaning accessed via the verb stem (e.g., j...

Two distinct mechanisms are often considered necessary to account for generation of the past-tense of English verbs: a lexical associative process for irregular forms like speak “ spoke, and a rule-governed process (‘add -ed ’) for regular and novel forms like talk “ talked and wug “ wugged. An alternative account based on a parallel-distributed processing approach proposes that one complex pro...

BACKGROUND Recent literature documented the presence of spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain. The aim of the present study was to verify whether representation of past and future is also mapped onto spatial representations and whether the cerebellum may be a neural substrate for linking space and time in the linguistic domain. We asked whether processing of the tense of a verb is in...

This paper examines the question of whether language impairment in Down’s syndrome (DS) can be characterized in terms of the same linguistic markers that were identified for Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The specific proposal we will assess is whether English-speaking adolescents with DS are more impaired in tense-related grammatical morphemes than in non-tense-related morphemes, a dissoc...

As the number of learners of English is constantly growing, automatic error correction of ESL learners’ writing is an increasingly active area of research. However, most research has mainly focused on errors concerning articles and prepositions even though tense/aspect errors are also important. One of the main reasons why tense/aspect error correction is difficult is that the choice of tense/a...

This paper presents results from an ongoing investigation into stop consonants in Waima’a, focusing on the issue of tense v. lax ejectives. Sources tend to describe ejectives in a given language as either tense or lax; however ejectives in Waima'a, do not fit squarely into either category [4]. Here we compare ejectives in word-initial and word-medial contexts, to specifically address the role o...