Feature distinctiveness is a measure representing the uniqueness of objects’ features. Previous research found links between noun feature distinctiveness and age of acquisition (i.e. nouns referring to objects with relatively unique features are learned earlier). The present work investigates the links between feature distinctiveness and age of acquisition in verbs. Using high-dimensional vecto...

In this article, we show how grammar can account for Benglish verbs, a particular type of complex predicate, which are constituted of an English word and a Bengali verb (e.g. /EksiDenT kOra/ ‘to have an accident’, /in kOra/ ‘to get/come/put in’ or /kOnfuz kOra/ ‘to confuse’). We analyze these verbs in the light of a couple of models (e.g. Kageyama, 1991; Lieber, 1992; Matsumoto, 1996) which cla...

Italian developmental dyslexic readers show a striking length effect and have been hypothesised to rely mostly on nonlexical reading. Our experiments tested this hypothesis by assessing whether or not the defi cit underlying dyslexia is specifi c to lexical reading. The effects of lexicality, word frequency and length were investigated in the same group of children in four separate experiments....

Demographic and psychological studies show that children and adults from divorced families utilise professional counselling two to three times more frequently than members coming from intact families to cope with problems in connection with separation and divorce. Research on divorce has well documented the consequences of separation and divorce for children and parents (Amato & Booth, 1997; Ft...

We investigate how the degree to which a context constrains the words that could occur in a sentence affects the processing of the word that does occur. Roland et al. (2012) found that processing was facilitated when target words were more semantically similar to word alternatives that could have appeared. Because this effect is independent of word predictability, it suggests that comprehenders...

In this paper we address the theoretical debate about the representation and processing of derived words, presenting the results of a lexical decision task experiment aiming to investigate the visual recognition of Italian prefixed and suffixed words and nonwords. The study was specifically designed to test hypotheses stemming from the manipulation of two linguistic factors: (1) linearity (i.e....

We describe our word-based implementation of a language identifying system for the text messages written in European languages. Speci cally, we use and compare linguistic (based on functional words) and statistic (based on the word frequency) approaches to construction of the identifying vocabularies. Our version of the statistic approach copes with the di erences in degrees of word overlap amo...

We examine two different methods for finding rising words (among which neologisms) and falling words (among which archaisms) in decades of magazine texts (millions of words) and in years of tweets (billions of words): one based on correlation coefficients of relative frequencies and time, and one based on comparing initial and final word frequencies of time intervals. We find that smoothing fre...

For any deep computational processing of language we need evidences, and one such set of evidences is corpus. This paper describes the development of a textbased corpus for the Bishnupriya Manipuri language. A Corpus is considered as a building block for any language processing tasks. Due to the lack of awareness like other Indian languages, it is also studied less frequently. As a result the l...

Conditional reasoning involves making inferences from a ”if p, then q” major premise. Availability of alternative antecedents increases the probability of giving logical responses to invalid inferences with concrete premises (e.g., Cummins & al., 1991). With abstract premises, alternatives construction becomes cognitively complex. We hypothesized that the quality of alternatives produced in res...