This paper explores how verb meanings that differ in semantic complexity are processed and represented. In particular, we compare eventive verbs, which denote causally structured events, with stative verbs, which denote facts without causal structure. We predicted that the conceptually more complex eventive verbs should take longer to process than stative verbs. Two experiments, a lexical decis...

This paper describes a new, psychologically-plausible model of human sentence interpretation, based on a new model of linguistic structure, Construction Grammar. This on-line, parallel, probabilistic interpreter accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results on lexical access, idiom processing, parsing preferences, and studies of gap-filling and other valence ambiguities, including var...

Much previous work on generation has focused on the general problem of producing lexical strings from abstract semantic representations. We consider generation in the context of a particular task, creating full sentential paraphrases of fragments in dialogue. When the syntactic, semantic and phonological information provided by a dialogue fragment resolution system is made accessible to a gener...

This paper presents an unsupervised and incremental model of learning segmentation that combines multiple cues whose use by children and adults were attested by experimental studies. The cues we exploit in this study are predictability statistics , phonotactics , lexical stress and partial lexical information . The performance of the model presented in this paper is competitive with the state-o...

The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Education...

The paper looks at size nouns of the type grămadă ‘heap / pile’ in Romanian and classifies them into two categories: with a comparative interpretation (Doetjes Rooryck 2003) quantifying (Brems 2007; 2010), latter reading being sometimes contextually extended to third interpretation, negative evaluation 2010). major types readings that may have are read off head-complement syntactic structure, t...

: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of sy...

Most large lexical resources have been developed with language interpretation in mind and can not be used directly for generation. We present a rich large-scale lexical base for generation, constructed by merging various linguistic resources. Our approach meets the needs of language generation systems by providing the facilities for mapping from semantic concepts to verb/sense pairs, for identi...

One interpretation of levels of processing effects (LOP) on priming in implicit tests of memory is in terms of deficits in lexical processing during shallow study tasks. In two experiments the extent of lexical processing engaged in during standard shallow encoding tasks was manipulated by placing the encoding question either before or after the target stimulus. Clear evidence was found in expl...

The traditional framework ['or ambiguity resolution employs only 'static' knowledge, expressed generally as selectional restrictions or domain specific constraints, and makes uo use of any specific knowledge manipulation mechanisms apart from the simple ability to match valences of structurally related words. In contraust, this paper suggests how a theory of lexical semantics making use of a kn...