Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by exaggerated intonation patterns and short, simple phrases. Because these exaggerated intonation patterns frequently convey a small, stereotyped range of emotional signals, we might expect particular words, like good or no, to be realized with consistent pitch contours. This consistency in a word’s pitch realization might facilitate word recogniti...

Within tone languages that use pitch variations to contrast meaning, large variability exists in the pitches produced by different speakers. Context-dependent perception may help to resolve this perceptual challenge. However, whether speakers rely on context in contour tone perception is unclear; previous studies have produced inconsistent results. The present study aimed to provide an unambigu...

The lexical and phonetic mapping of auditorily confusable L2 nonwords was examined by teaching L2 learners novel words and by later examining their word recognition using an eyetracking paradigm. During word learning, two groups of highly proficient Dutch learners of English learned 20 English nonwords of which 10 contained the English contrast /ε/-/æ/ (a confusable contrast for native Dutch sp...

This study investigates French dyslexic and control adult participants' ability to perceive and produce two different non-native contrasts (one segmental and one prosodic), across several conditions varying short-term memory load. For this purpose, we selected Korean plosive voicing (whose categories conflict with French ones) as the segmental contrast and lexical stress as the prosodic contras...

Introduction The problem addressed in this paper is establishment of semantic invariants to serve as a kind of metalanguage of ”senses” valid for the natural language systems under consideration. We see the key objective of natural language processing in developing multilingual facilities of computer access to knowledge contained in texts. Our experience in design and implementation of natural ...

Alignment of communicative behaviour is an important feature Human–Human interaction that directly affects the collaboration and social connection conversational partners. With aim improving abilities a virtual agent, in particular its strategies related to (lexical) verbal alignment, this article focuses on alignment linguistic productions dialogue participants task-oriented dialogues. We prop...

The felicity of contrast and parallel relations as well as structures such as ellipsis are in part dependent on the presence of lexical elements contrasting or sharing. Traditional dictionaries and lexical resources like WordNet code information about antonyms, yet this is often not the type of polarity found in real contrast or parallel examples. It is not yet clear how negative or positive po...

Tashlhiyt Berber has contrastive singleton and lexical geminate consonants in all positions. In addition, it has two types of phonologically derived geminates: concatenated and assimilated ones. Within CV phonology, geminates, including post-lexical ones, are represented as single melodic units associated to two prosodic positions. This study examines the way these abstract autosegmental repres...

Classically, semantic theories have assumed that words are endowed with universal, immutable meanings. This assumption is not tenable when modeling natural language dialogue; far from treating word meanings as fixed entities, linguistic agents are constantly coordinating useful semantic conventions. They disambiguate polysemous words, construct ad hoc interpretations particular to their communi...