This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG) developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (201...

We propose a range of deep lexical acquisition methods which make use of morphological, syntactic and ontological language resources to model word similarity and bootstrap from a seed lexicon. The different methods are deployed in learning lexical items for a precision grammar, and shown to each have strengths and weaknesses over different word classes. A particular focus of this paper is the r...

The meanings of words are frequently pragmatically modulated in context, so that the concept a word is used to communicate is different than what it encodes. In this short paper, I begin to consider the nature of these communicated, „ad hoc‟ concepts. I start from the assumption that the concepts encoded by monomorphemic lexical items are atomic – or, at least, that the stable concepts these le...

. . . [T]he phonetic transcription is related by the rules of the phonological component to a string of formatives with labeled bracketing which represents the surface syntactic structure of the sentence. We will now examine in some detail the manner in which these formatives are represented in a linguistic description. Many of the formatives are lexical items, the “roots” or “stems” of traditi...

This paper is concerned with a type of speech errors called blends and what they may tell us about speech processing. A blend is a contamination of elements from two different lexical items. Sometime during the process of retrieving a lexical item for output, two functionally synonymous items that compete for the same slot are fused and realised as one separate word or nonce word (Levelt 1989: ...

This paper discusses a computational model of language generation, based on work in Phase Theory, that attempts to shed light on how the human mind generates sentences. This model presents explicit algorithms that a) determine selection and merger of Lexical Items, b) determine the labels of Merged elements, c) account for movement of Lexical Items within a derivation, and d) account for when c...

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of 240 spoken texts and 240 written texts produced by...

The role of segment similarity in early (i.e., partially learned) lexical entries was assessed using artificial lexicons in a referential context. During a learning phase participants heard 40 nonsense words, each accompanied by an unfamiliar picture. In testing, participants heard the direction ‘‘Click on the [X]’’, and chose which of four pictures was the target (X). Target lexical items (e.g...

Speech recognition systems are conventionally broken up into phonemic acoustic models, pronouncing dictionaries in terms of the phonemic units in the acoustic model and language models in terms of lexical units from the pronouncing dictionary. Here we explore a new method for incorporating pronunciation probabilities into recognition systems by moving them from the pronouncing lexicon into the ...